Selected Writings Collection
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Polecaj historie
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Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Front matter
Title page
Publisher information
Notebooks, 1922–86
Title page
Preface
Introduction
Notebook 1 (c.1922)
Notebook 2 (c.1922)
Notebook 3 (1922)
Notebook 4 (1923)
Plato 1 (July 1923)
Plato 2 (July 1923)
Early Greek Philosophy (October 1923)
Spinoza (October 1923)
Aristotle 1 (November 1923)
Notebook 5 (1923)
Aristotle 2 (December 1923)
Aristotle 3 (January 1924)
Aristotle 4 (February 1924)
Aristotle 5 (April 1924)
Notebook 6 (September 1924)
Notebook 7 (November 1925)
Notebook 8 (November 1926)
Notebook 9 (January 1927)
Notebook 10 (September 1928)
Belle Dame Notebook 1 (1928–1929)
Belle Dame Notebook 2 (1929–January 1930)
Belle Dame Notebook 3 (January–June 1930)
Belle Dame Notebook 4 (June–December 1930)
Belle Dame Notebook 5 (December 1930–April 1931)
Secularism (c.1930)
Belle Dame Notebook 6 (March–June 1931)
Belle Dame Notebook 7 (June–July 1931)
Belle Dame Notebook 8 (July–31 December 1931)
Notebook 11 (October 1931)
Belle Dame Notebook 9 (January–October 1932)
Belle Dame Notebook 10 (October 1932–March 1934)
Belle Dame Notebook 11 (March 1934)
Notebook 12 (December 1934)
Notebook 13 (April 1936)
A Conversation (1944)
Nelson (c.1947)
Notebook 14 (February 1955)
Notebook 15 (March 1955)
Notebook 16 (September 1958)
Notebook 17 (April 1961)
Notebook 18 (March 1964)
Notebook 19 (January 1966)
Notebook 20 (April 1967)
Notebook 21 (1 January 1981)
Early Political Writings 1925–30
Title Page
Preface
Editorial Introduction
I: The Early Oakeshott and Political Philosophy
II: A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy
III: The Philosophical Approach to Politics
IV: Oakeshott’s Early and Late Ideas on Political Philosophy Compared
V: A Note on the Texts
Part 1: A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy
Introduction
Definition
Political Philosophy
The State
Note A: A State and the State.
Note B: The Ideal, the Real and the Actual.
Note C: A State and a Nation.
Note D: Some Definitions of the State.
The Self
The State and the Self
Government and Law
Conclusion
Part 2 The Philosophical Approach to Politics
What is Political Philosophy?
The General Nature of Thinking and Philosophy
Political Thinking in General
Scientific Thinking about Politics
Historical Thinking about Politics
Practical Thinking about Politics
Pseudo-Philosophical Thinking about Politics
Philosophy Again
The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence
Title Page
Preface
Introduction
I: Religion
II: Historiography and Philosophy of History
III: Culture
IV: Philosophy
V: Politics
VI: The History of Political Thought
A Note on the Texts
Science, Religion, and Reality
The Christian Religion and Its Competitors To‑day
Providence — Divine and Human
The Metaphysics of Evolution
General Theory of Value
The Principles and Problems of Philosophy
The Realm of Mind and Three Conceptions of Mind
Contemporary Thought of Great Britain
Can We Then Believe? Essays Catholic and Critical, and The Inescapable Christ
Modernism in the English Church
Fundamental Problems of Life
Authority in Church and State
Clemenceau
The Meaning of Culture
The Principles of Politics
What is Conservatism? and The Pathetic Fallacy
God and Man
The Making of the Christian Mind
Experience of God
Afterthoughts and Aphorisms
Hunger and Love
Adventures in Philosophy and Religion
Ethical Principles in Theory and Practice
Religion without God, The New Divine Order, and Philosophy without Metaphysics
John Locke
The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Age of Reaction and Reconstruction
The Making of the State
Interpreting the Universe
Idealistic Logic
In Job’s Balances
A New Argument for God and Survival
Civitas Dei
Natural Law and the Theory of Society
Aspects of Dialectical Materialism
Adventures of Ideas
The Horizon of Experience
Richard Hooker als politischer Denker
Thomas Hobbes
Christianity and the Nature of History and Religion and History
Morals and Politics
The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel
Right: a Study in Physical and Moral Order
History and the Social Sciences
An Introduction to Contemporary German Philosophy
The Meaning of History
The Historical Element in Religion
Collected Essays
Bernard Bosanquet’s Philosophy of the State
The Political Philosophy of Hobbes
Ideology and Utopia
This Freedom of Ours
The Modern Mind
The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence
I
II
III
The Principles of Art
Swords and Symbols
Reason in Politics
The Politics of Democratic Socialism
Men and Ideas
Politics and Morals
The Idea of History
The Liberal Tradition
Western Political Thought
Contemporary British Politics
The Analysis of Political Behaviour
The English Festivals
Nietzsche
Masters of Political Thought
Why We Read History
Father, a Portrait of G.G. Coulton at Home
Bulwer-Lytton
Man and Society
Reason and Unreason in Society
Puritanism and Democracy
Decadence
Science and Society
The State and the Citizen
The Triple Challenge
How to Stop the Russians without War
Principles and Ideals in Politics
The Modern Approach to Descartes’ Problem, Notes on Descartes’ Règles and Descartes
Socialism and Ethics
The Tree of Commonwealth
Insight and Outlook
Deviation into Sense
The Life of Reason
Matter, Mind, and Meaning
Barbara Celarent
The Freedom of Necessity
The Life of Reason
Marxism and Contemporary Science
The Origins of Modern Science
The Coming Defeat of Communism
The Tyrants
The Attack
Listen to Him!
Cambridge Conversations
The English Utilitarians
John Locke’s Political Philosophy
Patriarcha
The Concept of Mind
Tell Me the Next One
Beyond Realism and Idealism
The Great Philosophers
Mr Carr’s First Volume
The B.B.C.
Modern Capitalism and Economic Progress
The City of God and Introduction to St Augustine
Citizenship and Social Class
The Discourses of Niccoló Machiavelli
History, Its Purpose and Method
Liberties of the Mind
Dominations and Powers
The Price of Revolution
Psychoanalysis and Politics
Introduction to Politics
The Vocabulary of a Modern European State
Title page
Preface
Introduction
I: Religion
II: Philosophy
III: Culture
IV: Historiography and Philosophy of History
V: History and Political Thought
VI: Politics—The Reviews
VII: Politics—The Essays
A Note on the Texts
A Reminder from Leviathan
The Ethics of Redistribution
Two Cheers for Democracy
An Introduction to Philosophy of History
Liberty or Equality
The Problem of Power
The Liberal Anglican Idea of History
Freedom: A New Analysis
The Vocabulary of Politics
The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt
Anarchy and Order
Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century
Political Parties
The Conservative Mind
Memoirs of Dr Eduard Beneš
The Hungry Sheep
Reason and Revolution
The Concept of Government in Modern Europe
I Introduction
II Assumptions for the Existence of Government
III Different Ideas about Government
IV The Constitution of Government
V The Growing Importance of the Functions of Government
VI The Ordering of Governmental Activities
VII The Ambiguity of Our Political Vocabulary and Its Meaning
VIII Historical Origins of Our Thinking about the Function of Government
IX Conclusion
Government by Committee
Man on His Past
Uncommon People
History in a Changing World
Conservatism in America
Studies in Communication
Minos or Minotaur?
Mazzini
The Chatham Administration, 1766–1768
Sovereignty
The English Woman in History
The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes
The Study of Comparative Government and Politics
Marxism and the Open Mind
George III and the Historians
The Opium of the Intellectuals
Documents of Modern Political Thought
Personal Knowledge
Realism and Imagination
Political Discipline in a Free Society
The Story of Fabian Socialism
Two Treatises of Government
Montesquieu
Political Laws and Captive Audiences
The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy
Rationalism in Politics: A Reply to Professor Raphael
The Conservative Opportunity
Philosophy, Politics and Society
Magna Charta
The Works of Joseph de Maistre
Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State
Nazism
History of the Party
Programme
Revolutionary Aims and Tactics
Social and Political Doctrine
Party and State
Hobbes Studies
The Principles of Politics
Sovereignty
William of Wykeham
The Aims of History
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State
The Vocabulary of a Modern European State
I
II
III
On Misunderstanding Human Conduct
Conservative Essays
In Search of the Constitution
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
Preface to ‘The Form of Ideology’
Conservative Thoughts and Conservative Thinkers
Lectures in the History of Political Thought
Title page
Preface
Editors’ Introduction
Oakeshott’s Introduction (Lecture 1)
Greek Political Thought (Lectures 2–10)
Roman Political Thought (Lectures 11–15)
Medieval Political Thought (Lectures 16–22)
Modern Political Thought (Lectures 23–33)
A Note on the Texts
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Editorial Note
The Political Experience of the Ancient Greeks
1
2
3: The Land
4: The People
5: The Early Polis
6
7
8
9
10
Editorial Note
The Greek Image of the World
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Editorial Note
The Political Thought of the Ancient Greeks (1)
1
2
3
4
5
6
Editorial Note
The Political Thought of the Ancient Greeks (2)
1
2
3
4
5
6
Editorial Note
Aristotle (1)
1
2
3
4
5
6
Editorial Note
Aristotle (2)
1
2
3
4
5
Editorial Note
Plato (1)
1
2
3
4
5
6
Editorial Note
Plato (2)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Editorial Note
Stoics and Epicureans
1
2
3
4
5
Editorial Note
The Political Experience of the Ancient Romans (1)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8: The Rule of the Patrician Consuls
9
Editorial Note
The Political Experience of the Ancient Romans (2)
1
2
3
4
5
Editorial Note
Roman Political Thought (1)
1
2
3
Editorial Note LSE
Roman Political Thought (2)
1
2
3: Auctoritas
4: Potestas
5
6
Editorial Note
Roman Political Thought (3)
1
2
3
4
Editorial Note
Medieval Political Experience
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Editorial Note
Medieval Government
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Editorial Note
The Medieval Theory of Empire
1
2
3
4
5
Editorial Note
Medieval Law
1
2
3
4
5
Editorial Note LSE
Medieval Parliaments
1
2
4
5
Editorial Note
Medieval Political Philosophy (1): Augustine
1
2
3
4
6
7
8
Editorial Note
Medieval Political Philosophy (2): Aquinas
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Editorial Note
The Character of a Modern European State
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Editorial Note
The Generation of a Modern State
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Editorial Note
Modern European Political Thought
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Editorial Note
Interpretations of the Modern European State (1)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Editorial Note
Interpretations of the Modern European State (2)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
8
Editorial Note
The Authority of Governments and the Obligations of Subjects (1)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Editorial Note
The Authority of Governments and the Obligations of Subjects (2)
1
2
3
4
5
6
Editorial Note
The Authority of Governments and the Obligations of Subjects (3)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Editorial Note
The Office of Government (1)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Editorial Note
The Office of Government (2)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7: Kant
8: Adam Smith
9: Bentham
10
11
Editorial Note
What Is History?
Title page
Preface
Introduction
The Essays
1. The Nature of Philosophy
2. Historical Understanding
3. Political Philosophy
4. Education
A Note on the Texts
History is a Fable
Editorial Notes
The Cambridge School of Political Science
Editorial Notes
An Essay on the Relations of Philosophy, Poetry and Reality
I. Introduction
II. PHILOSOPHY
III. POETRY
IV. Philosophy and Poetry Face to Face
V. Conclusion
Editorial Notes
The Philosophy of History
Editorial Notes
What Do We Look for in an Historian?
Editorial Notes
The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe
Editorial Notes
On Peace with Germany
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Editorial Notes
The Voice of Conversation in the Education of Mankind
Editorial Notes
The Philosophy of History
Editorial Notes
Richard Hooker
Editorial Notes
The Whig Interpretation of History
Editorial Notes
The New Society
Editorial Notes
The New Science of Politics
Editorial Notes
Freedom and Power
Editorial Notes
Conduct and Ideology in Politics
Editorial Notes
The Idea of ‘Character’ in the Interpretation of Modern Politics
1
2
3
4
Editorial Notes
Democracy in England
Editorial Notes
Current Ideas about Government
Editorial Notes
The Constitution of Liberty
Editorial Notes
Work and Play
Editorial Notes
Between Past and Future
Editorial Notes
What is History?
1
2
Editorial Notes
On Arriving at a University
Editorial Notes
The Historiography of Max Lenz
Editorial Notes
The Emergence of the History of Thought
Editorial Notes
The Character of a University Education
1
2
Editorial Notes
What is Political Theory?
Editorial Notes
Political Thought as a Subject of Historical Enquiry
II
III
IV
V
Editorial Notes
Law
Editorial Notes
Europe, the Emergence of an Idea
Editorial Notes
Back matter
Also available
Citation preview
Contents Front matter Title page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .i Publisher information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii Notebooks, 1922–86 Title page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Notebook 1 (c.1922) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43 Notebook 2 (c.1922) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48 Notebook 3 (1922) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53 Notebook 4 (1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59 Plato 1 (July 1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64 Plato 2 (July 1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 Early Greek Philosophy (October 1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 Spinoza (October 1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79 Aristotle 1 (November 1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88 Notebook 5 (1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .99 Aristotle 2 (December 1923) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Aristotle 3 (January 1924) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Aristotle 4 (February 1924) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Aristotle 5 (April 1924) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Notebook 6 (September 1924) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Notebook 7 (November 1925) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Notebook 8 (November 1926) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 Notebook 9 (January 1927) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 Notebook 10 (September 1928) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Belle Dame Notebook 1 (1928–1929) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 Belle Dame Notebook 2 (1929–January 1930) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294 Belle Dame Notebook 3 (January–June 1930) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Belle Dame Notebook 4 (June–December 1930) . . . . . . . . . . . . 314 Belle Dame Notebook 5 (December 1930–April 1931) . . . . . . . . 322 Secularism (c.1930) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328 Belle Dame Notebook 6 (March–June 1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 Belle Dame Notebook 7 (June–July 1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353 Belle Dame Notebook 8 (July–31 December 1931) . . . . . . . . . . 361 Notebook 11 (October 1931) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370 Belle Dame Notebook 9 (January–October 1932) . . . . . . . . . . . 427 Belle Dame Notebook 10 (October 1932–March 1934) . . . . . . . . 438
Belle Dame Notebook 11 (March 1934) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451 Notebook 12 (December 1934) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 460 Notebook 13 (April 1936) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 474 A Conversation (1944) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513 Nelson (c.1947) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601 Notebook 14 (February 1955) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 611 Notebook 15 (March 1955) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 633 Notebook 16 (September 1958) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 657 Notebook 17 (April 1961) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 688 Notebook 18 (March 1964) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 724 Notebook 19 (January 1966) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 774 Notebook 20 (April 1967) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 812 Notebook 21 (1 January 1981) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 872 Early Political Writings 1925–30 Title Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 889 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 890 Editorial Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 892 I: The Early Oakeshott and Political Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 892 II: A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy . 894 III: The Philosophical Approach to Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 911 IV: Oakeshott’s Early and Late Ideas on Political Philosophy Compared . . . . . . . 933 V: A Note on the Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 942
Part 1: A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 944 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 944 Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 954 Political Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 968 The State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 989
Note A: A State and the State. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1005 Note B: The Ideal, the Real and the Actual. . . . . . . . . . . . 1007 Note C: A State and a Nation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1014 Note D: Some Definitions of the State. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1015
The Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1033 The State and the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1051 Government and Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1060 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1079
Part 2 The Philosophical Approach to Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1094 What is Political Philosophy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1094 The General Nature of Thinking and Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1106 Political Thinking in General . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1121 Scientific Thinking about Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1136 Historical Thinking about Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1152 Practical Thinking about Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1167 Pseudo-Philosophical Thinking about Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1183 Philosophy Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1198
The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence Title Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1213 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1214 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1216 I: Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1219 II: Historiography and Philosophy of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1224 III: Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1233 IV: Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1238 V: Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1251 VI: The History of Political Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1265 A Note on the Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1270
Science, Religion, and Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1271 The Christian Religion and Its Competitors To‑day . . . . . . . . . 1275 Providence — Divine and Human . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1277 The Metaphysics of Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1278 General Theory of Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1279 The Principles and Problems of Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1280 The Realm of Mind and Three Conceptions of Mind . . . . . . . . . 1281 Contemporary Thought of Great Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1283 Can We Then Believe? Essays Catholic and Critical, and The Inescapable Christ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1285 Modernism in the English Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1288 Fundamental Problems of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1289 Authority in Church and State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1293 Clemenceau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1296 The Meaning of Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1297 The Principles of Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1301 What is Conservatism? and The Pathetic Fallacy . . . . . . . . . . . 1303 God and Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1305 The Making of the Christian Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1306 Experience of God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1312 Afterthoughts and Aphorisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1314 Hunger and Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1318 Adventures in Philosophy and Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1320 Ethical Principles in Theory and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1321 Religion without God, The New Divine Order, and Philosophy without Metaphysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1323 John Locke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1325 The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Age of Reaction and Reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1331 The Making of the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1332 Interpreting the Universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1333 Idealistic Logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1335
In Job’s Balances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1336 A New Argument for God and Survival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1340 Civitas Dei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1342 Natural Law and the Theory of Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1343 Aspects of Dialectical Materialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1347 Adventures of Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1354 The Horizon of Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1358 Richard Hooker als politischer Denker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1359 Thomas Hobbes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1360 Christianity and the Nature of History and Religion and History . . 1377 Morals and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1380 The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1382 Right: a Study in Physical and Moral Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1384 History and the Social Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1385 An Introduction to Contemporary German Philosophy . . . . . . . 1393 The Meaning of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1395 The Historical Element in Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1397 Collected Essays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1400 Bernard Bosanquet’s Philosophy of the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1404 The Political Philosophy of Hobbes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1406 Ideology and Utopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1408 This Freedom of Ours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1410 The Modern Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1412 The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence . . . . . . . . . . . . 1416 I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1417 II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1440 III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1455
The Principles of Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1460 Swords and Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1463 Reason in Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1465 The Politics of Democratic Socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1468 Men and Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1474 Politics and Morals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1476 The Idea of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1478 The Liberal Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1482 Western Political Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1483 Contemporary British Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1485 The Analysis of Political Behaviour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1508 The English Festivals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1510 Nietzsche . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1512 Masters of Political Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1515 Why We Read History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1517 Father, a Portrait of G.G. Coulton at Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1520
Bulwer-Lytton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1523 Man and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1525 Reason and Unreason in Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1526 Puritanism and Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1528 Decadence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1531 Science and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1534 The State and the Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1545 The Triple Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1561 How to Stop the Russians without War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1564 Principles and Ideals in Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1569 The Modern Approach to Descartes’ Problem, Notes on Descartes’ Règles and Descartes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1571 Socialism and Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1574 The Tree of Commonwealth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1579 Insight and Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1581 Deviation into Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1585 The Life of Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1589 Matter, Mind, and Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1592 Barbara Celarent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1594 The Freedom of Necessity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1597 The Life of Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1600 Marxism and Contemporary Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1604 The Origins of Modern Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1606 The Coming Defeat of Communism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1618 The Tyrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1620 The Attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1622 Listen to Him! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1623
Cambridge Conversations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1624 The English Utilitarians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1626 John Locke’s Political Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1628 Patriarcha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1630 The Concept of Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1632 Tell Me the Next One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1635 Beyond Realism and Idealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1637 The Great Philosophers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1639 Mr Carr’s First Volume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1641 The B.B.C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1653 Modern Capitalism and Economic Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1669 The City of God and Introduction to St Augustine . . . . . . . . . . 1673 Citizenship and Social Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1678 The Discourses of Niccoló Machiavelli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1682 History, Its Purpose and Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1684 Liberties of the Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1687
Dominations and Powers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Price of Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Psychoanalysis and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction to Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1691 1694 1697 1700
The Vocabulary of a Modern European State Title page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1702 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1703 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1706 I: Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1708 II: Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1710 III: Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1712 IV: Historiography and Philosophy of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1714 V: History and Political Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1720 VI: Politics—The Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1731 VII: Politics—The Essays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1743 A Note on the Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1759
A Reminder from Leviathan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1760 The Ethics of Redistribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1764 Two Cheers for Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1768 An Introduction to Philosophy of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1773 Liberty or Equality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1776 The Problem of Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1779 The Liberal Anglican Idea of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1782 Freedom: A New Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1789 The Vocabulary of Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1791 The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1795 Anarchy and Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1804 Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . 1808 Political Parties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1811 The Conservative Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1815 Memoirs of Dr Eduard Beneš . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1820 The Hungry Sheep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1824 Reason and Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1827 The Concept of Government in Modern Europe . . . . . . . . . . . 1830 I Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1830 II Assumptions for the Existence of Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1832 III Different Ideas about Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1833 IV The Constitution of Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1835 V The Growing Importance of the Functions of Government . . . . . . . . . . . . 1839 VI The Ordering of Governmental Activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1840 VII The Ambiguity of Our Political Vocabulary and Its Meaning . . . . . . . . . . 1843 VIII Historical Origins of Our Thinking about the Function of Government . . . 1846 IX Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1849
Government by Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1851
Man on His Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1853 Uncommon People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1856 History in a Changing World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1861 Conservatism in America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1864 Studies in Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1867 Minos or Minotaur? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1868 Mazzini . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1871 The Chatham Administration, 1766–1768 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1873 Sovereignty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1876 The English Woman in History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1880 The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1883 The Study of Comparative Government and Politics . . . . . . . . . 1886 Marxism and the Open Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1888 George III and the Historians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1890 The Opium of the Intellectuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1892 Documents of Modern Political Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1896 Personal Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1899 Realism and Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1905 Political Discipline in a Free Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1908 The Story of Fabian Socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1911 Two Treatises of Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1914 Montesquieu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1920 Political Laws and Captive Audiences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1924 The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1937 Rationalism in Politics: A Reply to Professor Raphael . . . . . . . . 1941 The Conservative Opportunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1949 Philosophy, Politics and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1953 Magna Charta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1958 The Works of Joseph de Maistre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1966 Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1969 Nazism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1972 History of the Party . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1973 Programme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1975 Revolutionary Aims and Tactics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1976 Social and Political Doctrine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1979 Party and State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1980
Hobbes Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1982 The Principles of Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1985 Sovereignty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1991 William of Wykeham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1993 The Aims of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1996 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1997 Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2002
The Vocabulary of a Modern European State . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2008 I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2011 II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2032 III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2038
On Misunderstanding Human Conduct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2057 Conservative Essays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2075 In Search of the Constitution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2079 The Foundations of Modern Political Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . 2085 Preface to ‘The Form of Ideology’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2093 Conservative Thoughts and Conservative Thinkers . . . . . . . . . 2096 Lectures in the History of Political Thought Title page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2100 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2101 Editors’ Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2103 Oakeshott’s Introduction (Lecture 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2106 Greek Political Thought (Lectures 2–10) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2112 Roman Political Thought (Lectures 11–15) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2117 Medieval Political Thought (Lectures 16–22) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2123 Modern Political Thought (Lectures 23–33) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2129 A Note on the Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2137
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2140 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2140 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2142 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2144 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2145 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2150 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2152 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2155 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2157 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2158 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2159
The Political Experience of the Ancient Greeks . . . . . . . . . . . . 2160 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2160 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2160 3: The Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2162 4: The People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2163 5: The Early Polis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2165 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2167 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2172 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2174 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2178 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2179 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2181
The Greek Image of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2182 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 .
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. 2182 . 2183 . 2186 . 2188
5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2191 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2194 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2198 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2199
The Political Thought of the Ancient Greeks (1) . . . . . . . . . . . 2200 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2200 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2202 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2206 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2210 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2212 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2213 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2218
The Political Thought of the Ancient Greeks (2) . . . . . . . . . . . 2219 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2219 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2219 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2222 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2226 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2229 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2232 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2235
Aristotle (1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2236 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2236 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2238 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2240 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2246 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2247 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2257 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2258
Aristotle (2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2259 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2259 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2261 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2266 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2271 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2275 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2277
Plato (1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2278 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2278 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2281 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2282 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2287 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2290 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2294 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2297
Plato (2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2298 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 .
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. 2298 . 2300 . 2305 . 2308 . 2311 . 2314 . 2317
Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2318
Stoics and Epicureans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2319 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2319 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2322 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2324 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2329 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2336 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2338
The Political Experience of the Ancient Romans (1) . . . . . . . . . 2339 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2339 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2341 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2343 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2346 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2347 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2350 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2353 8: The Rule of the Patrician Consuls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2357 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2361 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2363
The Political Experience of the Ancient Romans (2) . . . . . . . . . 2364 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2364 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2370 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2373 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2376 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2380 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2383
Roman Political Thought (1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2384 1 . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . . . . . . Editorial Note LSE .
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. 2384 . 2385 . 2392 . 2401
Roman Political Thought (2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2402 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2402 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2402 3: Auctoritas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2405 4: Potestas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2411 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2418 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2419 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2421
Roman Political Thought (3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2422 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2422 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2424 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2432 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2436 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2441
Medieval Political Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2442 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 .
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. 2442 . 2445 . 2447 . 2448 . 2451
6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2453 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2454 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2456 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2457 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2459 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2462 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2463
Medieval Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2464 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2464 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2466 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2469 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2471 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2480 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2484 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2488 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2489
The Medieval Theory of Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2490 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2490 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2492 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2494 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2498 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2499 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2502
Medieval Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2503 1 . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . . . . . . 4 . . . . . . . . . . . 5 . . . . . . . . . . . Editorial Note LSE .
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. 2503 . 2505 . 2508 . 2512 . 2517 . 2518
Medieval Parliaments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2519 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2519 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2522 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2535 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2538 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2541
Medieval Political Philosophy (1): Augustine . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2542 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2542 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2545 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2548 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2550 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2559 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2561 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2562 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2565
Medieval Political Philosophy (2): Aquinas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2566 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 .
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. 2566 . 2569 . 2573 . 2576 . 2578
6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2579 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2582 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2584 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2592 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2593
The Character of a Modern European State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2594 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2594 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2594 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2596 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2598 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2600 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2603 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2604 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2607 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2611 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2613 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2614
The Generation of a Modern State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2615 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2615 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2617 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2621 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2625 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2630 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2632 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2635 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2636
Modern European Political Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2637 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2637 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2639 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2641 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2643 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2644 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2647 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2648 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2650 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2652 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2654 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2655 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2656
Interpretations of the Modern European State (1) . . . . . . . . . . 2657 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2657 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2658 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2660 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2662 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2663 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2670 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2672 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2674
Interpretations of the Modern European State (2) . . . . . . . . . . 2675 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2675 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2675
3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2680 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2681 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2682 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2683 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2685 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2686 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2689 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2690 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2692 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2693
The Authority of Governments and the Obligations of Subjects (1) 2694
1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2694 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2696 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2697 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2702 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2703 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2705 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2709 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2712 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2713
The Authority of Governments and the Obligations of Subjects (2) 2714
1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2714 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2717 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2718 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2725 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2728 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2731 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2732
The Authority of Governments and the Obligations of Subjects (3) 2733
1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2733 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2736 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2738 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2739 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2744 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2745 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2748 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2755 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2756
The Office of Government (1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2757 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2757 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2757 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2760 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2763 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2766 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2768 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2772 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2774 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2775 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2776 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2777
The Office of Government (2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2778
1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2778 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2779 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2781 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2783 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2786 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2789 7: Kant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2790 8: Adam Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2792 9: Bentham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2794 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2796 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2797 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2798
What Is History? Title page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2799 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2800 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2801 The Essays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2805
1. The Nature of Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2805 2. Historical Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2809 3. Political Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2816 4. Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2831
A Note on the Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2833
History is a Fable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2838 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2854
The Cambridge School of Political Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2855 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2880
An Essay on the Relations of Philosophy, Poetry and Reality . . . . 2881 I. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2882 II. PHILOSOPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2892 III. POETRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2905 IV. Philosophy and Poetry Face to Face . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2921 V. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2934 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2942
The Philosophy of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2943 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2961
What Do We Look for in an Historian? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2962 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2979
The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe . . . . 2980 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2993
On Peace with Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2994 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 .
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. 2995 . 2999 . 3001 . 3007 . 3009 . 3012 . 3021
Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3025
The Voice of Conversation in the Education of Mankind . . . . . . 3026 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3040
The Philosophy of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3041 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3046
Richard Hooker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3047 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3061
The Whig Interpretation of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3062 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3067
The New Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3068 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3071
The New Science of Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3072 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3077
Freedom and Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3078 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3088
Conduct and Ideology in Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3089 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3101
The Idea of ‘Character’ in the Interpretation of Modern Politics . . 3102 1 . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . . . . 4 . . . . . . . . . Editorial Notes .
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. 3103 . 3108 . 3116 . 3126 . 3129
Democracy in England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3130 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3134
Current Ideas about Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3135 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3154
The Constitution of Liberty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3155 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3157
Work and Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3158 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3172
Between Past and Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3173 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3177
What is History? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3178 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3179 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3188 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3196
On Arriving at a University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3197 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3205
The Historiography of Max Lenz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3206 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3209
The Emergence of the History of Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3210 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3240
The Character of a University Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3241 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3242 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3250 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3263
What is Political Theory? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3264 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3276
Political Thought as a Subject of Historical Enquiry . . . . . . . . . 3277 II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3279 III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3288 IV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3291 V . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3294 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3301
Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3302 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3307
Europe, the Emergence of an Idea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3308 Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3319
Back matter Also available . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3320
Michael Oakeshott Selected Writings Collection
Notebooks, 1922–86 Copyright © 2014 Imprint Academic Early Political Writings 1925–30 Copyright © 2010 Imprint Academic The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence Copyright © 2007 Imprint Academic The Vocabulary of a Modern European State Copyright © 2008 Imprint Academic Lectures in the History of Political Thought Copyright © 2006 Imprint Academic What Is History? Copyright © 2004 Imprint Academic The moral rights of the author have been asserted. No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion. Digital version converted and published in 2014 by Andrews UK Limited www.andrewsuk.com
Michael Oakeshott
Notebooks, 1922–86
Edited by Luke O’Sullivan
Preface In the decade during which this series has been in preparation, Oakeshott’s reputation has continued to grow. The recent appearance of a volume devoted to him in the series of Cambridge Companions effectively acknowledges that he has achieved a canonical status accorded to relatively few writers. Only the most important modern philosophers merit inclusion in such a series, and when a writer is recognized to have achieved this kind of status, the presumption is that everything he had to say is of potential interest. Many of the other authors of the same rank have had their unpublished as well as their published works exhaustively dissected. In particular, where they left collections of notebooks, these have eventually seen publication. This has certainly been the case for Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, for example, and few would argue that bringing their private reflections to light has been a wasted endeavour. Readers will hopefully come to think the same of the present volume, which includes selections from over forty of Oakeshott’s notebooks, spanning his entire career. The notebooks open a window onto Oakeshott’s intellectual development that simply cannot be found elsewhere amongst his writings. They are a unique source of aphorisms and miniature essays that have no parallel in his books, articles, and reviews, although they certainly form a valuable complement to the published works. As the editorial introduction will show, they indicate connections between his private and scholarly life that have only recently begun to come to light, and make clear continuities in his thought, such as a persistent interest in Christianity, which are much less visible elsewhere. The original intention was for this sixth volume in the Selected Writings series to be the final one. It was to have consisted in selections from both Oakeshott’s letters and his notebooks. But as work proceeded, it became clear that combining the notebooks
with the letters in this fashion would have meant sacrificing too much interesting material. This conviction was only reinforced by the emergence of eleven new notebooks from the years 1928–34, which delayed completion of this volume by over a year while this new material was assimilated. Imprint Academic thus graciously consented to a change of plan, and a separate seventh volume of correspondence will now hopefully follow in due course. Even this does not quite exhaust the material that deserves to be made more widely available, and so an eighth (and hopefully final) volume collecting up the more miscellaneous items amongst Oakeshott’s papers is also planned. This is the second volume in the series to have been completed mainly at the Political Science Department of the National University of Singapore, and once again I am pleased to be able to acknowledge the financial help I received when making a trip to the London School of Economics in June and July 2012 to carry out archival work. The generosity of Mr. Simon Oakeshott in making available his father’s private notebooks, and in granting his permission for early publication of excerpts from the writings they contain, deserves particular thanks. Professor Robert Grant was kind enough to share his digital photographs of both the new and existing notebooks which made preparing this edition at a distance feasible. I am also grateful to Mr. Chris Thomas of the Powys Society for his assistance with a query regarding the Cornhill Magazine. The continuing support of the Archive at the British Library of Political and Economic Science was essential for the volume to appear at all. As for the burden of transcribing the notebooks, it fell entirely on the editor, who as usual must be held solely accountable for all the mistakes that were made. Finally, profuse editorial thanks are owed to Mr. Graham Horswell for his patience in dealing with a particularly troublesome set of proofs. Singapore, 2013
Introduction Oakeshott attached considerable importance to his notebooks. He kept them all his life, and specifically mentioned them in his will as amongst the literary remains that his executor was to take charge of.1 He also revealed their existence to those who knew him personally, and from time to time passing references to them would appear in print.2 After his death they became part of the collection of his papers at the British Library of Political and Economic Science, but until now there has been no way to consult them without visiting the archive. Even those prepared to make the trip will not find them easily digestible in the form in which Oakeshott left them. In their unedited state they consist of several hundred thousand words and include material of all sorts, including quotations, transcriptions, reflections, and miniature essays.3 This volume contains selections from over forty of the notebooks. They begin in the early 1920s and break off around the mid-1980s. They fall into four more or less distinct groups. The first, largest, group is a series which Oakeshott kept throughout his career. The notebooks in this group are numbered one to [1] Oakeshott left ‘all manuscripts notebooks letters and copyrights’ to his literary executor. [2] See T. Fuller (ed.), ‘Preface’ to M. Oakeshott, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. vii n. 2, and R. Grant, ‘Inside the Hedge: Oakeshott’s Early Life and Work’, Special Issue: Remembering Michael Oakeshott, Cambridge Review, 112, 106–9, at p. 109. [3] All of these notebooks are now in the Oakeshott archive at the British Library for Political and Economic Science. They are referred to in the footnotes by their catalogue reference number or by the page numberings used throughout this volume, as appropriate; see the final section of the editorial introduction for more details.
twenty-one, indicating unmistakably that he regarded them as a single series. The second is a group of eleven notebooks containing reflections on love and women composed over a relatively short period, 1928 to 1934. Though unnumbered, their dating and subject matter means that they too must be regarded as a single set. The third group is devoted to a close analysis of some of the major works of Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, and dates mostly from an even shorter period, 1923–4. It derives its unity from the period and purpose of its composition. Finally, there are a couple of individual notebooks compiled around the end of the war in 1945.4 Oakeshott remarked in one of his very last notebooks that ‘This is a sort of Zibaldone: a written chaos.’5 Whether he meant the individual notebook or the whole series is unclear, but the comparison with Giacomo Leopardi, whose own notebooks were published as the Zibaldone di pensieri, is significant. In drawing it, Oakeshott was connecting himself to a European aphoristic tradition. That this was a well-meditated observation rather than a passing comment is suggested by the fact that his notebooks feature remarks by a whole host of contributors to the genre. The list includes Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, Charles Duclos, Georg Lichtenberg, Antoine de Rivarol, Richard Garnett, Charles Colton, Nietzsche, and F.H. Bradley, amongst others. A successful aphorism, according to one of its modern students, should be brief, definitive, personal, and philosophical; and it should have a twist, a sting in the tail.6 There are plenty of examples in these notebooks of aphorisms that Oakeshott seems [4] Other notebooks do survive amongst Oakeshott’s papers but are not represented in this volume because of the nature of the material they contain; there is one devoted to poems he had composed himself, for example. [5] See 20[64]. [6] See James Geary, The World in a Phrase (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2005).
to have coined himself which meet these criteria. For example, ‘Prejudice is knowing the answer to a question without knowing that it is an answer to a question’7 gives a pithy definition which invokes the philosophical proposition that all ideas involve assumptions, while also providing a sharp reminder of the limits of common sense. There are plenty of others – ‘Loneliness is not living alone; it is loving alone’, and ‘A book is a mirror; we see only ourselves’, are two more examples – which readers will discover for themselves.8 The notebooks are much more than a collection of aphorisms, however. A number of major twentieth-century philosophers routinely drew inspiration from poetry and the novel; George Santayana, Iris Murdoch, and Jean-Paul Sartre are notable examples. Though he would not have enjoyed the comparison with Sartre, Oakeshott, too, belongs to this group. A lifelong interest in literature informed his entire intellectual outlook. In general, the novelists Oakeshott favoured were themselves philosophically inclined, and in his notebooks he treated literary depictions of characters, ideas, and situations as either incipiently philosophical in themselves or as material for further philosophical reflection. Amongst his favourites were Spanish and Russian authors such as Cervantes, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, although he also had considerable affection for writers in English such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. An idea encountered in a novel could assume lasting importance for him, as was the case with Conrad’s notion of the ‘shadow line’ that separates the illusions of youth from the realities of adulthood. Oakeshott treated poetry in the same way, and was especially drawn to the Romantics. His early admiration for Wordsworth and Coleridge is familiar; they both appear, albeit briefly, in a consideration of the nature of ‘the State’ which concluded, in keeping with Idealist philosophy, that State, Self, and Society were [7] See 17[22]. [8] See 16[11] and 16[45].
ultimately all aspects of a single whole. So, indeed, does Shelley; Oakeshott wrote approvingly that he had grasped ‘the true notion that literature, art, and institutions are the valid expressions of…a single social will’.9 But the notebooks indicate that there were other authors from the Romantic era, such as Keats and Goethe, who were also important to him. Moreover, as we shall see, the notebooks suggest very strongly that his interest in Romanticism was not purely academic; in his youth in particular he treated it as a living tradition which had a major impact on his approach to life. While the present volume hopefully gives the reader a good sense of the nature and range of Oakeshott’s literary interests, it aims to present his own thoughts rather than simply reproduce the passages he selected for transcription. The early notebooks in particular are notebooks in the most literal sense; they were used simply to record passages, sometimes at considerable length, from his reading. As a result, very little of the material in the early notebooks has been included here. For those readers who nevertheless wish to know exactly what he read and when, the first footnote to every notebook contains some information on what has been omitted. Once Oakeshott ceased to treat the notebooks exclusively as repositories for transcription, he did not use them instead to make detailed drafts of whatever paper he was currently working on, but to record particular thoughts. References to any of his own books and essays are actually extremely rare.10 Mostly he used the notebooks to record his reactions to whatever he was currently reading, but this was as likely to be a novel or newspaper [9] M. Oakeshott, ‘A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy’ in Early Political Writings 1925– 30. Selected Writings vol. 5 (SW), ed. L. O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007), pp. 74, 75 n. [10] For the only mention of Experience and its Modes see 11[82]. M. Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1933]).
as a work of philosophy. Often he appears simply to have seized on a passing notion to scrutinize it further without necessarily seeking to develop it into anything intended for more general consumption. Anyone familiar with Oakeshott’s published works will soon discover that their main themes can all also be found in the notebooks. Philosophy, politics, history, morals, education, aesthetics, religion – all are present. Yet the treatment they received in the notebooks does not simply mirror their handling in print. History, for example, receives much less attention in the notebooks than in Oakeshott’s published writings. There is relatively little discussion of the narrative of post-Renaissance European history that figured so prominently in his published works from the 1950s onwards. Nor, indeed, are there more than occasional remarks on the philosophy of historical knowledge, to which he devoted so much thought in Experience and its Modes and On History. There is more on politics – Oakeshott exaggerated when he told a friend that they contained ‘almost nothing’ on the subject – but much of what there is takes a withering tone.11 Still, some overlap with the published writings is unmistakable; the theory of civil association, for example, is mentioned a couple of times in the later notebooks, and its precursor, the ‘politics of scepticism’, can be seen in the modified form of ‘the politics of conversation’. Philosophy in the strict sense is also rather under-represented. Oakeshott did not use the notebooks to work out ideas for his own theories of modality and categoriality in any detail, nor in many cases did he have much to say about the thinkers whom we know from other sources to have been very important to him. There is almost nothing in the notebooks on Hobbes, for instance, even though Oakeshott published more on him than on any other writer. This is perhaps partly a reflection of how Oakeshott worked. Once he had decided to read a philosophical work closely, rather than make notes in one of the notebooks, [11] Grant, ‘Inside the Hedge’, p. 109.
he worked on loose paper or annotated a personal copy of a book or a pamphlet directly, as he did, for example, with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Nevertheless, there are exceptions to this rule, and the main numbered series of notebooks does provide some valuable evidence about his philosophical reading. They contain conclusive evidence, for example, that Oakeshott sustained an interest in Nietzsche throughout the 1920s and 1930s that was much more extensive than his published writings, which mention Nietzsche only a handful of times, would indicate. The published writings also show little trace of the fact that he read many of Santayana’s major works, including the multi-volume treatise on the Life of Reason, with some care. There is proof, too, that he succumbed to the fashion for Bergson that was so prevalent in the first decades of the twentieth century. Remarks in the later notebooks suggest that Oakeshott’s attitude to philosophy was far more equivocal than it had been in his youth. His statement that ‘I too have tried to be a philosopher, but happiness keeps breaking in’ may be taken as at least partly in jest, but he seems to have been entirely in earnest when he wrote in old age that ‘Strangely enough, I have always preferred practice to theory’, and wondered to himself whether he had simply ‘not enough intellect to be a philosopher’.12 As a young man, he showed no such qualms about his competence in or attraction to philosophy, which, as readers of Experience and its Modes will remember, he was inclined to think of as absolute experience. The view of philosophy as absolute experience was derived from Oakeshott’s early studies of Idealist and Rationalist thought, and those with a particular interest in his relationship to these schools of thought will want to pay especially close attention to the early notebooks on Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza. They are an exception to the general lack of close engagement with particular thinkers which characterizes the main numbered series. At first glance, they appear to be direct commentaries on the relevant texts, albeit in English translation. This impression, however, is [12] See 19[08], 20[59].
misleading. What we are dealing with in every case is in fact a digest of the commentaries of several of the leading scholars of the day rather than Oakeshott’s spontaneous responses to the text in question. In studying Aristotle’s Politics, for example, Oakeshott quite clearly had Jowett, Congreve, and Newman all open before him at once as he went through their various translations of the Greek text and their voluminous accompanying notes. But his manner of working is less important than the fact that he was using commentaries produced by Victorian scholars most if not all of whom had felt the attraction of Idealism in both its ancient and modern varieties. This situation is a perfect example of why the problem of ‘influence’ in intellectual history is so notoriously tricky; to say simply that Oakeshott was influenced by the ancient Idealism of Plato ignores the fact that this ‘Plato’ was mostly the creation of nineteenth-century Anglo-German Idealist scholarship. Oakeshott’s reception of ancient and modern Idealist thought was thus fused in a manner which it is impossible to separate, as an example will show. Take, for example, the first notebook on Plato, dated 1923. On the first page a quotation appears from ‘Nettleship’, which is traceable easily enough to R.L. Nettleship’s Lectures on the Republic of Plato. It is very obviously a quotation, as it appears in quotation marks. But much of the rest of the material on the first pages of this notebook does not announce itself as quotation, although one only has to read a little of Nettleship to realise that Oakeshott was summarizing his commentary. Then, however, eleven pages into the notebook, numerical references begin to appear which are clearly not to the canonical Stephanus numbers used to refer to Plato’s works, but which do not correlate with Nettleship’s work either. It is not immediately obvious what these Roman numerals (which are accompanied by headings and followed by Arabic numerals separated by full stops) refer to. In fact, they were taken from Bosanquet’s Companion to the Republic of Plato, which was
in turn keyed to a translation by Davies and Vaughan. Much of the subsequent text of the notebook, when it is not paraphrasing Nettleship, turns out to be condensing Bosanquet instead. Before one could consider any of the remarks on Plato in this notebook to be exclusively attributable to ‘Oakeshott’, then, one must look carefully at several different texts. The other notebooks in this sequence pose similar puzzles. The notes on Spinoza’s Tractatus De Intellectus Emendatione, for example, turn out to be particularly indebted to H.H. Joachim’s Study of the Ethics of Spinoza. Some readers will care deeply about the precise sources of Oakeshott’s notes, and others will be indifferent, but in general it is wise to be aware that he began from a context in which the thought of the nineteenth century was still very much alive. It is safe on the whole to assume that when Oakeshott made these notes, his intention was not simply to collect information but to form some opinions which could serve as his own. That the young Oakeshott lacked the keen historical sense he would later develop is clear from descriptions like that of Socrates from his notebook on ‘Early Greek Philosophy’ as both a ‘Conservative’ and a ‘Radical’. One of his later precepts for understanding the history of thought was to avoid using the contemporary vocabulary of practical politics and moral judgment as far as possible, but in these early notebooks past thinkers are effectively treated as if they were contemporaries. The same lack of historical awareness is clearly visible in the way Oakeshott singled out the Aristotelian ideal of the good man as a forerunner of the character type of the English gentleman. Aristotle remained important for Oakeshott long after he had learned to see him in his proper historical context, as the only serious study of his notebooks on Aristotle to date has made clear.13 In light of the longer-term importance of Aristotle for Oakeshott, it is worth pointing out that in his early notebooks he [13] See C. Abel, ‘Appropriating Aristotle’, in C. Abel and T. Fuller (eds.), The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), pp. 37–60.
devoted far more space to the study of Aristotle’s Ethics than to the Politics. It seems likely that in addition to the emphasis on the importance of character for understanding action, topics such as play and conversation as essential elements of civilized life entered Oakeshott’s thought at least partly via the study of that particular text. With the exception of the notebooks on Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza just described, however, Oakeshott seems mostly to have used his notebooks to record his thoughts on the great problems of life: love and mortality, religion and morality. While the subject of ‘Oakeshott on life’ has occasionally engaged his readers, he never produced a systematic treatise on the topic.14 But if we are tempted to speculate about what he might have written had he done so, the notebooks are far and away our best source. In particular, the material they contain on religion (which most of the time was a synonym for Christianity) transforms the conventional view of his thought on the subject. The conventional view is that Oakeshott had an early interest in religion which waned significantly as he got older, although it flickered briefly once again in old age. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he published two essays on religion, wrote many more, and regularly reviewed works on the subject.15 In the early 1930s, [14] See G. Worthington, ‘Michael Oakeshott on Life: Waiting With Godot’, History of Political Thought, 16 (1995), 105–19. [15] See ‘Religion and the Moral Life’, ‘The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity’ (first published in 1927 and 1928 respectively), and ‘Religion and the World’ (composed in 1929), in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, and the numerous reviews republished in The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence: Essays and Reviews 1926–51. Selected Writings vol. 3, ed. L. O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007). In 1982 Oakeshott mentioned in a letter (to Noël O’Sullivan, 12 March 1982) that when he moved out of his office at LSE he had found that ‘I have kept almost everything from the last 50 years & it has been fascinating to discover in it my past life – my undergraduate notebooks, an almost endless collection of papers I had written for historical &
Experience and its Modes developed the idea of religion as the most complete form of practical experience, but after that, he fell virtually silent on the issue. Many years later, in On Human Conduct, written in the 1970s, he treated it as one means of reconciliation to the inevitable finitude of human life.16 Both books, however, devoted only a handful of pages to the theme. From Oakeshott’s correspondence, as well as from the notebooks, it is clear that the conventional view needs serious correction. More than once, he contemplated writing an entire book on Christianity.17 This, admittedly, was only one of several major projects he never accomplished. The notebooks contain material for at least three other books he did not write, including an autobiographical treatise on love, a biography of Nelson, and a dramatic dialogue (to have been entitled ‘A Conversation’) on the problems of modernity. But religion, the notebooks make very clear, was not one of the subjects he toyed with and then dropped, only to come back to it much later, as the published writings tend to suggest. Rather, it was a persistent focus of attention, one that occupied a much more central role in his thinking than has been evident hitherto. It was still possible for a discerning reader to suspect that religion had more ongoing importance than Oakeshott’s theological societies’, but that he threw most of this material away. The current archive of his papers thus contains only what survived this cull. [16] Experience and its Modes, pp. 292–5; On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 81–6. [17] There are two references of this sort from the 1920s. At 01[60] there are headings for a work, probably an essay, on ‘The Psychology of the Saints’, and at 07[A] ‘A work on the nature of Religion & the philosophy of the Christian Religion’ is listed amongst a number of ‘Projected Labours’. Oakeshott wrote in a letter (to Dorothea Krook, 10 April 1970), in the context of a discussion of Christian belief, that ‘I once thought I might write a history of modern European moral sentiments, but the thought came too late.’
published works seemed to suggest.18 But even a careful reader lacked the benefit of being able to consult the notebooks, which make clear that even if Oakeshott was ‘probably not [a Christian] in any ordinary sense’, he certainly considered himself to be one throughout his life, even into his old age. So, while it is true that ‘he was not much drawn to theology’ in the sense of being keenly interested in dogmatics, he continuously reflected on the meaning of Christianity for contemporary life, and believed strongly that the modern abandonment of it was a great loss.19 Reading through the notebooks allows us to follow the development of Oakeshott’s ideas on religion in a way that is not possible using any other source. The first phase of his intellectual trajectory is, admittedly, already well known. He was committed to a modernistic Anglicanism which minimized the importance of liturgy and opposed literalism in the interpretation of the Bible. Studying Types of Christian Saintliness (1915) by William Inge, Dean of St Paul’s, he noted the view that ‘The religion of authority is Catholicism’ and ‘the religion of the Spirit is Liberal Protestantism’; Oakeshott was firmly on the side of the Spirit.20 Such views lead him to argue for an explicit recognition that religion was perpetually changing in tandem with the needs of the society it served. This meant he was unruffled by the implications of research in history, geology, biology, and anthropology for [18] E. Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006). [19] See E. Corey, ‘The Religious Sensibility of Michael Oakeshott’, in A Companion to Michael Oakeshott, pp. 134–50, at pp. 140, 148. ‘What rot. We’re not apes but good Christians’ was Oakeshott’s derisive response to a comparison between humans and apes in 1970: see 20[48]. In his final notebooks he remarked that ‘The twentieth century is distinguished by the large number of people who do not think it worthwhile to remake Christianity for themselves’: see 20[20]. Nevertheless, he considered that ‘we could not do without [the scriptures], but they have been fatally misrepresented’: see 21[09]. [20] LSE 2/1/1.
Christianity, since he was not concerned with its truth but with its ability to give spiritual sustenance.21 Typically, the first notebook begins with an extract from a novel, The Man of the World (1907) by the Italian writer Antonio Fogazzaro, a Catholic with mystical and reforming tendencies. In the passage Oakeshott seized upon, a young man has been debating whether or not to enter a monastery. The excerpt begins with the words of an old priest to him: ‘My son, you must remain in the world, and still you must withdraw from it.’22 This tension between worldly and spiritual values would remain an enduring opposition in Oakeshott’s thought; it would be just about a pardonable exaggeration to say that it summarizes the main theme of the notebooks in their entirety. Oakeshott came to think of life, or, in technical terms, ‘practical experience’, as necessarily defined by the attempt to realize the ‘ought’ latent in the ‘is’. As such, practice is at once the realm of instrumental action and consequentialist thinking, and the scene of the realization of the non-instrumental values of love and friendship. Religion is this non-instrumental side of practical experience taken to its logical conclusion. But the tension between worldly and spiritual values also marked the distinction between practice in general and the pursuit of theoretical knowledge and aesthetic experience for their own sake. Early in his career, Oakeshott was inclined to assimilate religion to philosophy in a way that he would not do later on. ‘Philosophy is really the clear thinking of what is felt in religion – the oneness. If we have no religion we have but a poor starting place for philosophy.’23 This assimilation was characteristic of the Idealist and Rationalist thought which largely determined his philosophical horizons in the 1920s and into the 1930s. The [21] For a lengthier discussion see the introduction to Oakeshott, The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence, SW iii.2–5. [22] LSE 2/1/1. [23] See 04[A].
influence of Idealist logic is clearly visible, for example, in his description of the doctrine of the Trinity as the solution to the problem of ‘the relation of the universal to the particular’.24 By the later 1920s, however, there is already a discernible shift away from the vocabulary of Idealism. A note for another essay on ‘Modern Religion’ which was either never completed or has not survived was supposed ‘to call attention to…the Epicurean element in Christianity’.25 This was a radical move to make, because for centuries Epicureanism had been conventionally regarded as unchristian, sensual, hedonistic, and selfish; J.S. Mill still felt obliged to distance himself from this view of it when identifying Bentham and Epicurus as both utilitarians in 1861.26 But Oakeshott did not see Epicureanism in this negative light; nor did he see Epicurus as Mill did, as a proto-utilitarian. The pagan figure of Epicurus became an example for him of a possible form of reconciliation to life based on a refusal of instrumentalist and consequentialist values: a rejection of ‘the world’. He took from Epicureanism the belief that one should concentrate on those relationships and activities and ideas that are intrinsically rewarding, and strive to live in the present. One of the greatest problems with conventional Christianity, Oakeshott increasingly came to think, was its literal attachment to the notion of an afterlife which left it open to contamination by the worldly, consequentialist way of thinking. Salvation was not something to be endlessly postponed into the future, like a retirement fund which relies on the willingness of savers to defer gratification, but an attitude to life that was possible here and now. What Christianity really offered was a rich set of metaphors for understanding the human condition, and in particular for [24] See 06[41]. [25] See 10[30]. [26] J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91), x.209.
acceptance of the inevitability of death. This is perhaps what Oakeshott meant when he described sin and God as being solutions rather than problems.27 By the early 1930s Oakeshott was convinced that it was important to ‘Attempt to restate the doctrines of Christianity for the contemporary mind’ by emphasizing the fact that Christianity is something which we have made.28 He seems to have thought that accepting that Christianity was what might now be called a social construct was not to devalue it but to bring it into harmony with modernity. The view put forward by the Victorian author Samuel Butler that ‘Either Jesus was the son of God, or He was not’ struck him as ‘entirely out of date’.29 Abandoning the commitment to literalism would be a radical transformation, but it would not be the first time Christianity had radically changed its character. In any case, such a transformation was necessary to its survival. ‘To defend Christianity is always to transform it. Each defence has been a readjustment.’30 If all of this sounds rather abstract, it is clear that it was intended to be compatible with a conception of Christianity as a way of life. ‘Christian festivals, worship, prayer’ were definitely to have a place in Oakeshott’s reformed religion.31 ‘Are not the gods, from earliest times, associated with dancing, feasting, laughter, poetry, holiday, joy, gifts?’ he asked himself rhetorically. Religious observances provided an important focus for ‘human need and aspiration’, though he never really addressed the problem of how spontaneous products of popular belief could be consciously
[27] See 10[43]. [28] See 11[07]. [29] See 11[09]. [30] See 11[27]. [31] See 11[07].
remade without suffering from the kinds of problems he exposed in a political context in his critique of Rationalism.32 Oakeshott continued developing his critique of traditional Christianity during the 1940s, sometimes comparing it unfavourably with paganism. The belief in the Incarnation now struck him as a device for bridging the gap between man and God, something which had not been a problem for Greek religion in which men and gods inhabited the same world.33 He also became increasingly convinced that the idea of an afterlife had actually become a means of avoiding the problem of mortality. The traditional Christian doctrine was not entirely valueless insofar as it really had helped people to accept their mortality, but this had never been its explicit purpose.34 The disappointment of the imminent expectation of Christ’s return which characterized the earliest years of Christian faith had been met by a promise of an ultimate redemption that did not necessarily address the need for redemption in the present.35 Late in life, pondering Foucault’s views on Christian attitudes to sexuality, Oakeshott still remained convinced that Christianity had ‘never succeeded in divesting itself of a notion of “salvation” as a future condition to be awaited or promoted’.36 By that point he had long been convinced that the transformation Christianity had to undergo was into a religion not of immortality but mortality. In the mid-1950s, for example, he suggested that Confucianism and humanism, as well as ‘the religions of Greece’, could serve as guides as to how to achieve this.37 [32] See CV[36]. [33] See CV[35]. [34] See CV[27]. [35] See CV[45]. [36] See 21[18–20]. [37] See 14[25].
While human beings could not escape the fact of their own mortality, they also had to contend constantly with the fatality of action. What is done can never be undone, and given the liability of human beings to error, this brought with it the possibility of crushing feelings of guilt and remorse. It was because ‘everything is irreparable’ in this sense that the notion of sin could serve as a solution. A wrong done to another could be conceived in ultimate terms as an injury to God which could be forgiven, thus creating the possibility of absolution and a fresh beginning.38 One might, of course, dismiss this as simply a psychological device, and a possible criticism of Oakeshott’s position is that this God is a very insubstantial one. He was happy nevertheless to accept that the idea of God as ‘not a being or a person’, but as ‘a way of thinking about human life’ was a consequence of his view that Christianity was a human invention.39 He seems to have conceived of the idea of God as offering a kind of ultimate or unconditional perspective on life which reached beyond the limits of ordinary morality. ‘What is staggering is God’s imagination: no human inventor could possibly have imagined relationships such as love. There is nothing humane about this imagination, it is pure fantasy.’40 The imaginative and metaphorical approach Oakeshott took to understanding God is equally visible in an analysis of ‘The History of Creation’ which was written in the early 1960s. The creation of both man and the angels ‘so that he should not be alone’ gave the impression of a ‘restless, discontented’ God. Oakeshott’s interpretation of the Fall which resulted in our expulsion from the Garden of Eden deserves particularly close attention. The outcome of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge was that Adam and Eve became aware of their own nakedness, and indeed [38] See 15[41]. [39] See 15[59]. [40] See 16[47].
their own mortality. Thus, in Oakeshott’s understanding of it, ‘The burden of original sin is “self-consciousness.”’41 Oakeshott actually gave two somewhat different accounts of what occasioned the Fall in the first place. At one point in the notebooks he ascribes it to human pride stemming from a desire to be God’s equal. Elsewhere, he describes it as ‘an unavoidable consequence of the character with which God had endowed mankind: imagination’. But although he was inconsistent in the grounds he gave for the cause of the Fall, one could argue that either of these reasons would still allow his interpretation to make sense. Moreover, his two reasons are not mutually exclusive: imagination is presumably a precondition of pride. The profound implication of the story, which Oakeshott thought St Augustine had appreciated, was that (whether pride or imagination was the cause) the Fall was not an accident. The birth of self-consciousness represented the awakening of a quality that was already latent in humanity. ‘There was no point in creating the possibility of “sin” if in fact there were to be no sinners.’ Here we are quite clearly dealing with the view that Oakeshott put forth in On Human Conduct, of a God ‘who, when he might have devised an untroublesome universe, had the nerve to create one composed of self-employed adventurers of unpredictable fancy’, with the aim of acquiring ‘convives capable of “answering back”’.42 Oakeshott’s God rather resembles the gods of the pagans in having very human qualities. Commenting on the decline of the Roman Empire, he remarked that ‘Change is what people long for, not better or worse. In this they are like God.’43 Given the human inability to escape more than temporarily from the ceaseless flow of activity, what mattered in the end was the reality of the inevitability of change. From this point of view the process [41] See 17[38–48]. [42] See 21[22]. Cp. On Human Conduct, p. 324 (reading ‘adventurers’ for ‘adventures’ in the original). [43] See 18[02].
rather than the result was the important thing. The problem with modernity, so Oakeshott believed, was a characteristic failure to recognize this. An obsession with achievements and outcomes had distracted Western civilization from what was truly worthwhile. The ‘only human value lies in the adventure & the excitement of discovery …It is our non-recognition of this, our rejection of it, which makes our civilization…non-Christian.’44 This conception of it as a ‘religion of “non-achievement’” casts important light on the kind of salvation his modernized Christianity was able to provide. It offers eternal life, not in the form of a life after death, but in the metaphorical sense of ‘a note of timelessness, of the unconditioned, of the absolute which may be heard in the hubbub of the transitory & the conditional’.45 This form of salvation is potentially open to all, for ‘Every man is an attempt on the part of God to make a human being’, but it also presents a major challenge, as it requires people to be capable of ‘self-enactment’. The self for Oakeshott was not a natural endowment; like Christianity, it was something that had to be made, and the education necessary for this self-fashioning was a process that could fail, or even never take place. There was thus a sense for him in which ‘Some never become human’ in the full meaning of the term, though he also recognized that even people falling into this category deserved consideration; ‘they must all be treated as if they were human.’46 The outline of the book Oakeshott never wrote on Christianity is clear, then. It would have proposed, in deliberate imitation of William Blake (an ideal example for anyone wishing to argue that we must create our religion for ourselves), that ‘all deities reside in the human breast’, and that what were once called the ‘evidences’ of Christianity, its historical proofs, were in fact ‘“events” in the [44] See 18[126]. [45] See 19[75–76]. [46] See 20[39].
history of human imagination, in human self-understanding’.47 But far from treating this historicization of Christianity as a way of undermining it, it would have gone on to argue that Christianity should be celebrated as ‘a stupendous imaginative engagement, a poem whose first languages were Hebrew & Greek & Latin but which has since been written in all the languages of the world’.48 It cannot be pretended that this conception of Christianity ‘in which the Cross [is] understood as a symbol of the character of God’ was one that Oakeshott ever completely worked out. Some of his remarks seem plainly contradictory. For example, his characterization of God as ‘remote, untouched, caring nothing for suffering, for the desires & the longings of men, for their life or death’ and as one who ‘cares only about good & evil’ seems plainly at odds with his idea of God’s ‘love’ as ‘a delight in difference which must be capable of including the acceptance of errancy’.49 If God indeed cares nothing for suffering, why would He ever bother to grant forgiveness? Yet we can be certain that Oakeshott went on pondering over such matters virtually until the end of his days. The last entry in the notebooks returns once more to the advent of self-consciousness after the Fall, and asks, in respect of this new self-knowledge, ‘Was God repairing a mistake or did he intend it all along?’ In On Human Conduct, the discussion of religion immediately follows that of morality, and it should already be clear that these two subjects were very closely linked, if not indeed inseparable, so far as Oakeshott was concerned. After all, they addressed the same problem, of how best to live a mortal life. However, the sources for Oakeshott’s moral thought were somewhat different. He drew, for example, on Aristotle’s Ethics, as well as on a variety of medieval and early modern authors, for what might be called an aristocratic ideal of conduct which clearly parallels his portrait [47] See 21[09]. [48] See 20[111]. [49] Cp. 19[75–76] and 21[22].
of the religious personality without quite being identical with it. His work on this subject led him to argue, following Burckhardt, that there was a distinctive European post-Renaissance practice of moral individualism which is familiar from a number of his published essays, including ‘The Masses in Representative Democracy’. But although the notebooks are not quite so important for understanding his ideas on morality as they are for his view of religion, they once again allow us to see these ideas in formation, and add significant extra detail with respect to their sources. Perhaps the single moral virtue to receive the most attention in the notebooks is courage, for which, once more, Aristotle seems to have been a major source.50 Courage was a necessity in the face of mortality; it was a condition of being able to realize the Aristotelian injunction to live as an immortal, a saying which is quoted several times throughout the notebooks.51 It was a characteristic which Oakeshott thought distinguished Nelson, one of his great heroes, on whom some of the fragmentary notes which survive from the material he collected in the later 1940s for his unwritten biography are included here. Nelson, he believed, was driven not by ‘exterior success’ or ‘tangible ends’ (‘wealth, power, position’) but by ‘interior success’ – ‘honour, reputation, fame’.52 There was, however, a period during which this Aristotelian outlook, with its emphasis on courage and integrity, was pushed into the background. In his later twenties and early thirties, after an unrequited passion lead to an extended period of introspection, Oakeshott broke off for a time from his numbered series of notebooks to concentrate on writing what we shall call the ‘Belle Dame’ notebooks. The first bears the heading ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, after the title of a poem by Keats. In Keats’ poem, [50] See Aristotle 2. [51] See for example Notebook 8 n. 1, 08[46], 14[27], 20[02]. [52] See NE[06].
a ‘knight-at-arms’ is found ‘palely loitering’ following a meeting with a mysterious lady who took him back to her grotto where he was lulled to sleep, only to awaken alone ‘on the cold hill’s side’.53 For Oakeshott, ‘La Belle Dame’ came to represent something akin to a Platonic form of womanhood, different fragments of which he found instantiated both in women he knew and in complete strangers, but which never fully revealed itself. We have already noted that Oakeshott treated Romanticism as a living literary tradition, but this statement deserves considerable emphasis. He actually tried to live out his interpretation of Keats’ poem in his pursuit of the figure of the ‘Belle Dame’ in a manner that was entirely self-conscious and also inevitably doomed, something which he gradually seems to have realised himself.54 The unhappiness of his love life seems, for a time, to have pitched him into depression and even lead him to contemplate suicide, or at least to long for death. These too were sentiments quite in keeping with the darker side of the Romantic tradition, but they can hardly be described as classical.55 These notebooks were not simply private diaries; it is incontrovertibly clear that they were conceived as material for yet another book Oakeshott did not write, namely the semi[53] As Grant points out, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ was a sufficiently important figure in Romanticism – being the subject, for example, of several paintings – for Praz to use the phrase as the title of an entire section of The Romantic Agony, but this cannot have been Oakeshott’s source for the term. He certainly knew Praz’s book, but it was published in 1933, five years after the first of the ‘Belle Dame’ notebooks was written. See R. Grant, ‘The Pursuit of Intimacy, or Rationalism in Love’, in P. Franco and L. Marsh (eds.), A Companion to Michael Oakeshott (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), pp. 15–44, at p. 44 n. 59. [54] See BD6[11]. For a full discussion of the Belle Dame notebooks and Oakeshott’s love life in general, as well as its relationship to his intellectual life, see Grant, ‘The Pursuit of Intimacy’. [55] See BD10[04], BD10[11].
autobiographical reflection on love mentioned above.56 The book he did write during these years was Experience and its Modes, and when it is placed beside the ‘Belle Dame’ notebooks there is no better illustration of the contrast or even contradiction between the two sides of Oakeshott’s personality. There was what Grant calls the Apollonian side, for which a supremely rational approach to philosophy was the only form of experience which could escape modality, and the ‘radical Dionysiac’ side which could declare that love, not philosophy, was ‘the absolute category of experience’.57 Yet these two sides were not totally separate; they flowed into one another. In his most intensely Romantic phase, Oakeshott still thought of himself as pursuing the Aristotelian goal of immortality. Only the means had changed; the realization of a perfect love was now what was required. Thus, depending on his mood, the young Oakeshott could regard any one of religion, love, and philosophy as the way to transcend mortality and repudiate worldly values. But a man of thirty, though far from old, is no longer in the first flush of youth, and he could not escape the fear that worldliness eventually overtakes us all, however we try to evade it. The remark that ‘The story [of Don Quixote] is played out in the lives of each of us’ so that ‘At the expense of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza grows in each of us & comes to dominate us’ is revealing.58 What worried Oakeshott was not suffering from delusions, like Don Quixote who believed himself to be a medieval knight in an age of chivalry which was not only long past but had never really existed in the manner in which he imagined it in the first place. Rather, his worry was about not being able to suffer from delusions of this sort. Sancho Panza, the elderly Don’s faithful squire who is forever shattering his illusions, was precisely the kind of person [56] See BD7[20–21], BD8[08–10], BD10[38]. [57] See BD10[02]. [58] See BD3[26].
Oakeshott did not want to become, or to have any more to do with than was necessary. For Oakeshott, it seems, Cervantes had hit upon a fundamental feature of human life, namely, that it is grounded in imagination. This, we have already noted, was crucial to his understanding of religion, but it was also a central feature of his moral thought. Just as in religion, he considered it important to guard against allowing the future to dominate our imagination. Even when the intense Romanticism of his late twenties and early thirties had passed, the great problem remained of how to deal with the fears to which knowledge of their own finitude left human beings exposed. It seems to have been this problem which prompted him to declare that Epicureanism was of permanent interest.59 Once more, there is an overlap with Oakeshott’s approach to Christianity, but the emphasis changes somewhat. The problem of mortality raises the question of how best to spend the time one has as well as of how to confront one’s final demise, and here Epicurus was important because of his connection to the thought of the Renaissance and the early modern era, and in particular to Montaigne. There is no doubt about the reality of this connection; Montaigne expressed an affinity for Epicurus in his Essays and was widely regarded by later generations as an Epicurean.60 Oakeshott thus had good grounds for grouping Montaigne with Epicurus. What matters, though, is what he made of Montaigne. What the Frenchman had to offer, he believed, was not a consistent set of arguments with which to answer problems of the human condition,61 but (like Aristotle) a feeling for balance and an ability to live without the need for certainty. Moreover, he had a sense of his own integrity; late in life, Oakeshott made a [59] See 11[82]. [60] See F. Hugo, Montaigne (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991 [1949]), p. 67. [61] See 13[07–08], 14[01].
note of Montaigne’s remark that ‘The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.’62 Oakeshott was as attracted to the French thought of this period as a source of moral and ethical example as he was repelled by the French authors of his own day. It seemed to him to provide a range of moral personae – the homme habile, the honnête homme, the prudhomme – illustrating his conviction of the importance of holding fast to one’s own identity (though it is fair to say that he found it in some of his contemporaries, too – in D.H. Lawrence, for example). In the mid-1960s he inserted a quotation from Pierre Charron’s work De la sagesse into a character sketch of the idea of Prud’homie which is a distilled summary of this ideal: ‘True Prud’homie…is free, candid, manly, generous, cheerful, pleasant, self-possessed, constant, it walks with a firm tread, is bold and confident, pursuing its own path…not changing its gait & pace for wind or weather or any other circumstance.’63 It insists, above all else, on a self-chosen life; the kind of life that he believed Nelson had lived in a later era, for example. In one of the late notebooks Oakeshott made the intriguing remark that his ideal ethical theory would be a kind of fusion of the ideas of Montaigne and Pascal. He mused that ‘Pascal misunderstood Montaigne…and Montaigne would never have understood Pascal. But there is a land, an island, where they meet & understand one another. I have not found it; but this is what I have looked for, without knowing what I looked for.’64 It is well established that Pascal knew Montaigne’s Essais in detail and admired him as a stylist, while disliking his lack of piety and relative indifference to religious questions. Perhaps the misunderstanding Oakeshott had in mind refers, as some have suggested, to Pascal’s failure to appreciate sufficiently that Montaigne shared his own deep scepticism about the ability of [62] See 19[13]. [63] See 18[30]. [64] See 20[69].
reason alone to provide answers for the fundamental problems of life, and that Montaigne was just as convinced as Pascal himself was of the importance of self-knowledge for living well.65 The ethical ideal that Montaigne and Pascal represented to Oakeshott was not one that he thought of as exclusively European. As with religion, he found it in Chinese culture too, particularly in Confucius, but also in the Daoists. The notebooks help us to date his interest in Chinese thought, which notably informed his conception of practical activity in the essays in Rationalism in Politics, to the early 1930s. In a notebook begun in 1931, he drew an explicit comparison between ‘The “superior man” of Confucius’ and ‘the “homme habile” of La Rochefoucauld’; later, he compared Chuang Tzu and Epicurus, making an analogy between the Daoist’s stress on the ‘importance of seeming unimportant’ and the Greek’s injunction to ‘live unknown’.66 All of this had nothing to do with philosophy, in any technical sense of the term. Oakeshott explicitly rejected the vita contemplativa as an answer to the kinds of problems raised by a concern with mortality and integrity – if the aim was to be ‘free’ in the sense of being ‘superior to fortune’, good or bad, and to that extent ‘unconquerable’, then what was necessary was not ‘Platonic wisdom’ but ‘Platonic courage’ and ‘Hobbesian “pride”’.67 The question of how widely this ethic, which is plainly radical and demanding, could be shared was certainly one that occurred to Oakeshott. In his published writings, he made plain that the practice of individualism was by no means the only moral [65] On the relationship between Pascal and Montaigne see F.M. Chambers, ‘Pascal’s Montaigne’, PMLA, 65:5 (1950), 790–804; R.C. La Charité, ‘Pascal’s Ambivalence toward Montaigne’, Studies in Philology, 70:2 (1973), 187–98; and P. Force, ‘Innovation as Spiritual Exercise: Montaigne and Pascal’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 66:1 (2005), 17– 35. [66] See 11[89], 17[11]. [67] See 17[17].
tendency visible in modern Europe. Some never acquired it, and others were actively hostile to it. In the notebooks, the alternatives tend perhaps to be presented less starkly, but they are certainly there. The bourgeois, concerned with security, actually makes the world habitable for the ‘extremist’ who refuses to compromise; he ‘keeps the world going’ and ensures it is ‘a world in which to be extremist is not absolute disaster’.68 Radical individualists determined to live out the life of a Don Quixote, it turns out, have a genuine need of their Sancho Panzas. Sancho was, after all, the one who was always there to dust the Don down and patch him up after his frequent (largely self-inflicted) mishaps, only to watch him sally forth once again in search of more adventures. Oakeshott certainly seems to have done his best to live a life of radical moral individualism himself, though not, it must be said, without imposing considerable costs on some of those around him, particularly the women in his life. There was, he wrote as a young man, ‘something wild in me’, and in old age he thought of himself as having been ‘born under a wandering star’.69 Following this star certainly ensured, as he put it, that he ‘wasted a lot of time living’,70 and the wistful remark in the ‘Preface’ to On Human Conduct that ‘when I look back upon the path my footprints make in the snow I wish it might have been less rambling’ may perhaps be read as a tacit confession of regret at the cost to his intellectual life of his often chaotic private circumstances. Perhaps, too, we ought not to overlook the way in which his ethical values lead him to regard intellectual work in a manner which may partially explain the equivocal attitude to philosophy we noted earlier. When he was young, at least, he was inclined to regard it as an ‘escape’ in a negative sense, a means of avoiding life, and one that also imposed a worldly standard of productivity.71 There is, after [68] See 19[B]. [69] See BD7[38]. [70] See 20[09]. [71] See 10[66–67].
all, an enormous difference between talking philosophy with friends when the mood strikes, and writing, much less publishing, a book of philosophy. There is also the question of how Quixotic Oakeshott became as a result of his insistence on a self-chosen life. In one sense, he was very successful in avoiding the fate he had feared in his youth, of becoming Sancho. As an old man he declared to himself that ‘those marvelous ambiguous centuries of the early Christian era, which carried with them reminiscences of ancient Athens & Sparta, & the realities of Rome’ constituted ‘my world’.72 Admittedly, he believed, also, that the twelfth century had survived into the present, and remained a shared fate: it was ‘the century in which we are all born’. But this view, if taken literally, can only be described as eccentric. Certainly, there are parts of the modern world that really have survived from the medieval past. But by the mid-twentieth century the differences between modernity and the medieval world were surely greater, when viewed in a genuinely historical fashion, than the similarities. When Oakeshott made these remarks, however, he was not aiming at historical truth. Rather, he was composing a practical present for himself, one that was rooted in imagination – as indeed he thought that such a present must be. No doubt his claim that ‘I & Charlemagne & Roland & Oliver are contemporaries’ was true, for him. But it is significant that at the head of the passage in question he placed a quote from the nineteenth-century French Romantic poet Alfred de Vigny. One of Vigny’s early poems was a reworking of the medieval epic of The Song of Roland, a heroic narrative set during Charlemagne’s wars in Spain in the late eighth century. This kind of faux medievalism was typical of Romanticism, which was always trying to leap from the present into either the past or the future; Keats, as it happens, had also taken the title of ‘La Belle Dame’ from a late medieval poem. So it is significant that the period seems to have acquired its emotional resonance for Oakeshott via Vigny, rather than from the original [72] See 20[62].
epic. Even as an old man, his values were still mediated by nineteenth-century Romanticism in a way that he himself was not always fully conscious of. What Oakeshott did know was that he disliked more or less everything that he judged distinctively modern. The hostility to modernity which comes through strongly in the notebooks is important, because some of his interpreters have tried to argue that he was a defender of it. In fact, all of the things which really mattered to Oakeshott were products of earlier periods that now seemed to him to be in danger of disappearing altogether. We have seen that this was true of Christianity, but it is equally true of other things that he also considered hallmarks of English civilization (as he tended to think of it), including the rule of law, education, and standards of civility in general. The rule of law, he liked to observe, was best understood by the Romans and the Normans in Sicily, and Englishmen of the seventeenth century such as Halifax showed a far greater attachment to and grasp of it than contemporary politicians. As for contemporary popular culture, it disgusted him on the rare occasions that he took any notice of it. ‘The indescribable vulgarity of Sergeant Pepper’ shows what he thought of the Beatles.73 In defending ethical individualism and moral and intellectual pluralism, as he undoubtedly did, Oakeshott saw himself not as defending modernity (which was characterized by Rationalism and the spirit of enterprise) but as fighting a rearguard action against it. Although he never became a true reactionary, he had a certain sympathy for spirits of this type (Joseph de Maistre is a case in point), and there can be no doubt of where he thought modernity was going. His second telling of the story of the Tower of Babel, the version which appeared in On History, may well have had its germ in the narrative of the Creation noticed above.74 It has [73] See 20[61]. [74] See 17[38–48] Cp. ‘The Tower of Babel’ in M. Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Blackwell: Oxford, 1983), pp. 165–94.
perhaps not been emphasized enough that although he thought all cultures had myths warning of the dangers of pride and overambition, it was a Christian myth that he chose to re-tell to make his point. But whatever the reason he decided to write the essay, its message was clear: the materialistic and acquisitive nature of modern civilization, and its neglect of everything incompatible with its goal of ever greater productivity, meant that it was heading for disaster. Some of this hostility may be an expression of the disappointed hopes of Oakeshott’s youth. As a young man, he had taken the view (which, typically, he derived from Spinoza) that ‘Citizenship is a spiritual experience – not a legal relationship.’75 At least, he believed, having imbibed deeply in his youth of Rationalisms and Idealisms both ancient and modern, that this was what citizenship ought to be, and seems to have hoped that society was on the brink of an imminent transformation for the better. But his experience of the rise of totalitarian ideology in the thirties set him on a long road towards just the opposite conclusion.76 By the time he wrote On Human Conduct, a legal relationship was precisely what he now thought citizenship was; spiritual matters belonged to another part of life entirely. His early religious yearnings for unity slowly became detached from politics as well as philosophy. The first steps on the road to the theory of civil association seem to have consisted of an attempt to restate the principles of democracy in the face of the totalitarian threat. The remarks on this subject, particularly those contained in the long notebook ‘A Conversation’, are entirely consistent with the moral and religious concerns we have encountered thus far. This notebook lies outside the main numbered series, but it is an important one, for it seems to have been the seedbed for many of the essays written in the 1940s [75] See 04[C]. [76] See 13[73]. For Oakeshott’s early views on politics and the relationship of his lectures on ‘The Philosophical Approach to Politics’ to Experience and its Modes see the editorial introduction to Oakeshott, Early Political Writings, SW v.
and 1950s which eventually appeared in Rationalism in Politics. The roots of the essay on ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’ also seem ultimately to lie in this notebook. This essay is important for having introduced the idea that there was a distinctively aesthetic form of experience which had not been included in Experience and its Modes. But what Oakeshott originally appears to have contemplated was a dialogue between a number of characters who represented different tendencies in contemporary society. The opening pages of ‘A Conversation’ conceive of politics as the interchange between the different voices of the poet, the scientist, the soldier, the religious man, and so on. The aim was apparently to show a style of ‘politics become conversable’, in which the aim was to avoid dogmatism at all costs. It was also to be a style to which modern democratic politics might ideally conform. Oakeshott’s conception of what democracy ought to be shared in the Romantic vision that shaped his moral and religious ideas. He noted, apparently with approval, Walt Whitman’s belief that democracy should be ‘based upon individualism, & equality’,77 but even more important, once again, was the figure of Montaigne: ‘The principle in democracy. Que sais-je? Montaigne. Humility & not presumption; enquiry & not scepticism.’78 The scepticism being ruled out here is presumably the absolute or Pyrrhonian variety, for it is evident that the approach to politics Oakeshott favoured was most definitely sceptical in the sense of being critical and questioning. He wanted a kind of democracy which would be ‘the expression of mortality’.79 At least part of what was meant by this, presumably, was that democratic politics should avoid the pursuit of Quixotic projects of the sort that the Tower of Babel came to symbolize. Utopianism of any kind became a particular species of dogmatism, or a fatal insistence [77] See 13[68]. [78] See CV[12]. [79] See 13[57].
on being right at all costs. ‘Utopian ideals have always turned to blood when they have touched the earth – & they must always do so. “Truths” always kill; errors are better, they are sometimes merciful.’80 How to ensure that this undogmatic style prevailed in politics was not a question Oakeshott believed that the modern world had discovered how to answer. ‘How to be the enemy of superstition without being the friend of “truth” – a problem never solved by J.S. Mill or any “liberal”’, he noted in the early 1960s.81 His own answer was to concentrate on processes rather than outcomes; for the ‘politics of scepticism’, ‘what you do is much less important than how you do it.’82 This presumes, of course, that there were some kinds of things that the politics of scepticism would not even attempt in the first place, but the general thrust of the remark is clear; the true political priority was, as he put it in his essay on ‘Political Education’, not to get anywhere but simply ‘to keep afloat on an even keel’.83 When the phrase ‘civil association’ first appears in the notebooks in the late 1950s, the emphasis is clearly on the art of living well amongst strangers. Civil association is ‘concerned with people whom we do not particularly like, with whom we do not agree, whom we may even despise or even hate, but with whom we must have a relationship because we live near them’.84 One of its chief characteristics might be described as what has latterly been called ‘disattendability’;85 it emphasizes the importance for freedom of [80] See 16[23]. [81] See 17[73]. [82] See 17[29]. [83] M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 2nd edn., ed. T. Fuller (Liberty Press: Indianapolis, 1991), p. 60. [84] See 16[63]. [85] Raymond Geuss, Private Goods, Public Goods (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 32.
leaving well enough alone. This aspect of civil association also comes out strongly in another brief statement of the aims of politics a few years later, in the early 1960s. ‘Politics is the art of living together & of being “just” to one another – not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life. The art of peace; the art of accommodating moralities to one another.’86 Correctly understood, politics was an important means of preserving the individual capacity for choice which gives life the possibility of religious and moral significance in the face of contingency. ‘Where there is no choice we are for ever at the mercy of chance.’87 The framework of rules which results from political deliberation in the form of legislation provides the structure within which people are free to pursue their own devices. From this point of view, individuals should be made the targets of policy as little as possible; not executive decision, but the civil and criminal law, should set the limits to their actions. Only thus could one hope fully to realize the possibility of the sole kind of life which Oakeshott considered truly meaningful, namely a self-chosen life. Such a life might as well consist in a decision to succeed in business as to live on a kibbutz; the point was that it should belong to the person choosing it, in the sense of being intelligibly related to their own choices. Yet Oakeshott believed the reality of political practice fell far short of providing the protection necessary to ensure the liberty of individual choice. Privately, he condemned it in the harshest terms. ‘Rape’, he wrote, ‘is the typical crime of modern politics; politicians rape their victims, rulers rape their subjects; technology is the rape of the earth.’88 This statement reinforces the observation already made in relation to his moral thought, that far from being any kind of defender of modernity, he was revolted by its exploitative excesses. Worse, this exploitation was now no [86] See 17[74]. [87] See 16[05]. [88] See 17[72].
longer simply a European problem, but thanks to Imperialism, a global one. ‘The liquidation of colonial government is an incident overshadowed by a revolution with which it is not very closely connected – a revolution in which Africans have learned to want.’89 The future he foresaw was a bleak one in which the rest of the world would imitate the materialistic and acquisitive habits which were making Western civilization so miserable. When considering the contemporary fortunes of education it is no surprise, then, that Oakeshott was similarly pessimistic. ‘For centuries…“Education” has meant a release from the current vulgarities of the world…Now, education is merely instruction in the current vulgarities.’90 His own defence of the values of liberal learning appears in this light as also something of a rearguard action, one from which, moreover, his own view of the limitations of philosophy meant that he could not expect much in the way of success. He had already posed the problem to himself in the 1930s. ‘Will a synthesis, a system, a corpus, teach, when we have failed to learn from those who given us insight into our civilization already?’ He answered his own question: ‘No.’91 Yet the effort itself was ‘worth trying’. Even if its value was ‘small’, it was ‘not pretentious’ to make the attempt. Though we have seen that Oakeshott condemned the idea of philosophy insofar as it was an ‘escape’ from the pressing religious and ethical problems life raised, in another sense he thought of the ability of philosophy and other forms of theoretical and artistic experience to offer temporary relief from the banality of daily life as extremely important. It was difficult if not impossible to avoid ‘work’, his synonym for instrumental activity, altogether in life, but if it could be balanced with ‘play’, which included the diversions of conversation and leisure (whether a trip to the races [89] See 17[63]. [90] See 17[66]. [91] See 13[73].
or a camping expedition) as well as intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, life became less burdensome. Education was crucial to making this possible. Although Oakeshott only began publishing his thoughts on the subject in the later 1940s, the notebooks demonstrate that he had been thinking about it since the early 1920s. In his youth, he seems to have been particularly interested in progressive education movements such as that lead by Maria Montessori. He took a very broad view of the things that were relevant to education, including, for example, music and dance. Somewhat later, in the 1930s, he seems to have been so concerned about the threat to liberal and humanistic learning that he went through a period of being actively hostile to science, fulminating that ‘this science-ridden civilization is a menace to civilized life.’92 But it was unusual for him to rant in this fashion, and further reflection convinced him that not scientific education, but scientism, or Rationalism, was the real problem. To the end of his life he remained grateful for his own education, telling himself in his eighties that ‘I was lucky: my schooldays were filled with wonder’, although he clearly felt in old age that education was not providing the same experience for modern children. ‘How can we stop education from killing the sense of wonder?’ he asked himself; but this time the question went unanswered.93 The literary sensibility which did so much to colour Oakeshott’s views on religion, morality, and politics seems to have been at work in his ideas on education and philosophy also. There is a list of ‘escapes’ in one of the early notebooks from the 1920s based on his notes on Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, and a possible source for the term ‘mode of experience’ is Murry’s The Problem of Style which he encountered in the same period.94 While his use of the concept of a mode of experience was mostly [92] See 13[B]. [93] See 21[28]. [94] See 04[45].
indebted to Spinoza and to Idealist thought, the term itself may well have had a literary source. One might wonder, too, whether there is not something fundamentally aesthetic in Oakeshott’s notion of a mode or a category of understanding: at least, any kind of perspectivalism which emphasizes that the world must always be seen from a particular point of view is potentially liable to develop in this direction. After all, Oakeshott reflected to himself when he was still young that he had chosen to live life as if it were a novel; it would be no surprise if the aestheticism which informed his moral and religious values turned out to have informed his philosophy also.95 Perhaps the lesson of the notebooks as a whole is that Oakeshott was really the last great representative, not only of British Idealism, but also of English Romanticism; and that, indeed, he continued to cleave to the latter long after he had abandoned the former. Whether this was the case is something that readers can now reflect on for themselves. Hopefully, they will find, too, that there is far more in them to discover than has been covered here. A Note on the Texts The notebooks required considerably more editorial intervention than the other material from amongst Oakeshott’s papers published in this series so far. The problem of how to present the material on the page in an orderly fashion was the first problem that needed solving. The solution adopted for the recent Cambridge editions of Nietzsche’s notebooks, of prefacing each passage with the number of the notebook and its accompanying page number (where available), seemed to be the most elegant answer.96 It both provided an absolute reference point for citation
[95] See BD5[02–04]. [96] F. Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, ed. R. Geuss and A. Nehemas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
and allowed any reader wishing to find the relevant text in the original notebook to do so easily. A more minor problem was the presence in the notebooks of various notes on loose sheets which could not always be reliably tied to a particular point in the text and which in any case could not be ascertained to have remained in the place where Oakeshott originally inserted them (assuming that he did in fact do so himself). In some cases they did appear closely connected to passages in the notebooks, but in other instances their placement seemed arbitrary. In the interests of consistency, notes on loose sheets have been placed at the end of the notebook in question and given a letter rather than a page number, with a note indicating their original location where appropriate. Some of them have been numbered, apparently by an archivist, and these numberings have also been noted. It was also in the nature of the material that it contained copious abbreviations, such as ‘Xt’ and ‘Xtianity’ for ‘Christ’ and ‘Christianity’, for example. Most of these abbreviations have been expanded in the interests of readability. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization have also been standardized and corrected where it seemed desirable. But where Oakeshott wrote in note form rather than in complete sentences, his phrasing has been allowed to stand. At the same time, to preserve as much of the flavour of reading the originals as possible, Oakeshott’s underlinings have been preserved, and certain abbreviations (such as ‘Cp.’ for ‘Compare’) have been retained, as have his ampersands. An effort has been made in the first footnote to each chapter to describe the notebook physically and to record the quotations Oakeshott sometimes used to embellish the title page, where appropriate. On the whole, passages of continuous prose have been favoured over the more fragmentary entries in the notebooks. Instances of these, such as lists, have only been included when they seemed to be of exceptional interest; for example, Oakeshott’s list of projected works at 07[A]. As already noted, most of the material in the notebooks which consisted exclusively of quotations from
other writers has been omitted; even though they are often of interest to read through, their inclusion was not appropriate in a volume of this kind. Since, however, some readers will inevitably wish for more detail about Oakeshott’s reading than an edition of this kind can provide, the editor has also tried to list in the first footnote those works from which at least roughly a page or so of notes were copied out. It must be remarked, however, that the notebooks also contain very many individual quotations which were simply too numerous to be included, and any mention of these has been silently omitted. Very occasionally, an unaccompanied quotation has been included in the main text if it seemed to have particular significance for Oakeshott’s thought; for example, Santayana’s reflections on the use of the term theoria.97 Then there was the question of what to do with Oakeshott’s own references. It can probably be assumed that readers of Oakeshott will not need guidance regarding the works of Hobbes and Hegel, but many of the other authors mentioned are now generally forgotten, so some annotation seemed called for. Oakeshott’s references are typically cursory; in general, an author, short title, and perhaps a page number or other indication of a book or chapter is the most one can hope for. His notes, such as they are, are given in the footnotes, and where possible they have been put into a standard short form. If it were possible to be sure of the edition that Oakeshott was using, his note has been expanded into a full bibliographic reference. Where there is some doubt, a full citation has been placed after his note. In cases where no information was supplied at all, an editorial note has been inserted. These inserted notes are based on a first edition, another contemporary edition, or a modern edition if available, in that order of preference. A final word of warning is required – many times during the preparation of this volume a phrase which gave no indication of being a quotation turned out to be such. While the editor would like to believe that everything represented in this volume as being [97] See 09[16].
Oakeshott’s own words really falls into that category, the possibility of error can never be entirely excluded. And on that note, it must also be said that (owing chiefly to a lack of time and wherewithal), the annotation has been almost exclusively reliant on electronic sources. Although a gratifyingly large number of the nineteenth and early twentieth century works that figure in the notebooks can now be found online as scanned digital copies, which for the purpose of bibliographic reference is as often as good as being able to consult the original, this is not uniformly the case. Hundreds of the books Oakeshott refers to were available in this form, but sometimes a reference had to be based on the electronic catalogue of a national or university library, or even in some cases of an antiquarian bookseller. The perils of this approach are too obvious to be worth emphasizing, but the benefit to the reader was felt overall to outweigh the inevitable mistakes which it entails. Similarly, while some of the persons mentioned in the notebooks will need no introduction, many of those named are now also forgotten, and they, too, have been identified where possible in the hope of saving the reader some trouble. Lastly, as for the problem of selection, it can only be acknowledged that another editor would have chosen differently. Much had to be omitted in order to fit this volume within a single pair of covers. At least until the notebooks can be made available in their entirety in electronic form, the present volume, whatever its inadequacies, will have to serve as the public record of Oakeshott’s private thoughts.
Notebook 1 (c.1922) 1
01[05] In arguing for a national church we must not forget to distinguish between what is national in a nation and what is merely incidental – such as education etc: The difference between personality & faddy habits.2 01[05] Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world!3 01[14] To make allegories was the aim of medieval Christianity.4 [1] LSE 2/1/1. Soft cover, green, 20 cm × 15 cm, ruled. Recto folios numbered 1–62. Autograph, pencil and ink. Cover: ‘Notes / Michael Oakeshott / I.’ Undated. Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fos. 2–4, A. Fogazzaro, The Man of the World, tr. M. Prichard Agnetti, 3rd edn (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907); 57–8, John Keats, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, ed. R.M. Milnes, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1848); 59–60, Plato, Symposium and Phaedrus, probably from The Dialogues of Plato, tr. B. Jowett, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871). [2] Fos. 5–6 contain notes on Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi (c.1418–27). [3] John 16:33. [4] Fos. 6–16 contain notes on W.R. Inge, Types of Christian Saintliness (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1915).
01[19–20] The Trinity5 (Power) God. The Absolute creator. (Wisdom) The Son. God turned towards the world. The word (will) made flesh. Means by which all was created. Immanent in man’s soul. (Goodness) The spirit. Witness of the will. The interpreter. Argument from (i) Our own personality. (ii) The meaning of ‘persons’ – utterly reasonable. 01[29] Love and knowledge go on acting and reacting upon one another till love finally is made perfect and reigns supreme. 01[35] Jesus Christ is the sure proof of the sacramentality of our life. A life with an inner meaning – a material body with the spirit within. In Him it was God wholly possessing the body. 01[35] The first act of a democratic state would be to form an aristocracy.
[5] Fos. 17–38 contain notes on W.R. Inge, Studies of English Mystics (London: John Murray, 1906).
01[36] We must not condemn the world as evil because it seems to be evil at the moment, any more than it would be just to condemn a policy which was stopped half way. 01[36] Father & Son Those fragile loves to which men look back with tenderness & passion, emotions only to be explained as Montaigne explained them, ‘parceque c’était lui, parceque c’était moi.’6 01[37] Flowers are spring’s whisperings. 01[39] If you admit no possibility of fall you can admit none of rise.7 01[39] Allegory is what prose writers use where the poet uses symbols.8
[6] See Montaigne, Essais, ‘Of Friendship.’ [7] Fos. 38–40 contain notes on Emile Gebhart, L’Italie mystique: histoire de la renaissance religieuse au moyen age (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1890). [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Symons.’ Probably Arthur William Symons (1865–1945), Welsh poet.
01[41] There are more molecules in one tear than there are people on the Earth.9 01[41] The perfect Christian character. The balanced mind. The man who has all good qualities at his command and the necessary judgment to know when to use them. 01[48] In Indian art we see the realization that the infinite is the goal of India’s ideal by the accumulation of images.10 Infinite accumulation is India’s expression of her ideal. 01[50] Birds & flowers and all beauty are rainbows – they are promises, assurances that all is well, from God. 01[50] In love is our existence made intelligible. For in love are all contraries reconciled.
[9] Fos. 40–1 contain notes on W.R. Inge, Truth and Falsehood in Religion Six Lectures Delivered in Cambridge to Undergraduates in the Lent Term 1906 (London: John Murray, Albermarle Street, 1906). [10] Fos. 46–50 contain notes on R. Tagore, Sādhanā: The Realisation of Life (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1921).
01[60] Plan11 The Psychology of the Saints Monasticism – the externalizing properties of the church. From freedom to authority – the philosophy of Papalism. From Doubt to belief. Religion – bearing or borne. The sense of sin. The meaning of poverty. Celibacy, etc: Children – their message & significance to the saints. The Balanced mind. Liberal Theologians. Liberal-Conservative.
[11] This page crossed out in pencil.
Notebook 2 (c.1922) 1
[1] LSE 2/1/2. Soft cover, green, 20 cm × 15 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–97. Autograph, pencil and ink. Cover: ‘II.’ Undated. Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fos. 1–4, H. Bergson, Dreams, tr. E.E. Slosson (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1914); 17–20, H. Bergson, Le rire. Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1900); 36–40, One Hundred Poems of Kabir, tr. R. Tagore and E. Underhill (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1915); 55–7, R.L. Stevenson, Lay Morals, and Other Papers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1911); 58–9, John Fiske, The Unseen World, and Other Essays, 5th edn (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1876); 60, ‘Kingsley, Life, 18th ed.’, probably Charles Kingsley His Letters And Memories of his Life, ed. F.E. Kingsley, 2 vols. (London: H.S. King, 1876); 61, W.R. Inge, Faith and Knowledge (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1904); 64–5, R. Tagore, The Gardener (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1913); 68, H. Black, Edinburgh Sermons Listening to God (London, Edinburgh, New York, Chicago and Toronto: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1906); 73–5, J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1920); 76–7, F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. H. Zimmern (Edinburgh and London: T. Foulis, 1907); 79–82, J. Combarieu, Music Its Laws and Evolution (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd, 1910); 83–4, T.H. Huxley, Method and Results Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1893); George William Russell, aka ‘A.E.,’ Imaginations and Reveries (Dublin and London: Mansel & Company, Ltd., 1915); 86, C.K.D. Patmore, The Rod, The Root, and the Flower (London: George Bell and Sons, 1895); 87–8, A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 8th edn (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1915); 88–90, J. Bryce, Modern Democracies, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1921); 92– 4, B. de Selincourt, ‘Rhyme in English Poetry’ and A.H. Fox Strangways, ‘Words and Music in Song’, in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, vol. vii, ed. J. Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 7–29, 30–56.
02[07] The complexity of our eye enables us to see things simply – see things as a whole.2 02[12] ‘But through the words, lives & verses, runs the simple inspiration which is the whole poem. So, among the dislocated individuals one life goes on moving.’3 Individuals joining together in a society; but the society soon becomes an individual in itself able in its turn to be part and parcel of a new association. 02[27] ‘Joy is a soul-force…joy illuminates thought.’4 02[31] ‘The complete citizen should leave school capable not only of living normally, but of feeling life. He should be in a position both to create and to respond to the creation of others.’5 That response to the creations of others which is itself creation. [2] Fos. 5–16 contain notes on H. Bergson, Evolution créatrice (Paris: F. Alcan, 1907). [3] Bergson, Evolution créatrice, p. 272. [4] Fos. 21–35 contain notes on Emile-Jacques Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music and Education (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921). The quotation is attributed by Dalcroze to Henri Bois at p. 175 n. [5] Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music and Education, p. 137.
02[43] The child must be armed against the present, must be protected from falling prey to a view of life which knows only the present, by that knowledge and feeling of eternity, which is behind, which upholds time, without which no time could exist, which comes to us in religion. The slaves of petty desires, of materialism, of ‘rationalism’ are the slaves of a restricted view, and can only be freed by the impulse of natural religion springing up within him and showing him the spiritual world which is above all time and place, which includes all times & places & people.6 02[43] Religion is the poetry of morality. A code of morality only rules bad, unloving souls in order that they first may become better & then good. As an eagle flies high above the highest mountains so the transport of religion transcends the persuasion of our moral law. 02[44] A child is to you, that which is in your heart. Children will be loving, gentle, beautiful, thoughtful, unselfish if in your heart they can, all unawares, find these virtues. Cf. Jeremy Taylor. 02[44] Church = fellowship = Friendship with God
[6] Fos. 40–54 contain notes on Jean Paul Richter, Levana; Or, The Doctrine Of Education, tr. S. Wood (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., 1887).
02[47] Joy is spiritual pleasure. Cheerfulness is the result of spiritual enjoyment. 02[67] Practice & improvement Improvement takes place actually during the interruption of practice. It has been found that the memory is more retentive if after it has ‘memorized’ the facts it is given a period of rest before use for any other purpose. In this period of ‘rest’ the facts are engraved in the memory more indelibly. 02[67] Thought is always spasmodic. There is no such thing as an unbroken chain of thought. The revelation comes suddenly & categorically. Our actions do not come as the fruit of an unbroken train of thought, they are the materialization of a sudden, unexpected desire, passionate longing, of the whole soul. 02[69] 1. Logic.7 2. The Philosophy of the practical. 3. Aesthetic. [7] Fos. 69–72 contain notes on B. Croce, Theory and History of Historiography, tr. D. Ainslie (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1921).
4. History. 02[A]8 Jesus’ saying – ‘Mother behold thy son.’ Astounding when viewed according to Jewish ideas – women & children in Jewish society.
[8] On a loose sheet inserted at 02[51], crossed out.
Notebook 3 (1922) 1
[1] LSE 2/1/3. Soft cover, green, 20 cm × 16 cm, ruled, 20 cm × 16 cm, ruled. Recto folios numbered 1–62. Autograph, pencil and ink. Title page: ‘Michael Oakeshott / Notes. / Volume III. / August. 1922.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fos. 1–8, W. Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1895); 8–10, Ella Fuller Maitland, Pages from the Day-Book of Bethia Hardacre (London: Chapman & Hall, 1895), and More Pages from the Day-Book of Bethia Hardacre (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1907); 10–11, W.F. de Morgan, It Never Can Happen Again (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1909); 14–18, P.T. Forsyth, Christ on Parnassus Lectures on Art, Ethic, and Theology (London: Independent Press, 1911); 19–22, Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1876); 23–30, Henry Jones, A Faith That Enquires: The Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Glasgow in the years 1920 and 1921, (London: Macmillan, 1922); 30–3, E.G.A. Holmes, What Is Philosophy? (London and New York: John Lane: The Bodley Head, 1905); 32, J.S. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions Political, Philosophical, and Historical, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867); 34–5, T.H. Green, Works, ed. R.L. Nettleship, 3 vols. (London and New York: Longmans, Green, And Co., 1888); 35, W.E. Soothill, The Three Religions of China. Lectures delivered at Oxford (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913); 36–9, L.P. Jacks, The Legends of Smokeover (Toronto, London, and New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1921); 40–2, A.J. Balfour, Essays Speculative and Political (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920); 43–6, G. Santayana, The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress Reason in Art (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1905); 47–51, H. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. T.E. Hulme (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912); 51–2, L.P. Jacks, Religious Perplexities (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1923); 54–6, J.W. von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, tr. B. Saunders (New York: The Macmillan Company; London, Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1906); 58–9, B. Bosanquet, What Religion Is (London: Macmillan and Co., 1920); 60–1, K. Stephen, The
03[62] Repentance. ‘Repent ye for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.’2 To the Hebrew & the Greek, Repentance means turning round – one of life, other of mind. No emphasis on the backward look. ‘Open your hearts & minds or you will not see a Good thing when it comes, or understand it when you see it.’ Jesus’ ‘repentance’ is a casting off of preconceptions, a becoming as a little child, & it is followed by the Kingdom of Heaven. It is a freeing of the mind, it is joyful & forward looking.3 03[62–3] The Vision of the Spirit. Jesus lived in a world where the hand of God was visible everywhere. In every happening he was drawn close to His Father. Thus in the Storm on the Sea of Gallilee, he is awakened suddenly among men who do not see the world thus – and who are consequently afraid & perplexed. The fear of the disciples is so evident, that for a moment Jesus himself is dazed – then he comes to himself & says ‘You cowards.’ Misuse of Mind: A Study of Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism (London: Kegan Paul Trench Trübner and Co. Ltd., 1922); 70–72, J.P. Richter, Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days, tr. C.T. Brooks, 2 vols. (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865); 84–6, P.T. Forsyth, Marriage: Its Ethic and Religion (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912); 87–90, M. Rutherford, Pages From A Journal With Other Papers (London: T.F. Unwin, 1900), More Pages From A Journal With Other Papers (London, Edinburgh, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne: Henry Frowde Oxford University Press, 1910), and Last Pages From A Journal With Other Papers, ed. D.V. White (London: Humphrey Milford, 1915); 91–3, G. Santayana, Poems (London, Bombay, and Sydney: Constable and Company Ltd, 1922). [2] Matthew 3:2. [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Burkitt, Christian Beginnings.’ F.C. Burkitt, Christian Beginnings Three Lectures (London: University of London Press, 1924).
Also, after the mystic Transfiguration, he is met on his return by the blind man & his father & the disciples who have failed to effect a cure. He is so full of the reality of God everywhere that he cannot at first understand the difficulty felt by others. He then crys out to the men before him – ‘Believe.’ You have no faith – no vision of the Spirit. 03[65] Men & women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bear the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid the burden on their lives. 03[82] General Argument4 General assumption throughout – Christianity is Roman Catholicism. Modernism = position adopted by many who wish to remain Catholic but who have pursued (i) Rationalistic study of Bible & Church History. (ii) Modern Philosophy. Christianity thinks, a priori, that a miracle is probable. It must stand apart from the intellectual world of any particular day. It is always anti the world. (In what sense does Santayana use the word ‘world’?) Modernism is an allegiance to God & the World. It tries to reconcile the ever irreconcilable – Christianity & ‘Modern’ thought. Church & the World. Tries to take all dogmas in a ‘purely symbolic or moral sense.’ Christianity came to announce salvation [4] Fos. 79–84 contain notes on G. Santayana, Winds of Doctrine Studies In Contemporary Opinion (London: J.M. Dent & Sons; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913).
from the world. Catholicism etc. ‘gives out the full & exact note of the New Testament.’ The wish ‘to preserve a continuity of moral traditions,’ to take good out of all human activities, is a Pagan, Renaissance wish & contrary to Christiantity. Modernists think that the weakness of the Church is that it does not follow the impulse of the age – but this may well prove its strength. The real power in all Churches lies with those who believe in the sacraments & miracles literally, who preach ‘foolishness.’5 03[83] Modernism is suicide – it gives up all the essential dignity of Christianity.6 Whatever the ‘world’ is, Christianity by definition is different? 03[A]7 Philosophy & temperament. We cannot exclude this factor – Everyman an Aristotelian or a Platonist by nature. What is this factor? 03[A] Can it be conceived that such books as W. James, Varieties, will give anyone real belief, faith.8 It is a scientific examination of facts [5] See Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, pp. 36–7, 50–1, 59. [6] See Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, pp. 35, 56. [7] On a loose sheet inserted at 03[24], headed ‘The Ultimate Belief.’ Apparently a note on A. Clutton-Brock, The Ultimate Belief (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1916). [8] W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–2 (London and Bombay: Longman’s, Green, and Co., 1902).
which adds to our knowledge about (correct language here) these things, but does not help us to know them. 03[B]9 To produce great literature we must have within us that spirit of quiet, that ‘central peace Subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.’ The world is agitated but behind it is peace; and he who has cleft the veil and can see, has eternal life. See Carroll, ‘Preface’ to Silvie & Bruno etc. – full of life, but in harmony with ‘those deeper cadences of life.’10 03[C]11 I. Is there such a sensation as one of pure admiration? Is it not usually – always – mixed with an active desire to emulate? If the sovereignty of personality is a fact then it is not possible. If we admire a picture then we cannot wish to emulate the picture. Which is to say that we can never merely contemplate human character. II. Beauty of a process? Scientific mans point of view was aesthetic? IV, & V. Then a simple, unrestricted mass of colour cannot be called, ‘Beautiful.’
[9] On a loose sheet inserted at 03[26]. [10] L. Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (London: Macmillan and Co., 1889). [11] On pencil on the reverse of a mutilated letter to J.F. Oakeshott from the Encylopedia Britannica, inserted at 03[78]. Apparently notes on J.S. Blackie, On Beauty: Three Discourses Delivered in the University of Edinburgh. With an Exposition of the Doctrine of the Beautiful According to Plato (Edinburgh: Sunderland and Knox; London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1858), including pp. 118, 148, 150.
VI. Sometimes, when the shape can be perceived as a whole in one glance, memory is not a factor in sense perception – only extent.12 VII. Then greater ability of mind will find fewer things ugly. XIII. Aesthetic appreciation came before production. XVIII. Cf. Keat’s attempt at incompleteness. It can at times be right to leave a work of art incomplete. XX. The lyric.
[12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Bergson.’
Notebook 4 (1923) 1
[1] LSE 2/1/4. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 14 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–85. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘NOTES. IV. / July 2nd 1923.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fos. 1–2, W.S. Landor, Pericles & Aspasia, ed. C.G. Crump, 2 vols. (London: J.M. Dent and Co., 1890); 3, W.S. Landor, The Hellenics of Walter Savage Landor. Enlarged and Completed (Edward Moxon: London, 1847); 5–13, W.B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A.H. Bullen, 1903); 18–20, J.M. Murry, The Problem of Style (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Copehagen, New York, Toronto, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Shanghai: Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press, 1922); 21–26, B. Bosanquet, Essays and Addresses (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1891); 30–3, J.M.E. McTaggart, ‘The Necessity of Dogma’, International Journal of Ethics, 5 (1895), 147–62; 34–7, G. Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (London, Bombay, and Sydney: Constable and Company Ltd., 1922); 37–8, T.E. Brown, Letters of Thomas Edward Brown Author of ‘Fo’c’sle Yarns’, ed. S.T. Irwin, 2 vols. (London: Archibald Constable and Co., Ltd., 1900); 38–40, D. Merejkowski, Christ and Anti-Christ The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci The Forerunner, tr. H. Trench (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908); 41–2, J.M.E. McTaggart, ‘Mysticism’, New Quarterly, 2 (1909), 315–39; 45–6, W.H. White, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, Dissenting Minister. Edited by his Friend Reuben Shapcott (London: Trübner and Co., 1881); 49–50, R.L. Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance (London: Chatto and Windus, 1896); 51–4, G. Macdonald, Phantastes A Faërie Romance for Men and Women (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1858); 55–6, T. Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling (London: Chapman and Hall, 1871); 60–1, R. Browning, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1871); 62–3, G. Moore, The Brook Kerith A Syrian Story (Edinburgh: Dunedin Press, 1921); 63, B. Pascal, Discours sur les passions de l’amour avec un commentaire de Emile Faguet (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1911); 64–5, M. Pattison, Essays by the Late Mark Pattison Sometime Rector of Lincoln College, ed. H. Nettleship,
04[45] Escapes. Fantasy – (Bennett – Hugo.)2 Romance, Dreams.3 Sleep, insensibility, poetry of escape, wine, the past, childhood (Vaughan).4 04[48] Milton was not the proverbial puritan without any sensitiveness to beauty – he was a man who knew only too well the force of temptation & his life was a long struggle against it.5 All his poems treat of temptation either succumbed to or thwarted. Paradise Regained is not a continuation of Paradise Lost but a new theme, a new temptation & a final victory. We are all Miltons in at least a part of our lives. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889); 68–9, possibly G.T.W. Patrick, The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature Translated from the Greek Text of Bywater with an Introduction Historical and Critical (Baltimore: N. Murray, 1889); 69–71, J.M.E. McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion (London: Edward Arnold, 1906); 72–77, G. Santayana, The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress Reason in Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905); 78–80, W.M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel Without A Hero (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1849); 81–3, W.E.H. Lecky, The Map of Life Conduct and Character (London: Longman’s, Green, and Co., 1901); 84–5, B. Russell, Prospects of Industrial Civilization (London: Allen and Unwin, 1923). [2] Arnold Bennett, Hugo. A Fantasia on Modern Themes (London: Chatto and Windus, 1906). [3] Fos. 42–5 contain notes on A. Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 2nd edn (1908). [4] Possibly a reference to ‘Childhood’ by Henry Vaughan (1621–95), which begins ‘I cannot reach it; and my striving eye / Dazzles at it, as at eternity.’ [5] Fos. 47–9 contain notes on Sir W. Raleigh, Milton (London: Edward Arnold, 1913).
04[67] ‘Pascal is naturally & rightly taken by those who found their Apologetic upon Immanence as their leader.’6 Cf. Schleiermacher. Pascal was his precusor in his attempt to build up an ‘Immanent’ apologetic. 04[84] Habit Socrates defined excellence in terms of knowledge – which is the opposite of Habit. Fichte said that to form a habit was to fail; & Shelley describes it as ‘The queen of slaves, the hoodwinked angel of the blind & dead.’ But cf. Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, for the value of habit.7 04[A]8 The poet’s business to reveal the real under the symbol. See Shelley’s ‘Defence.’9 04[A] We must get back to the idea that all philosophy is built on experience & that some experience is more profound, truer than other. And that the true poet’s experience is the profoundest – [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘H.F. Stewart, The Holiness of Pascal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), p. 89.’ [7] B. Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London: Macmillan and Co., 1899). [8] On a loose sheet inserted into Notebook 4. [9] i.e. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry.’
because we mean by poet, ‘he who experiences best what is true’ – feels unity when others only feel diversity; knows spirit, mind, when others see only material & physical expression. 04[A] Philosophy is really the clear thinking of what is felt in religion – the oneness. If we have no religion we have but a poor starting place for philosophy. 04[B]10 The Poetry of A.E. Poetry & politics. Politics of time; politics of eternity. How to join. Few have dared not believe that here we are in exile – Paul, Augustine;— But what sort of exile? A vale of soul-making? Prometheus, Psyche. 04[B] It were too much, perhaps, to ask that every worker should envisage the whole – that were to demand the quarryman should build the temple in his mind – but we may ask that those who profess to see it whole should not leave out half – & that the invisible, eternal half.
[10] On a loose sheet inserted into Notebook 4.
04[C]11 See Bosanquet, Aspects, essay I – the true citizen sees life whole.12 04[C] Citizenship is a spiritual experience – not a legal relationship. See Spinoza – De intellectus emendatione & Ethics & Tractatus theologico–politicus. 04[D]13 Read Plato The great question is, what exactly is the social experience? The poet takes us behind forms which are dissimilar to show us the unity.
[11] On a loose sheet inserted into Notebook 4. [12] B. Bosanquet, ‘The Duties of Citizenship,’ in B. Bosanquet (ed.), Aspects of the Social Problem (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1895), pp. 1–13. [13] On a loose sheet inserted into Notebook 4.
Plato 1 (July 1923) 1
PL1[01] Plato’s conception – The best life can only be lived in some form of organized community, (therefore) he calls it ‘The Republic.’ So the question ‘What is the best life?’ is the same as ‘What is the best order or organization of society?’ PL1[01] Greeks did not distinguish between ethical & political aspects of life – but they did not therefore confuse them. Nowadays we have come to distinguish – for good or for evil. PL1[01] The Republic is also a book of a reformer. (Unlike Aristotle in this way.)
[1] LSE 2/2/1. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 12.5 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–86. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘I. / Plato. Republic. / July. 1923.’ The notebooks on Plato make extensive use of B. Bosanquet, A Companion to Plato’s Republic For English Readers Being a Commentary Adapted to Davies and Vaughan’s Translation (London: Rivington and Co., 1895); R.L. Nettleship, Lectures on the Republic of Plato, ed. G.R. Benson (London: Macmillan and Co, 1898); and The Republic of Plato Translated into English with an Analysis and Notes, tr. J.L. Davies and D.J. Vaughan (Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1866).
PL1[04] Plato’s aim was to awaken Athens to her desperate need of discipline. Sparta, he saw, took life seriously, was scientifically organized – for a purpose – war. ‘The children of this world are wiser than the children of light’ (Luke 16:8). Athens must be disciplined, scientifically organized for the purpose of – ‘the good life.’ It is the old, old trouble which Jesus saw in the religious life of men. PL1[21] 35.412 Is this the question which Political Philosophy sets itself to answer? – ‘the manner in which a man ought to live.’ PL1[26] The idea that God blesses the just, that virtue should have its reward is instinctive in man. In purest form found in Old Testament. Later is corrupted by making material prosperity a criterion of justice. In early times it was but a convenient way of expressing the fact that righteousness rules the world. But ordinary facts contradict it as a theory of life.3
[2] Oakeshott’s numberings refer to the page and line number in Davies and Vaughan. [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. J.E. Acton, Historical Essays & Studies, ed. J.N. Figgis and R.V. Laurence (London: Macmillan and Co., 1907), p. 286, and Plato, Laws, 662.’
PL1[29] ‘While every man is insufficient for himself, every man has it in him to give to others what they have not got. This is what we may call the principle of reciprocity.’4 Cp. Hegel’s principle that unity requires differentiation, & that the greater the differentiation, the greater the unity. PL1[34] 66. 2–5 The Quest for God is the whole business of human life. This idea puts meaning into the living history of man’s mental & physical struggles. PL1[35] Whole argument from 70.35–71.14 lies against the Christian conception of God. But does this idea necessitate the idea of change in God? (Note Plato merely says that it is ‘very unlikely.’)5 PL1[36] Bradley leaves open the question as to why there should be appearance as well as reality. Appearance seems like a lie of God in Plato’s sense. That is, if we can speak of appearances as created by Him.
[4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Nettleship, Lectures, p. 71.’ [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 381e.’
PL1[38] Cf. Spinoza, Ethics. Ideal of Freedom. It is really the same thing as Plato’s Temperance. Cf. 292.34. PL1[44] The problem of Christian theology – Man is sinful, God is good – there is no common ground in either, no analogy. A gulf to be bridged – the Divine Initiative. ‘While we were yet in sin.’ PL1[51] Plato’s idea that the thing to do is to get the State to a certain level of life & then keep it there at all costs. No idea of continuing progress.6 PL1[54–55] The basis of all political theory must be sought in the individual consciousness. This is fundamental in Plato & Aristotle. The justification & nature of the State is in the mind of man. PL1[59] (a) Communism & (b) the Sovereignty of Philosophy are the subjects of book V. (a) As advocated by Plato only applies to the Guardians. It is supplementary machinery to give effect to & reinforce the spirit which education is to create.
[6] Compare Nettleship, Lectures, p. 142.
Plato sees the enormous dangers, socially, which come from property & family. They are the great strongholds of selfishness. (b) Two elements – (i) ‘speculative.’ This is possessed by all, but in very varying degrees. To do good it must, like art, be enlisted in the service of the State. (ii) ‘Spiritual’ cf. Roman Catholic Church & England in the 17th century.7 PL1[61–62] Plato is so taken up with the different elements & abilities of woman’s nature, that he does not question whether her real nature can or cannot be said to be the sum of these abilities. Or whether, having these abilities, to a degree, the same as men, she has not, perhaps, others, higher & more suited to her nature. There is a logical fallacy. A is similar to B (therefore) B has nothing other than A. The more co-operation in a community the better – this is Plato’s principle. But how? Plato takes what we should call a restricted view of woman & her capabilities. Partly owing to his time and place. Greece was almost Oriental in its treatment of women. Plato makes a great advance.8 Cf. Rousseau & his protest against woman’s neglect of her family. And Rousseau was, in many ways, a true Platonist.9 PL1[63] Such phenomena as ‘crowd suggestion,’ & such observations as ‘corporations have no conscience,’ point out the fact that human [7] Compare Nettleship, Lectures, pp. 166–9. [8] Compare Bosanquet, Companion, p. 182; Nettleship, Lectures, p. 173. [9] Compare Bosanquet, Companion, p. 187.
nature is limited in the degree to which it can really lead a common life. To force it further means the loss of all the greatness of a higher individuality. Family may often be the greatest source of selfishness – dynastic wars, nepotism, etc: – but it is also the occasion of the highest unselfishness. Are we to enforce unity, to say that the Family is on occasion evil & so must be done away & the whole ruled by ‘wise men,’ or are we to seek to limit the evil & give fullest scope for the good, i.e. to eliminate evil by slow education of the whole & not by authority in these matters?10 PL1[64] It is nothing against the Ideal that it cannot be made actual. The actual is never more than an approximation to the ideal pattern. Justice is a pattern for human action; true human life would be lived in an ideal community. Actual life is, to a degree, a falsification of the Truth.11 ‘Theory’ a misleading word. The antithesis between ‘theory & practice’ is vulgar. Read, ‘Is it possible for things to be done as they are said?’12
[10] Compare Nettleship, Lectures, pp. 178–9. [11] Compare Nettleship, Lectures, pp. 184–5. [12] Compare Bosanquet, Companion, p. 201.
PL1[66] What are called ‘forms’ then, are the elements of unity in the manifold objects or things which we apprehend by the senses.13 PL1[66] The object of knowledge is what is; or, in other words, the operation of knowledge is to produce consciousness of what is. Opinion must have an object; but it cannot be the same as that of knowledge.14 PL1[77] Simile of the Cave. Everything is seen from a fixed standpoint – prejudice. Man sees what he can, not what is, as a rule. No open minded observation. Education is painful.15 PL1[78] When a ‘philosopher’ returns to ordinary life he is, at first, unable to grasp the awful reality of ordinary life. (Cf. Christ after the Transfiguration. Matthew 17:17.)
[13] A direct quotation from Nettleship, Lectures, p. 191. See also Nettleship, Lectures, p. 195: ‘The world as it is for science, the world of what Plato calls forms, is not a second, shadowy, unreal world, it is the same world better understood.’ [14] The first sentence is direct quotation, the second a digest of Nettleship, Lectures, p. 193. [15] Compare Nettleship, Lectures, p. 261.
But cf. ‘You will see a thousand times better’ – This is the final justification for the sovereignty of philosophy.16 PL1[79] The relation between society & great men should be one of mutual recognition & service. The great man must remember that he owes a tremendous amount of his greatness & character to society; & he will willingly serve society in return. PL1[81] The truths of science ‘always’ are, granted the assumptions on which they are based.17 PL1[83] 258.17 Dialectic is Rational. It does not even use diagrams to the extent which geometry does.18 PL1[83] 260.17 Dialectic is critical; & its result, categorical.19 [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘242.22; 239.11–26.’ The context is a discussion of Plato’s myth of the cave. [17] Compare Bosanquet, Companion, p. 287. [18] Compare Bosanquet, Companion, p. 297. [19] Compare Bosanquet, Companion, p. 301.
PL1[84–5] Plato’s principles of Education:— 1. Education must be complete, meeting all the demands that human nature brings with it. 2. Education should be co-extensive with life, for education simply means keeping the soul alive. 3. The organs of education are simply the great things of life – Religion, art, science, philosophy, etc:— 4. Its aim is to realize the harmonious & complete man – whose completeness is found in service of the community. These principles, & not any method suggested, are Plato’s gift to the world.20 PL1[85] Note: The idea of Government in Greece. We have narrowed it tremendously. There it meant the total leadership afforded to the people. Now, it means simply politics. But there are other leaders than political.
[20] Compare Nettleship, Lectures, p. 292.
Plato 2 (July 1923)1 PL2[01] Books II–VII of the Republic may be regarded as a philosophy of history. But it is in no sense an ‘historical’ account. And for this reason all account of the reaction from without, which plays so great a part in actual societies, is omitted. Did Plato think that reactions from without were only the results, the occasions of fall, & that the whole health of society was ruled internally? PL2[06] 299.10 The tyrant grows from the public champion. The despotism of the Thirty did not arise in this manner, but that of Dionysius the elder did.2 PL2[12] 334.13 ‘Perhaps in heaven there is laid up a pattern [of the city] for him who wishes to behold it, and, beholding, to organize himself accordingly.’ [1] LSE 2/2/2. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 12.5 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–79. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘II. / Plato. Republic / Phaedo. p. 40. / Politicus. p. 42. / July. 1923.’ [2] Compare Bosanquet, Companion, p. 338.
‘Heaven’ is here a mere passing figure of speech. Each must try to organize his life according to the scheme of a community in which man’s being would find perfect expression. Present society is pretty well calculated to demoralize a great character. But such a man will always carry his ideal with him & live the life of it. The philosopher neither does the best for himself, nor for society, until he finds a state & a part into which he fits – prosecoysa politeia.3 PL2[15–16] 339.34 There is no question of the artist seeking reality. It is fundamentally impossible for him ever to have a glimpse of what is – qua artist. As an artist he places himself in a state of unreality & cultivates ignorance of what is. The artist’s knowledge is mere ‘conjecture’ (eicasia). (The craftsman has a certain right opinion (orthe doxa). The artist is not in earnest, but plays.4 PL2[16] 344.20 So far as a man grasps the purpose or function of an object, so far he has knowledge about it. The ‘user’ alone has real knowledge.5 [3] Oakeshott’s note ‘Cf. 208.8.’ Compare also Nettleship, Lectures, p. 338. [4] Compare Nettleship, Lectures, pp. 347–8. [5] Compare Bosanquet, Companion, p. 390.
PL2[19] The proper place of poetry in life – for it has a proper place & is only harmful when used for improper purposes.6
[6] Compare Nettleship, Lectures, pp. 348–9.
Early Greek Philosophy (October 1923)1 GK[12] Socrates was a Conservative in that he equated the just & the legal. A real loyalty & love of law. There is no such thing as natural justice. What the law commands, that is just. But he was also a Radical. He taught men to think & to question everything. He refused to cease his teaching in spite of prohibition. All except conscience must be under the control of the State. But even life must be given up readily if it is the will of the State to take it. Even Plato never resolved this antithesis.
[1] LSE 2/4/1. Soft cover, white, 23.5 cm × 18.5 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–21. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘[EARLY] GREEK PHILOSOPHY. / Order in development, tho’ not necessarily in chronology. 1. Ionic School. / Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes. / 2. Italic School. / Pythagoras. / 3. Eleatics. / Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno. / 4. Heraclitus / 5. Empedocles / 6. Atomic School. / Leucippus & Democritus. / 7. Anaxagoras. / 8. Sophists. / Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus. / 9. Socrates. / 10. Cyrenaics. / 11. Cynics. / 12. Megaric School. / 13. Plato. 14. Aristotle. 15. Stoics. 16. Epicureans. / [October 1923] / Oct. 1925.’ The notebook on Early Greek Philosophy makes extensive use of J.E. Erdmann, A History of Philosophy, ed. W.S. Hough, 3 vols. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1889); J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1892); Lectures on Greek Philosophy and Other Philosophical Remains of James Frederick Ferrier, ed. Sir A. Grant and E.L. Lushington, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1866); and E. Zeller, A History of Greek Philosophy from the Earliest Period to the Time of Socrates, tr. S.F. Alleyne, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1881).
GK[14] Doctrine of Ideas. Whatever the Platonic ‘ideas’ really are, it is certain that they are something connected with all kinds of thought, & not merely with mere scientific thinking. Their connection with the more elementary kinds of thinking may not be the same as that with ‘philosophy’, but none the less it is there. They are, in essence, a property of thought qua thought. Whenever we think we make use of ‘ideas’ – for the most part unconsciously, but the philosopher examines these ‘ideas’ & knows that he is using them. (And since a man of mere ‘sensation’ is an abstraction, whenever we ‘feel’ we make use of them also.) ‘Ideas’ are the models or archetypes according to which God fabricates all things. They are not separate things. All men have ‘ideas’ (or know things according to their idea), but only the instructed mind is conscious of this. The doctrine of ideas is Plato’s effort to turn men from the abstract sensationalism of the Sophists to the contemplation of the concrete whole of the things of experience. Thinking, of any sort, (but in varying degrees) necessitates passing from the particular (the abstract object of sensation) to the universal or concrete whole of experience. The idea cannot be pictured or represented, for that would reduce it to a particular.
GK[18] Stoicism & Epicureanism agree that ‘happiness’ is the end of man, that man must live ‘according to his nature’ to achieve happiness, & that this life is ‘virtuous.’ They differ upon what is happiness, ‘nature,’ & virtue. Socrates was a life according to reason; Epicurus, a life according to sensation.
Spinoza (October 1923)1 SP[08] Spinoza’s conception that all ‘reasonable’ men agree. SP[10] ‘It is part of my happiness to lend a helping hand, that many others may understand even as I do, so that their understanding and desire may entirely agree with my own.’2 The ‘good life’ is essentially social. The principle of Fraternity – bound together by an unseen chain of common desire & enlightenment.
[1] LSE 2/4/2. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 12.5 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–39. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘Spinoza. / I. / Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione. pp. 1–39. / Oct. 1923.’ Oakeshott appears to have been using both the Hale Wight and Elwes translations of the Tractatus: see Tractatus de intellectus emandatione et de via, qua optime in veram rerum cognitionem dirigitur. Translated From The Latin Of Benedict Spinoza By W. Hale Wight. Translation Revised By Amelia Hutchinson Stirling (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1895), and The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, Translated from the Latin, with an Introduction by R.H.M Elwes, 2 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891). The notebook on Spinoza also includes quotations and summaries from F. Pollock, Spinoza His Life And Philosophy (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1880), and H.H. Joachim, A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901). [2] Spinoza, Works, i.6.
SP[10] ‘It is necessary…to form a social order such as is most conducive to the attainment of this character by the greatest number with the least difficulty and danger.’3 The object of the State. The State is a society formed for the purpose of enabling the greatest number to acquire this new nature, which is Wisdom. SP[10] ‘But before all things, a means must be devised for improving the understanding and purifying it, as far as may be at the outset, so that it may apprehend things without error, and in the best possible way.’4 Spinoza is ‘methodical.’ And yet it is no lifeless method. It is a true ‘taking by storm’ of the citadel of Truth. We can see in this, the same desire which consumed Plato – to leave no stone unturned if by any chance we can come to know the truth. SP[11] Experientia vaga.5 Un-examined ‘experience’ can be turned to any use. [3] Spinoza, Works, i.6–7. [4] Spinoza, Works, i.7. [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Bacon, Novum organum, Aphorism 100: “For vague and arbitrary experience is (as we have observed), mere groping in the dark, and rather astonishes than instructs.” Qv. Cf. F.H. Bradley, The Presuppositions of Critical History (Oxford: J. Parker and Co., 1874), p. 6.’
SP[11] ‘Reflection shows that all modes of perception or knowledge may be reduced to four.’6 Presuppositions must be made, but we must understand what they are & their import. SP[13] Essentiam rei, cf. the ‘thing itself ’ in Plato,7 not to be confused with the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself.’ ‘To understand a thing is to know why it is what it is – to see the necessity of its being.’8 This is what Spinoza calls seeing it sub specie aeternitatis. Cf. the Platonic conception of ‘eternal’ & ‘infinite.’9 SP[14] ‘The method of knowledge is that knowledge reflected on itself – the thinking of our thinking, “cognitio reflexiva” or “idea ideae.”’10 SP[16] As soon as an ‘idea’ becomes an object of thought it is an ‘ideatum.’ Thus to Spinoza the difference between ‘objective’ & ‘subjective’ is [6] Spinoza, Works, ii.8. [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Plato, Republic, pp. 190, 196 etc.’ [8] Joachim, Ethics, p. 5. [9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. §1 (Republic, pp. 362, 370).’ [10] Joachim, Ethics, p. 5.
not fundamental, i.e., is merely psychological. An ‘idea’ can be the object of thought, though its existence is nowhere but in thought, i.e. subjective.11 ‘Essence’ – essential. That which makes a thing what it is. We are said to know per essentiam when we see that if two lines are parallel to a third they are parallel to one another. The essence of a thing is what it actually is in its whole nature & relations. SP[18–19] The nature of method It is ‘nothing else than reflective knowledge, or the idea of an idea.’ And the best method will be that which reflects on the truest idea – the most perfect knowledge. The relation between ideas & ideas = relation between formal essences. Thus body & mind are parallel. Mind & matter are coexisting differentiations of an activity connected yet separate & (equally) real. The most perfect thing – ‘formal essence’ – has a corresponding perfect ‘idea,’ or ‘objective essence.’ SP[20–21] True knowledge is knowledge of the totality of a thing’s relations. We must know its ‘place in Nature’ before we can understand it. And as we gradually come to understand our place in Nature we come to know how we can best live to fulfill the ‘duties of our station’ – to keep ourselves from useless things. The mind that understands is undistracted.
[11] Compare Joachim, Ethics, pp. 6–7.
SP[21–22] If we have an idea of God – ‘the origin & fountain of the whole of Nature’ – then we have an idea which can help us in seeking all other knowledge. For this is the one common factor & life of all that is. Cf. ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, & all these things shall be added unto you.’12 SP[23] The difference between knowledge of the Truth & the ability to explain it to others. The double task of the teacher (i) To possess & foster his knowledge & love of the ideal. And (ii) to seek the basis & principle of human nature & study how it may be touched, moved & at last transported to the ideal. (i) Ideal. (ii) Method. SP[25] Spinoza makes a distinction between the imagination & the understanding. But both are included in ‘Reason’ – which is the sum total of man’s epistemological faculties. The need for distinction emphasized. Hegel was driven to stress the need for unity. Both conceptions are found in Spinoza & Hegel. SP[26] The nature of the imagination. It rests upon experience. It is an act of memory, – in most cases unconscious.13 [12] Matthew 6:33. [13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Montessori on the imagination.’ Maria Montessori (1870–1952), Italian educationalist.
SP[27] The positive attitude. It matters little what statement we take as our starting place, we can get at truth from it. For everything is in a measure true; & there are degrees of truth. All expression is in its degree adequate or inadequate. No expression is without its background of truth. This is the problem of education. We must start at what our pupils are thinking of. Get from them its truth & advance from that. All knowledge is progress from inadequacy to greater adequacy.14 SP[28] The secret of adequacy of thought is clear distinction. SP[30] Ultimately there is no external test of truth. An idea may be true apart from any formal existence. This cuts both ways. We can claim truth for an idea not formally realized. But we can claim truth for no idea which, though it be formally realized, we are ignorant of. It is a ‘high standard’ of truth. To tell the truth unwittingly is not telling the truth – it is a lucky shot. Often we ourselves are the only possible judges of the truth of our statements – we must be imperious in our judgments. SP[30] Ideas possess reality. That reality is true; & by investigating it we shall arrive at some standard by which we can judge whether an idea is true or false.
[14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Richter, Levana.’
SP[31] Not the bare possession of fact, but ordered knowledge constitutes truth. SP[32] A knowledge of the whole will clarify our ideas of the particular. The idea which is fundamental to Spinoza’s thought is that of the uniformity of nature. The universe is ‘all of a piece.’15 We can understand the parts only in the whole, & the whole only through the parts. SP[33] Spinoza never for a moment supposes that doubt is a healthy state of mind. It is a symptom of disease. SP[33] It is possible to have as clear an idea of God as of a triangle & when we have it we cannot think of him as a deceiver. No man can doubt that the three angles of a ∆ make two right angles, whatever theory he has about a deceiving God. SP[34–35] The imagination – which is something different from the intellect – is the seat of error. It matters little what it is so long as we are freed from it.
[15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pollock, Spinoza, pp. 84, 136, 143.’
SP[35–36] Words have, nor can have, no definite meaning. It depends wholly upon the hearer what he understands by them & the meaning he reads into them. We must use language accurately and reduce to a minimum the danger of misunderstanding from this quarter. SP[36] Language does not necessarily correspond to fact – & distinctions we can make in words are not necessarily real distinctions. We shall only save ourselves from being deluded by words if we constantly refer them to actuality. SP[37] It is to know God – the unity – that all our effort must be finally expended. SP[37] Thought must have a starting place – it can have none better than a good definition. As a particular thing coordinates the mind & leads it to the truth; so a good definition centres the mind upon the essential nature of a particular thing & keeps it from ‘useless’ speculation. SP[37–38] ‘Res creata’ = ‘modus’ of the Ethics & Spinoza speaks of ‘infinite modes.’ But still, it = more or less a finite thing.
SP[38] Spinoza requires far more of a definition than an ordinary logician would. It is, rather, a scientific explanation. SP[39] ‘Things fixed and eternal.’ What are these? They are themselves particular (singularia). Are they the constant relations between phenomena which we call Laws of Nature? No. Spinoza would not confuse abstract relations with things. ‘Eternal things’ have laws of their own. Sigwart identifies the ‘eternal things’ of Spinoza with the ‘forms’ of Bacon. But Baconian ‘Forms’ are not things. Pollock – the ‘eternal things’ = the ‘infinite modes’ of the Ethics. Motion, the material universe, etc.
Aristotle 1 (November 1923)1 AR1[13] I.iii.4–92 The Individual & the State3 ‘The political faculty’ or ‘the social purpose’ (politice) is the greatest end a man can set himself, for if he follows it he will realize his nature most fully. The good of society & the good of the individual are the same.4 With the discovery of the true social purpose will come the knowledge of our individual stations within that purpose. Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. XVII: The State is ‘that mortal God to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace & defence.’ [1] LSE 2/3/1. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 12.5 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 2–83. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘Aristotle. / I / Nicomachean Ethics I.1.1 to III.2.17. / November 1923.’ The notebooks on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics make extensive use of Sir W.D. Ross, Aristotle (London: Methuen and Co., 1923); J.A. Stewart, Notes on the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892); Sir A. Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle Illustrated with Essays and Notes, 2 vols. (London: J.W. Parker and Son, 1857); and The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, tr. F.H. Peters (London: Kegan Paul, 1881). [2] Oakeshott’s numberings refer to the divisions of the Ethics. [3] Compare Stewart, Notes, i.24–5. [4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. M. Aurelius, Meditations, Bk V §xv.’ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1906), p. 50: ‘Society therefore is the proper good of a rational creature.’
Social purpose is the lesser Absolute – the Absolute within our relative experience – which we must hold ever before our eyes. AR1[23] I.vi.5 Stewart remarks that Platonic ‘ideas’ hold a very similar position as our ‘laws of Nature.’5 They are fixed & so can be known scientifically. The absolute is a law & not a separate thing.6 AR1[26] I.vi.15–16 Ethics 1097a is not a fair criticism of Plato. For he reserves the study of dialectice for those only who have undergone a very rigorous preparatory training.7 It is not for the artisan – but for those who are to rule & lead – the Guardians.8 What it comes to is that this knowledge of the Idea is necessary to all the finer & higher development of the spirit – which is apt to be called an unpractical life. While it can be dispensed with in the crafts & occupations of every-day life. But as life has no ‘pass’ standard to those who take it seriously, Plato’s remains the truer theory. AR1[27] I.vii.3 [5] See Stewart, Notes, i.71. [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. W.R. Inge, “Confessio Fidei”, in Outspoken Essays (Second Series) (London: Longman’s, Green and Co.), 1922, 1–59.’ [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Plato, Republic, Bk VII.’ [8] Compare Stewart, Notes, i.89.
Aristotle suggests a compromise. He will call that the chief good which, if there is no obvious single end to all action, is the most predominant. It is a matter of degree. The final good is the same in kind as any other good.9 AR1[29] I.vii We must live in the present. And our study of the past must be used for this purpose & not for the purpose of prolonging the rule of the past into the present.10 So too with regard to the future. We may take a quietistic view – the world is young, many changes must come, the span of individual life is too short for an estimate in terms of the universal, what we do matters but little. But we must act & live by the light we possess & not ‘jack’ the race because we are not hares or horses but only men.11 AR1[33–34] I.vii.16
[9] Compare Grant, Ethics, i.447, and Stewart, Notes, i.92. [10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. A. Schweitzer, The Decay & Restoration of Civilization The Philosophy of Civilization Part I, tr. C.T. Campion, 2 vols. (London: Adam & Charles Black, Ltd., 1923), p. 47.’ [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Ethics, Bk I ch. iii §4.’
bios implies form and duration of life.12 Happiness comes to be inseparable from something which we might call a career. It must be active throughout.13 Cf. also St Paul’s continual comparison of his life to a ‘race.’14 Happiness without a kind of ‘habit of happiness’ does not truly exist.15 It is a condemnation of ‘quick salvation.’16 AR1[35] Mathematical exactness is not suited to Ethics – too much subtlety must not be expected – too much detail is to be avoided. A knowledge of tendencies – not a complete knowledge.17 AR1[38] I.viii.9 Aristotle is always optimistic; he never doubts that the Good is attainable in life. He is heedless of many difficulties because so intent upon the end. Cf. Spinoza & Plato.
[12] Compare Grant, Ethics, i.451. [13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Ethics, Bk I ch. v §6.’ [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pater, Marius the Epicurean, ii.220.’ [15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Ethics, Bk II ch. iv.’ [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Plato, Republic, 362.39.’ [17] Compare Grant, Ethics, i.452.
AR1[38] It is fairly easy to forget scientific truth, but very difficult to lose the basis of virtuous action – ‘knowledge’ is less stable & so less reliable than character.18 AR1[38] I.x.10 Aristotle tries to discover the true aspect of this popular difficulty, i.e. of not being able to predicate happiness except retrospectively.19 It shows that men do consider happiness as something more abiding that the fluctuations of fortune – which supports Aristotle’s own theory. Cf. Spinoza’s attitude of search. In a monistic universe nothing can be entirely without relevance; it matters not from what point we start, if we examine it acutely truth can be reached. AR1[50] I.xiii.8 The extent of this ‘higher’ knowledge [of the psyche] must be measured by practical value – the Politician must not be led to spend his whole time on questions of pure metaphysics.20 AR1[51] I.xiii.18–20 [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Ethics, Bk I ch. x §14.’ [19] Compare Grant, Ethics, i.465. [20] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Ethics, Bk I ch. xiii §10.’ See also Grant, Ethics, i.474.
Aristotle comes to a conclusion different from that reached by Plato & Spinoza, both of whom place morality in the intellectual sphere. Aristotle was wrong in taking popular opinion on a psychological point; but right when he refers moral judgments to current practice & opinion. The ‘soul’ to Aristotle is much the same as ‘Reason’ to Plato, Spinoza, Hegel, Green etc. ‘Aristotle is founding the distinction between the moral & the intellectual which has lasted ever since.’21 AR1[53] ‘I do not know any inborn propensity which may not be moralized into good or turned into bad.’22 Custom possesses the power of transmutation or sublimation – not of creation. It can mould power, but not generate it. AR1[54] II.i.5 But Aristotle had not grasped the truth that ‘constitutions are not made but grow.’23 AR1[54] II.i.7 [21] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Grant, Ethics, i.479.’ [22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (London: Henry S. King, 1876), p. 249.’ [23] Compare Stewart, Notes, i.171.
‘This is Aristotle’s famous doctrine of habits.’24 Circumstances will unfailingly mould character, but whether it makes it stronger or weaker, better or worse depends on other factors. AR1[56–57] II.ii.6–7 The principle of the Mean. ‘The doctrine that medical treatment ought to aim at the mean had been laid down by Hippocrates.’25 This illustrates the truth that there is very little absolute originality, but new discoveries are made by the application of facts of other branches of studies – or methods or principles – to your own study. A rigid system of specialization will therefore tend to deaden originality, whether it is self-imposed or imposed by university regulations. Ideas are necessarily fluid, they act & interact, & we cannot really grasp them separately. The great mind is that which sees a truth & all its relations in one vision. AR1[56–57] I.vi.14 (note). The principle of the Mean connects itself with the ideas of selfcontrol, Freedom, Harmony, etc. Plato, Spinoza. Kant. Hegel. [24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Grant, Ethics, i.485.’ [25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Stewart, Notes, i.175.’
It is the very spirit of Greece. And the ideal of Plato. Ideals are usually extensions of the present. They grow out of the actual soil, & carry with them some of its properties to the end. Virtue reproduces the actions out of which it is formed.26 AR1[56–57] II.ii.9 Theory of Education – Aristotle really asserts a theory of ‘technical’ education. That is to say, practice of bravery only will make us brave. We must learn the actual thing we wish to know. This is the reverse of the theory of liberal education, which tries to educate so that a man shall be able to do that which he has not specially practised. AR1[60] Virtue is the highest – & so hardest – we know – & by experience it is the most difficult thing to contend against pleasure & pain – the contest therefore is worthy of Politics – the Art of Life.27 AR1[61] II.iv.3 ‘The real object of the moral judgment is not the isolated action, but the system of conduct to which it belongs.’28
[26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Ethics, Bk II ch. ii §8.’ [27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Spinoza, Ethics, Bk V §42 schol. cf. Aristotle, Politics, Bk V ch. ii §31.’ [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Stewart i.183.’
This includes motive. It ought to represent a permanent outlook, & so can be counted on for repetition. We can never judge an act from the outside alone. Knowledge and purity of purpose are the internal requisites of a good action. But knowledge without anything else is of little avail for virtue. A reaction against the Platonic idea of virtue as knowledge. Knowledge & will must be combined. But Aristotle uses ‘knowledge’ in two senses here. (i) Man must know he is doing an act for it to have moral significance. But (ii) man may act well without a theory of action, if his moral habits are good. But a theory will vastly help to make a system of life – a character. Plato & Aristotle really hold similar opinions about the place of knowledge in moral life.29 A good act must be chosen for its own sake. AR1[64–65] II.vi.5 Aristotle unwittingly lays his theory open to a grave distortion – i.e., the recognition of only a quantitative difference between Virtue & Vice. But he does not himself make this mistake. To him, ‘the mean,’ though it is explained & described as something equidistant from either extreme, does not in itself depend upon these extremes – that is, is a positive value, with a real meaning apart from that derived from its mere descriptive position. Quantity changes into quality. A quantity which is ‘just right’ for the purpose in hand, by being so transcends all thought of mere quantity & degree. It is either right or wrong. A very little less would have been useless. The fact that the quantity is exactly [29] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Stewart, Notes, i.185.’
suitable excludes ideas of degree and changes the whole thing on to a qualitative basis.30 AR1[66] II.vi.10,11 ‘Moral excellence,’ ‘Virtue,’ ‘the mean of conduct or harmony of character’ is the principle which should govern & organize our instincts & emotions, which in themselves are natural, i.e., nonmoral. AR1[76] III.i.2 This is not a disquisition on Free Will. Aristotle assumes that man is an arche of his own actions. In what sense, & how, the individual is an arche is the point where Aristotle stops short in the enquiry. The enquiry is about responsibility; & Aristotle shows that it is meaningless except as a resting on the immediate cause of an act, i.e. with the concrete individual whose function the act is. The individual is ‘responsible’ for acts which can be assigned to his character as immediate cause. ‘Free’ means ‘caused immediately by a character.’ It is only the individual, as affected by particular circumstances, who can put forth acts, & be responsible for them, i.e., come in for their consequences. Antecedents are not ‘responsible.’ Individual character alone is. Character is the product of the universe, so is environment. The individual performs acts & must bear consequences – the Universe is irresponsible.
[30] Compare Stewart, Notes, i.194–5.
All living beings are ‘responsible’ i.e. come in for the consequences of their acts. This is what it means to be alive.31 AR1[77] III.i.3 Aristotle is content with the ordinary meaning of words – at any rate to start with. It is not a metaphysical enquiry.32 AR1[79] III.i.16 The particulars – (i) The active person. (ii) The thing done. (iii) The thing or person acted upon. (iv) The instrument used. (v) The purpose. (vi) The manner. Ignorance can exist about all except about (i).33 AR1[82] III.ii.11 Moral choice is a matter of character; opinion changes with the changing content of the mind. Our moral character does not depend on our opinions on good & evil, but in the deliberate acts of our will.
[31] Compare Stewart, Notes, i.225–7. [32] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.6. [33] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.12.
Notebook 5 (1923)1 05[05] ‘An Englishman never thinks he is really impartial til he has voted against his better judgment.’ [1] LSE 2/1/5. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 12.5 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–85. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘Notes V. / November 1923.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fos. 15–24, M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Social and Political Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1889) ; 29–30, B. Bosanquet, Social and International Ideals (London: Macmillan and Co., 1917); 32–6, E.W. Hobson, The Domain of Natural Science The Gifford Lecures Delivered in the University of Aberdeen in 1921 and 1922 (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 1923); 40–2, Sir Sidney Colvin, Keats (London: Macmillan and Co., 1887); 44–7, Bolton King, Life of Mazzini (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1912); 48–50, A.J. Balfour, Theism and Humanism Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow, 1914 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915); 51–3, E. Faure, History of Art, tr. W. Pack, 5 vols. (London: John Lane; New York: Harper and Bros., 1921–30); 54–5, J.W. von Goethe, Torquato Tasso, in Dramatic Works of Goethe: Comprising Faust, Iphigenia in Taurus, Torquato Tasso, Egmont, and Goetz von Berlichingen, tr. A. Swan, Sir Walter Scott, and H.G. Bohn (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1860); 59–61, I. Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations, 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1845) ; 65–7, C.S. Loch (ed.), Methods of Social Advance Short Studies in Social Practice by various Authors (London: Macmillan and Co., 1904); 69–71, A. Clutton-Brock, Studies in Christianity (London: Constable and Company Limited, 1918); 73–4, W.E. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience A Philosophic Study of Religion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1912); 75–6, G. Lowes Dickinson, Justice and Liberty (London: J.M. Dent and Co., 1908); 78–80, W.F. de Morgan, Joseph Vance An Illwritten Autobiography (London: William Heinemann, 1906).
Cf. J.F. Bethune-Baker’s remark2 – it was suggested that the idea of an Earthly Paradise was peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon race; he replied, ‘But don’t you believe that we really are the highest point in human evolution?’ He rose above the English fear of prejudice. 05[05] Patriotism – love of family, school – love of God usward, etc. Why do we love? Because the object merits it? Because it is the best of all schools? This is the popular theory; and it rests in the uncertain basis of a kindly sentiment often blind to fact. We love because the object needs our love. Love answers need, not rewards merit. 05[07–08] ‘It is well nigh impossible to devise a League which does not demand from the nations concerned in it, & especially from the great nations, something which they are unwilling to give up. It demands a considerable surrender of their power, or, as we call it, their sovereign rights, for the common good.’3 (But rights come from moral law, & if there existed a moral law governing the nations these rights would no longer be demanded in vain.)
[2] James Franklin Bethune Baker (1861–1951), modernist Anglican theologian, founder of the Cambridge D Society for the discussion of philosophical and systematic theology, and editor of the Journal of Theological Studies, 1903–35. [3] Fos. 6–8 contain notes on L.P. Jacks, A Living Universe Three Lectures (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923). See Jacks, Living Universe, p. 74.
05[09] ‘I recollect his (his father’s) indignation at my using the common expression that something was true in theory but required correction in practice.’4 But there is something of a true meaning in this form of speech – notice how Aristotle is persistent that ethical theory can give an account of ethical practice – only ‘in outline.’ 05[26] Natural self & moral self – clearly this cannot exist apart from the group, & yet we are told that it is just this moral self that demands complete independence.5 05[30] The Meaning & Necessity of Becoming as little Children.6 05[31] Nietzsche – the state is simply ‘nature’s roundabout way of making a few great individuals.’ [4] Fos. 9–13 contain notes on J.S. Mill, Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1873). See Mill, Autobiography, p. 32. [5] Fos. 25–7 contain notes on a review of M.P. Follett, The New State Group Organization The Solution of Popular Government (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1923), in Times Literary Supplement, 3 July 1919. [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Baron Friedrich von Hügel, “Preliminaries to Religious Belief ” in Essays & Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion (London and Toronto: J.M Dent & Sons Limited; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1921), pp. 98–116.’
(Yes: but it is the raison d’être of the State to struggle to make the million what the one attains to be.) 05[37] International Relations ‘The promises & bargains for truck, etc., between the two men in Soldania, in or between a Swiss and an Indian, in the woods of America, are binding on them, though they are perfectly in a state of nature in reference to one another, for truth & keeping of faith belongs to man as man, and not as members of society.’7 But Locke forgets that without the idea of society there could not be an idea of bargaining, of faith, of truth etc. 05[37] ‘No man wants happiness; only the Englishman desires that.’ Nietzsche. – The result of the hedonist philosophy of early utilitarianism. 05[37] ‘Had you seen these roads before they were made, You’d throw up your hands & bless General Wade.’ On a wayside obelisk between Inverness & Inverary. 05[38] ‘A is like B’ = ‘A has some qualities in common with B.’
[7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. J. Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Bk II §ii.’
So, A must also be unlike B – i.e., have some qualities peculiar to itself. Thus, ‘A is like B’ implies ‘A is unlike B.’ All judgments, except those which affirm totality of identity – A (identical to) B – are subject to the law of thesis & antithesis. 05[38–39] Education ‘Educere’: first meaning is the fact of birth. Then it comes to mean the rearing of the child by the mother – cf. Virgil, where it means ‘bring forth’; and ‘reared.’8 Further extension of meaning. Tacitus, Annals – ‘Eductum in domo regnatrice’ – ‘reared’ again, rather than ‘educated.’9 ‘Educare’ begins where ‘educere’ leaves off; & is used primarily of the nurse who rears the child. So, Varro: ‘Educit obstetrix, educat nutrix.’10 (‘Educs’ would go ‘Eduction’ not ‘Education,’ like ‘Induco’ – Induction (not ‘Inducation’) or ‘deduco’ – Deduction. It is reductio ad absurdum, not reducatio.) Cf. Cicero, De finibus, uses ‘educatio’ as nurture; in De oratore, ‘sit modo is, qui dicet aut scribet, institutus liberaliter educatione doctrinaque puerile,’ it means what we call ‘education.’11 Cf.
[8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Virgil, Aeneid, Bk VI, 764–5, 769; Bk VII, 762–3; Bk VIII, 413; Bk IX, 584.’ [9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Tacitus, Annals, Bk I ch. 4.’ [10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Varro, Apud nonium, 447.’ [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cicero, De finibus, Bk III ch. 19; De oratore, Bk III ch. 31.’
Tacitus, Annals, ‘Sosibius Britannici educator’; ‘Optimum quemque educatorem filii exilis aut morte afficit.’12 05[58–59] The Ordeal of Richard Feverel shows the reaction caused in a truly sensitive & artistic mind by the early advances of science as a panacea in the 19th century.13 Meredith is continually referring to the fact that Science has a limited scope & if used indiscriminately (e.g. in education) will lead us astray. He contrasts science & nature; mans inventions & orderings & Gods. But this is a false contrast. Science, if it is anything, is a systematic attempt at discovery, not manufacture. In its imperfect stages it may well lead us astray, yet its imperfections are not a necessary part of science, & true science will but reveal to us what is the will of nature. What is to be feared & guarded against are the inaccuracies of science. A Comte will try & systematize human life, but if the laws he pretends to have discovered are not laws at all, but fictions, then the harm he will do will be just the harm of Sir Austin Feverel.14 Another point of interest is Meredith’s insight into the fact that a science attempting to surplant nature is the outcome of a Manichee philosophy. To fear nature, to treat it as evil, to think to better it is Manichaeism.15 But true science leads us not away [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Tacitus, Annals, Bk XI ch. 1; Bk XII ch. 41.’ [13] Fos. 58–9 contain notes on George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of Father and Son (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859). [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Science & Nature – pp. 205–6, Ch. XXVI, & Ch. XLIII.’ The character of Sir Austin Feverel appears in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. [15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘see p. 299 (Ch. XXXIV), p. 308.’
from, but to nature. So in education, Montessori returns to nature. The Rousseauian pose & the idea of a return to nature by a path other than that of science is pure barbarism, but excusable in the 18th Century, when the reaction was not against science but social convention. Cf. T.E. Brown – ‘Pain’ – ‘timorous manichee’ & Bradley, Ethical Studies.16 Things are not good & evil, but there is nothing that may not be moralized into good or turned to evil. 05[61] There is no such thing as a final & unexplainable anachronism.17 05[63] ‘As wise historians are now beginning to recognize, the part of a nations life which attains notoriety, or gets itself visibly & audibly published, is a small affair compared with other parts which never come into public at all, these latter being transacted, like the best deeds & major operations of the universe, under conditions which do not invite the presence of reporters.’18
[16] See ‘Pain,’ ll. 20–8 by T.E. Brown (1830–97): ‘Nay, the great passions are His veriest thought, / Which whoso can absorb, / Nor, querulous halting, violate their orb, / In him the mind of God is fullest wrought. / Thrice happy such an one ! Far other he Who dallies on the edge / Of the great vortex, clinging to a sedge / Of patent good, a timorous Manichee.’ [17] This remark occurs on the verso facing a quotation from Theodore Golobensky from A.P. Stanley, Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church, p. 378, which Oakeshott employed in ‘A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy’ (1925): see SW, v.60, n. 7. [18] Fos. 62–4 contain notes on L.P. Jacks, Realities & Shams (London: Williams and Norgate, 1923). Oakeshott’s note: ‘p. 17.’
But, a fact which L.P. Jacks does not realize, in all the best usage ‘the State’ is the name given to the sum of all possible communities of this nature – i.e., conducive to the ‘good life.’ 05[67] George IV the only King who has aesthetic taste & showed it by building Brighton pavilion. 05[67–68] History. It is a feature of these days that an immense amount of scholarship is expended on the reversal of the hitherto accepted verdict of history. For instance – P.B. Bronte is made out to be the genius of his family; Tolstoy’s ruling motive was vanity; Henry VIII’s fault an ill judged indulgence of the whims of his wives; Judas Iscariot a far-sighted financial genius. And the rest. While M. Aurelius was a bad man, Pitt an incompetent scoundrel, Palmerstone an unprincipled grabber of power & land & Jesus the first Anglican Clergyman or a modern slum worker. What does this mean? 1. It is a good sign. ‘The first lesson of history is the good of evil.’ (Creighton). We are beginning to depart from our judgments (childish) of simply good & wicked. (Cf. Mazzini. ‘Individuals were to him too much wholly good or wholly bad.’19 And the Hebrew element of our civilization.) A more refined judgment of character is called for. 2. It is a bad sign. Cf. Acton’s strictures of condoning evil in history. It is a sign of merely the changing point of view of our age. We are writing history from our point of view; yesterday wrote from its point of view; & not until we know the truth finally (which we never shall) shall we be able to write true history. The evolution of this factor in the writing of history is most clearly seen in the researches of New Testament scholars. [19] Oakeshott’s note ‘Bolton King, Mazzini, p. 336.’
It may, of course, be simply bad history in some case – but the motive for these attempted explanations is what is significant. 05[A]20 Divorce Moral & other laws | Is it a friendly Universe. It is often ignorance that leads men to fight against economic laws for the sake of a supposed moral principle, but on this account let us not persuade ourselves that there is an eternal agreement between moral & economic laws. The Christian must defy economic laws. But unlike others he is not restricted. Immortality. He can die with a sure hope. There is always the opening of death. – Not suicide though – Schiller’s line. – ‘Life is not the highest thing.’21 05[B]22 Sea The experience of the Red Sea in the history of the Jews evidently influenced them greatly – it was their experience of the sea – its mightiness & the greater strength of God. [20] On a loose sheet in ink inserted at the front of Notebook 5. [21] Probably an allusion to the concluding lines of Friedrich Schiller, The Bride of Messina. See The Works of Charles Follen, With A Memoir Of His Life, 5 vols (Boston, MA: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1841), vol. iv, On Schiller’s Life and Dramas, p. 324: ‘One thing, indeed, I feel and know it clearly / That life is not the highest of all goods; / But guilt, guilt is the greatest of all evils.’ [22] On a loose sheet in ink, inserted at the rear of Notebook 5 on notepaper headed ‘GONVILLE & CAIUS COLLEGE, / CAMBRIDGE.’
So largely did it bulk in their minds that the ‘west’ & the ‘sea’ are synonymous. The Mediterranean – after they settled in Canaan – was the ‘great sea.’23 05[B] Jews not seafaring. For most of their history debarred from the coast. Their view of sea entirely contemplative. No utilitarian motive could enter. They were oppressed with fear & its mystery & the ‘sorrow of the sea’ – so we are not surprised that in heaven there is ‘no more sea.’24 05[B] The stars have lost much of their mystery. They are in human thought a symbol for the silent forces of destiny. Astrology purports to have discovered the secret of their influence on human life – but who would dare to say that he had discovered the secret of the sea? 05[C]25 1. The English Constitution. Theory; law; practice & history 2. Philosophical Theorists. Plato to to-day. 3. Social etc: psychology. Modern writers. 4. Religion. The individuals relation to God – history & validity. 5. Religion – Institutional. 6. General History of Philosophy & political theory. 7. The Philosophy of History. 8. Outlines of Jurisprudence & legal practice. [23] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Exodus 36:22; Joshua 5:1; 1 Kings 8:25 etc.’ [24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Revelation 21:1.’ [25] On a loose sheet inserted at the front of Notebook 5 on notepaper embossed: ‘VALE COTTAGE, / DOWNLEY, / HIGH WYCOMBE.’
Greek. German. 05[D]26 The Charm of the Past. 05[D] Sleep & the Sea. Cf. Hopkins’ poems. They express the two poles – views of life, one of retirement, the other of danger – Odyssey. 05[E]27 Dante’s idea that the will of God – which is our peace – is the sea to which all things which it created moves.28 05[E] The sea breeds energy of soul – which Aristotle called happiness. 05[F]29 The first sight of the sea is a great experience in the life of a nation – but also of the individual. ‘I doubt whether I shall ever receive [26] On a loose sheet in pencil inserted at the front of Notebook 5. [27] On a loose sheet inserted at the rear of Notebook 5 on notepaper headed ‘GONVILLE & CAIUS COLLEGE, / CAMBRIDGE.’ [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Dante, Paradiso, Canto III, l. 87.’ See D. Johnston, A Translation of Dante’s Paradiso (Bath: The Chronicle, 1868), Canto III, ll. 85–7, at p. 16: ‘And in His will it is our peace resides; / It is the oceans whither all things move / By Him created or by nature made.’ [29] On a scrap of paper inserted at the rear of Notebook 5.
a stronger impression than when, from the rising ground above Cromer, we caught sight of the sparkling expanse.’30 05[G]31 Shipwreck The Sea used to express the idea of total loss of personality etc: – mergence. Death – a flask of water broken in the Sea. The sea, it appears, will always be somewhat of a mystery, expressing inexpressible thoughts & feelings to humanity. For familiarity has not bred contempt, & we are hardly less in awe of it, we hardly less wonder at it now than did those nations long ago when its vast expanses & restless waves first met their gaze after long wanderings. Perplexed. 05[G] Whenever man has attempted to express the immensity that surrounds him he has thought not, primarily of the stars, of the distant desert horizon, the heavens with their worlds on worlds, but of the sea. The sea in all human experience is the symbol of immensity.
[30] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, ed. M.W. Chapman, 3 vols. (Boston, MA: James R. Osgood and Company), i.45.’ [31] On a scrap of paper inserted at the rear of Notebook 5.
Start with this: Restlessness – the lady who went to stay in cottage on the shore – got on her nerves. 05[H]32 Divorce Life is serious. Or as Plato puts it – ‘we have work to do.’33
[32] On a scrap of paper inserted at the front of Notebook 5. [33] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Plato, Republic, 406.’
Aristotle 2 (December 1923)1 AR2[09] At the bottom of the whole doctrine of the Mean lies the idea that it is man’s function to maintain his own nature – to rise above or fall below is failure. Cf. Spinoza. Man’s first business ‘to preserve his own being.’ AR2[09] III.vii.1 Aristotle never treats of the ‘perfect’ man & never ventures on a counsel of perfection. It is ‘man’ whom he is studying, not a ‘god or a beast.’ AR2[14] III.ix Courage is no mere matter of discipline, but is an energy of the individual soul – a quality of character. AR2[15] III.ix.4
[1] LSE 2/3/2. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 12.5 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–82. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘ARISTOTLE. / II / NICOMACHEAN ETHICS. III.3 to VI.7 / December 1923.’
The whole essence of the ‘safety first’ cry as a guide to life (it is all very well in getting off a bus!) is immoral.2 AR2[18] III.x.7 For a pleasure to be beyond the realm of Temperance it must be enjoyed for its own sake – i.e. aesthetically. AR2[20] III.xi.7 Monasticism tends to deaden natural pleasure, producing that disinterestedness in life which is a parody of the true principle of equanimity – the mean.3 AR2[25] IV.i.15 Wealth in itself is not valued by the Liberal man, for it can only be of use when used, & its greatest value is to be rightly used. Miserliness contains a fallacious conception of the nature of ‘wealth.’ AR2[27] IV.i.17
[2] See Grant, Ethics, ii.45. [3] See Grant, Ethics, ii.51.
The duty of care in charitable acts. To give indiscriminately may do great harm. The Liberal man takes all precautions necessary to enable him to make the best use of his wealth.4 Not moved by monetary sentiment. AR2[28] IV.i.26, 27 The liberal man, when all is said & done, has a leaning to carelessness in matters of money – he would rather sin on one side than the other. A minute precision of conduct is inhuman – the principle of the mean is but ‘an outline.’ AR2[32] IV.ii.9 This is the great principle of both Platonic & Aristotelian Ethics – a thing should be well done, and it should be the sole aim of the doer to do it well. Excellence is the porro unum necessarium, expense, time, trouble & the rest are not to be measured or considered at all. The Modern World has deserted this, the whole principle of Trade Unions, Rings, Combines etc. is against it. AR2[32] IV.ii.18 The ‘poor’ man who lives beyond his means so as to appear richer than he is, is one of the perennial objects of laughter (& pity) in the world. He has forgotten his ‘station.’ [4] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.60.
The other type, well known to Punch in our day, is the ‘Profiteer’ – ‘Nouveau Riche.’ He is the man with wealth enough to be truly magnificent, but so utterly devoid of taste or knowledge that he fails in his objects and becomes a laughing stock to many.5 Cf. The ‘Catechism,’ & compare with Bradley’s ‘My Station and its Duties.’6 AR2[34] IV.iii ‘Highmindedness is nothing else than a certain loftiness of spirit possessed by great men.’7 This is a picture of what Aristotle finds in great men; it is in no sense an ‘ought to be.’ It is one of the criteria of greatness. In this we see the means of moral development. Moral behavior, convention, etc., cannot stipulate for certain ways of living before these have been discovered. The great man discovers new ways, higher ways & reveals them in his life & perhaps, teaching – e.g. Jesus – society gradually conforms to these, man’s moral nature develops, then the moral philosopher finally makes men conscious of the advance by placing moral behavior in a system – by viewing it not, as in daily life, in parts as circumstances demand, but as a whole, and a consistent whole. AR2[35] IV.iii.3 [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, Bk IV ch. iii §21; Bk IV ch. vii.’ [6] See F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, Essay V. [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Grant, Ethics, ii.72.’
The great-souled one knows himself. And is not afraid of knowing himself to be great – cf. Keats. But great men often see defects in themselves & their work which others fail to see, simply because they know more about themselves & it than anyone else. Cf. Dedication of Bradley’s Appearance & Reality.8 AR2[37] IV.iii.23 ‘Excellence’ is the name which the great-souled man would give to his aim in life, and death is a little thing, not to be counted, in comparison with a fall from excellence already attained. AR2[39] IV.v.3 The near relation of Gentleness or Mildness to Perfect Self mastery is shown. The Mild man is imperturbable. He is a free man ‘not carried away by passion.’9 AR2[42] IV.vii.4 The Truthful man is he whose judgments & acts are his own. He does not, while seeing clearly what he ought to do & be, confuse [8] The ‘Dedication’ to F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1902) reads: ‘To my friend E.R. this unworthy volume is respectfully dedicated.’ [9] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.81.
this with what he is, & no-one can persuade him that he is other than he is. It is a matter of Reality. He is a Real Individual who knows himself, & harbours no delusions. He is unaffected, what we call a ‘simple-minded man.’ It will be seen how this quality combines with & flows into that of ‘friendliness’ in the last chapter. AR2[42] IV.vii.8,9 It is easier to delude oneself than to do anything else in the world. The Truthful man is brave enough to refuse to be deluded – he is a free man, & a wise man, & a good man because of his love of Truth & freedom. AR2[44] IV.viii ‘The eytrapelos, or epidexios, is the man whose conversation in society is easy, bright & playful, contributing to the pleasure & amusement of the company, without offending against good taste or hurting susceptibilities.’10 The Gentleman. This is the standard of Hellenic Life & Culture. AR2[44–45] IV.viii.1 It is, then, not jocularity or wit in any narrow sense of which Aristotle speaks. The Gentleman is one who can play well. It is easy, comparatively speaking, to keep the mean in serious moments of concentrated attention, but far more difficult to do [10] Stewart, Notes, i.365.
so in the ‘pauses of life’ – moments when we may easily be ‘taken off our guard.’ AR2[45] IV.viii.5 ‘Tact’:11 it might almost be said that this English word, when used in its best sense, is the most adequate epitome of Aristotle’s philosophy of the Mean in the conduct of life. AR2[46] IV.ix.3 Shame is a means of forming the moral character of a man and so is right in the young; but in the old it shows a deficiency of character & is a symptom of lack of development. It is not wrong, in itself, in the old, but a symptom of wrong. Aristotle protests against the substitution of the subject’s feeling in place of an objective moral standard. AR2[46] IV.ix.6 ‘Shame is felt at voluntary actions only.’ Shame, we constantly see, is felt at many involuntary matters. Today a sensitive man feels shame at being unemployed, & it is often this feeling, when not too acute, which saves him from moral degeneration.
[11] Peters, Nicomachean Ethics, uses ‘tact.’
AR2[47] V.i.3 Justice is a state of mind which implies:— (i) Capacity of doing what is just. (ii) Doing what is just. (iii) Wishing what is just. Aristotle’s principle of virtue as an energy, ethics as a theory of action. But at the same time the morality of an action is judged by its motive as well as its effect. AR2[49] V.i.9 Aristotle bids us not pray for things, but for a better state of ourselves (or the selves of our friends). This but follows the psychology of desire – We always desire a state (better) of ourselves – Green, Prolegomena to Ethics.12 AR2[50] V.i.13 The end of the State – the common good of all – is expressed in its laws only when the ‘determining power’ in the State aims at ‘real goodness.’ AR2[51] V.i.13 [12] T.H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. A.C. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883).
‘Plato and Aristotle both make the mistake of wishing for entire state-control over individual life.’13 This statement must be modified (i) By the whole meaning of nomos. (ii) By the meaning of ‘state.’ (iii) By Plato’s desire for the reform of present abuses in Athens which led him to exaggeration.14 (iv) By Plato following the Spartan ideal of discipline too far in order to counteract the opposite tendencies of Athens. AR2[51] V.i.15 Justice is perfect social virtue. Aristotle implies that there are virtues which are not to be designated primarily ‘social.’ ‘Ethics’ (i.e. ‘individual ethics’) are a part of Politics. A true conception of the State will lead to a right individual life. Cf. Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, Bk IV – politics is a part of ethics. A true individual life will issue in the welfare of the whole. AR2[52] V.i Aristotle tends to think that there are such things as self-regarding acts, but he does not quite commit himself – i.e., no further than saying that some acts have a predominating self-regarding aspect. It is almost a matter of degree – all acts are social, but some more than others.15 [13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Grant, Ethics, ii.102.’ [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. M. Arnold, Culture & Anarchy, Ch. 2.’ [15] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.102.
AR2[52] V.i.17 Justice is a good to all for it is a state of mind which bestows good.16 AR2[56–57] V.iv–v Ethics, for the most part, has created no vocabulary of its own, for, being a late development in human history, finds language in a more or less rigid state. Hence (i). The main difficulties of Ethics – i.e., verbal disputes; & (ii) Perennial misunderstandings arising from the use of words which derive their meanings from other, non-ethical associations. And again, the true expression of the whole of morality can only be in action – ‘The Highest cannot be spoken’ (Goethe) – & so ‘Ethics’ – Moral Theory – can at most present morality ‘in outline’ – a point on which Aristotle is never tired of insisting. AR2[59] V.v.6 Mutual need as the basis for civil society – Plato, Republic.17 Dawn of political economy. But it was a false scent to place the basis of civil society on this need. The basis is deeper, is ethical.18
[16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Plato, Republic, 343c.’ [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Plato, Republic, 369b.’ [18] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.117.
AR2[61] V.vi.5 Justice does not depend upon law, but law is evidence that the idea of justice exists. Nor can there be justice without law – e.g., as between a father & son there is no law, & so no justice.19 AR2[61–62] V.vi.8, 9 Aristotle seems to admit the existence of an individual apart & separate from all social relations. Justice exists in social relations because men are not one in aim & life, for were they one indivisible & complete whole there could be no justice – ‘for no man chooses to hurt himself.’ Later idealist theorists seem to hold that, in fact, the individual is an abstraction, that society – or the State – is a single whole & that ‘Each individual is not only himself but also the State,’20 but that man has an evil, individual, selfish inclination or ‘will’ which must be converted into a good, social, real, general will. From the conflict of these wills – one is really only an uncoordinated inclination – arises the necessity of law, justice, punishment, etc. AR2[62–63] V.vii.1
[19] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.124. [20] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, 3rd edn, p. lvii.’
Distinction between Nature & Convention.21 Here & in Plato we see the first signs of that idea of a Law of Nature developed by the Stoics, Cicero, & Roman law. AR2[62–63] V.vii.2 This was a favourite Sophist argument, & one which occurred inevitably to one who had travelled at all.22 Locke & Paley bring forward the variety of moral customs as proof that no innate ‘moral sense’ exists.23 But the false step in the argument was to conclude from the fact that many different conventions of justice exist that, therefore, all that is contained in the idea of Justice is founded upon mere custom. AR2[63] V.vii.8 The Will constitutes Justice & Injustice in the Individual.24 AR2[67] V.ix.15 [21] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Grant, Ethics, i.150. Cf. Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, 3rd edn, p. 33.’ [22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Plato, Minos, 315e & d; cf. Herodotus, Histories, Bk III ch. 38.’ [23] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.127. [24] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.129.
To understand Justice is not to know a certain set of facts. It is a knowledge of principles.25 Laws are not just, except accidentally – i.e., when known & administered from certain motives & principles.26 AR2[68] V.ix.17 Justice is limited to a human sphere. The idea of property cannot be connected with God who is & has all good nor with those outside the pale of society.27 ‘A God or a beast.’28 Cf. Spinoza. Most modern writers concur in this. Kant etc.29 AR2[68–69] V.x.2–6
[25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, Bk X ch. ix §20.’ [26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, Bk V ch. viii §1.’ Compare Stewart, Notes, i.523. [27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, Bk X ch. viii §7; Bk X ch. viii §7; Bk V ch. i §9.’ [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Aristotle, Politics, Bk I ch. ii §14.’ Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.138. [29] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Schweitzer’s protest in A. Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics The Philosophy of Civilization Part II, tr. J. Naish, 2 vols. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1923), p. 239; Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, 3rd edn, p. 196.’
Justice, like Ethics itself has its proper expression in action & not in words.30 Words give to justice a kind of formality & rigidity which crushes from it that spontaneity & life which would enable it to adapt itself to circumstances. Law is a ‘general statement’ – a statement ‘in outline’ & so can never contain the whole of justice. Equity supplies this deficiency. AR2[82] VI.vii.3 We cannot say that Politics – practical wisdom – is supreme in an absolute sense unless our view of the universe is hopelessly anthropocentric. But ‘all good Philosophy is Theocentric’ (Inge).
[30] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf Aristotle, Ethics, Bk I ch. ii §3.’
Aristotle 3 (January 1924)1 AR3[01] VI.viii.1 ‘politice, the good sense of the citizen, & phronesis, the good sense of the man, are the same habit viewed from different points, as the citizen & the man are the same person viewed from different points.’2 This is rather an extraordinary position for a Greek to take up – so eminently was the man taken up into the citizen in the City-State. politice is here treated as a state of mind so that it may be compared with phronesis, whereas Aristotle had previously treated it as simply one of the divisions of the sciences. AR3[11] VII.ii.5 The Method of Ethics 1. State the phenomena. 2. State what men think on the subject. [1] LSE 2/3/3. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 12.5 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–77. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘Aristotle. / III / Nicomachean Ethics. VI.8 to End / [p. 72. Notes on Aristotle’s Ethics / from Ferrier’s Lectures on Gk Philosophy / (vol. 1 p. 367)] / January. 1924.’ [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Stewart, Notes, ii.63.’
3. Review the difficulties of the various opinions. Not to overthrow any, wholly, but to wring from all a residuum of truth. Attempt to reconcile them all by drawing the necessary distinctions.3 AR3[13–14] VII.iii.6 A man may have knowledge which is in abeyance because he does not apply a minor premise to his general principle. A universal proposition has to go through a long process before it can be brought into immediate relation to a practical situation. There are no rules which can be slavishly applied.4 AR3[17] VII.iv.4 It is more intemperate to pursue luxury in cold blood than under the influence of passion – it shows that the conduct is more essentially a part of the mind itself.5 AR3[21] VII.vii.1 Most men are neither eminently good nor bad, but inclining to weakness & liable to the lesser excesses – imperfect self-control, & softness. This was a typically Greek view. Cf. the Hebrew view, [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, Bk VII ch. ii §12.’ [4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Bradley, Ethical Studies, p. 141 sqq.’ [5] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.211.
that most men were desperately wicked; it is a more earnest view & finds a place in the Stoic teaching.6 AR3[22] VII.viii.1 The greatest enemy to recovery or advance is satisfaction. There are many harmonies which are premature & so incomplete. The only true harmony of life & character is one which has developed a critical self-consciousness which is content with nothing less than perfection. AR3[29] VII.ii.2 Aristotle guards himself from admitting the Platonic theory that the absolute good is always the object of human desire.7 Friendship, he says, can exist on the basis of an apparent good – a good as conceived by an individual at any moment. There can, however, be a kind of friendship which is not reciprocated – cf. Housman, A Shropshire Lad – ‘Soldier, I wish you well!’8 This is fraternity, but perhaps not friendship. AR3[30] VII.iii.6 [6] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.219–20. [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, Bk III ch. iv §1.’ Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.254. [8] A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (London: Kegan Paul and Co., 1896), no. XXII, l. 12.
Aristotle here puts ‘usefulness’ & ‘pleasure’ in their right places – they are results, incidental to some extent, & not ends to be aimed at. Cf. R.L. Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston: ‘Pleasure is a by-product of the singular chemistry of life, which only fools expect.’ The same process of distinction must be applied to ‘The State’ – but this many fail to do. AR3[31] VIII.v.1 The difference between the mere instinct of gregariousness & true fraternity – the latter is not affected by any physical separation, for it is a disposition of spirit. AR3[33] VIII.vii.3 The essential thing in Justice is that every man shall get his due, whatever it may be; the essential thing in Friendship is equality, or a certain degree of initial equality which will ensure that the gulf between the two men is not too great for the formation of a friendship.9 AR3[33] VIII.vii.5 Cf. this with the Christian conception of God in Jesus Christ & we see how great a conception that brought into the world. God is not so far off that we cannot go unto him, or so exalted that we cannot be friends with him. [9] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.265.
AR3[35] VIII.ix.1 The basis of Communism – Friendship. Usually ‘Communists’ put the process the other way round, and instead of working for Friendship, think to introduce ‘common ownership’ first. Whereas if Friendship truly prevailed, common ownership & use would be a simple fact without more ado. AR3[35–36] VIII.ix.4 This is the meaning of ‘the Sovereignty of the State.’ When a state exists it throws its mantle over the whole of life – i.e. gives every activity an end which it did not have before, without necessarily changing the outward seeming of the activity in any respect. Cf. Spinoza’s conception of state sovereignty. VIII.ix.5–6 It is not doubted that some of these social clubs, etc., may have existed, historically, before the State came into actual existence. But the State, once having been inaugurated, necessarily gives the end & purpose for which these things shall exist in the future. AR3[37] VIII.x.4 Aristotle is not without the conception that forms of government & laws must be adapted to men & circumstances, though he tends to think of men as all in fundamentally similar circumstances. Montesquieu, of course, worked out the theory to its fullest extent.
AR3[39–40] VIII.xiii.8 The General Will. Will is distinguished from actual momentary choice. Aristotle here departs from Plato, who would have held that to be honourable is finally more profitable than merely to seek & find profit. Cf. Spinoza – it is because all men’s wills, in the last analysis, are directed towards the good that any hope of final agreement is held out for us. AR3[39–40] VIII.xiii.10 This is the meeting & parting point of Idealism & Utilitarianism.10 Hitherto Aristotle has taken a middle position, saying that both motive & result are necessary criteria of goodness. AR3[41] VIII.xiv.1 Love does not reward merit. Love answers need. A true friendship exists for a mutual advantage – not by a mere adjustment of benefits, but because friends no longer live separate lives, but one life. Love yearns for oneness; not a mere leveling down, but a higher & yet higher oneness. AR3[42] IX.i.3
[10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, Bk IV ch. I §12.’
True, moral friendship, based on character, does not require a medium of exchange, for it is not a matter of giving & receiving, for all things, all life, is common. AR3[42–43] IX.i.3 In his reverence & respect for philosophical teaching, Aristotle has, perhaps, in mind the twenty years he spent in the school of Plato. The highest friendship is, to Aristotle, in the nature of a philosophic communion – dialectic.11 AR3[43] IX.i.8 Whatever other debts we have incurred & are obliged to repay, we have a standing debt to our parents (Plato would have put ‘the state’ on the same level) which we can never wholly repay. If, then, we are forced to choose whom we shall repay or ransom, we should consider this standing claim before all others. AR3[46] IX.iv.3 The psychology of the ‘good will.’ The good man is, as Plato said, the wise man, that is, not only desiring what he believes to be good – which all men do – but knowing what that good is. AR3[46] IX.iv.4 [11] Compare Stewart, Notes, ii.284.
Willing is always directed towards states of the self, & not external objects, or rather, only to external objects in so far as they will satisfy or create the desired state of self. AR3[48] IX.vi.1 Fraternity – Unanimity is ‘political friendship.’ AR3[49] IX.vi.3 There is perfect agreement found with perfect wisdom. Spinoza, Plato, Rousseau – all hold this doctrine. AR3[49] IX.vii.4 The real cause of this is that ‘a thing is its activities’ – our self is extended in our work & above all in our self, & the loss of any is an actual loss of part of the real self. Cf. Hegelian view of property & see Bosanquet, ‘Psychology of the Moral Self.’12 AR3[50] IX.vii.6 Love is a power with an end to achieve (cf. the fact that the word ‘Faith’ in the N.T. is always followed by an accusative). [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘B. Bosanquet, Psychology of the Moral Self (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1897), pp. 47–57, 89, etc.’
AR3[50] IX.viii.2 One’s feeling towards oneself are the only standard we know for one’s feelings towards one’s friend. AR3[51] IX.viii.8–10 The self-love of the good man leads him to all goodness & nobility, above all to self-sacrifice for his friends & country. But even this may be misunderstood, for in ‘sacrificing’ self – in dying – he attains a truer good – he lives more abundantly. In the self-sacrifice of the good man the highest good of all is attained. philaytia is simply a passionate devotion to what is great & noble & enduring.13 AR3[53] IX.ix.6–7 It is good to be alive.14 In this the Greek view of life contrasts with some of the Indian philosophers – Hindu. AR3[53] IX.ix.9 [13] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.300. [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Politics, Bk III ch. vi §5.’
Aristotle has the conception of the absolute unity of existence & thought; & in this respect anticipates Descartes’ Cogito; ergo sum.15 AR3[54] IX.x.4 The number of a man’s real friends is limited by his capacity to feel the highest kind of affection (uperbole tis philías) for many individuals, & the practical difficulties of close intercourse. This question of size is one of the greatest importance. It is a problem in politics – most modern states are far too large to gain all the benefits of a common life. It is a problem in schools, universities, etc. Too small a number limits the common unity & experience, too large destroys it altogether.16 AR3[55] IX.xii.2 There are many means of joining men – and the most useful is games. AR3[59] X.iv.4 Cf. the doctrine that art is play – it aims solely at pleasure (see Schiller etc.). Aesthetic appreciation is an act of ‘sight,’ & so ‘immediate,’ not considering comparisons etc., & for this reason [15] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.305. [16] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.306.
is similar, psychologically, to pleasure. But psychology treats only mental states as such & can make no judgments of value or meaning. AR3[59] X.iv.10 Because all men grasp at pleasure, does not say that it is the chief good – it is, rather, something, in itself choiceworthy, which comes with an harmonious life of desire & function satisfied. AR3[61] X.v.9 This fact of everyday experience, that the good man is pained by many things which give pleasure to others, is one of the chief causes why the good life & the happy life cannot go together. Great poets & prophets suffer most. Yet, it may be said that they find pleasure in things which will give no pleasure to others. Yes, but to these higher things the common herd give no thought, they are not pained, in any sense, by them.17 AR3[62–63] X.vi.5 We all find good in what we each take to be our own good. But this is no guarantee that it is good, really. The real good is the outcome of the general will – & this is most clearly exhibited in ‘the good man’. Aristotle sees no benefit in the freedom which simply allows a man to follow his inclinations, or which allows a country to be [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Plato, Republic, 409–end.’
ruled by a majority – goodness, conformity to the will of the ‘good man,’ is all that is finally worth attaining. AR3[63–64] X.vii.1 Happiness, in the highest sense, is found in the working of the intellectual faculty – philosophy. (i) Because this is the most excellent part of our nature (§2).18 (ii) Because it most admits of continuance. (iii) Because it affords most solid & lasting pleasure.19 Aristotle’s statement suffers from that optimism (some call it pride)20 which will believe in no limits to the possible attainments of the human mind.21 AR3[64] X.vii.4 It may be supposed that the career of the man given up to contemplation is entirely divorced from the ‘political’ life. But the Savant, wise man, is rather to be considered as one who has little or nothing to learn from the world, but is not averse from teaching men something. Has this emphasis on the retired life no [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk I ch. ii §14, Bk I ch. xiii §20.’ [19] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.334. [20] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Grant, Ethics, i.165.’ [21] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Spinoza.’
cause in the contemporary history of Aristotle’s time? Greece was about to enter upon its ‘dark age.’22 Contemplation has a soul-body relation. But the philosopher learns little from the inhabitants from the cave. AR3[65] X.vii.6 Leisure.23 It is a kind of leisure of mind which Aristotle aims at.24 It is this leisure that we have lost in our industrial civilization. This doctrine of leisure is the corollary of the doctrine of the end.25 AR3[66] X.vii.9
[22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Boethius. Cf. Plato, Republic, 520a.’ Compare Stewart, Notes, ii. 443. [23] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Politics Of Aristotle Translated Into English With Introduction, Marginal Analysis Essays, Notes And Indices By B. Jowett, M.A. Master Of Balliol College Regius Professor Of Greek In The University Of Oxford Doctor In Theology Of The University Of Leyden, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), i.cxliv.’ [24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. B. Russell, Roads to Freedom Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1918), p. 188; B. Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1916), pp. 226, 230; Prospects of Industrial Civilization, p. 181.’ See also Stewart, Notes, ii.446. [25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Aristotle, Ethics, Bk I ch. ii §1.’
All ideals must be based upon the actual or they are false & useless (cf. §4.) We must take men as they are & put before them an ideal which can grow out of their truest nature. The best must develop out of the present state. Man’s most real part is his best part, for it is a satisfaction for his higher & yet higher cravings & needs that he is always seeking.26 AR3[66] X.viii.1–3 The life of practical morality holds a place second to the philosophic life. For it is bound up with man as an only partially achieved whole – with his passions and struggles.27 Morality is made by the gradual struggle of man with his environment; it is evolved. Philosophy ‘is more than human.’28 AR3[67] X.viii.7 Contemplation is clearly above the life of practical morality for it is the life we attribute to the gods.29 AR3[67] X.viii.9 [26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Bosanquet, Psychology, p. 107.’ [27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, Bk X ch. vii §3.’ [28] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.338. [29] Compare Grant, Ethics, ii.340.
This complete happiness found in contemplative speculation is slightly anomalous in the case of men. Gods have no need of ‘external prosperity’ in order to exist, but man has, &, though it be little that he needs, yet he cannot cut himself entirely from these needs. We may be away & off into the world of contemplation, but there are some who must rule & guide men’s lives, & they need our help. AR3[68] X.ix.1 The end of morality is action, not mere knowledge. AR3[69] X.ix.4 Men are not free by nature, not born free, nor can they be made so by talking to them, for a man can only hear what he can understand; freedom is acquired by gradual teaching, & all teaching must be originally based on what a man can learn, not what the teacher can teach.30 AR3[69] X.ix.8 The supreme task of the education of the young. Upon this everything depends – & so, it should be made a matter for
[30] Compare Stewart, Notes, ii.459.
legislation, or rather, the laws that govern the lives of men (especially the young) must be good laws.31 The reformer in Aristotle is far less evident than in Plato, but here he shows just that ardour which fell in love with Spartanism. AR3[69] X.ix.11 Aristotle’s view that knowledge is not power, as against Plato, comes out again & again when he is treating of practical questions. AR3[70] X.ix.12 The impersonal nature of law; its anger can only be the ‘settled’ anger of Bishop Butler, which has no part or lot with mere malice or caprice. AR3[71] X.ix.17 Aristotle holds that laws may improve, make good, because he holds that their value is educational. We should say – man’s moral character can be educated. AR3[76] To sum up. Virtue is a habit. There is— [31] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Plato.’
(i) An original power of acting rightly or wrongly – mere energy. (ii) A Proairesis, a power of choice, involving freedom, deliberation, will. (iii) The energeia – i.e., the practice. (iv) The exis, or habit of virtue (or vice) – a disposition built on practice. (v) The conduct resulting can alone be called virtuous, or moral.32 Kant made it clear that the will only can be good or bad. Aristotle says, rather, that it is the whole man, character, which can be good or bad, & not particular acts – and the two really mean the same thing.
[32] Compare Ferrier, Greek Philosophy, i.398–9.
Aristotle 4 (February 1924)1 AR4[01] I.ii Who is the real ‘statesman’? To-day, is it an M.P. (however illinformed, traitorous, & bigoted) or a man who deeply influences the life of his country tho’ not through ‘politics’? Horatio Bottomley or Dean Inge?2 AR4[04] 1.ii.13
[1] LSE 2/3/4. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 12.5 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–85. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘The Politics. – “It is an amazing book. It seems to me to show a Shakespearean understanding of human beings & their ways, together with a sublime good sense.” Henry Jackson, in a letter (see Memoirs by Parry, p. 131). / Aristotle. / IV. / Politics. Bks. I, II, III, VII, VIII, IV, V, VI / VII & VIII. I & III (& II). IV. V. & VI. / February 1924.’ In addition to Jowett’s translation, the notebooks on Aristotle’s Politics make extensive use of Aristoteloys Ta Politica The Politics Of Aristotle With English Notes By Richard Congreve M.A. Late Fellow And Tutor Of Wadham College Oxford (London: John W. Parker And Son, 1855); and The Politics Of Aristotle With An Introduction, Two Prefatory Essays And Notes Critical And Explanatory By W.L. Newman, M.A., Fellow Of Balliol College, And Formerly Reader In Ancient History In The University Of Oxford, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887). Quotations from Aristotle, Politics, are from Jowett’s translation unless otherwise noted. [2] Horatio Bottomley (1860–1933), MP for Hackney South 1918–22, lost his seat after a conviction for fraud; William Ralph Inge (1860– 1954), Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, 1911–34.
‘Things are defined by their working & power.’3 A thing is a thing in virtue of some purpose; we have no other way of distinguishing one ‘thing’ from another except in terms of purpose, function (ergon) etc. AR4[04] 1.ii.15 The idea of ‘the legislator’ or maker of states. It is found in Plato; & recurs in Spinoza (‘the wise man’) & Rousseau. AR4[06] I.iii.3 ‘Looking to the needs of practical life and also seeking to attain some better theory of their relation than exists at present.’ The double aim of the Politics. To form a true theory, & at the same time be useful. AR4[06] I.iv.5 The relation of the master to the slave is different from the relation of the slave to the master.
[3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, Bk II ch. v §2; Bk III ch. x §6 etc; arete. Cf. also R.L. Nettleship, Philosophical Remains of Richard Lewis Nettleship, ed. A.C. Bradley, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1897), on “Identity.”’
Cf. Coleridge, who asserted that, for the Christian, the world minus God = 0, but God minus the world = God, while for Spinoza God minus the world = 0.4 AR4[08–09] I.v.8 In the case of inferior men – cf. Carlyle, Miscellaneous Essays, ‘The Nigger Question’ – ‘Happy he who has found a master; – and now, farther I will say, having found, let him well keep him. In all human relations permanency is what I advocate, nomadism, continual change, is what I perceive to be prohibitory of any good whatsoever.’5 The same thought is expressed in Rousseau’s idea of being forced to be free. AR4[10] I.vi.8 Perhaps a modern conclusion to be drawn from this is that Eugenics, tho’ it may accomplish something, is not a solution to the greatest social problem; how to raise & enlighten men? Cf. controversy between Edmund Holmes & Prof. Bateson.6 [4] S.T. Coleridge, Specimens Of The Table Talk Of The Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), i.61–2. [5] T. Carlyle, ‘The Nigger Question,’ in Critical And Miscellaneous Essays: Collected And Republished, 7 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1869), vii.79–110, at p. 96. [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Holmes, “The Real Basis Of Democracy” [not traced]. See also J.H. Oldham, Christianity and the Race Problem (London: Student Christian Movement, 1924), pp. 46–79.’ Edmond Gore Alexander Holmes (1850–1936), educationalist, who argued that
AR4[11] I.vii.1 Government differs with the difference of the governed.7 AR4[12–13] I.ix.4 The point where trade becomes ‘unnatural’ is very difficult to determine, but Aristotle sees that it is the unforeseen consequence of the invention of a medium of exchange to which we must attribute many of the evils of society. Its evil nature is that it continually occupies men’s minds with subjects not in themselves of value, & creates lives spent from false motives & for false ends.8 AR4[14] I.x.1 ‘For political science does not make men, but takes them from nature and uses them.’ Political science deals with men as they are.9 This is the whole basis of politics & social reform.
inequality was mostly the result of environmental factors, was criticized by William Bateson (1861–1926), geneticist, who held that it was innate. [7] Compare Congreve, Politics, p. 22. [8] Compare Congreve, Politics, p. 29. [9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Plato, Laws, 889a.’ Compare Jowett, Politics, i.18–19.
AR4[16] I.xi.13 ‘A state is often as much in want of money and of such devices for obtaining it as a household, or even more so; hence some public men devote themselves entirely to finance.’ In our days finance is almost a fetish with politicians, more attention is paid to it than it deserves.10 AR4[16] I.xii.3 Compare this idea of a father & therefore a king, & a king & therefore a father, to the Christian conception of God. The idea of God as a father differs greatly in its meaning for us when we have different conceptions of fatherhood. Aristotle here gives us a glance at the Greek conception. Cf. also, this is the basis of all social reform – education. We can only understand something which is similar to us or what we already know. The social reformer must start with men as they are. Christian conception of God in Christ. If Christ is not man he is of no use to use. If he is not God he is not true. AR4[17] I.xiii.7
[10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Plato, Laws, 742d.’ Compare Jowett, Politics, i.22.
‘The freeman rules over the slave after another manner from that in which the male rules over the female, or the man over the child.’11 Note in this the whole theory & justification of education punishment in schools. ‘Punishment’ in schools differs fundamentally from punishment in the State. With Aristotle the same argument would apply to women & slaves. AR4[19] II.i.2 Aristotle treats the whole question of Communism in a quantitative manner – as to a large extent Plato had done before him. It is the triumph of modern political philosophy to have risen above this, & treated it qualitatively. Spinoza probably shows the first real attempt at this. AR4[19–20] II.ii.2 ‘Is it not obvious that a state may at length attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state.’12 Aristotle’s point is that ‘mere unity’ is not a final aim. In a sense it is true, i.e., that unanimity is not necessarily truth. But Plato never uses unity = unanimity. It is the volonté générale & the volonté de tous. The greatest unity is not the individual, for (i) the ‘individual’ is an abstraction, & (ii) if he did exist he could not be a ‘whole.’ [11] Jowett, Politics, i.24. [12] Jowett, Politics, i.28.
AR4[20] II.ii.8 ‘A city only comes into being when the community is large enough to be self-sufficing.’ A ‘whole’ is surely the only truly self-sufficing thing (& a true whole must be compounded of opposites), so then the most selfsufficing thing is a unity, for a whole is a unity par excellence.13 AR4[21] II.iii.6 The basis of Plato’s doctrine was that he hoped that when the whole of the citizens spoke of the same person or thing as ‘mine,’ the State would be pervaded with a feeling of friendliness & brotherhood.14 AR4[22–23] II.v.6 Aristotle has not the idea, so central in Hegel etc., that property should be common & private at the same time, because the general will is only fittingly expressed in the individual wills of good men. The conclusion is similar, but the reasons different.15
[13] Jowett, Politics, i.29. [14] Compare Newman, Politics, ii.238. [15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Plato, Republic, 424a.’
AR4[23] II.v.8 ‘Property should be private, but the use of it common; the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.’16 ‘The legislator’: we should bear in mind the full Greek meaning. It was not a blind faith in ‘law’ as we know it, but rather the legislator was the moral, religious & legal teacher & possibly reformer. AR4[23] II.v.10 ‘No one, when men have all things in common, will any longer set an example of liberality, or do any liberal action.’17 Aristotle’s point is that though the standard of moral action might be higher in Plato’s state, yet it would cease to be moral, for morality is ‘settled choice.’ Plato emphasized habit almost to the exclusion of choice. AR4[24] II.v.19 ‘If, like the guardians, they are to have all things in common, in what do they differ from them?’18 [16] Jowett, Politics, i.34. [17] Jowett, Politics, i.34–5. [18] Jowett, Politics, i.36.
Aristotle seems to assume that the only distinguishing mark between the Guardians & the rest was that of communal property, which was by no means the case. The Guardians were of a different quality altogether. AR4[27–28] II.vii.19 ‘We should bear in mind that a certain amount of wealth is an advantage. The best limit will probably be, not so much as will tempt a more powerful neighbour, or make it his interest to go to war with you.’19 If these were the only motives men ever had for war then Norman Angel’s thesis would be right, – that war doesn’t pay & therefore, if men can be persuaded of this truth, war will cease. Cf. the various ‘economic’ interpretations of history. AR4[28] II.vii.20 ‘The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the nobler sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more; that is to say, they must be kept down, but not ill-treated.’20 The nature of all true reform is education; for which end persuasion moves the higher & better man, force, only, the lower. The great thing is to prevent the lower from influencing affairs, & at the same time to educate & train them. [19] Jowett, Politics, i.45. [20] Jowett, Politics, i 46.
AR4[30] II.ix.24 ‘The law has no power to command obedience except that of habit, which can only be given by time.’21 Plato held that only old men should be allowed to draw attention to defects in law.22 These remarks of Aristotle about laws & their nature are very acute. He sees that law must be a conservative force, & advance cannot originate in that quarter. AR4[33–34] II.xii.10 ‘It is surely a bad thing that the greatest offices, such as those of kings and generals, should be bought.’23 The error is making wealth a qualification for office. Wealth is necessary to office; but all wealthy people are not capable of holding office. If the ‘governing class’ (the ‘gold’ men of the Republic) were given sufficient wealth to secure leisure, then the actual rulers could be chosen from it easily.24 AR4[34] II.xii.11 [21] Jowett, Politics, i.51. [22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Plato, Laws, 634d, e.’ [23] Jowett, Politics, i.62. [24] Compare Jowett, Politics, ii.99.
Aristotle has a view that the ‘government’ can absolutely direct opinion.25 But ‘the chiefs of the State’ may include other than the governors. But this is improbable in view of Aristotle’s treatment of ‘the Statesman.’26 This is perhaps the most important particular in which the modern world differs from the ancient city state. There, the men in the position of Socrates were few; the influential ones were all ‘statesmen’, politicians, public officials; here, almost, the reverse is the case. AR4[36] III.i.1 ‘What is a State? At present this is a disputed question.’27 It has since been disputed for 2000 years & we are not much nearer a consensus of opinion. AR4[36–37] III.i.2 The state is made up of citizens.28 Aristotle is forced to use ‘citizen’ in its narrow & technical sense, & the definition therefore depends on the nature of the constitution. Political practice has advanced immeasurably since that time, & [25] Compare Congreve, Politics, p. 97. [26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Politics, Bk I ch. I §2.’ [27] Jowett, Politics, i.67. [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Bk VII ch. 77, & Rousseau, Contrat Social, Bk II ch. 7.’
the theorist is no longer bound by these restrictions. Citizenship does not depend upon government, it is a philosophic & not a legal term. AR4[37] III.ii.3 If we are to take origins into account we must accept the fact that there are many sources from which citizenship flows. It is more profitable, however, to take the citizen as he is & define him in terms of present states, rights & duties. AR4[38] III.iii.8 ‘When the form of the government changes and becomes different, then it may be supposed that the state is no longer the same.’29 Identity of a constitution forms the identity of the State.30 This is unsatisfactory because (i) identity consists in many things besides form of government, e.g. language, religion, history, etc. (ii) It is always changing & developing (iii) Its identity must be a matter of degree. How far, for instance, has the English constitution remained an identity? And how far does this question affect the identity of the State? AR4[39] III.iv.5 [29] Jowett, Politics, i.71. [30] Compare Jowett, Politics, ii.112–13.
Aristotle’s argument is that the State, having immediate power over, & immediate interest in, certain sides of man’s nature, will count that perfect virtue which conforms to the standard, in those activities which it has set. In the main (cf. Green) it amounts to outward conformity. This is a restricted view, & we should rather hold (with Plato) that an immoral man was disloyal to the State in a way similar to the disloyalty of the political traitor. AR4[40] III.v.9 Citizenship is no status unchanged in history and unchangeable. It differs according to circumstances. AR4[41] III.vi.1 There is no real confusion here, but the extreme subtlety of the facts makes expression awkward. politeyma = the government, i.e. the administrative officers. politeia = government administering & being administered, i.e. the constitution. polis = the State; which includes everything. These meanings are, however, fluid, and constantly pass into one another.31
[31] Compare Jowett, Politics, ii.122.
Some (e.g. Congreve & Laski) have (erroneously) concluded from this that the State is the government.32 This is neither true, nor Aristotelian. AR4[41] III.vi.8 ‘The trainer or the pilot considers the good of those committed to his care. But, when he is one of the persons taken care of, he accidentally participates in the advantage.’33 This is the key to all political philosophy, which is an attempt to theorize the harmony which life as we know it demands as a practical presupposition.34 AR4[43] III.ix.2 ‘For all men cling to justice of some kind, but their conceptions are imperfect and they do not express the whole idea.’35 Men always consider themselves to be as good as others, & therefore claim equal political rights – e.g., they claim a vote without considering whether they are fit or not. We might argue from practical experience that those who are wise enough to give consideration to their fitness or unfitness are [32] See Congreve, Politics, p. 122: ‘more shortly, the state is its government.’ [33] Jowett, Politics, i.78–9. [34] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. F. Bastiat, Harmonies économiques (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850).’ [35] Jowett, Politics, i.81.
usually wise enough to have a vote. From which follows that those who are unfit are those who give not consideration to fitness & so can only be excluded by force & not by reasoned argument – for they would not understand argument.36 AR4[44] III.ix.7 ‘There are no magistracies common to the contracting parties who will enforce their engagements; different states have each their own magistracies.’37 The sovereign state, & the problem of international relations. There is no international magistracy. AR4[44] III.ix.8 A true State is primarily a partnership in the good life. Cf. Burke, French Revolution. It should promote virtue. ‘Still, even where the polis failed to do this, much was done for virtue by other agencies at work within it as we see from the address of Protagoras.38 So that Aristotle’s view that a polis omitting to make the promotion of virtue a matter of public concern becomes a mere “alliance” does not seem to be altogether true.’39
[36] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Politics, Bk III ch. xvi §8.’ Compare Jowett, Politics, ii.125. [37] Jowett, Politics, i.83. [38] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Plato, Protagoras, 325c sqq.’ [39] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Newman, iii.205.’
But the polis is the whole & there can be no such things as ‘other agencies at work within it.’ Newman confuses (like most political philosophy in England) polis & politeia. From this it would seem that we might develop a theory of degrees of statehood. It is a fallacy to suppose that a state is, any more than an individual is. All is growing or decaying. There are some men whom we can call ‘individuals’ only by courtesy; & so it is with States. AR4[44] III.ix.8 ‘A state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of crime and for the sake of exchange. These are conditions without which a state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a state.’40 There are certain minimum requirements for a state – a common area of territory etc: – just as ‘living together’ is a necessity of friendship.41 But no amount of living together will produce, of itself, friendship, & no security on a piece of land will produce statehood. These things cannot enter into the definition. AR4[45] III.x.5
[40] Jowett, Politics, i.84. [41] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Aristotle, Ethics,Bk IX ch. xii §1, etc.’
The rule of law.42 Plato, of course, meant ‘good’ law. (Cf. Burke, speech on American taxation: ‘bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.’)43 The only conclusion that can be drawn from this chapter is that all forms of government are equally baseless because they are not based on justice.44 AR4[46] III.xi.14 Without saying vox populi, vox dei, it may be said of the people (i) they are free from sophism & hypercriticism (ii) they form conclusions on simple grounds (iii) their moral principles are generally sound (iv) susceptible to noble impulses & sacrifices (v) they retain human & national feeling.45 AR4[47] III.xiii.11 Laws must all be ‘general,’ i.e., made with a view to the common good of all & not to the private good of any one section.46 AR4[47] III.xiii.13 [42] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Plato, Laws, 713e.’ [43] Compare Newman, Politics, iii.212. [44] Compare Jowett, Politics, ii.127–8. [45] Compare Jowett, Politics, ii.131. [46] Compare Jowett, Politics, ii.135.
Law, to be just (that is, equal), must be made with a view to the needs of ordinary men, & must promote justice in ordinary circumstances. A god (or a beast) is outside their jurisdiction. AR4[48] III.xiii.25 ‘The only alternative is that all should joyfully obey such a ruler, according to what seems to be the order of nature, and that men like him should be kings in their state for life.’47 The tragedy of human history is that men’s prejudices & pride have prevented them from recognizing a great leader & following him. Whether by law or merely by social custom, society has ostracized its great ones – laughed at them & not listened, rejected them & not followed. This difficulty that Aristotle presents is not one that merely affects a State with the peculiar laws of Athens, but it affects the relation between the great man & society under all circumstances. It is characteristic of Aristotle that he always seizes upon those points in the make-up of the State & Society which are ‘universal’ or ‘essential.’ When treating a particular law he has his mind upon the necessity in human nature which made the law – the real problem in all political philosophy. AR4[49] III.xv.4
[47] Jowett, Politics, i.95.
Men have always been more to men, than laws have – Augustine must find his Ambrose, the Christian Christ. Books, law, dead heroes – these avail nothing.48 AR4[49] III.xv.13 Democracy accepted as inevitable, & not as good. AR4[49–50] III.xv.14 ‘Even supposing the principle to be maintained that kingly power is the best thing for states, how about the family of the king? Are his children to succeed him?’49 This has always been a great factor in history.50 It is true that M. Aurelius refrained from giving the regency into the hands of his son Commodus, but most men cannot refrain from giving first thought to their friends & relations.51 The popes of the later Middle Ages & Renaissance developed Nepotism to an unparalleled degree. But even English politics has been influenced by this e.g. Lord Salisbury’s appointment of Mr. Balfour.52 And in many cases it is not only to be excused, but recognized as a wise act. [48] Compare Jowett, ii.141. [49] Jowett, Politics, i.100. [50] Compare Congreve, pp. 154–5. [51] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See C. Merivale, A History of the Romans Under The Empire, 3rd edn, 8 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1865), viii.340.’ [52] Arthur James Balfour, first Earl of Balfour (1848–1930), Prime Minister 1902–5, nephew of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquess of
AR4[50] III.xvi.5 It is the aim of law, not to justify itself at all costs, but to bring justice about, & so a good law will, recognizing its own intrinsic limitations, atone for them by admitting the right of spirit over letter. Cf. Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice. AR4[51] III.xvii.2 Government did not come into being (as St Augustine etc. thought) because of man’s wickedness, but because of the inequalities among men. If we were all equally bad or all equally good government would not be needed. AR4[51] III.xviii.1 The Good Man & the Good Citizen.53 (i) The good citizen is not the same as the good man, under ordinary circumstances, for virtue is relative to the constitution. (ii) But in the perfect state he is the same.
Salisbury (1830–1903), Prime Minister 1885–92, 1895–1902, was given a succession of government appointments by his uncle including the office of Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1887. [53] Compare Jowett, Politics, ii.147.
(iii) Even in the perfect State, since each will have special duties, they will not all conform to a special type of perfection. (iv) The good ruler alone can be identified with the good man. (v) And yet the citizen, who knows both how to rule & how to obey is more complete. (vi) So in the perfect state the citizens should take it in turn to rule & be ruled. AR4[53] VII.ii.654 ‘For these two lives – the life of the philosopher and the life of the statesman – appear to have been preferred by those who have been most keen in the pursuit of virtue, both in our own and in other ages. Which is better is a question of no small moment.’ This is a practical question. There are many men, fitted for a ‘life of contemplation,’ who yet, because they feel it their duty, spend much of their strength in the work of a ‘statesman,’ i.e., in practical work of helping their fellow men. In these, as Aristotle says, is a rough division of all that is best in life, of all that is worth living for; and many of the best have found their highest good in a combination of the two. AR4[53] VII.ii.12 [54] Oakeshott’s notes move directly from book III to book VII; at AR4[70] he cites the view of Ross, Aristotle, p. 265, that books IV–VI were ‘Originally, it would appear, a separate treatise more technical in character than the rest of the work.’
Aristotle is never carried away by this thirst for power which history has always exhibited, on the contrary he wondered at it & saw how little it availed to satisfy man’s true wants. If men could only be taught what the good life really is. AR4[54] VII.ii.18 Aristotle never imagines that the ordinary state can repudiate all thought of ‘international relations,’ but to make these, & conquest, its main end is wholly wrong.55 AR4[54–55] VII.iii.2 Those who retire from active life & discard ‘politics’ are right in a certain way because there is nothing intrinsically good in commanding & governing. But they are wrong in supposing that the whole of ‘political’ activity is comprised in these things. There is another sort of rule, which is good & upon the exercise of which a good man might well spend his days. Those who remain in active life are wrong if they concern themselves merely with ruling but right if they are occupied with true ‘statesmanship.’ It is a fact of common occurrence how often men whose lives are spent in action desire all the time to retire from the world for contemplation. The Emperor Charles V accomplished his wish in the end; Lord Strafford died in harness. AR4[55] VII.iii.3 [55] Compare Jowett, Politics, ii.258.
Action is, after all, man’s native expression of what he believes most surely & desires most ardently. ‘The highest,’ says Goethe, ‘may not be spoken.’ Drama is the only expression of our deepest thoughts & feelings, life of our truest ideals & longings. AR4[55] VII.iii.5 A ruler must be in a position to better & enlighten his subjects, or he is merely ‘governing’ & spending his life in vain. AR4[55] VII.iii.7 There can be no real antagonism between the good of the individual & the good of the community. AR4[56] VII.iii.8 (i) Activity is not necessarily in relation to others. (ii) It is not necessarily a means to something else; thoughts which are an end in themselves may be of an active type. Cf. the common & erroneous idea that fraternity necessitates a physical pleasure & is equivalent to mere ‘sociability’ or ‘gregariousness.’ AR4[57] VII.iv.5
A city is great, not by its extent, but by its ability & success in fulfilling its station.56 AR4[57] VII.vi.4 The city is not to make it an end to hold a great market. AR4[58] VII.viii.5 Governments are means to accomplish not their own ends, but the ends of the State. And as means have nothing in common with the end. AR4[57] VII.viii.8 ‘For a state is not a mere aggregate of persons, but a union of them sufficing for the purposes of life.’57 Fraternity – real unity is the key to the essence of the state. AR4[59–60] VII.xi.2
[56] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. J. Ruskin, Unto This Last and The Two Paths (London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1862).’ [57] Jowett, Politics, i.220.
Would that our statesmen had half the wisdom of Aristotle about the establishment of cities. The difference lies in the fact that Aristotle is planning an ideal city, and one element in it, in his view, is that it should exist for the good life & not for commercial or military purposes. Cities in our own day grow up at the demand of economic facts, i.e., the establishment of industries. Population moves with employment. But it ought to be possible to regulate the establishment of industries, though just where they should be carried on is usually dictated by natural conditions. AR4[61] VII.xiii.6 ‘I use the term “conditional” to express that which is indispensable, and “absolute” to express that which is good in itself.’ ‘Conditional’ = those minimum necessities which are good only as means & not ends. Punishment is a ‘necessity’ in our present state, but no-one can pretend that it has in it a power of real moral regeneration.58 AR4[61] VII.xiii.9 External goods – themselves necessary, to a certain point, to the good life – are the gifts of fortune. Virtue comes from knowledge & will. AR4[62] VII.xiii.12 [58] Jowett, Politics, i.230.
Reason can, & should, dominate man’s impulses. For the manner of this domination, see, Nicomachean Ethics – the doctrine of ‘pleasure.’ AR4[62] VII.xiii.13 ‘We learn some things by habit and some by instruction.’59 Habit here = ‘experience’ in the sense of ‘chance, everyday experience’ – ‘practice.’ So, Aristotle’s theory of education. Habit Instruction
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Education AR4[63]
VII.xiv.14 The training is to put first things first – to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven. AR4[63] VII.xiv.15 ‘Hellenes of the present day, and the legislators who gave them their constitutions, do not appear to have framed their government with a regard to the best end, or to have given them laws and education but in a vulgar spirit have fallen back on those which promised to be more useful and profitable.’60 [59] Jowett, Politics, i.231. [60] Jowett, Politics, i.234.
Commercialization is Aristotle’s bête noire. It is the curse of our own day too – Industrialism.61 AR4[65] VII.xvii.5 ‘The sports of children should be for the most part imitations of the occupation which they will hereafter pursue in earnest.’62 This has an element of truth in it when applied to physical education. But it is a fallacy to suppose that the best education is, in the widest sense, a technical one. Education of character must precede any instruction in particular businesses. AR4[66] VIII.i.1 The State, as much as an individual, has an end & a ‘calling.’ AR4[66] VIII.ii.5 ‘There are also some liberal arts quite proper for a freeman to acquire, but only in a certain degree.’63
[61] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See R.H. Tawney, The Sickness of an Acquisitive Society (London: Fabian Society, 1920).’ [62] Jowett, Politics, i.241. [63] Jowett, Politics, i.245.
Acquaintance, but not perfection in some arts is desirable. Cf. Bridge and other card games. Spencer’s remark that perfection in billiards argues an ill-spent youth.64 AR4[66] VIII.iii.13 ‘In education habit must go before reason, and the body before the mind.’65 Aristotle is very wise on the subject of order in education. Body must develop before the mind is too greatly taxed & burdened. AR4[68] VIII.v.22 The power that music may have over the minds of even the most unmusical is a matter of common experience. It may exert a power of good or of evil. I was once told by a man of great musical sensibility & of no narrow moral convictions that if a man & woman were on the brink of a moral crisis and they heard a performance of Wagner’s Tristan & Isolde they would have lost all hold over themselves before the evening was out. AR4[68–69] VIII.v.25
[64] See D. Duncan, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London: Methuen & Co., 1908), pp. 298–9. [65] Jowett, Politics, i.248.
‘There seems to be in us a sort of affinity to harmonies and rhythms.’66 Music is suitable in the education of the very youngest for its language is understood without being learned & its power the soul is unable to resist, for it creeps upon us and has stormed the heart before we realized its pleasure. AR4[69] VIII.vii.7 ‘A man receives pleasure from what is natural to him.’67 Pleasure is man’s most disingenuous action. If a man really examines himself as to what he takes pleasure in he will find out more about himself than in any other way. Our actions are expressions of our beliefs & are often truer expressions than our words. AR4[70] IV.i Aristotle sees that all advance must be built upon what the people can understand & not on what some prophet is able to tell them without them understanding. The principles of politics, like those of education, can be discovered by thought & experiment, but it is necessary to have some plan & method by which these principles are applied & adapted to varying stages of growth & development. This is the subject of Books IV, V, & VI. [66] Jowett, Politics, i.253. [67] Jowett, Politics, i.258.
AR4[73] IV.iv.4 We must understand not that the rich are ‘unfree’ but that in oligarchy the fact of their ‘freedom’ is not taken into account, & see ‘free’ poor men are not admitted to office. AR4[74] IV.v.3 ‘In many states the constitution which is established by law, although not democratic, owing to the character and habits of the people, may be administered democractically.’68 Cp. Bryce, American Commonwealth: in England ‘though the constitution has become democratic, the habits of the nation are still aristocratic.’ (This is a change in the opposite direction to that contemplated by Aristotle.)69 France has never become Republican at heart. Prussia has never become constitutional. AR4[74] IV.vi.2 One of the uses of ‘leisure’ is political action.
[68] Jowett, Politics, i.118. [69] Compare Jowett, ii.160 which refers to James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1888), Ch. 76, ‘The Nature of Public Opinion.’
AR4[74] IV.vi.4 ‘Every one to whose birth there is no objection is eligible, and may share in the government if he can find leisure. And in such a democracy the supreme power is vested in the laws, because the state has no means of paying the citizens.’70 Something of this state of affairs obtained in England before the payment of M.Ps. AR4[74] IV.vii.2 One form of aristocracy is the perfect state. But there are others which are far from perfect. AR4[75] IV.viii.5 ‘Good laws, if they are not obeyed, do not constitute good government.’71 This was discovered by the Elizabethan legislators & to remedy it the whole English local government system grew up and with it police etc.
[70] Jowett, Politics, i.119. [71] Jowett, Politics, i.122.
AR4[75] IV.viii.6 ‘There are two parts of good government; one is the actual obedience of citizens to the laws, the other part is the goodness of the laws which they obey.’72 The division between the executive & the legislative for efficiency’s sake. Cf. Montesquieu. There is no need to attribute to Montesquieu a deep knowledge of the English Constitution – as the inspiration he required is found in Aristotle. AR4[75] IV.ix.3 ‘There are three modes in which fusions of government may be effected.’73 On the three modes of combination cf. Hobhouse, The Rational Good.74 There is a fourth, to which both Aristotle & Hobhouse are blind, which is the key to the ‘Idealist’ position. The doctrine of the ‘mean’ was not meant by Aristotle to be a ‘compromise’ – it is something new, & other than either extreme, & the extremes find their fullest life in it. Aristotle seems to force political institutions into the frame which he made in the Nicomachean Ethics. [72] Jowett, Politics, i.122. [73] Jowett, Politics, i.124. Aristotle is discussing how to combine oligarchy and democracy. [74] Oakeshott’s note: ‘L.T. Hobhouse, The Rational Good: A Study in the Logic of Practice (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1921), Ch. IV, notes, pp. 19–20.’
AR4[76] IV.xi.17 ‘Whichever side gets the better…regards political supremacy as the prize of victory.’75 To assume that any class or party is, as a class or party, disinterested is absurd. They all desire power, & they all claim to desire good & democratic government. AR4[79] V.i.5 Revolution is the outcome of an internal dichotomy or lack of balance between the elements or parts of a State. There is a ‘kind of ‘justice’ in the claims of each party, but they are party claims,76 and not ‘general,’ & so lead to strife. Absolute justice is where all is ordered for the common good, & in this state no revolutions occur. AR4[81] V.vi.10 ‘An oligarchy which is at unity with itself is not easily destroyed from within.’77 Cf. the story told of Lord Melbourne when Prime Minister – he stood with his back to the door & said ‘It does not much matter [75] Jowett, Politics, i.129. [76] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Politics, Bk IV ch. ii §17.’ [77] Jowett, Politics, i.157.
what we say so long as we all say the same thing’ – (re: the Corn Laws). AR4[82] V.viii.5 How to control necessary change – this is the great problem of government. AR4[83] V.ix.2 ‘There may be a doubt, however, when all these qualities do not meet in the same person, how the selection is to be made.’78 Cf. St Theresa’s advice to choose a confessor both wise & pious, but if that is not possible, then prefer one who is wise.
[78] Jowett, Politics, i.166.
Aristotle 5 (April 1924)1 AR5[01–02] VI.ii.2–4 ‘The basis of a democratic state is liberty.’2 Here are detailed several of the fallacies about liberty – fallacies still current in our own day. (i) A person excluded from office is not free. Cf. Rousseau – the English people are only free at elections. This is at the bottom of our belief in the vote. Freedom identified with government by majority & permission to do what you like.3 (ii) Numerical equality. (iii) A man should do as he likes. ‘A desire of the individual to be let alone, to do as he pleases, indulge his impulses, follow out his projects’ has been extremely strong in the U.S.A.4 Cf. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty: ‘in our own day no fact is more
[1] LSE 2/3/4. Unlined loose sheets inserted at rear of Aristotle 4. Recto fos. numbered 1–5. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘ARISTOTLE. / V. / Politics. Book. VI. / April. 1924.’ [2] Jowett, Politics, i.189. [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Sir J.R. Seeley, Introduction to Political Science Two Series of Lectures (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1896), pp. 119, 158.’ [4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Bryce, American Commonwealth, iii.269.’
incontestable & conspicuous than the love of democracy for authoritative regulation.’5 Cf. also M. Arnold’s strictures in Culture & Anarchy. AR5[02] VI.ii.9 Numerical equality is the great failure of democracy, but it is impossible to secure real freedom by this or any machinery. AR5[02] VI.iii.2 (i) Democracy is rule by majority. (ii) Oligarchy is rule by propertied class. But both are unjust for (i) will not care about the minority, & (ii) will disregard the poor. AR5[03] VI.iv.15 ‘Democracy…will not last long unless well regulated by laws and customs.’6 Aristotle again remarks upon the necessity for a sure-established custom & tradition where a greater independence of life is [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. W.E.H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), i.213, 462.’ [6] Jowett, Politics, i.195.
admitted. The law must be there – in the people’s hearts, where it is absent from their circumstances. AR5[03] VI.iv.16 If every citizen is to have a share in the government we must take care not to make our citizen class too large. But democracies not only give every citizen a share in government, they make all men citizens. AR5[03] VI.iv.20 ‘Most persons would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner.’7 Aristotle’s pessimistic view of ‘human nature’ as he saw it.8 AR5[04–05] VI.vii.18 Religion is the basis of the State. & cf. the idea that men can only unite in a true unity when their end & aim for unison is the highest. We are only one with one another when we are one with the One. And Plotinus’ idea of the harmony of the universe dependent upon the ‘conducting’ of the one. Spinoza, St Paul, and Aristotle (see Nicomachean Ethics) have this idea of the highest end & the only true ground of unity. [7] Jowett, Politics, i.196. [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, and Aristotle, Politics, Bk VI ch. iii §7 etc.’
Greek ‘religion’ may have been very different from what we should recognize as such, & Aristotle’s meaning may be repugnant to us. But he states in general terms such as have a meaning to us to-day. Cf. ‘maintenance of thy true religion’ (Communion Service) meant something very different than it means today. Cf. also Hooker & Rousseau on the place of religion in the State.
Notebook 6 (September 1924)1 06[02] This novel puts before us the problem of leadership – education – in a simple, elemental & grand manner.2 The Virginian is a born leader. Why? And we can see in the elements of his character just those qualities which give a man the mastery of men – for their own good. Not mere literary education; but a fundamental greatness of character. Here is collected, in a most admirable manner, the data which life affords for a true theory of education, leadership etc. 06[07–08] Philosophers, as well as poets, have the elemental principle of childhood in them, are men who have never grown up, for, after all, they spend their lives enquiring where the candle flame [1] LSE 2/1/6. Soft cover, grey, exercise book, 20 cm × 16 cm, ruled. Recto folios numbered 1–46. Autograph, ink. Cover emblazoned ‘KING EDWARD VII SCHOOL. LYTHAM,’ endorsed: ‘NOTES. VI. \ Sept. 1924.’ Title page: ‘Note Book. / VI. / September 1924.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fos. 17–19, H.B. Walters, The Art of the Greeks (London: Methuen and Co., 1906); 26–7, J.J. Brousson, Anatole France en pantoufles (Paris: G. Cres, 1924); 32–3, T. Hardy, The Return of the Native (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1878); 34, T.B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, 5 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848–61); 40, H. Shipp, The New Art. A Study of the Principles of Non-Representational Art and their Application in the Work of Lawrence Atkinson (London: Cecil Palmer, 1922). [2] Fos. 2–6 contain notes on Owen Wister, The Virginian A Horseman Of The Plains (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902).
went when it was ‘blown out.’ Their minds are unhardened by prejudice, they have not suffered from what Shelley calls the ‘contagion of the world’s slow stain,’ & what St Paul calls being ‘spotted’ by the world.3 It is the heart of religion that moves the mind of philosophy. 06[08] A nation may be said to perish with its art & literature – its culture. Cf. modern Denmark & the fate of the Schleswig-Holstein provinces when bereft of Danish culture & before they acquired German – immorality, lawlessness increased 100% etc.4 06[09] The realization of unity in Society & the universe is the last fruit of long experience. 06[09] Cortés’s methods – always divided responsibility by asking advice before action – but always had his own way. Eloquence. Explained everything first. Did nothing without calling attention to it in words. [3] See Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘An Elegy on the Death of John Keats,’ ll. 14–15: ‘From the contagion of the world’s slow stain / He is secure’; James 1:27, ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ [4] Fos. 8–12 contain notes on W.H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico: With a Preliminary View of the Ancient Mexican Civilization and the Life of the Conquerer, Hernando Cortés, ed. J.F. Kirk, 3 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1843), but the edition Oakeshott was using has not been traced.
The Greeks had a special style of rhetoric which they considered appropriate for the occasion of a general addressing troops before battle.5 Boldness. When in difficulty it is fruitless to ask, ‘What is the wisest course?’ Ask, ‘What is the boldest?’ & it will be the wisest. 06[10] Clause in Cortés’s will – ‘It has long been a question whether one can conscientiously hold property in Indian slaves. Since this point has not yet been determined, I enjoin my son Martin & his heirs that they spare no pains to come to an exact knowledge of the truth.’6 Morality – its growth and development. So International Morality to-day; – to be followed by international law. 06[10] Cortés’s tireless activity. ‘The mere excitement of exploring the strange & unknown was a sufficient compensation to the Spanish adventurer for all his toils & trials. It seems to have been ordered by Providence that such a race of man should exist contemporaneously with the discovery of the New World.’7 [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See F.A. Wright, Greek Athletics (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), p. 56.’ [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, VII, Ch. V, p. 622.’ [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, VII, Ch. III, p. 598.’
No! the discovery of the New World is evidence of the existence of such a race. Cf. Croce’s view of history. 06[11] ‘Nearly all fallacies & paradoxes depend upon a confusion of categories.’8 06[12] Extremes are ever near to one another. Realism & Romanticism constantly merge with each other & they are the defect & excess of something truer – the ‘Classic’ – Idealism. 06[13] (The artists) ‘All set to work and strove to express nature as they saw her; but each saw her through the eyes of a master.9 In a short time Philippe Dubois had knocked off in the style of Herbert Robert a deserted farm, a clump of storm-riven trees, a dried-up torrent. Evariste Gamelin found a landscape by Poussin ready made on the banks of the Yvette. Philippe Desmalins was at work before a pigeon-cote in the picaresque manner of Callot & Duplessis.’10 This is exactly the opposite process to that of the true artist, who sees things as they are.11 [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘B. Bosanquet, Logic Or The Morphology Of Knowledge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), ii.156.’ [9] Fos. 13–14 contain notes on Anatole France, The Gods Are Athirst, tr. A. Allinson (London: John Lane, 1924). [10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘France, The Gods Are Athirst, p. 114.’ [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Bergson.’
06[14] The incomparable last scene between Maurice Brotteaux (with his love of man & his Lucretius), Father Longuemare (the priest who can see that the Atheist may be nearer God than he), & the girl Athenaїs.12 06[16] ‘All this is metaphysics, you cry: That is enough: there needs nothing more to give a strong presumption of falsity.’ Hume. Science & Religion are seeing their way to reconciliation; but there is a more dangerous & subtle struggle going on between Science & Philosophy – dangerous, because largely unrecognized & unfaced. 06[16] Re: Selective Breeding ‘To breed poets is quite possible, but it might cost us the adventure & enterprise that make a race worth writing about.’13 This denies the fact that, at bottom, it is the same kind of genius that makes e.g. a great explorer & a great philosopher. Cf. remark about Bradley, that had his health been better we might have lost a philosopher & gained an explorer of the first rank. Cf. poetry & soldiers – Raleigh’s remark about Wordsworth. Wolfe, Nelson.
[12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘France, The Gods Are Athirst, Ch. XXIV.’ [13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A.E. Wiggam, The New Decalogue of Science. Including the Correspondence Between the Author and George Bernard Shaw (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merill Co., 1925).’
06[20] Truth & Coherence In literary judgments of value the standards are in the artists themselves – & not in the critics. Homer, Shakespeare, etc. possess the standards & the only standards by which they can be judged. It is the same as with truth – it cannot rest on any argument to uphold it, it rests solely upon itself – Coherence with the world of experience as the seeker knows it. 06[21] America In the letters of Walter Page there is constant reference to the American lack of ‘foreign consciousness.’ He notes their ‘isolation.’14 Cf. President Wilson’s career & his failure. It is nearly impossible for an American to be a great European statesman. 06[25] Dancing to an audience.15 All art commences with the individual practice, it is the immediate expression of motion with the object of making it more intense & more durable – (cf. Shelley’s ‘Defence’). But then, the audience comes in – & rightly. For it is no exercise, but an art. The artists aim, (e.g., as dancer etc.) is [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, ed. B.J. Hendrick , 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1922), ii.218.’ [15] Fos. 25–6 contain notes on Jehan Tabourot, aka Thoinot Arbeau, Orchésographie. Et traicté en forme de dialogue, par lequel toutes personnes peuvent facilement apprendre et practiquer l’honneste exercice des dances (Lengres: Lehan des Preyz, 1588).
to produce in his audience the emotions he feels. This required faultless execution on his part, & imagination of their part. He aims at producing similar emotion, not at merely describing. No art is merely descriptive. 06[26] Most good dancers feel a rhythm that is more significant than the actual beats, and they follow its dictates rather than the absolute count of two, three or four. People, generally, do not dance in time; the music plays in time, and stimulates the dancers’ rhymic centres, and even though these respond in a very clumsy fashion, the music has done its work. Jazz is a stimulant of this sort – not music in itself, but productive of rhythmic motion. 06[27] E.M Forster has the double purpose of showing how miserably the Anglo-Indians fail to do the country any good, & also how extremely difficult it is to effect anything there however sympathetic you may be.16 06[28] ‘We are not out here to be pleasant, we’re here to do justice & keep the peace.’17 Then Forster goes on to show the immense difficulties which have to be faced to do even these things in India. The fundamental
[16] Fos. 27–30 contain notes on E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold and Co., 1924). [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Forster, A Passage to India, p. 48.’
disregard for truth in the Indian’s nature. To dispense justice fearlessly is very difficult there. 06[31] ‘Religion needs science to save it from superstition.’ Principle Selbie, British Association, Sunday 30 August 1925. On the contrary, Science has constructed an immense edifice of superstition in breaking down that which encumbered religion.18 06[33] The Purpose of Life The Germans have a theory that the world advances towards a single end & we are parts of that; this is so in a sense but it is misleading. In times of trouble we are apt to say, ‘we must build for the future & remember that we cannot find in the present the end of life.’ But this is not so.19 06[37] How about adapting Pater’s ‘all art strives towards the condition of music’ into ‘all art strives towards the condition of dancing’?20 Terpsichore – the Muse of Dancing. [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See supra, p. 19.’ At 06[19] Oakeshott quotes A. France, L’Etui de Nacre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1892), p. 126: ‘Une recherche d’ordre scientifique n’amènera jamais qu’un découverte du même ordre.’ [19] Oakeshott’s note: ‘But cf. R. Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra, and Prospice (London: A.C. Fifield, 1906).’ [20] Fos 37–9 contain quotations from F.A. Wright, The Arts in Greece. Three Essays (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1923).
06[41] ‘More can be said philosophically for an ornate ritual, symbolizing ideas regarded as valid now, than for a creed containing asssertions about matters of historical fact in the past.’21 The faith has suffered more from its defenders (apologetics – history etc.) than from those who have attacked it. Tho’ it is true that the attackers have always chosen the ground of combat, & the defenders meekly followed them on to it. 06[41] The doctrine of the Trinity is the greatest of all religio-speculative efforts to solve the most fundamental of all problems – the relation of the universal to the particular. 06[44] The whole problem of the permissibility of divorce cannot be settled by casuistical arguments. It depends on the case – whereas a ‘light’ man or woman is rightly condemned, another may well perform the same acts without meriting a similar condemnation. We must judge only ‘settled’ character, not isolated acts. 06[46] ‘It is indeed curious how ill-health, marriage, success in business, the birth of a child or change of neighbourhood will in turn drive in or divert all outward expression of religious interest.’22 [21] Oakeshott’s note: ‘D.G. Ritchie, Philosophical Studies, ed. R. Latta (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1905), p. 119.’ [22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A.C. Bouquet, The Christian Religion and its Competitors To-day: Being the Hulsean Lectures for 1924–5 Delivered
This is questionable – the opposite contains greater truth. Cf. Schweitzer, Edge of the Primeval Forest, for a fine expression of ‘what religion is.’23 06[46] The beneficent part which an unprejudiced government (& government qua government must be unprejudiced & no respecter of persons) can play. How government rises above mere party & local prejudices. How it approaches the wisdom of the State.24 Religion – how much it is a practical affair of living, & how it grows & blossoms in a life of stress & anxiety – see Parkin, Thring’s passion. His continual THeo Doxa. 06[A] Aristotle, Politics. Leisure is the end of work. We must remember that the Greek while fully admiring the results of Phidias’ labour, would have despised the labour itself. They never reached the notion of the creation of human personality as the end of labour – results to them were always visible, concrete results.25
Before the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. 12.’ [23] A. Schweitzer, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest Experiences and Observations of a Doctor in Equatorial Africa, tr. T. Campion (London: A. & C. Black, Ltd., 1924). [24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See G.R. Parkin, Edward Thring Headmaster of Uppingham School: Life Diary and Letters, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1898), p. 346 sq.’ [25] On the reverse of a half-sheet of typed minutes inserted at 06[22].
Notebook 7 (November 1925)1
[1] LSE 2/1/7. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 16 cm, blank. Recto pages numbered 1–64. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘coina ta ton philon. / Republic, 424a. / O anima cortese! / Notes / VII / November 1925.’ [‘Friends have all things in common,’ tr. Jowett; ‘O courteous shade!’: Dante’s Inferno, tr. H.F. Cary (New York, London and Paris: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., [n.d.]), Canto II, l. 58, at p. 9.] Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 6, Chance, Love and Logic Philosophical Essays By the late Charles S. Peirce, ed. M.R. Cohen (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, Ltd., 1923); 11, St John Ervine, Parnell (London: Ernest Benn, 1925); The Letters of Paul Gauguin to Georges Daniel de Monfreid, tr. R. Pielkovo (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1922); 28–9, W. Macneile Dixon, Tragedy (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1929); 30–1, C.K. Watson, ‘The Life and Genius of Molière,’ in Cambridge Essays, contributed by Members of the University (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855), 1–56; 34, Letters Written By The Earl of Chesterfield to his Son, ed. E. Stanhope, 3 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1827); 37–8, F.J.A. Hort, ‘Coleridge,’ in Cambridge Essays, contributed by Members of the University (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1856), 292–351; 50, Virgil’s Messianic Eclogue Its Meaning Occasion and Sources Three Studies By Joseph B. Mayor W. Warde Fowler R.S. Conway With The Text of the Eclogue, and a Verse Translation by R.S. Conway (London: John Murray, 1907); 53–4, W.Y. Sellar, The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883); 55–9, The Anabasis of Alexander; or, The history of the wars and conquests of Alexander the Great. Literally translated, with a commentary, from the Greek of Arrian, the Nicomedian, tr. E.J. Chinnock (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1884); 61–4, S. Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works (London: Jones & Co., 1825 [1781]).
07[01] Education ‘When a certain quibbler asked him why he asked no questions of him, he replied, “Because I asked questions when I was a stripling; & it is not my business to ask questions now, but to teach other people what I have discovered.” “How, then,” the other asked him afresh, “O Appollonius, should the sage converse?” “Like a lawgiver,” he replied, “for it is the duty of the law-giver to deliver to the many the instructions of whose truth he has persuaded himself.”’2 Consider the Socratic view of teaching – implying as it does a quite different view of what knowledge is & how it is reached.3 07[05] Example of a man working for the State but against the government. Lord Fisher, by subterfuge & without the permission of Parliament, carried out a great submarine-building campaign in 1904 onwards.4 07[08] ‘Professor Wobbermin of Breslau has tried to do it [express a necessary difference] by making a distinction between Geschichte [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Philostratus, Life of Appollonius, Bk I ch. xvii.’ See The Life of Apollonius of Tyana The Epistles of Apollonius and The Treatise of Eusebius, tr. F.C. Conybeare, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann; New York, The Macmillan Co., 1912). [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. W. Pater, Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1895).’ [4] John Fisher, first Baron Fisher (1841–1920), First Sea Lord 1904–11, 1914.
& Historie…Professor Wobbermin uses Geschichte for the real Course of Events, the things, deeds, words, thoughts, that have made things what they are, while he defines Historie as that which we can reconstruct of the past times from our documents or other sources of information. Historie may therefore be false or imperfect: the Christian religion does not depend upon Historie, but it depends upon Geschichte… whether we happen to know it or be ignorant of it.’5 But just which our recorded events (Historie) are real Geschichte, & how are we to tell? 07[09] ‘He was confident that, on the square, “on the square, mind!” there was nothing he couldn’t meet. Ever since he had been “so high” – “quite a little chap” he had been preparing himself for all the difficulties that can beset one on land and water. He confessed proudly to this kind of foresight. He had been elaborating dangers & defences, expecting the worst, rehearsing his best.’6 (And Lord Jim was betrayed in the end! We must prepare not for events, but for a whole view of life. Education is not the presentation of a number of receipts for meeting different situations, it is the making of a prepared state of mind.)
[5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘F.C. Burkitt, Comments & Criticism, 2.1 (May 1914), p. 28.’ [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: A Tale (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1900), Ch. VIII.’
07[10] ‘Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; & so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.’7 (And that, written by a man who in youth left his native country to sail the sea & finally to settle among foreigners & contribute to their literature. It is either a God or a Beast who can leave his native land permanently without impairing his self.) 07[13] The necessary distinction between art as art & art as a teacher, between Homer qua poet-Homer, & Homer qua popular teacher of religion & mythology, is not sufficiently made in Plato. He condemns Homer on the second count, but says very little about him on the first.8 07[14] Imaginative power in the realm of action means an aliveness to the social ethos as a whole & a power of placing particular events or persons within a whole of social tradition. More than this becomes casuistry, less than this is lack of sensibility & judgment. Cf. Dr Johnson’s power of judgment.
[7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Conrad, Lord Jim, Ch. XXI.’ [8] Fos. 13–16 contain quotation from W.P. Ker, ‘On the Philosophy of Art,’ in Collected Essays, ed. C. Whibley, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1925), vol. 2.
07[15] Hegel’s philosophy of history is great history, but often poor philosophy. Hegel had that purely historical-literary interest in his work as well as the philosophical, & sometimes it gets the upper hand. Cf. his literary criticisms in his Aesthetic. 07[17] Ireland contains two cultures – cf. Canada in the Durham Report. And the position of Quebec with that of Ulster.9 Cf. the place of literature in politics. Yeats, Russell, Stephens etc. Rough generalizations— (i) All the great political leaders of Ireland have been Anglo-Irish (Protestants). Exception – Michael Davitt.10 (ii) All the great poets from Moore onwards, all greater writers, artists & playwrights have been Anglo-Irish (Protestants).11 (iii) All the great singers, actors, & movers in the renaissance of the Irish language have been of pure Irish stock (Roman Catholic) Gaelic League. Except: Douglas Hyde.12 [9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Stephen Gwynn, ‘Ireland.’’’ Stephen Lucius Gwynn (1864–1950), Irish writer and politician, was author of a number of works on Ireland. [10] Michael Davitt (1846–1906), Irish Catholic republican politician. [11] Possibly George Augustus Moore (1852–1933), Irish novelist and poet who converted from Catholicism to Protestantism. [12] Douglas Hyde (1860–1949), Irish Catholic Gaelic scholar and first President of Ireland, 1938–45.
‘Citizenship’ has always been a conscious force in the academic life of Ireland. Note the place which the Universities have taken in politics & public life. (Cf. Germany 1805 & 1919 & Egypt, 1923– 4) Cf. also Greek Independence. Italian Independence. 07[19] ‘To live as a moral being, the individual must look at himself & treat himself from the point of view of the family, of the state, or of humanity, giving to his own desires & interests just the weight which they deserve when regarded from such higher centre, & not the exclusive weight which they claim when they are allowed to speak for themselves.’13 And this moral life is not fully theorized till we see that by so doing we are obeying & fulfilling a self compared with which the ‘individual self ’ is but a poor shadow of reality. 07[22] (1) ‘“Natural objects always did, & now do, weaken, deaden, & obliterate imagination for me.”14 “I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation & that to me it is hindrance & not action.” This doctrine, let it be said in all sincerity, may be good & true for the seer; it is certainly bad & false for the artist. It leaves Blake without a reason for drawing a man with two legs. His own [13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘E. Caird, Hegel (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1883), pp. 151–2.’ [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Sir W. Raleigh on Blake.’ Fos. 21–5 contain notes on Sir Walter Raleigh, Some Authors A Collection of Literary Essays 1896–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923).
pictorial art suffered from his belief that “nature is the work of the devil.”’ (2) ‘He taught his age to look at a picture, not through it, & the lesson was a needed one. But in his zeal to reprove the public for their preoccupation with incident & morality he was apt to deny to his pictures qualities which, after all, they have.’15 There is a subtle contradiction in these two statements. The ‘thing’ which Whistler looked at & painted was the same as what Blake saw – it was not the physical object per se – because no-one has ever seen that. To the artist the physical object has no meaning; the meaning is arrived at not by symbolism (which is the death of art), but by experience. 07[24] ‘Boccaccio describes so many kinds of lives that each of them is seen in relation to all humanity; & this is the truest criticism; it gives the right perspective.’16 (It is true logic too: the individual is not seen truly except as related to the whole – when he is seen as the whole.) 07[24–25] ‘Don Quixote is a high-minded idealist, who sees all things by the light of his own lofty preconceptions…He shapes his behaviour in accordance with these ideas, and is laughed at for his pains.’17
[15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Raleigh on Whistler.’ [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Raleigh.’ [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Raleigh.’
To see things as they are, i.e., theoretically, is of no practical value. Life demands that we see things coming into being & help that growth & effort; philosophy sees things as existing. cf. Don Quixote & leadership, Government, Social Reform. 07[25] In the Prometheus Unbound the supreme suffering of Prometheus is brought about when he is led to doubt lest his age-long suffering is in vain. – The Christian Religion does not set out to explain the whole universe, but it does place this human suffering in relation to a larger whole – a whole of God, man & the world, & show it to be not in vain, but part of the system in which God shares. 07[26] A certain university in America boasted a magnificent building led up to by an immense flight of steps, from the top of which, at the entrance to the building, a fine view was to be seen. For some purpose, it came about that the building was destroyed, but the flight of steps was left standing. And it occurred to some that this was no inappropriate figure by which to represent philosophy – an immense stair-way leading nowhere. The figure being put to the professor of philosophy he answered, ‘Yes, but do not forget the view you may get from the top.’ 07[30] Controversy The birds of which Fuller speaks who can only take wing against the wind.
07[33] ‘School’ Subjects & Education ‘No study (pursued on intellectual grounds alone) is fit to be a general one, or a part of a scheme of education for all, in the manner in which most school education is carried on, unless it admits of being mindless without being positively nonsensical or hurtful; & most of the studies which are intellectually the highest will not admit of this.’18 The real point is that, even though some ‘subjects’ are common to both university & school education (for instance), they are treated from quite a different aspect at school, & for a different purpose. No subject is ever taught in a school for its own sake. So what appears as a single subject is, from the necessary diversity of treatment, two.19 07[33] ‘Persons who would read Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution unmoved, would not be proof against such books as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or the Heir of Redclyffe.’20 [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J. Grote, “Old Studies and New,” in Cambridge Essays contributed by Members of the University (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1856), p. 105.’ Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution A History, 3 vols. (London: James Fraser, 1837); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Tale of Slave Life (London: Clarke, Beeton & Co., 1853); Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe (London: John W. Parker and son, 1853). [19] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Burke on education in French Revolution, Works, i.418d.’ [20] Fos. 32–3 contain notes on Fitzjames Stephen, ‘The Relation of Novels to Life,’ in Cambridge Essays (1855), pp. 148–92.
(This is hardly strange. The novel, as a work of art, is far more intense than ordinary life & its effect is naturally greater. This is just what it means to be a work of art.) 07[33] Sentimentality denotes, not a capability of any sort of feeling, but the habitual indulgence of one particular class of feelings. 07[39] ‘The Compleat Angler & the Natural History of Selbourne are types of a style of literature peculiar to this country (England).’21 The English Mind Cp. Englishmen, Frenchmen & Spaniards.22 Berkeley. Cf. Nettleship. John Grote. Bradley, Ethical Studies. F.C. Burkitt. G.M. Trevelyan. Pater. [21] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A German Historian.’ The quotation has not been traced. Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler or, The Contemplative Man’s Recreation: Being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, Not Unworthy the Perusal of Most Anglers (London: Richard Marriot, 1653); Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the County of Southampton: With Engravings and an Appendix (London: White and Son, 1789). [22] Salvador de Madariaga, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards: An Essay on Comparative Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928).
Hort. Etc., etc. 07[39] Lord Fisher was a great dancer till well over 70. 07[40] Literature – poetry – is the result of life intensely experienced.23 07[41] Societies are not overthrown because their foundations are tampered with, but because someone cries upon the house-tops & rocks the chimney-stacks. Foundations are out of sight, & in general out of mind. But question the superficialities of the social order, cry out against some trivial irregularity, but one which has the importance of something before our eyes, and men will destroy that social order, if not intentionally, at least inadvertently in their contentions. 07[41] Morality ‘A proper education would make it possible to live in accordance with instinct, but it would be a trained & cultivated instinct, not the crude, unformed impulse which is all that nature provides.’24
[23] Fos. 39–40 contain quotations from a discussion of Samuel Johson in the Times Literary Supplement, 2 September 1926. [24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘B. Russell, On Education: Especially in Early Childhood (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1926), p. 108.’
B. Russell means that a ‘proper’ education would give us not moral laws to be obeyed, but a ‘law of the heart,’ an ‘instinct,’ which would serve as a principle for action in life, a living principle ready to meet a diversity of circumstance. The ‘casuistry’ of the moral life is a kind of unconscious process which goes on on the ‘instinctive’ i.e., immediate, level – akin to a slow, invisible chemical change. 07[42] The Self In our earliest days & weeks of life our body is not (or parts of it are not) recognized as belonging to us more essentially than many other objects of perception. It is a definite stage of consciousness (or of conscious sensibility) when we recognize our toes as our own, & connect them with self – at least implicitly. This might suggest to us, that it is only a matter of sensibility that we do not more habitually give other ‘objects of perception’ a more personal quality & feel them to be parts of self. And indeed, it is a common experience with artists & poets & men of fine sensibility that all that they have ‘met’ is as truly a part of self as that which is physically joined to them – & that that which is physically a ‘part’ of them, is only a part of self through some intense experience of it.25 07[43] ‘Why do sober scholars refuse to believe in the existence of a Baconian “cipher” in the works of Shakespeare? Not because the thing is an impossibility…but because of an unproved &
[25] Oakeshotts’ note: ‘Cf. A.E. Housman. Wordsworth etc.’
unprovable conviction of the inherent craziness of the whole thing.’26 And this, in spite of the vague probability suggested by the fact that the ingenious Baconian can, by applying his ‘key’, extract some sort of coherent meaning. We must distinguish between a rejection of the theory on the grounds of (i), the absurd arguments by which it is supported. And (ii), the improbability of finding any sound arguments to support it. 07[44] ‘Since Christianity is a “positive” religion, which came into the world at a particular time & has & claims specific religious beliefs – it follows that Christianity is not anything which could be discovered or invented for himself by any person, however intellectually or spiritually gifted, in independence of historical tradition…It is a term which to the historian possesses a definite content, discoverable from history. And because Christianity is thus an historical and positive religion, it is impossible, in the first instance, for the individual to know anything about it at first hand. He must be content to derive his knowledge from authority, whether the authority in question be primarily that of a living teacher, or of past tradition.’27 The connection between Christianity & truth? The value of history? The necessity of interpretation. [26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See A.E. Taylor, “The Vindication of Religion,” in E.G. Selwyn (ed.), Essays Catholic & Critical. By Members of the Anglican Communion (London: S.P.C.K., 1926), pp. 35–6.’ [27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See A.E.J. Rawlinson, “Authority as a Ground of Belief,” in Essays Catholic and Critical, pp. 85–6.’
If this is true then Christianity, be what it will, is not a religion. No religion is founded, or can be founded ultimately upon ‘history,’ it is a contradiction in terms. 07[44] ‘Wise men do not need to be reminded that the deliberate voluntary refusal of real good things is necessary, as a protection against the overvaluation of the secular, in any life they count worth living…“Good” is always recounced for the sake of some “better good.” But the “better good” plainly cannot be any of the good things of this secular existence. For there is none of them whatever which it may not be a duty to renounce for some man at some time.’28 And this is true not merely of the ‘good things’ of the average man, but of the good things to which men of nobler mould are ready to sacrifice these other & obviously lesser ‘goods.’ There is nothing which we may not be called upon to give up. What then is the meaning of ‘good’? What is the standard by which a ‘better’ good is judged? The only solution is that all ‘goods’ are good as far as they go, & that those which go furthest include everything of value in those beneath, so the sacrificing of the ‘lesser’ good to the greater is giving up nothing for something. 07[45] ‘The church is not primarily a society for spiritual or intellectual research, but a society of which it belongs to the very essence to put forward the emphatic claim to be the bearer of a revelation, to
[28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Taylor, “Vindication of Religion,” p. 60.’
have been put in trust with the Gospel as God’s revealed message to mankind.’29 What is a revelation? What are the laws by which things are ‘revealed’ to men? etc.30 07[45–46] ‘Aristotle was primarily a man not only of remarkable but universal intelligence; & universal intelligence means that he could apply his intelligence to anything. The ordinary intelligence is good for certain classes of objects; a brilliant man of science, if he is interested in poetry at all, may conceive grotesque judgments: like one poet because he reminds him of himself, or another because he expresses emotions which he admires; he may use art, in fact, as the outlet for the egotism which is suppressed in his own specialty. But Aristotle had none of these impure desires to satisfy; in whatever sphere of interest, he looked solely & steadfastly at the object.’31 Insistence on random tastes & desire. The classical education, perhaps, may be said to foster this kind of intelligence more than any other. (Cf. Lord Fisher’s saying that a 1st Class Greats Man was the best for the head of any government office.)
[29] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Rawlinson, “Authority as a Ground of Belief,” p. 87.’ [30] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J.W. Oman, Grace and Personality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917).’ [31] Oakeshott’s note: ‘T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen & Co., 1920), pp. 9–10.’
07[47] Japan absorbed the civilization & culture of China 1000 years ago in the same way as it has recently absorbed that of the West.32 07[52–53] Bossuet is said to have known the works of Virgil by heart. Renan knew the Psalms in Hebrew by heart.33 The pre-eminence of Virgil was unchallenged, from one point of view, throughout the Middle Ages, from another, his influence, as literature & as a poet, grew steadily till the second half of the 18th century. In France he continued to exercise great influence, but in Germany the ‘romantic’ spirit of its literature rejected him, & likewise in England. The only poet of that great age of English literature who was deeply influenced by him was Wordsworth. The rest, as with Goethe, turned to Greece. And together with the general disparagement of ‘Augustan’ poetry, the great original was condemned as one who had achieved merely technical perfection. 07[A] Projected Labours34 The Logic of Political Philosophy. A work on Political Philosophy – including Ethics. (Cf. Rousseau) An edition of Spinoza, for the purposes of making clear his political philosophy. [32] Fos. 47–9 contain quotations from L. Binyon, Painting in the Far East. An Introduction to the History of Pictorial Art in Asia, Especially China and Japan (London: Edward Arnold, 1913). [33] Fos. 50–4 contain notes on Virgil. [34] In ink on both sides of a loose sheet inserted at the end of NB 7, letterhead: ‘WADH / COLL / OXON.’
A work on Aesthetic. Essays on the English Prayer Book. A work on the nature of Religion & the philosophy of the Christian Religion. A volume on Coleridge. Essays on Various Subjects. Millet, Dancing, Thought in Art, Sleep, the Sea, Hegel, Spinoza, Plato, AE, Housman’s poems, History, Pascal, Queen Christina of Sweden, Life and Letters of Lord Strafford. Essays on the nature & meaning of Social Reform & Education. A work on Historiography treated as a branch of epistemology. An edition of the Psalms for schools, treated as religious poetry & compared with English religious poetry. A life of Nelson. A work on El Greco. A work on Balzac. The Portrait of a Philosopher. Young Man. The Lives of the Poets.
Notebook 8 (November 1926)1 08[01] Theology Aristotle took this as the proper name of his primary philosophy, the philosophy of Being, which we perversely but inevitably call metaphysics, because of the accidental arrangement of his works by the Alexandrian editors. 08[01] Truth & Pragmatism Truth can be said to ‘work’ only within the discourse of the true. That is, a philosophy may be said to ‘work’ when it is consistent with itself. But by no theory of knowledge, or logic, can we [1] LSE 2/1/8. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 16 cm, blank. Recto pages numbered 1–69. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘eph’ oson endechetai athanatizein / So far as is possible live as an immortal. / Aristotle. Nic. Eth. / Notes. VIII / ageometretos medeis eisito. / Let noone who is not a geometrician enter these walls. / (wrongly attributed to Plato, but / put up at the Academy of Athens). / cf Rep. 502, 527. / o Bios en te cinesei esti . / [illegible] / ‘To hunt the wind.’ Cervantes. / Nov’ 26.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fos. 2–3, J. Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (London: William Heinemann, 1922); 10–11, F. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für alle und keinen (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1908); 14, G. Keller, Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, ed. W.A. Adams (Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1900); 19–20, I. Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto (London: W. Heinemann, 1898); 51, C. O’Riordan, Adam and Caroline Being the Sequel to Adam of Dublin (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1921).
suppose that truth will ‘work’ within a foreign discourse, e.g. the world as viewed by common sense. One of the reasons why philosophy & ‘the practical’ are two different things, is that philosophy consists of certain reasons or grounds given for reaching certain conclusions, & ‘the practical’ takes account alone of the conclusions – which appear similar, & for its purposes are similar, even when they are reached for differing reasons. 08[03] Law. Knowledge v. ignorant action. ‘Blessed art thou, if thou knowest what thou doest; but if not, thou art accursed & a breaker of the law.’2 Jesus to the disciple plucking corn on the Sabbath. 08[03] General Will ‘Motto for Calvinists: – “Twenty wise men may easily add up into one fool.”’3 (This, however, does not deny the reality of the ‘general will’ – it but demonstrates the volonté de tous.)
[2] Luke 6:4, Codex. [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J.A. Spender, The Comments of Bagshot (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1907), p. 24.’
08[05] Statesmen & Leadership ‘When one of the children of light proves wiser in his generation than the children of this world, the powers of darkness may begin to tremble. Many of the great makers & emancipators have been supreme over the worldlings in worldly wiles – Cromwell, for instance, Cavour, & even Lincoln. As a rule the impatient idealists only win their victory when they get a man of this type to lead them, & a large part of his work consists in preventing them from ruining their cause by forcing his hands.’4 It is true that Lincoln, Cavour & Peel would have been nowhere without Lloyd Garrison, Mazzini & Garibaldi, & Cobden. We are often wrong when we blame statesmen for lack of enthusiasm, or cynicism, or scepticism – they ought to be sceptical & even cynical – a man without a measure of these qualities is without the basis of really sound judgment – blind enthusiasm never accomplished anything single-handed. A sceptical people is a sad spectacle, a sceptical statesman is a necessity. 08[06] Religion & the Kingdom of Heaven Religion may be divided into two classes. (i) Mystical – treating the world as a veil between us & God – itself an evil.
[4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Spender, Comments of Bagshot, p. 230.’
(ii) Apocalyptic – this world has in itself the seeds of a change whereby God shall be revealed in it.5 Christianity is (ii). The world is to be changed. But this change is not to be identified with mere moral progress – the getting rid of one evil after another – but with looking at things from a new point of view & finding a new world all at once. John Oman. It is the rule that the originating mind is the spiritual & the later minds materialize – (cf. Plato’s ‘ideas’) – Apply this to Christianity & what becomes of Schweitzer? Christ becomes less than St John? 08[07] It is curious how some even of the best trained minds submit to the circumscription of genres. When I argue with my friends & am led to make some assertion, they are accustomed to cry out ‘Instance! Instance!’ (cf. As You Like It) for they say that my principal vice is hasty generalization. Sometimes I have turned to them & enquired what in their opinion would be the exact value of an instance supposing I were to produce one – for they are willing to be believe almost anything for which authority of this kind can be put forward. But this is treated as a mere subterfuge on my part (so small is their regard for my honesty), as a mere irrelevance. I have, they say, a diffuse & vague mind, & my thinking is undisciplined by a strict regard for facts. Some even hint at a certain lack of probity of thought. And yet, what is the value of an instance, what is the real nature of generalization? Does the mind always work in this fashion, or is it possible that what we take for a generalization is often an argument of a wholly different nature & value?
[5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Plato, and Paul, Romans I.’
08[08] The awful spectacle of the contempt of small minds for those a little smaller! 08[08] The first condition for the improvement of the marriage relation is the economic freedom of women. (‘Every woman who submits to-day to economic dependence on an individual is propping up parasitism & encouraging prostitution.’6 The second condition is a ‘noviciate for marriage.’ 08[09–10] On the Teaching of Children ‘It is well to remember that a “trailing cloud of glory,” suddenly born into this world of flesh & blood, cannot grasp earthly conditions or secrets for some time. These conditions & secrets must be presented in terms of a possible different dimension or as near to it as human imagination can attain.’7 The illustrations afforded by botany, flowers, birds & beasts. There is no natural fact, told simply, that will shock a child – but it must be told as it can understand it. Our usual method is the one we follow with foreigners – to shout.8
[6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Edith Ellis, The New Horizon in Love and Life (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1921), p. 7.’ [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Ellis, New Horizon, p. 76.’ [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. E.T. Campagnac, Society And Solitude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922).’
Cf. Blake, ‘Nothing can be told so as to be understood & not believed.’9 ‘Speaking the truth with love.’ Has Montessori studied the mental attitude of children towards sex? Psychologists tell us enough, nowadays, about the unconscious attitude; the teacher needs to know the conscious attitude. This is more difficult; vague, momentary, directed by conditions of body – but none the less important. We cannot answer questions aright till we understand this conscious attitude. 08[11] The legend of the ‘mad Englishman’ still exists in Germany. They say ‘Englischer Spleen,’ meaning thereby ‘English impulsiveness & contradictoriness.’ To them it is the predominating characteristic. Lord Byron is still the type. They think of him, strangely enough, as an ‘artistic’ character, an ‘original’ character, full of whims and whimsicalities.10 08[11–12] The Schwab or Würtemburger is the German ‘Scotchman,’ close fisted, ‘all da,’ great colonizer, philosophic temperament & slightly inclined to pessimism. Schiller. 08[15] ‘“Bow to the board,” said Bumble. Oliver brushed away two or three tears that were lingering in his eyes, & seeing no board but the table, fortunately bowed to that.’ [9] See W. Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell,’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. [10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 438.’
‘He had been wondering, with his eyes fixed on the magistrate’s powder, whether all boards were born with that white stuff on their heads, & were boards from thenceforth on that account.’11 (Argumentum – This element is present So far as I know it is common to this type of thing (therefore) It is an account of this element that this thing is what it is. 1. Psychological or Methodological Fallacy – That of looking for the ‘essential’ necessarily among the visible elements of the physical presentation. 2. Logical Fallacy – That the common or general is the essential.)12 08[16] Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.13 And what shall we do to the Christianity we have inherited? 08[18] ‘“In a little community like ours, my dear,” said Fagin, “we have a general number one – that is, you can’t consider yourself as number one without considering me too as the same, & all the other young people.”’14
[11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist; or the Parish Boy’s Progress (London: Richard Bentley, 1838), Ch. 2.’ [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. William De Morgan, Joseph Vance.’ [13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Goethe, Faust, Pt 1, ll. 682–3.’ [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Dickens, Oliver Twist, Ch. 43.’
(The only real ‘number one’ is the Whole – because it is the only real thing in existence. It is according as we love & serve this that we follow that is best for our little ‘number ones,’ which appear as such, but really are not. That is the only difference between Fagin’s political philosophy & a true political philosophy.) (Because I am you, & you are I.) 08[22] Make a comparison between Faust & Hamlet – Faust, I think, turns out an almost academic production, with its problems & their solution taken from an academic world, when set besides Shakespeare’s play’s character. Most Germans make the mistake of reading Hamlet, more or less unconsciously, in the light of Faust.15 Place Faust in relation to the spirit of the ‘Aufklärung.’ Cf. the ‘Renaissance’ & the ‘Aufklärung.’ The latter was founded on ‘books’ – & so soon brought its own end upon itself; Goethe, in many respects, rose above it. Cf. Also the ‘Sentimentalität’ of the Aufklärung & its ‘Romanticism,’ with the spirit of the Renaissance. Faust is the nemesis of the Aufklärung, cf. ‘antiquarianism.’ 08[31] Logic ‘He talks with angels.’ ‘How do you know that?’ ‘He admits it himself.’ ‘But suppose he lies!’ ‘What, a man who talks with angels be capable of a lie!’ [15] Fos. 22–9 contain notes in German on Theodor Meyer, Der Ideengehalt von Goethe’s Faust [not traced].
08[31] ‘Whatever is, is right!’16 (Not Hegel, you’ll note!) ‘Alles was ist, is vernünftig.’ ‘Die wirkliche Welt ist, wie sie sein soll.’17 08[31] The Comfort of God It is only in our weaker moments that we desire to live ‘among the leaves’ – & God does not encourage this weakness.18 08[32] ‘The Victorians see the rolling ages pass as no other creators have seen them. Thackeray keeps his mayflies fluttering, half mournfully, but they die & are reborn from generation to generation; Carlyle sees the fiery lava-flow, with Jehova speaking in thunder above it; Dickens sees life’s river growing deeper & kindlier; to George Eliot the law grows clearer as the ages pass,
[16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A. Pope, An Essay on Man, being the first book of Ethic Epistles. To Henry S. John, L. Bolingbroke (London: Lawton Gilliver, 1734), I. 289’. [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Hegel, Werke, ix.45.’ [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. supra 08[16], Nietzsche’ presumably refers to the following quotation: ‘“Wenn ihr das Angenehme verachtet und das weiche Bett, und von den Weichlichen euch nicht weit genug betten könnt: da ist der Ursprung eurer Tugend.” Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 81.’
& Tennyson fixes his eyes on the forward march to the “divine event.” These are of their age & time.’19 This they inherited in part from the 18th century. The idea of Progress (see Bury), of Evolution, became a new Philosophy by which to judge & systemize human life & the universe. But it was new, & it is not necessarily complete. Those who escaped Victorianism – Browning, Brontës & Meredith – different because they see that the value for human life, & so for religion, of this evolution idea is limited: & that what we must do is to live our lives, as entities. The value of the Evolution idea (which must be defined) for (i) Religion. (ii) Theology. Its value for philosophy also – but that is negligible. 08[32] The Last Judgment Und eh man nur den halben Weg erreicht, Muss wohl ein armer Teufel sterben.20 Were we to follow a philosophy in which ‘accomplishment’ were the aim, were we to live life in this faith, & to view the Last Judgment so – then suicide were only prevented because it were no remedy for what may come. [19] Oakeshott’s note: ‘M.P. Willcocks, Between the Old World & the New Being Studies In Literary Personality From Goethe and Balzac to Anatole France and Thomas Hardy (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1925), p. 162. Cp. G.E. Lessing, Eine Duplik (Baunschweig: Buchhandlug des Fürstl. Waisenhauses, 1778); Höffding, II, p. 18 sq, 80–1.’ [20] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Goethe, Faust, 150.’
08[32] Christianity Whether we ‘fall to rise’ with Browning, or ‘swim to sink’ with Housman, Christianity does not claim to make us in any philosophical sense ‘optimists’ – only ‘happy men.’21 08[33] Accuracy What is exactitude? The fitting of our standards of judgment to the subjects about which we judge. So (i) It is inexact to fail to make a precise & categorical line between say acid & alkali in chemistry. Vagueness, meaning inexactness, is here lack of absolute precision. But (ii) it is equally inexact to make a precise line between say one nation & another. In the realms of mind, & often in the realms of matter (e.g. organic & inorganic, solid & liquid etc.) precision is inaccuracy, and, since vagueness means here inaccuracy, precision is vagueness. Cf. with this the word ‘ideal.’ Instead of saying that a thing is ‘too ideal’ when it fails in respect of reality, we ought to say that it is ‘not ideal enough’ – it is not a unity in that characteristic which is its nature. And so with ‘scientific accuracy.’ Or ‘mathematical accuracy’ – when wrongly applied, applied as a standard to subjects which are of a different nature to those strictly ‘scientific’ or ‘mathematical’ it is inaccuracy. [21] R. Browning, ‘Epilogue,’ II. 11–14: ‘One who…Held we fall to rise’; A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, XX, l. 2: ‘Charge to fall and swim to drown.’
08[34] Modernity & Antiquarianism Cf. old, & perhaps picturesque, forms of dress. The German Aufklärung. Goethe’s Faust. Nietzsche’s diatribe against the ‘historicism’ of the 19th century. Some things are always modern – e.g. Plato. Some things become modern after they have been in the world a considerable time – e.g. Spinoza. Some things are never modern – e.g. Spencer? For ‘modern’ means ‘having meaning.’ P.S. Some things, also, grow old? 08[34–35] Religion Psychologically Taoism & Buddhism in China are as good as Christianity. The people come to pray either to ask a blessing on their life & work, or to give thanks. These religions make the people happy & contented. By them they are calmed in times of trouble, & quieted in the hour of death. But what is this for a religion? (Cf. Gibbon’s remark about Christianity in the Roman Empire). Religion should awaken, not lull to sleep; should make discontented, not contented; should stir to newer effort, not breed quiescence. The Chinese religion to-day is, naturally, an expression of their civilization. It has become hard, crystallized, & lacking movement. It, fundamentally, lacks life (o Bios en te cinesei esti), even though it plays a necessary part in the life of the people. It expresses the sleep which is there.
08[35–36] History (of philosophy) If we view this simply with regard to the ideas men have held, & the ‘results’ they have presented to the world, it appears, simply, as the repetition of a certain number of notions, at various intervals of time, & as, more or less, the result of a reaction to the culture & thought of a given period. But the ‘real thing’ in philosophy is never the result, but the reason we give for reaching the result. It is true of course that a given result held for two different reasons is, not, in any real sense, a single result at all – but it appears as such & historians treat it as such. We must view the history of philosophy, not as a series of conclusions, but as a series of reasons given for reaching certain conclusions – for the reason is the conclusion, for philosophy.22 The same is true of all theoretical statements – e.g. the theory of Christianity. When we do this, things which appear ‘alike,’ what appears a mere ‘repetition,’ will be seen as distinct – though we must not run away with the idea that there is any ‘progress’ to be found. 08[36] Theory & Practice Do you expect a theory of Humour to be funny?
[22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Coleridge’s remark in S.T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion: Illustrated by Select Passages from our Elder Divines, especially from Archbishop Leighton (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1825).’
08[37] One of the things which Germans find it most difficult to understand in Englishmen is that they allow Shaw (& others) to say all sorts of insulting things about them – & then go & listen to his plays with enjoyment! One German I met supposed that these remarks were cut out in an English production of the plays. In the same way, it is an unheard of offense to caricature a professor or a leading Politician. When I explained that in England, on the contrary, many professors would take it as a compliment, delightful Fräulein Hauer remarked ‘Ach! Für das bekommt man arrest in Deutschland!’ Germany is even a little in the position of King Lear, often from among its people the good Kent speaks to it, but it will not listen – it is treason to speak the truth. But a healthy nation, in normal times, is prepared to hear anything about itself – only flippancy is abhorrent to it. 08[37–38] One of the results of the war has been to make even the most thoughtless among us sensible to its horrors, and to cause us, also, in a way entirely foreign to our grandfathers, to question the morality of war. I sat this evening at the supper table with a dozen ordinary, normal young men & women, of six different nationalities – & not one of them had a good word to say for war: to everyone it was something immoral. But we may hardly conclude from this that our morality is changing in regard to this question – though, that it may change is by no means impossible – for this is more in the nature of a sentimental reaction, than a moral change. Twenty years ago the question of the morality of war was debated & thought about by many – now it is not thought about at all; we know, it is said, that war is wrong. At any rate, we know that it is unchristian!
08[40] The Historic Christ – to know Christ ‘after the flesh’23 – is not enough, & is not Christianity. ‘After the flesh’ – the imitation of the letter.24 08[41] ‘Die Römischen Liturgie teilt mit der orientalischen den Mysteriencharakter.’25 (What is the Mysteriencharakter? Is it essentially lacking in the Protestant service?)26 08[42] ‘Der Anglikanismus ist, wie es Friedrich von Hügel trufflich ausgedrückt hat, ein Kompromiz zwischen dem Calvinismus und dessen bête noire, dem römischen Katholizismus.’ The Oxford Movement & the modern Anglo-Catholics attempt to throw out the Calvinistic element.27 This may be a true account of the historical origins of Anglicanism – but it is a mere parody of Anglicanism itself. Noone who has really shared the spirit of an Anglican service could be guilty of so one-sided a conclusion. [23] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Romans 8:13.’ [24] Fos. 39–43 contain notes in German on F. Heiler, Katholischer und evangelischer Gottesdienst (Munich: Ch. Kaiser, 1921). [25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Heiler, Gottesdienst, p. 33.’ [26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Heiler, Gottesdienst, p. 37.’ [27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Heiler, Gottesdienst, pp. 57–8.’
08[43] Conclusion – states how he has experienced the ‘services’ of all kinds of Christians & can find in each a peculiar & valuable experience.28 Each has its contribution, each is a reflection of a strand in the ‘service’ of the early Christians. ‘Ich freue mich darüber, dass es mir selbst immerlich möglich ist, am Gottesdienst der verschiedensten christlichen Bekenntsmuuse teilzunehmen.’29 His point of view is sane, but academic. It fails to grasp the fact that in matters of life, where a service is something inseparable from life, men can indeed recognize the validity of other forms than their own – but cannot share in them. It fails for the just the same reason that the Cosmpolitanism of the 18th century failed – it is academic. The problem of ‘Reunion’ is just the problem of a ‘world state’ or some substitute for one – & it cannot be solved by some empty cosmopolitanism. 08[43] Cuius regio, eijus religio – Though this, as a policy, may be repugnant to modern folk, yet as a principle of what is, there remains in it a fundamental truth. For what is a people’s religion? Not, what creed do they officially subscribe to?, but What do they believe? What is the power which moves them in life? And when we have found out this, we shall see that it is ever, & essentially, closely bound up with the rest of its social life.
[28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘1 Corinthians 12:4.’ [29] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Heiler, Gottesdienst, p. 62.’
08[44] Perhaps part of our unwillingness to hand ‘morality’ over to the ordinary judgment of humankind arises from our distrust of the capacity for judgment possessed by ordinary persons. But the ability of the ‘ordinary’ mind to win, by reflexion, from experience, is far greater than we imagine, & folk, innocent of all philosophy, who are yet accustomed to reflect upon events, sometimes develop a fineness of judgment in these matters that surprises us at every turn. Cf. the result of reflection on the ‘war,’ etc. But why should we entrust ‘morality’ to the ordinary man? Why not to the ‘moral seer’? Because it is only in so far as the teaching of the prophet is apprehended & digested by the ordinary man, that a ‘morality,’ in any true sense, exists. The judgments of ordinary people are a register for the morality of the whole – for morality is essentially a thing of community. What is it that often incapacitates ‘thinkers’ & ‘the learned’ from being the best register? Irrelevant associations, and a lack of fineness of feeling for community sentiment. 08[45] The course of philosophy is always to be making clear to itself the problems which belong properly to its sphere. The history of philosophy is not the history of so many riddles solved, but the history of so many problems, ever more clearly stated, so that in the end they are seen to be irrelevant. When are we going to arrive at the real problem? Who worries now about whether ideas are inside or outside the mind? And yet once, that was the whole of philosophy. For this reason the great philosophers – Plato – never grow old: not because they solved a problem, but because they saw clearest the direction in which our thought must ever tend.
08[45] Philosophers playing with analogies are like children playing with fire – it is pleasant, it is dangerous, & there’s nothing to be gained by it. Analogy is a method of discovery – not a proof. 08[46] We, in these latter days, perhaps, do not hope to steal the fire of wisdom, & nor do we think of the gods as those who punish such presumption. The fire that we steal is this fire of freedom, of immortality, of the immortal life – eph’ oson endechetai athanatizein – and it is the world which is ever ready to wreak its vengeance upon those who slight it in this manner.30 This is what it is to ‘overcome the world.’ 08[49] Physical ‘fitness’, physical strength, will often give us a sensation of power over ourselves which reacts upon the will in such a way as to strengthen resolve & even moral determination. This is a good illustration of an illogical & distinctively ‘historical’ relation. It is an illusion, & yet one that ‘acts.’ It has ‘historical’ existence, but lacks logical ground. We may sum up this kind of relation as ‘suggestive’ as opposed to ‘logical.’ 08[50] ‘The arts of painting & of sculpture are wholly based upon imitation, & upon the reproduction with pigment upon canvas, or with chisel upon marble, of objects which have met the eye… Raphael & Rembrandt, Phidias & Michael Angelo, are only supreme masters of the perfection of imitation, or of idealization, [30] See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk X ch. vii §8.
by means of the setting & the treatment, of the various aspects of living figure & of nature’s scenery.’31 An excellent illustration of the rubbish produced so often when an artist attempts to produce a theory of aesthetic. Artistic ability is no qualification for aesthetic theory, & lack of it no disqualification. 08[50] ‘Interested judgments’ i.e. those which have a psychological but no logical ground— (i) The man who refused to read Paradise Lost because he believed Milton to have composed his pamphlet on Divorce during his Honeymoon, & despised him for it. (ii) The Norwegian philosopher, who, while single, stated in the first edition of his work that no important philosopher had been a married man, but having married in the interval, converted his dictum in the second edition to ‘almost no important philosopher has been a married man.’ 08[53] English History32 Why was our Revolution so different from the French? Why had England a Parliament long before other nations & still has a far better Parliament than any other. [31] Oakeshott’s note: ‘C.V. Stanford, “On the Study of Music,” Music & Letters, 7 (1926), 229–35.’ [32] Below this list of questions regarding English history Oakeshott pasted a cutting on Queen Elizabeth from G.M. Trevelyan, History of England (London: Longmans & Co., 1926).
Why have we never since 1688 suffered from monarchical tyranny or from mob anarchy? Why have we a church which is neither Roman nor Calvinist? Why did Presbyterianism fail in England & succeed in Scotland? Why was England a nation a century or more before France or Spain, & many centuries before German? 08[54] There is, perhaps, nothing so abstract as that which is at any particular moment. 08[54] ‘I don’t remember another night that I can at all compare with it since I was capable of suffering.’33 It is the same with everything – we confuse the thing as a real fact & something which looks like it. So, we are told, ‘the family’ is first & a number coming together make a ‘state’; but the ‘family’ which existed before the ‘state’ is only one in appearance, it is only the embrio of the real institution, which cannot exist until the ‘state,’ i.e. some wider society, establishes, institutes it. We know well that suffering has no unquestioned & easily distinguished & measured ‘objective’ existence. There are times in our lives when we are ‘incapable’ of suffering – we do not in fact become capable of it until we have outgrown the ‘imperfect will’ (Aristotle) of childhood; & we are increasingly capable of it as we experience human life more completely & more deeply. What we call human suffering – the only suffering we know – because it is only children & men whose minds have never grown or become defunct who can ‘experience’ a purely ‘sensational’ suffering – [33] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1850), Ch. 3.’
mere physical pain – this human suffering, which is the reaction of a mind to a certain bodily (in the case of physical pain) circumstance, or to a certain mental experience, is attributable to animals only by some vague analogy – because it is not a quality common to sentient beings, but only to sentient beings capable of distinctively human experience & emotion. The problem of suffering which we have to face – the problem of Pain – is a problem of human, & not sentient, life as such. 08[56] Much of what is called Pessimism & Optimism concerning human life may be described like this – Pessimism asserts that all is night (or Winter) & that the day (or Summer) comes & goes, is illusory or temporary. Optimism, that all is day (or Summer) & that the night (or Winter) comes & goes, is illusory or temporary. In these circumstances there clearly remains an alternative position, i.e., that ‘good’ & ‘evil,’ ‘joy’ & ‘pain’ are like, or may properly be compared with the day & night, the Summer & Winter of the world of nature. That one is not the absence of the other, that neither is more or less essential than the other, but that they are equally real, & equally permanent – that, in short, so far as human life is concerned Blake’s poem – ‘Joy & pain are woven fine’ – express the truth. We have, then, not two alternative positions, but a choice between three. This, of course, is not true of anything which is concerned with an ultimate optimism or pessimism. 08[57] God & the Absolute These the religious mind hardly distinguishes; & where religion takes on its intensest glow it merges into something which is more than the myths which tells us the truth in such a way as to
put it into relation to the needs of human life, it takes on the being of a theoretic wholeness. 08[57] Often the wind is in Emily Brontë’s poems, this for instance, Yes; I could swear that glorious wind Has swept the world aside, Has dashed its memory from thy mind Like foam-bells from the tide.34 She knew the wind in all its moods – & they all meant for her, Liberty. 08[61] On judging others. The World. ‘Nicknames for the most part govern the world.’35 In practical life we are almost forced into this view of our fellows – but it is the world, & we should free ourselves of it. Religion seeks to free us from this – the world. It shows us that the partial view & judgments which we make every day, are views & judgments from a particular & often merely selfish standpoint. It is mere polemics – we speak, judge, deliver ourselves of views on other in order to attain a particular object – not in order to make a right judgment. But religion teaches to get above the world – to judge with the sole object of making a right judgment about the whole of a man or a circumstance. [34] Emily Brontë, ‘The Night Wind’, in Poems of Emily Brontë, ed. A. Symons (London: William Heinemann, 1906). [35] Oakeshott’s note: ‘William Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays by William Hazlitt, now first Collected by his Son, ed. W. Hazlitt (London: J. Templeman, 1839), p. 144.’
08[61] To deal justly (generously) with our fellow creatures, and courageously with our circumstances. 08[62] Burke says that we should ‘cherish our prejudices, because they are prejudices.’ A prejudice which would pass itself off for reason is an unmitigated evil: – Burke was at the heart of the philosophy of modernity. See French Revolution. 08[63] Savoir faire & savoir vivre. 08[63] Romanticism, sentimentality & the ‘business mind’ of the Germans. 08[63] ‘To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.’36 But it is one of the ways of ‘living beyond one’s income’ which is open to everyone; & has its own reward of quietness of mind. 08[64] ‘Money is everything.’ [36] Oakeshott’s note: ‘E.M. Forster, Howard’s End (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), p. 33.’
‘No, you’re wrong, you’ve forgotten death. If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice & greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death – not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death & Money are the eternal foes. Not Death & Life.’37 What is death? Only to be answered by, what is life. If life is existence, then death is its opposite. But ‘human life’ is not ‘physical existence,’ & death is not its cessation. 08[66] St Francis No cloistered saint. If you wish a restricted life go to Simon on his Pillar or Diogenes in his tub – not to Francis. He more than any other Saint (since his re-discovery which began in the late 19th Century) has influenced the minds of ordinary English men & women. No other figure of the Calendar has approached his influence. It is no odd chance that he is the first of the Renaissance poets – he was a poet from start to finish, without the hardness of ‘ideas’ or the harshness of the merely practical. He it was who ended the tyranny of slavish belief, blind obedience & logicless imitation which ruled the middle ages, & put Europe on the high road to a freedom which is religion. Courage & religion – St Francis had the courage which ‘goes on’, not that which ‘stands fast’. This latter is valuable – is, indeed, one of our chief natural characteristics – but it is of a lower order than the other, which requires wisdom before it is properly operative.
[37] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Forster, Howard’s End, pp. 235–6.’
Notebook 9 (January 1927)1 09[03] ‘Bis saltavit et placuit.’ – ‘Danced Twice, & Pleased.’ Epitaph of a Roman dancing girl of the Early Roman Empire. [1] LSE 2/1/9. Hard cover, black and red marbling, 20 cm × 16 cm, blank. Recto pages numbered 1–72. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘O my soul, thou hast marched valiantly! / Song of Deborah / Proverbs. xxx. 9. / Notes. / IX. / Memento vivere / ‘All sciences, indeed, are more necessary than this, / but none is better.’ Arist. Met. 903a 10 / ‘Die Wahrheit ist der Bacchantische Taumel, worin alle Gestalten trunken sind.’ Hegel. Phän d. Geistes. Vorrede. / ‘Aimer et penser; c’est la véritable vie / des esprits.’ Voltaire. / Jan. 1927.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fos. 2–3, The Letters of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1879–1922, ed. Lady Raleigh (London: Methuen & Co., 1926); 4–6 , L.R. Farnell, The Attributes of God The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St Andrews in the year 1924–25 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925); 13, S. Johnson, Rasselas (London: R.and J. Dodsley; and W. Johnston, 1759); 21, Sir H.J.C. Grierson (ed.), Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921); 24–5, Emily Dickinson, possibly Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. M.L. Todd (London: Methuen and Co., 1904); 26– 7, A.N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making Lowell Lectures 1926 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926); 30–1, C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable Composed Chiefly of his Letters (London: James Carpenter, 1843); 33–4, H. Ford, My Life and Work (London: William Heinemann, 1922); 39–40, Oman, Grace and Personality; 41, W. Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927); 45–7, C.H. Cooley, Life and the Student. Roadside Notes on Human Nature, Society, and Letters (London and New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927); 62–3, G. Moore, Modern Painting (London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 1906); 68, James Laver, A Stitch in Time; or, Pride Prevents A Fall (London: Nonesuch Press, 1927).
09[10] Voltaire The affair at Frankfurt. There is something almost sublime in his sitting down calmly to work at his Annales de l’empire as soon as the door closed on his tormentors. 09[12] Though Voltaire despised men, he tried to help them: ‘Il vengea Calas, La Barre, Sirven et Monbailli. Poète, philosophe, historien, il a fait prendre un grand essor à l’esprit humain, et nous a préparés à être libres.’2 09[14] ‘Poetry is not made with ideas, but with words.’ Mallarmé. 09[14] ‘Thought is abstract; & the intolerant use of abstractions is the major vice of the intellect.’3 But what kind of thinking are you speaking of?
[2] This inscription appeared on the sarcophagus for Voltaire’s funeral procession. [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1925), p. 26.’
09[15] ‘There have been reactions & revivals. But on the whole, during many generations, there has been a gradual decay of religious influence in European civilization. Each revival touches a lower peak than its predecessor, & each period of slackness a lower depth.’4 Two causes: (i) ‘For over two centuries religion has been on the defensive.’5 Each new development in thought has found religious thinkers unprepared. (But what is religion? How far does this unpreparedness show them to have been not ‘religious thinkers’?) (ii) ‘The churches have put forward aspects of religion which are expressed in terms either suited to the emotional reactions of bygone times or directed to excite modern emotional interests of non-religious character.’6 ‘Conduct is a by-product of religion – an inevitable by-product but not the main point. Every great religious teacher has revolted against the presentation of religion as a mere sanction of rules of conduct.’7 (But what has ‘a mere sanction etc’: to do with conduct itself? Is conduct rules?)
[4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Whitehead, Science, p. 269.’ [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Whitehead, Scence, p. 270.’ [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Whitehead, Science, p. 273.’ [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Whitehead, Science, p. 274.’
09[16] ‘In Philosophy itself investigation & reasoning are only preparatory & servile parts, means to an end. They terminate in insight, or what in the noblest sense of the word may be called theory, theoria, – a steady contemplation of all things in their order & worth. Such a contemplation is imaginative.’8 09[23] Moby Dick is the Paradise Lost of Melville, Billy Budd his Paradise Regained.9 Moby Dick compared with Paradise Lost. Ahab sets out to conquer the whale, & in the end is slain by it. A parable of eternal strife. Cf. Dante’s symbolism. 09[28] The World ‘As a people the Chinese possess a quality of extreme rarity even in European individuals, the power of enduring suffering or disaster without the compensation of metaphysical or religious dreams.’10 An English officer was ordered to burn a Chinese village; he went to the headman to tell him. He was received with politeness, offered tea, which he refused & delivered his order. The Chinaman [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘G. Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets Lucretius Dante and Goethe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1910), p. 10.’ [9] Fos. 22–3 contain quotations from J. Freeman, Herman Melville (London: Macmillan & Co., 1926). [10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘D.W. Russell, The Right to be Happy (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1927), p. 10.’
himself lighted a brand & without the smallest attempt to save any of his possessions, light his house, threw the brand into the middle of the village & walked away into the country. 09[28] ‘Otherworldliness’ – a new view of society. 09[29] Lucian complained that history writing was, in his day, becoming an obsession. To-day historians have taken to writing – & a well schooled age to reading – history as an amusement, as a trade, as a means of grace & even as a new religion.11 09[35] Morality – Knowledge – Art Our position – if we are not at all costs ourselves, – I have ventur’d Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride At length broke under me. Wolsey.12 Gain the whole world & lose your soul. Reputation, fame, working for ‘humanity,’ contributing to knowledge – everything, if this is not added to it, is vanity. [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See E. Troeltsch, “Der Historismus und seine Probleme” in Gesammelte Schriften, 4 vols. (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr Paul Siebeck, 1912–25), iii.6, 26, 110.’ [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act III sc. ii.’
09[36] The World & the Flesh The contrast has always been between the Spirit & Flesh & in a sense it is a contrast which we experience vitally; but it has often & continually been misinterpreted – interpreted by prudish puritans – so as to make it something which contradicts a full life – a life lived to its fullest. The great contrast, upon which rests the whole of the true life of the mind is between spirit & the world. This, too, is familiar & is misinterpreted so as to produce an indigent existence not worth calling ‘life.’ But ‘the Flesh’ is not ‘the world’ except in so far as it means ‘existence at any cost.’ All love poetry cries out against the identification of the Flesh & the World – it is the world only which is the negation of love. 09[37] Philosophy is to get rid of your phlegm. Philosophieren ist dephlegmatisiren vivificium. Novalis.13 09[37–38] ‘There is, thanks to our various communities & sects, a steady supply of religion laid before the public, & a supply so varied that one would expect all tastes to find satisfaction.’14 A supply of religion! As if it were water or bread & butter, instead of life itself. How can there be a supply of life laid before the public?
[13] For Oakeshott’s use of this quotation see SW, v.147, n. 10. [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘R.G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis or The Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), p. 15.’
‘Every religion claims to tell us something which is not only true, but supremely true, something that lets us into the secret of the universe.’15 ? The religious consciousness does not understand ‘the secret of the universe’ – truth, strictly has little meaning for it: or else its object is religious truth – is a certain kind of truth, metaphorically called truth. But ‘the practical’ must not be identified with ‘the object of will,’ because will is abstract, & nothing is the object of anything save mind as a whole. This is a common fallacy. ‘Religion & science know their own business a great deal better than these impartial persons who attempt to “reconcile” them.’16 They do not. Religion & science, on your own showing, are not self-conscious knowledge, & therefore know nothing whatever of themselves, as a whole, as such. 09[38] ‘When the philosopher devotes his attention to subjects with which other people are familiar, it often becomes possible to put down the book before finishing it. Thus treatises on aesthetics are mainly convincing to everybody but poets, painters & musicians, & philosophical writings on science are probably in great demand among classical scholars.’17 [15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 40.’ [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Speculum Mentis, p. 49.’ [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J.W.N. Sullivan, Aspects of Science, 2 vols. (London: R. Cobden-Sanderson and W. Collins Sons & Co., 1923–6), i.23.’
The fallacy being that the scientist as such is not familiar with science as such – it is not his subject. 09[42] History tells us the when? of things: what could make more assumptions, what could be more abstract? 09[42] It is often said that with women the chief business of life is love; but how much truer is this of men: & with them it appears to have less force simply because they are led into the ‘world’ & distracted with things lower, – & perhaps things higher. 09[45] Sperry’s conclusion18 – Although the historical study of Jesus has no theological significance as far as its results are concerned, yet the discipline of historical study is one which is most calculated to produce religious-mindedness, because it cannot be undertaken except religiously. Historical thinking requires faithfulness to objective fact and to personal interpretation – it is objective & subjective at once – and this is what religion requires also. The notion is that Hellenism has not the ‘time sense’ of Hebraism. Is it true? How far were the Greek religions historical religions also? 09[49] Nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus. [18] Fo. 45 contains quotations from W.L. Sperry, ‘The Relation of Religion to Historical Fact’, Hibbert Journal, 26 (1927), pp. 44–5.
Nothing is lasting unless it is divine; the rest is smoke. 09[50] ‘For myself…I had drawn the obvious deduction that since the fundamental instinct of life, in the savage as much as in the civilized man, is to hold on to life, that instinct must inevitably breed a belief in the continuance of life after its obvious cessation.’19 So much the worse for your logic! 09[52] The aim of Dr Arnold at Rugby was to produce men who were Christians & Englishmen.20 The two points at which reform was obviously demanded were (i) in the curriculum – the introduction of modern studies. (ii) in the moral tone. Arnold did more for (ii) than he did for (i). Under (i) he introduced modern history – 1 hour a week: French, – purely grammatically – it was a failure. Mathematics. Indeed A. was convinced that the best education there was to be had was that to be obtained from Latin & Greek. But he did see that his object must be to teach ‘not knowledge, but the means of gaining knowledge.’ But he started out with certain prejudices – e.g. ‘Boys do not like poetry’ (cf. G.C. Armstrong on the poets vs the historians for boys); ‘boys at a public school never will learn to speak or pronounce French well, under any circumstances.’ His aim was ‘to introduce a religious principle into education’; ‘to make the school a place of really Christian education.’ [19] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Beverley Nichols, Are They They Same At Home? Being A Series of Bouquets Differently Distributed (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), p. 46.’ [20] Fos. 51–3 contain notes on L. Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918).
(i) Religious & moral principle. (ii) Gentlemanly conduct. (iii) Intellectual ability. 09[54] The Philosophy of ‘As If ’ & Theology See Schleiermacher on Prayer etc.21 On Immortality. Lipsius. Immortality has been considered as a real thing i.e., an hypothesis, but it is really a fiction. Dogma: hypothesis: fiction.22 09[54–55] ‘The good man works towards the coming of a kingdom of God upon earth, the kingdom of truth’s justice: but, at the end of his career, he sees it as far off as ever…what can he, a single individual, do against an immoral world? Shall he cease to struggle against the stream of wrong?…No – his good heart loudly admonishes him – you shall do good & never weary of it! Believe that virtue in the end will triumph…believe that the Kingdom of God, the [21] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, §§949–73.’ Alois E. Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik (Zurich: Orell, Füssli & Co., 1869). [22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Lotze, Logik, E.T., p. 351.’ Assuming ‘E.T.’ stands for ‘English Translation,’ probably a reference to Bosanquet’s translation of H. Lotze, Logik (Leipzig: Weidmann’sche Buchhandlung, 1843) as Logic in Three Books Of Thought, Of Investigation, And Of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884).
Kingdom of truth & justice, will come on the earth; & do you but work for its coming. It is true that in all this you cannot scientifically demonstrate that it must be so. Enough that your heart bids you act as if it were so, & merely by so acting you will prove that you have religion.’23 (This can only be justified if it turns out that this notion of amelioration, progress is a fiction which, if followed, because of its power of inspiration & invigoration, will achieve the real end, the making of the individual soul. But there is such a thing as a decadent fiction, a fiction which has none of this power, & perhaps the idea of progress is one of this kind. At any rate the fiction of some kind of Kingdom of Heaven seems to be necessary for man’s life to be lived to the fullest. But how far is it necessary that we should be unconscious that it is a fiction for it to do its work?) 09[57] Theology is concerned with setting forth the truth of God as He has revealed it in His Word to His Church. (All capitals!) Cp. Bishop Wilson. ‘Rule of Religion. When the Holy Scriptures are silent, the Church is my text; where the Holy Scripture speaks, the Church is my comment; where both are silent I follow reason.’24 (This, indeed, is the general view of theology. But what they don’t see is that in any case they ‘follow reason,’ because everything [23] Oakeshott’s note: ‘F.K. Forberg, “Entwicklung des Begriffs der Religion” [Development of the Concept of Religion], Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft Teutscher Gelehrten, 8 (1798), 21–46, quoted in H. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As If,” tr. C.K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1924), p. 322.’ [24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cf. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London: A. Crooke, 1642), §5.’
is interpreted.25 There can be no ‘authority’ in theology, except reason; though in religion there may be what appears to be an external authority – but even that is no more than an appearance.) 09[58] ‘Afflictions bring us the nearest way to God.’ ‘Happy is the condition which forces us to trust only in God. Afflictions dispose us to pray.’ Bishop Wilson. This is a view of religion, undoubtedly true as far as it goes, but does it go far enough? What sort of religion is it which we feel most intensely only when in danger? The religion of most of us is like this, but is it the highest? 09[58] ‘Religion only recommends modesty, and condemns singularity [in dress].’ Bishop Wilson. How well that speaks the mind of the makers of the Book of Common Prayer. E.g. the marriage Service etc.: ‘Honesty’ is the virtue commended, ‘quietness,’ ‘sobriety.’ There is no passion & wildness about this religion, no daring and venture. The apotheosis of dullness & provincialism.
[25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Hort.’
09[59] ‘The faith which was delivered once for all unto the Saints.’26 – apax. This is the notion which is at the bottom of the total lack of logic in much Christian apologetic. 09[59] ‘Two things a Christian will do: Never go against the best light that he has; this will prove his sincerity: &, secondly, to take care that his light is not darkness.’ Bishop Wilson But the theoretical problem of life is to see these as one & not as two; for if they go together they must be subsumable under a single principle of life. 09[60] Lincoln (on a political platform, to his opponent) ‘Mr So–&–so, suppose I called the tail of a mule a leg, how many legs would the mule then have?’ Mr So–&–so. ‘Five legs, Sir.’ Lincoln. ‘No, it would have only four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it one!’ Three possibilities. (i) That the mule would still have only four legs. (ii) That it would then have five. [26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Jude 3.’
(iii) That it would then have but one. 09[60] Herbert Spencer was once confronted by a patient of a lunatic asylum who had heard him address an audience of convalescent inmates. The man was distraught with maniac laughter, but when calmed & asked to explain the joke to Spencer he remarked: ‘To think of me in & you out!’ Wasn’t he about right? 09[63] The desire to organize art. Cp. Literature. The desire of some journalists to make their calling a ‘profession.’ Cp. Schoolmasters, actors etc. But is it not the death of literature & art to be made a ‘profession’?27 A planned civilization! 09[63] Emily Brontë projected all her unsatisfied emotion into one famous work of art: she made Heathcliff & Catherine out of the anger, beauty & pain of unsatisfied passion. How far is this true of all art? Comfort & reputation; ease & satisfied desire – these kill art? Art is the product of dissatisfaction, of disharmony. And how far is this true of religion also. And would not this explain the fact that religion & danger are complementary?
[27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Raleigh in Aesthetic Notes, p. 60.’
09[64] Human life, as Hegel says of the life of God, sinks into insipidity ‘wenn der Ernst, der Schmerz, die Geduld und Arbeit des Negativen darin fehlt.’28 And this is the meaning both of Morality & Tragedy. 09[69–70] Otherworldliness29 Sometimes said that primitive Christianity is wholly foreign to modern civilization. It believed that the whole world-order was unstable, that shortly there would be a great catastrophy which would change everything. The permanent things were not the obviously permanent ones – the rich young man, the widow’s mite. They were living on the edge of a precipice; that, indeed, & the beliefs which fostered that feeling, were the basis of the greatness of the religion & life of that age. (Cp. the way in which Athenian social system accentuated & made man conscious of the fact that it was difficult to be a real ‘citizen.’) They lived dangerously, & their religion answered to their life & vice versa. We believe in Art & Literature & Patriotism & the pageant of history & the growth of human life – evolution etc. (Cp. Pascal on ‘Humanity’). Comfort. We even believe in the progress of things such as Chemistry & Mathematics – they go on, we it is who pass and are unstable elements. Now, it is sometimes said that the sacredness of the individual is what Christianity & particularly the Reformation gave Europe: but is this so? [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Hegel, Phänomenologie, p. 13.’ [29] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Green, Prolegomena, Bk VI, ch. 2, esp. §184.’
Clearly the whole value of life is in the individual life to primitive Christianity; for that alone is stable; the things pass away, but the soul only passes on to life. But our modern ideas are all against this; the individual is but a moment in a process. The Reformation was nearer primitive Christianity in its beliefs about the relative value of individuals & things, the Renaissance was also, & so were the Greeks. (Yet cp. modern belief that the work of art is valued for the work, for the artist.) At all events; the ideas which governed primitive Christianity are different from those which govern us. We believe in the fundamental stability of the present order, or that it will merely evolve into another, & right or wrong this belief has but small religious value. That is why the Gospels are & always will be helpful; because Jesus & they express ideas, & a view of the world, – in a language perhaps which needs modernizing – which is higher & nobler than ours. This belief which they express has been translated into the belief in a good time coming (Burkitt), but this I believe to be a mistranslation, which echoes our own beliefs in progress. It has also been said that we should live as if there were a good time coming, but that too, is too vague. What shall be our translation, what does, what can, otherworldliness mean to us? 09[72] Evolution, the master principle of biological life, has been elevated into a principle of moral life – & causes only confusion & a false ideal. 09[72] Evolution The modern scholar’s ideal. cp. Universal language; pooling of thought & learning.
Everything to contribute to a single end. Cp. Pascal on ‘Humanité.’ Breaking down of barriers. The world state. The idea of humanity – civilization as a ‘thing.’ Cosmopolitanism. Intellectual intercourse. Esperanto. Conferences & congresses. And compare with it all the opposite ideal. – The value of life for me. Otherworldliness. 09[A]30 Voltaire, historian31 Essai; Louis XIV; Louis XV; Annales de l’Empire; Charles XII; Russie. New conception of history; after Clarendon & Bossuet, & before Hume & Gibbon. ‘Rational’ history. Voltaire’s prejudices – the Church, ‘barbarous’ absolutism. History devoid of fantastic ‘theories.’ Desire to give more than a tale of kings – the people, the civilization. Belief in the amelioration of human lot. War & fanaticism his great enemies. Voltaire excels in rapid summaries of an age or a character.
[30] On a loose sheet in ink numbered ‘10a.’ [31] Oakeshott’s note ‘See Saintsbury.’ Possibly a reference to G.E.B. Saintsbury’s article “Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de,” in Encylopaedia Britannica, 11th edn (1911). The works listed by Voltaire are: Essai sur l’Histoire Générale, et sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations, depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à nos jours, 7 vols. (Geneva: Cramer, 1756); Le siècle de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Berlin: C.F. Henning, 1751); Précis du siècle de Louis XV, 4 vols. (Geneva: Cramer, 1768); Annales de l’empire depuis Charlemagne (Geneva: Cramer, 1754); Histoire de Charles XII. Roi de Suéde, 2 vols. (Basle: C. Revis, 1731); Histoire de l’empire de Russie sous Pierre le grand, 2 vols. (Lyon: Bruyset, 1759–63).
Notebook 10 (September 1928)1 10[02] Shelley’s total disregard of self-preservation. Cp. Trelawny’s story of his throwing himself into the Arno, though he could not swim.2
[1] LSE 2/1/10. Hard cover, blue, 17 cm × 11.5 cm, squared. Recto pages numbered 1–91. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘Notes. X. / ‘Surtout point de zèle.’ / Talleyrand. / Sept. 1928.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fos. 1–2, André Maurois, Ariel, ou la vie de Shelley (Paris: B. Grasset, 1923); 2–3, N. Douglas, South Wind (London: Martin Secker, 1922); 4, A. Huxley, Two or Three Graces and Other Stories (Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz, 1928); 6–7, Stendhal, On Love (London: Duckworth, 1915); 8–9, D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (London: Martin Secker, 1923); 11–12, T. Mann, Der Tod in Venedig (Munich: Hyperion-Verlag Hans von Weber, 1912); 13–14, Victoria Sackville-West, Heritage (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1919); 15, F. Nietzsche, Dawn of Day, tr. J. Votz (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902); 23–4, S. Sitwell, The Gothick North: A Study of Medieval Life, Art and Thought, 3 vols. (London: Duckworth, 1929); 27, G.E.B. Clemenceau, In the Evening of My Thought, tr. C.M. Thompson and J. Heard, 2 vols. (London: Constable & Co, 1929); 28, C. Bailey, Epicurus: The Extant Remains, tr. C. Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926); 32– 3, D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (London: Martin Secker, 1926); 38, Novalis, Christenheit oder Europa, possibly Christianity or Europe, tr. J. Dalton (London: J. Chapman, 1844); 72–4, F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, tr. H. Zimmern (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1910); 78, Jean de La Bruyère, Les caractères de Théophraste, et de La Bruyère, avec des notes par M. Coste, 2 vols. (Dresden, G.C. Walther, 1769); 84–6, D.H. Lawrence, The Boy in the Bush (London: Martin Secker, 1924). [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘E.J. Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author, 2 vols. (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1878), i.90.’
10[05] Christianity & History Somehow we must get away from the meaningless dualism of ‘what really happened’ – the ‘course of events’ – and ‘history’ – an account of it. These are not two, but one – for our world is never one of ‘things,’ but always one of ‘objects.’ Cp. in Christianity. There is (i) The Jesus of History. (ii) The Christ. But these are not two, but one. (i) is Jesus as experienced in history, i.e., Jesus for history or historical thinking, and (ii) is Jesus as experienced in religion, i.e., Jesus for religion, or religious thinking. What is the relation of these two? That can only be answered when we know what is the essential nature of (i) history & (ii) religion. But we ought not to assume an obvious or a close relationship. To know that something has happened brings it closer to us; to see it happening brings it closest. 10[06] Stendhal says that love follows the stages of (1) Admiration. (2) One says to oneself: ‘How delightful to kiss her, & be kissed in return.’
(3) Hope. (4) Love is born. A year may elapse between (1) & (2), a month between (2) & (3). Between (3) & (4) there is but the twinkling of an eye. 10[10] Number of grains of sand spread over England would make a layer hundreds of yards in depth. ‘Let us reflect that the earth is the millionth part of one such grain of sand, & our mundane affairs, our thoughts & our achievements, begin to appear in their correct proportion to the universe as a whole.’3 ? Not, perhaps, when we realize that this universe of which Jeans is speaking is the creation of man. His comparison, because it leaves out so much, gives a wholly wrong impression. It is anti-religious in the best sense. 10[16] The raison d’être of marriage. Its indissolubleness. The exclusive legal responsibility of the man. The necessity of descent. The rights of property. But ‘by showing ever more & more favour to love-marriages, the very foundation of matrimony, that which alone makes it an
[3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J.H. Jeans, EOS, or the Wider Aspects of Cosmogony (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd.; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1928), p. 21.’
institution, has been undermined…modern marriage has lost its meaning, consequently it is being abolished.’4 10[18–19] An examination & criticism of the ‘mythology’ of English Christianity. Cp. the criticism to which Socrates subjected the mythology of Greece. English people do not readily personalize or materialize their beliefs, as the Greeks in their mythology; but none the less we have a ‘mythology.’ Many of the ‘myths’ of Hebrew religion we have inherited, many have been, in name, discarded – but they still haunt us. Book of Common Prayer a respository of English religious mythology. Distinguish between mythology & theology.5 In Greece they were very much the same. – But their only theologians were the early scientists, Plato, Aristotle etc. – Homer & Hesiod were the creators of their myths; the scientists of their Theology. But the Greeks, until late in their history, were too religious a people to concern themselves much with theology. Myth = a kind of practical thinking about religion. But must be distinguished from devotional thinking. It is creative. Theology = theoretical thinking about religion – normally in the form of reflection upon myths already created and believed.
[4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 97 E.T.’ is probably a reference to F. Nietzsche, Twlight of the Idols, tr. A.M. Ludovici (London: Allen & Uniwn, 1911). [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Jane Harrison, Myths of Greece & Rome (London: Ernest Benn, 1927).’
10[19–20] God ‘The man who demands a reality more solid than that of the religious consciousness seeks he knows not what.’6 What we must get away from is this notion that the religious man as such demands a proof of the existence of God. Nothing has less meaning than this for him. And to say, also, that he demands some ‘objective’ correspondent to his ‘subjective’ beliefs is equally misleading. What he demands is that he should know the object of his religious belief to be real, & ‘real’ does not mean ‘objective.’ Often he, & others, use the word ‘objective’ when they mean real; but we ought not to follow them in this mistake. And if ‘objective’ means ‘independent of the religious consciousness,’ then it has no meaning and no reality whatever. 10[20] The Prospects of Theology ‘Modern Liberalism [in theology] is essentially based upon the critical study of the Old & New Testaments.’7 1. ‘The discoveries of natural science – evolution – have knocked the bottom out of our traditional theology.’ 2. ‘The criticism of the Old & New Testament has knocked the bottom out of our traditional theology.’
[6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Bradley, Ethical Studies.’ [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘H. Rashdall, Ideas and Ideals: Selected by H.D.A. Major and F.L. Cross (Oxford: Blackwell, 1928), p. 95.’
What is science? What is history? Can they do this to Theology? What can they do to Theology? ‘Attempts to deny that the synoptic gospels give us in the main a true historical picture of his character & teaching have altogether broken down.’8 Give who? Not the ordinary man, not the man who knows nothing but his Gospels. And is there any agreement about what that character is? And if not, how can it be said that we have a true picture? 10[21] Gratitude The effect of teaching children gratitude. They are voluble & communicative enough, charming & natural, until they are lead to be believe that they exist to glorify those ‘who have done everything for them.’ Then – reticence & an unavailing attempt to adjust their emotions to this new view. Children are egoistic. There is something distasteful in the notion of gratitude. 10[21] Prospects of Theology Distinguish these from the prospects of religion. Theology result of a decline of religion – not an historical statement, but resulting from the nature of theology, which is non-religious. Distinguish theological thinking from the effort to create a religious mythology, etc. [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Rashdall, Ideas & Ideals, p. 113.’
10[22] The work of the higher critics. Its nature & conclusion. Theology is like this to a large extent. Why then is it important? 10[23] ‘Religious experience must be made articulate & therefore needs a theology.’9 No; what it requires is not a theology but a mythology. 10[24] Religion Religion is ‘a proposition or conciliation of powers superior to man, which are believed to direct & control the course of nature & of human life.’10 Religion the recognition of our duties as divine commands. Kant. Religion is the consciousness of absolute dependence. Schleiermacher. Feelings connected with religion – dependency, & independence, our insignificance & our significance, wonder & peace, admiration, far, awe, hope, joy, mystery. Society is the primary object of religious devotion. Durkheim.
[9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘W.R. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, ed. S.A. Cook, 3rd edn (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1927).’ [10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1900), i.63.’
It is ‘a system of ideas with which individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members & the relations they have with it.’11 ‘The essence of religion is the strong & earnest dedication of the emotions & desires towards an ideal object, recognized as of the highest excellence, & as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of desire.’12 Religion is an experience of God. 10[26] ‘Popular theology has a positive appetite for absurdity.’13 (If ‘popular religious myth’ is meant, there is no reason why it should not be absurd. There is no such thing as ‘popular theology.’) 10[28] Lathe biosas – Live Unknown. Be unnoticed, having lived & died. [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life A Study in Religious Sociology, tr. J.W. Swain (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915), p. 225.’ [12] J.S. Mill, ‘The Utility of Religion,’ in Three Essays on Religion Nature The Utility of Religion and Theism, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1874), p. 109. Reprinted in Collected Works of John Stuart, ed. J.M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91), x.403–28. [13] See D. Hume, ‘The Natural History of Religion,’ §11, ‘With regard to Reason or Absurdity’ in Four dissertations. I. The Natural History of Religion. II. Of the Passions. III. Of Tragedy. IV. Of the Standard of Taste (London: A. Millar, 1757), at p. 70.
Epicurus. Live as far as possible without a following. 10[30] ‘There is a curious illusion that a more complete culture was possible when there was less to know. Surely the only gain was, that it was more possible to remain unconscious of ignorance. It cannot have been a gain to Plato to have read neither Shakespeare, nor Newton, nor Darwin.’14 There are many other gains. When there is less to know we are less easily seduced by the ideal of culture as knowing as much as we can.15 10[30] For Essays on Modern Religion It seems essential that if worship has its chief effect on us – & not on God – we must somehow be unconscious of this fact if it is to be accomplished.16 But the conclusion to be drawn from this is that theology does no good to religion. Cp. Santayana on how a philosophical attitude harms science.
[14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A.N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education, and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 73.’ [15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Conrad.’ [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. J.B. Pratt, The Religious Consciousness A Psychological Study (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921).’
My object in these essays is to call attention to what I may call the Epicurean element in Christianity – Cp. Inge’s work on the Platonic element in Christian theology.17 10[31] On Saying What We Mean A hero is never a hero to his valet, but as Hegel pointed out, that is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.18 10[31] Saying What We Mean Similes etc. The principle of them is pragmatic. The most usually associated things, not the most accurately associated. And further, what is ‘telling’; what is unusual because it is unusual.19 10[32] Christianity The absurd suggestion that we should not try so much to alter or reform Christanity as to take it seriously, practice it. [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Inge, Christianity & Personal Mysticism; Bishop Paddock lectures.’ Possibly W.R. Inge, Christian Mysticism. Considered in Eight Lectures Delivered Before the University of Oxford (London: Methuen & Co., 1899); and B.H. Paddock, The Bishop Paddock Lectures, 4 vols. (London: Griffith, Farran & Co., 1886–97). [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 33.’ [19] Oakeshott’s note: ‘C. Morgan, Portrait in a Mirror (Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz, 1930), pp. 133, 258–66.’
But what is it? 10[33] Religion, says Burke, should provide instruction in life & consolation in death. What we must see is that these are not two tasks but one. To find a view of life which explains death – so that death & mortality & growing old are not contradictions – broken pillars – but part of the process of living. Life must be made to conform with death. If we achieved this it is probable that we should deprive art & poetry of that vivid contrast between life & death which is at the heart of so many of the Elizabethans & 17th Century poets. But then poetry & art depend upon discomfort, mystery, unresolved contradictions, suffering & a feeling of not being at home in the universe. 10[34] Myths & Superstitions All myths tend to become superstitions, and in doing so they do not lose their force as myths, but they become dangerous. For a superstition is a myth taken literally, & when the belief or institution or way of living it supports no longer finds this support, it will dissolve not because of its inherent weakness, but because there is no evident reason, and no myth, to justify it.20
[20] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. J.G. Frazer, Psyche’s Task: A Discourse Concerning the Influence of Superstition on the Growth of Institutions (London: Macmillan & Co., 1909), pp. 3–5, 154–6.’
10[35] ‘As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.’21 Body, ‘matter,’ ‘physical’ = what can be isolated. 10[35] A long life, no less than a short, shows just as conclusively that we must all die in the end. 10[36] ‘L’histoire et la civilization marchant toujours du meme pied.’22 One kind of civilization. Why should we not suppose history to be a qualification of civilization rather than an enhancement of it – or evidence of it. 10[38] Napoleon found it difficult to believe in Christianity because it was not old enough.23 10[38] Fantasy, terror, mystery are sought in a world of ghosts & shadows beyond the grave, or a world of fairies & goblins, only by a people [21] Oakeshott’s note: ‘H. Hesse, Steppenwolf, tr. B. Creighton (London: Martin Secker, 1929), p. 27.’ [22] See Gabriel Hanotaux, De l’histoire et des historiens (Paris: Louis Conard, 1919), p. 47. [23] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. A.P.P. Rosebery, Napoleon: The Last Phase (London: A.L. Humphreys, 1900), p. 257.’
which has not imagination enough to know that this life is mysterious enough, terrible enough, fantastic enough to supply all such needs. Cp. Fairytales – children need them, because life is obvious to them & not mysterious or terrible? The ‘supernatural’ in Shakespeare etc. A ‘practical’ man understands all he sees – because he sees nothing save what he can explain to himself satisfactorily. It is another kind of man who sees all the while things he does not understand. If we are looking for something which is difficult to understand – this life supplies the need, we require to invent no other. 10[39] Otherworldliness The period of life when the routine of life is just beginning to get hold of us, when we begin to fear it, because we feel it to be our master, or nearly so – that is a Shadow Line. We revolt against it; few succeed in that revolt. They leave it until too late; until they have committed themselves to the world, & cannot again be free of it. Life, then, for them will be full of regrets – until they also are forgotten & the world has mastered its own. When we are afraid of the routine of life – then is the hour to strike, or it will be too late. 10[40] Modernity – the hate of anything that is not ourselves.24
[24] Oakeshott’s note ‘ibid., p. 131’ may be to D.H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl (London: Martin Secker, 1920), notes on which appear on fos. 39– 40.
10[40] ‘He has overcome the sharpness of death.’ What is the sharpness of death? (i) For ourselves. (ii) For others. 10[40] To ‘turn our duties into doubts’ – the weakness of the academic mind. We never believe any one thing strongly enough to lose consciousness of everything else. 10[41] Schopenhauer asserts that death inspired philosophy. It is more probable that poetry was inspired by death. The poetry & the mythology of the ancients are both taken up with the fear of death. And why should we not fear death? To be tranquil in the face of death may be mere insensitiveness. 10[42] ‘We see a man repent for his actions, and conclude that such actions should be avoided: an instance of false, but apparently irreproachable reasoning.’25 Alternative conclusions: [25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘L. Shestov, All Things Are Possible, or, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, tr. S.S. Koteliansky (London: Martin Secker, 1920), p. 102.’
1. That to act & to repent are both valuable experiences – neither to be avoided, & certainly not the former on account of the latter. 2. Act, but never repent. And either of these is better than the avoidance of actions merely because we know we shall repent for them. 10[43] Theological Studies Religion, Christianity consists in problems – not in solutions. Or only in solutions in so far as these are restatements, reassessments of the problems. But for so long has Christianity been concerned with the examination, the assertion & the exposition of solutions that we have forgotten what the problems are – we are even unaware that there are any. Moreover, each new solution offered is not based upon, & does not spring from a sense & feeling of the problem, but merely upon & from the last or some previous solution. The task always, & particularly now, is some restatement of the problems themselves. The greatness of the early fathers (some of them), of the greatest medieval theologians, of Luther & Melancthon, of the 17th century English Theologians was that they had not solutions before them, but problems. They began with problems, not mere solutions. But it is impossible to restate problems unambiguously & freely unless we abandon altogether the language & the ideas of the traditional solutions. And this is not because these solutions are valueless, but because, whatever their value be, they must tend to obscure the problem itself.
What is required now is a free & unambiguous statement of the problems, which any & every solution has answered & must answer. And these require restatement not because we have acquired new knowledge of ourselves & our world – that new knowledge may invalidate a solution that leaves the problem itself untouched. We must restate the problem because religion depends altogether for its vitality or a vivid consciousness of problems – & it is that which we have lost. And also, not until we restate the problems shall we distinguish them from the solutions. e.g. sin is not a problem, it is a solution. God is not a problem, it is a solution. The current language of religion & of theology is quite inadequate for a restatement of problems. 10[45] The old ‘memento mori’ – & the new.26 The old – remember death because of what comes after it. The new – remember death because it is the end. 10[46] Sometimes the way back to a life of physical integrity, a life on the soil, undistracted by complicated, ‘civilized’ emotions, seems so much shorter & more inviting than the way forward to a higher order of consciousness. Both Rousseau & Tolstoy have felt its charm, & Tolstoy at least believed in it to the end. – To fly the world, to leave behind us all its complications, distractions, problems, pains, misery, & find a life of simple contentment in some distant spot of earth, cultivating one’s own garden & living upon what one can produce for oneself. But there is so much that we must leave behind besides distraction & misery; & instead of [26] Fos. 44–5 contain notes on Mrs Susannah Dobson, Petrarch’s View of Human Life (London: John Stockdale, 1791).
leaving it we might perhaps to find a way of life which fosters & promotes that which we do not wish to & cannot leave behind. – friends, affections, art & poetry, & the fevers of love & hate. How? Are we to pass an existence four fifths of which is the mere securing of the leisure to live? 10[47] Death ‘When you die the grass will grow on your grave, & that’s all.’27 To become ‘primitive,’ to ‘cease to be clever,’ will that take the sting from death? Death attracted Tolstoy under two aspects— (i) When he was charged with the joy of living; death at the summit of consciousness. (ii) When he was wearied by the strife of thought & desire – death the liberator. What beauty can there be, if there be death? Can Christianity overcome the sharpness of death? How?
[27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Tolstoy, The Cossacks, p. 129.’ L. Tolstoy, The Cossacks A Tale of the Caucasus in the Year 1852, tr. N.H. Dole (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.).
10[49] ‘There is nothing new in the fact that men have ceased to believe in the religion of their fathers.’28 But: (i) Often when a generation thinks itself to have departed from the religion of its fathers it has done no such thing – e.g. Luther. (ii) How far is this true of to-day? (iii) What do the differences between the religion of a primitive community & a sophisticated man of to-day really amount to? 10[51] ‘Progress – a visible & accelerated progress – is always a symptom of the end.’29 How could we take trouble about progress, or even believe in it, if we believed in death? Is not ‘progress,’ civilization etc: one answer to death? But how cogent an answer is it? And is it an answer, or merely an escape? 10[53] The object – the sense of this life is to prepare for a future one – what argument have we against this? And in how many different forms is this believed? [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘W. Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (London: Allen & Unwin, 1929), p. 11.’ [29] Oakeshott’s note: ‘V. Soloviev, War, Progress, and the End of History Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ Three Discussions, tr. A. Bakshy (London: University of London Press, 1915), p. 123.’
How are we to achieve a rational scheme of life. To find the rules of moral life which (if any exist) correspond to rules of physical life, health. And to build up a scheme of life in accordance with these rules. We must say more about death than merely that there is no use complaining about it – Dr Johnson – that it is a law of nature, that it is only individuals who die, the species lives on. We must moralize death. And that cannot be done except by giving it a place in the life of the individual. A philosophy of life must be a philosophy of death also. 10[54] What is the attraction of suffering? That it is attractive, that it is often more attractive than what is called happiness, cannot be denied. It is a form of happiness, a form of satisfaction. To be happy, to accomplish something, achievement – all this stands over against suffering, disappointment, sorrow. The satisfaction of sorrow is found in something other than achievement. And I think that its attraction & its value lies in this – that it directs our attention to an entirely different notion of life: otherworldliness: Epicureanism. It is only in the ‘Epicurean’ theory that suffering & disappointment can be seen to be positive goods – unless we believe in them as educative, & then they are only good as a means, not an end. Goethe: – Christianity, the worship of sorrow – this is only another way of saying that Christianity is ‘otherworldly,’ is noncontributory. 10[56] What is meant when it is said—
That few scholars accept the entire New Testament as authentic.30 Or, that few of the elements of contemporary Christianity can be traced to its Founder? The Renaissance was a bouleversement of all the principles of Christianity. Christianity has rejected the ethical scheme propounded by Jesus. E.g. the moral outlook of Jesus would for example have countenanced sexual intercourse, but not if it led to children. The present, but not the future. 10[57] The intellectual life of the majority of men & women is cankered by a passion for indiscriminate knowledge. They not merely desert arguments for facts; they never enter upon argument at all. If a writer is to be popular he must pander to this taste. And the result has been the vast body of disconnected nonsense which is poured like an avalanche from our printing presses on every conceivable subject. Instead of considering the subject of religion, we are given numberless books on religious customs, rites, histories, anecdotes. Instead of love – we are given the histories of lovers. And this has penetrated even to our literature; it has indeed always infected literature; & most novelists are not less sinners in this respect than public lecturers. Some have escaped it; & their means of escape is by setting themselves to consider & master their own experience: In short, one has to become a poet or a philosopher to escape this disease. And neither poets or philosophers are loved of women or understood by men. Women, indeed, sometimes escape this disease – but rarely what are called educated women. For education with them has always been understood to require a stifling of oneself & ones own thoughts & feelings. Few women [30] Fos. 55–6 contain notes on H.L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods (London and New York: A.A. Knopf, 1930).
escape, but those who do escape usually escape more securely than men. To be educated is to know how much one wishes to know & to have the courage not to be tempted beyond this limit. 10[58] Mortality I have sketched a view of life; I have tried to show it in as favourable a light as I can. But, besides those who will think it undesirable, a negation of all they have been taught to value, there will be some who will ask, is it possible? Is this pleasantness, this absolute aliveness, a possible state of mind? Or if possible for a time, does it take into account the fact that it will not be possible over a long life, or even throughout the life of a man who scarcely survives middle age? And to this I must find some answer; for the whole tenor of my view is that it is in closer accord with the facts of human existence than other views, & certainly than the common view which is almost its opposite. To the question, Is it possible for a long life? I answer, is a long life a sine qua non? Our length of life is not something absolute, much less something in itself good: it depends upon what we do with it. And a view of life which would make life impossible beyond middle age would not, for that reason, be discredited – except by those who embrace the naturalistic fallacy that what is, is good. 10[59] To be cut off from communication with one’s fellow creatures, from the sound of human voices, from the intercourse of minds
& from love itself – is this to be cut off from everything, to be a prisoner?31 10[59–60] Mortality Dante met somewhere in hell a man whose crime was that he did not love the sweet light of day. It is the crime of our civilization. Instead of the sweetness of the present day, the light of today, we love what is gone or is to come. We despise all that is not productive, contributory: we do not understand what is simply for itself. The consolation for defeat in this life that we get from the notion of a life hereafter. The doctrine that works alone are imperishable, cannot but breed despair in the hearts of the majority of men – for they have no works, or none which they would willingly see survive. We cannot live for the future. The doctrine of eternal works, the permanence of what is done & achieved. It is good enough for the few who create masterpieces; and we have built our view of the world to fit with these – but it cannot satisfy our hearts – we who have no talents, who leave nothing behind us. Some view must be found which explains those who are defeated, those who produce nothing. We know well enough what it is to be defeated, unsuccessful: what is difficult is to understand the world from that standpoint. Many who are unsuccessful are not enough alive to despair; but some there are who are defeated & yet must find some way out. How are we to explain the attraction of lost causes? There are some men who will embrace any cause which is likely to fail; who are made for failure rather than success. What is the meaning of life to them? Mere activity? Or does their defeat refer merely to a [31] This passage is crossed out in the original.
part of their activity which to them is unimportant. They satisfy themselves – & that is enough, that is itself achievement. Cf. the women’s suffrage movement. No cause was more futile & misguided, & yet has given to people such satisfaction as this gave to the Pankhursts. They lost themselves, & that is what we all desire. 10[60] What will be our feeling about life when we come to die? – that is the test. Shall we bear to die alone. If not we have misconceived life. But it is hard to die alone – harder than anything else. What is it that would grace life & make death worth dying? It is somehow to have lived an integrated life – to have integrity. But death is the last enemy – not because it comes at the end of life, but because it is the most difficult moment of life. If we could be convinced that we are, literally, ‘full of immortality,’ all would be well & death conquered. But instead, most convince themselves that immortality is ‘to come,’ & a few die with no sense of immortality at all. 10[61] Anyone who is willing to die cannot feel himself entirely defeated. But for what reason willing to die? That is what matters. Mere disappointment & lassitude? It must be because we have understood death as a part of life. The business of life is the conquest of eternity, to master death. And often those have mastered death who think least about it. For we can master death only by a way of life which recognizes death. But most of those who do not frequently contemplate death have not mastered it – they have only thrust it aside for the moment.
10[61] Show how the whole of our life & activity & achievement is just an attempt to master death. All religion, all philosophy, learning, science, business, poetry, literature, art, – everything we do or think or make. Love, the family, communities, the state. 10[61] Besides gratitude, generosity also will go as a virtue. For generosity is essentially a feeling we have towards those whom we have little or no affection. When affection enters generosity becomes transformed. And in a life governed, dominated by affection, generosity can have no place. Gratitude is a form of revenge – an attempt to re-establish oneself after one has suffered defeat. People acquire no rights though gifts – but setting aside rights, is not a relationship inevitably set up, to refuse which we must refuse the gift, to accept which is to be grateful? Gratitude – justice – compensation. The ‘Exchange’ theory of life. 10[63] Our eclectic culture— ‘Nous prenons tout ce que nous trouvons; ceci pour sa beauté, ceci pour sa commodité, telle autre chose pour son antiquité, telle autre pour sa laideur même; en sorte que nous ne vivons que de débris, comme si la fin du monde était proche.’32 This ideal of culture will sometimes seize us with a sudden force, & the more active our moods, the more certainly will it carry [32] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A. de Musset, La confession d’un enfant du siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Félix Bonnaire, 1836), i.74.’
them away. We read, search, pick up one book after another & life becomes a febrile pursuit of knowledge. But culture is to know that there is much that one does not want to know. No; if the end of the world were approaching we should, or we ought logically, to abandon such a view of life & culture, & in order to prepare ourselves for the end, seek to establish the integrity of ourselves, but a vital integrity. Cp. the effect of: (i) The early Christian doctrine of the end of the world. (ii) The plague in Athens. Thucydides. Italy in Boccaccio. Rome. Lucretius. (iii) Zauberberg.33 10[63] We spend our lives trying to discover how to live, a perfect way of life, sens de la vie. But we shall never find it. Life is the search for it; the successful life is that which is given up to this search; & when we think we have found it, we are farthest from it. Delude ourselves that we have found it, persuade ourselves that here at least there is a point at which we can rest – and life has at once become moribund. Just as to remain in love we must be continually falling in love, so to remain living we must be continually striving to live.
[33] Possibly a reference to T. Mann, Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain] (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1924).
10[64] When we consider the accidents which may make an end to life, when we consider the thin thread of chance upon which the life of any one of us hangs – it is impossible to believe that the purpose of life & its satisfaction is be found in the production of some work, in achievement, in activity. 10[64] ‘When we are young the popular opinion sways us, & we are more solicitous to gain the esteem of others than of ourselves.’34 To be less anxious to gain the esteem of others than of ourselves – & here there is more often than not a contradiction. The esteem of the world is the death of the soul. 10[65] The most & the least sensitive men will not be interested in what I have to say – they instinctively turn away from consecutive thought about the conditions of life – the most sensitive because they could not endure it; the least sensitive because the problem never presents itself to them. Both these classes engage in ‘business’ of one sort or another – it is their only course. It is we who live between who have no business but to consider life. 10[65] I am no ‘creator.’ ‘I am he who dictates the values for a thousand years’ – Zarathustra. But this is not a part I presume to play. [34] Oakeshott’s note: ‘St Évremond, Letters.’ Possibly Letters Supposed to have passed Between M. De St. Évremond and Mr. Waller, ed. J. Langhorne, 2 vols. (London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 1769).
10[65] Mihi ipse scripsi – for myself & one other. And yet since I cannot hope to persuade her, in the end it is for myself alone. 10[65] Mortality Most of us defend our ideas either as true or as our own. But in defending my ideas here against ideas which I take to be inimical to them, I do not surprise myself to be able to persuade any man of the truth of them. Poets alone can persuade us of the truths of such practical ideas of life as I am engaged in considering, and I do not pretend to be a poet. If I write to persuade anyone, it is myself. Every writer must preach to the converted for they alone will listen to what he has to say & understand it. And besides, as will become clear later on, were I to set out to persuade any man of the truth of my views, I should, in the very act, have abandoned the root idea I am anxious to elucidate. So then, my purpose is not to persuade, and it is extremely unlikely that I shall persuade. I have, then, no gospel which will make the Gospel forgotten. If I preach it is to persuade myself. It is not my ambition to dictate to the future the way of life it shall follow. All I have wished is to think out for myself a way of life, to make it clear to myself, so that I must follow it. And if it should not commend itself to anyone else, I shall not be shaken or disturbed on that account. 10[66–67] The immense advantage it is to be free from extraneous interests. This alone allows a man to produce work which is homogenous, strong, relevant, & which will last. But, if we reject the whole view of life which looks for the criterion of life in the production of such work, we do not
require to reject also the benefits to be had from this freedom from extraneous interests, indeed we cannot reject them. For, on this other view of life, the production of such work is itself an extraneous interest of which we must free ourselves. It requires no less singleness of purpose, no less concentration of effort, no less discipline, to achieve a homogenous way of living, than to produce a homogenous piece of work. And if we are to embrace this view of life & follow it out to the end, life can be integrate, single, satisfying only when we have freed ourselves from the temptation to produce, to achieve, to accomplish anything whatsoever save an integrated life. But, it will be replied, is it not possible, is it not, indeed, a universal experience, that an homogenous life, integrated and satisfying, can be achieved only by turning our attention elsewhere, by concentrating upon some definite & specific piece of work? Is not such a life as you desire to achieve always a byproduct of the other kind of life, of ‘the worlds’ kind of life? (i) It is certain that most who concentrate upon achievement miss life. If life is a byproduct of achievement, then it is certainly not a necessary byproduct. (ii) And why should we suppose that life is the one thing in the world which can be satisfied by paying no attention to it, by neglecting it, by refusing to think of it? Everything else, we know, requires direct & specific effort, for what reason, save mere prejudice, is life itself excepted? Is it reasonable to expect that life can be lived in any conditions? And if there are conditions which promote life, shall we not seek them out; if there are conditions which are inimical to life, shall we not avoid them? And some will say, ‘My work, I know, is not my life; I do not pretend to stake my life upon contributing something to science or to history.’ What then is it?
It is an escape from life. And if we are determined not to escape from life, shall we not abandon this way of living? And if you say, ‘I do it for my own satisfaction,’ then you have already in principle abandoned the criterion which judges a work by what it actually achieves. To how many of us is what we do an escape from living – the explorer, the scholar, the businessman, the soldier, the priest. 10[69] I have wished to keep from my book the marks of those struggles, doubts, periods of waiting, experiments etc. by which I have reached the opinions I have expressed. 10[69] Mortality I want to consider the conduct of life. Our first business is, I suppose, to live, & the second to understand life. First easier than the second. But not to be divorced. I want to consider life in order to understand it, & to understand it in order to live it. It is often thought that the defects of our way of living arose not so much from our ignorance as from the inferiority of our will. We know what we ought to do, but fail to do it. But this, I think, misrepresents our position. It is ignorance, it is the failure to think out & have clearly before us a view of life & a view of how such a life is to be achieved which stands in our way. For, I believe that if we saw clearly what it is we want we should find our flaccid wills replaced by a strong & steady purpose. What I have to say might have been written in the form of an autobiography. I might have recounted the process by which I passed through a belief in these different views of the purpose & condition of life. But that would be too personal. And I have chosen instead to turn this story of my life into a more coherent
account of the views of life which come before any man who thinks & the reasons which may persuade him to adopt one & reject the others. 10[71] Nietzsche attacked Christianity not on the side of its myths, but its morality – & the ground of his attack was the conviction that Christian morality was contradictory of biological necessity or development. Here, then, is the crudest of naturalisms. It is the strength, not the weakness, of Christian morality that it does not pretend to promote what is biologically ‘better.’ 10[72] The world of La Rochefoucauld & the world of Nietzsche – the former simpler, less elaborate, more complete & unified. The latter more individual, tentative; its data more extensive, historical attitude, more diffuse & less concentrated. Less thought & more knowledge. The advantages of less knowledge. Nietzsche is more complete; but less effective.35 10[72] Why is it more worthy for an old man, who feels his powers decline, to await his slow exhaustion & extinction than with full consciousness to set a limit to his life? And, if it be said that it is not necessarily more worthy, but it is anti-social, & that society must discourage it – why, again?
[35] Oakeshott’s note: ‘cp. Nietzsche, Human, all too Human, §178’.
10[73] Simonides advised his contemporaries to look upon life as a game; earnestness was too well known to them as pain. 10[75] Criticism of the Epicurean view that we should live in the present. So far as avoiding the future is concerned it is possible & fits the facts. But the past we cannot escape. We can escape neither from our past selves, nor from the fact that having failed at one point in our lives, we can never have another opportunity. 10[75] Suicide has not become universal. Why? Not because men have considered the conditions of life & found them tolerable. Very few have considered them at all. The uselessness of suicide:— For we only contemplate it, most of us, when the moment for it has passed. Death should come at the highest, not the lowest moment – & few, when at their highest moments, see clearly enough to kill themselves. And when the moment when suicide would have made life complete has passed, there seems no more point in killing oneself than in living on. 10[77] Mortality Perhaps, in the end, all I have done is to find reasons for what I believe by instinct. Fundamentally I am quietist & indolent. And though I followed for some years an ideal of universal knowledge, I could not follow
it for ever. The vanity of it, as of everything else, could not be excluded from my mind. What I write here, then, is merely a kind of justification of my temperament. If I wrote it to persuade others, I should be guilty of self-contradiction: I write it to persuade myself, & because no man can be said to be master of himself until he has made himself clear to himself. 10[79] Mortality How then, shall we employ ourselves? What employment is there which will not distract us from this purpose to be without a purpose, this accomplishment to achieve nothing? No employment can save us. But cookery is better than most. Here is an art which can employ all that a man has of intellect & taste & ingenuity & invention. And yet he is still free: undogged by the past, whether failures or successes. Each day is new; each creation a thing of the moment & then gone. Perfect but fleeting. Here, if anywhere is the art which may be practised for art’s sake: the contemporary life. 10[80] D.H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious.36 Compare all this, so like & yet so unlike the conventional view, with the Epicurean & the ‘Christian’ view. Views:
[36] Oakeshott’s note: ‘D.H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922), pp. 14, 96–7.’
(i) Sexual act is subsidiary to the procreation of children; to make children, to carry on the species – this is the work of woman; man may do something else besides. (ii) Sexual act is parallel to the other activities of life: not the only activity. Subsidiary, but not subsidiary to procreation of children, but of works of art & the conquest of nature & knowledge. (iii) Sexual act is not subsidiary to anything. It is an end in itself. A form, the most intense form of being, of being alive. Not for any ulterior purpose, but simply for the purpose of being alive. 10[82] I want to consider, to write about, life from the standpoint of death. Death is the greatest, the all-pervading fact of life; if we can understand death, all our questions about life are answered already. Here then, in these meditations upon mortality & upon death, is all that I have come to think about life & living. 10[82] What is the meaning of the ‘Christian’ myth – derived from Genesis & expounded by Paul, – that God created not death, but the sin of man created it?37 There is a truth behind this – it is a ‘true myth.’ Death is the creation of a certain view of life – of sin. When there is no sin, death has no sting. And where there is no ‘mortality,’ there is no sin. But, somehow, death must be defeated, abolished without abolishing the moral world. And this is what Christianity offered [37] Oakeshott’s note ‘Cp. Donne, Devotions, p. 97’ may refer to J. Donne, Devotions With Two Sermons 1. On the Deceease of Lady Danvers Mother of George Herbert 2. Deaths Duel – His Own Funeral Sermon (London: William Pickering, 1860).
– an abolition of death which did not entail the abolition of an ordered life. 10[82–83] What is a ‘Natural Death’? (i) There is no ‘normal’ manner of dying. Anything may produce death. There are no accidents. We must first abolish this distinction between ‘natural’ & ‘accidental.’ (ii) Natural death is not merely death which is not procured, because many die naturally as a result of some voluntary action. (iii) Natural death is merely death which is not, as such, procured. If we bring about our own death by some action designed expressly for that purpose, our death is unnatural. A premeditated death, & a procured death is unnatural. So, then, ‘Natural death’ has behind it the notion not of nature, but of providence. It implies the idea of a ‘time’ which is set. And ‘natural death’ means any death which is governed entirely by this providence (or chance or fatality). But: (i) If natural Death is ‘providential’ luck – are we independent of this, are we stronger than God? And if not, how is any death unnatural. (ii) If we await our destiny, anything that happens is our destiny & no death is unnatural. (iii) So natural death can mean only death which is governed by chance alone.
And why should we deliver up to the hands of chance that event of our life which is the most momentous? Men have done this because, not knowing what comes after death they have shrunk from the responsibility of procuring their death. Just as the Athenians chose their governors by lot. But what Plato says to the Athenians, he says to us? Why leave it to chance? We may make mistakes, but surely that is better than allowing chance to make them. And if once we determined to decide for ourselves we should reflect upon the matter, & might, in time, achieve some wisdom which would guide us. 10[86] ‘I suppose now you have come to see that the coming generation is the most important.’ No! No! No! This is a devastating, nihilist, doctrine. It cuts the roots of life, it saps vitality. Indeed, it is so far a denial of moral (as against merely natural) life, that even those who profess it most unreservedly never really believe it, & certainly do not act upon it. And yet how often it is professed. Posterity, the future, children, the coming generation – these are the gods: & they are gods which demand & are daily accorded the most loathsome of human sacrifices – the sacrifice of the mind & the soul – the sacrifice of the self itself. 10[87] To assume complete responsibility for one’s life is itself a life work – enough to occupy a man’s whole energy & ingenuity. A man may engage upon all kinds of work besides this, but it will never be more than a mere by-product of his life. It breeds, also, a kind of spectator attitude to life.
Cp. the general attitude to life of the ‘I’ in The White Peacock.38 Without profession, without work, engaged upon the complete assumption of responsibility for his own life.39 10[87] It is difficult to be certain anything has been alive until it is dead. That is why the transitory seems so much more alive than the permanent & lasting. 10[89] The owning of property has become boring to us – we want to be free from its incumbrances. And this is the first sign of life. And it is not merely property itself which disgusts us; it is the whole ‘property attitude’ to things. We want to experience, & ownership stands in the way of free experience. It is extraneous, it diverts our attention from what we want. It may be true that ownership need not stand in the way of experience; but the fact is that for us it does. It is permanent, settled, continuous; while experience is fleeting, momentary & dies with its death. Property exists when dead: experience perishes & disappears at the same moment – like the body of Alexander. 10[89–90] How many ‘causes’ have I not adhered to in the belief that here was something enchanting, dangerous, liberating & something in which one could lose oneself? In the flush of youth I believed in socialism, because I thought it would be thrilling. I did not hate [38] Fo. 87 contains notes on D.H. Lawrence, The White Peacock (London: William Heinemann, 1911). [39] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Birkin in D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Martin Secker, 1921).’
injustice, I merely wanted to escape from an existence without a purpose. Now I believe in love – & for the same reason. And by love I mean the adventure of a relationship which knows no bounds. Love is the greatest ‘cause’. It is so much fuller & more satisfying than any other that it seems to be in an entirely different category. But love also is the most dangerous – unless you are content to be a mere Casanova. 10[91] To sustain a heart against a world’s reproof. 10[91] To live, not as others think it proper that we should live, but as we think fit to live ourselves. 10[91] Most of us have, at best, but a fitful hold on life; and our hold on death is no more sure. 10[91] No experience is perfect & complete: to know this & to understand it, to accept this as life’s loveliest grace is to have understood & to have accepted, & to have overcome death. 10[A] ‘Truth conquers with itself.’40
[40] On a loose sheet inserted at the front of Notebook 10.
Epictetus.41 & for all I know he wrote better than he knew. 10[B] Some problems in the life of Jesus.42 (i) Problems of interpretation of the New Testament & Gospels. (ii) Consider whether it is safe to base any belief upon the position that any of the sayings attributed to Jesus are his own. Do not necessarily disbelieve that some may be his own. But if it is not more than merely probable that any are his, should we base any belief on the position that they are ‘his words.’ (iii) Supposing they are his words; what then? What authority? What meaning? 10[C] Theological Studies43 The Historical Element in Christianity. It is contended that if Christianity as a religion be really independent of the truth of certain historical facts, then it should [41] Oakeshott’s note: ‘G. Long (ed.), The Discourses of Epictetus; with the Encheiridion and Fragments. Translated, with Notes, a Life of Epictetus, and a View of his Philosophy (London: George Bell and Sons, 1890), p. 414.’ [42] On a loose sheet inserted at the front of Notebook 10. [43] On a loose sheet inserted at the front of Notebook 10.
remain unimpaired if we were to believe in the Christ-myth theory etc.44 But: (i) Consider how far a belief in historical facts does really enter into the Christianity of the majority of ordinary believers. (ii) It is one thing to say – ‘Suppose these events never happened’ And quite another to say— ‘These events happened, but it is not because they happened that I believe in the principles which have been attached to them.’ The distinction required is similar to the distinction between a psychological description of mental processes & a logical examination of the validity of the products of those processes. What we say is that history enters into the first, but not into the second when it is abstracted from the first.
[44] Oakeshott’s note: ‘E.g. A.E. Taylor, Faith of a Moralist Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St Andrews, 1926–28, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited), v. 2.’ Oakeshott also noted ‘Sorley, J.T.S,’ but no article by W.R. Sorley in the Journal of Theological Studies has been traced. Oakeshott may have had in mind W.R. Sorley, ‘Does Religion Need A Philosophy?,’ Hibbert Journal, 11 (1913), 563–78.
Belle Dame Notebook 1 (1928–1929)1 BD1[08] Sometimes asked myself why this ideal should appear always in the form of a woman. Besides the appeal of sex; the feeling that here is the true life of the ‘otherworld,’ free from the cares & anxieties, fears & inhibitions of life as I have known it & transformed into its perfect self.2 BD1[10] Solitude – divorce from the actual security of your desires actualized – induces life as a world of imagination, peopled by shadowy, ideal forms; memories assume an incredible value and importance. BD1[10] Beauty is what all men seek; some men so little that they are unconscious of the desire, some so passionately that they give up their whole lives to the pursuit.
[1] LSE 20/1. Soft cover, black, 15.5 cm × 10 cm, squared. Recto folios numbered 1–22. Autograph, ink and pencil. Dated: ‘1928–1929 / Michael Oakeshott.’ First page headed: ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’ [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. paper on “Religion & the World”,’ presumably a reference to M. Oakeshott, ‘Religion and the World’ (1929), in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, ed. T. Fuller (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 27–38.
BD1[12] This desire to live a contemporary life, to live in the present. The hitch, the desire to escape from the present – into the personal past of youth. Perhaps the main temptation of the present generation to irreligion is this desire to retain a state of existence – youth – & not to move from it. It is a religious irreligion because this state desired is a vital state, & it desires the past, not for its own sake, but for the sake of its lost vitality. BD1[13] Some writers have attempted to give an expression of their actual feelings experiences as they come to them; the flood of sensation, the dizzy abyss of love, the quality of being outside time & space which belongs to union with the beloved – this I dare not attempt. Instead I choose to offer a mere description of these experiences as they seem to have been caught up in my character & become myself. BD1[14] What is age? – When the past & the future alike rule us. What is youth? – When all is present. BD1[14–15] On Control. – Early I learnt that I had to deny myself much in order to win what I most wanted. Sometimes forbid myself to touch, to speak, even to see her. Cp. Ulysses bound to the mast. Sometimes I have gone too far, grabbed & lost all. But in the end I learnt to look upon this as not a negative & difficult control, but as a positive condition of life, like Cp. Aristotle – a pleasure, free activity; settled character – ease.
But that did not still my desire, or give rest to my longing. – That continued unabated. BD1[15] The feeling that my life began, began again with her – The days when I had not known her cease to exist. BD1[15] When one is in love one wishes above all to have her of whom one dreams aware that one dreams, but reason & common sense say what they like to the contrary. Yet I have hardly dared to provoke affection; she seemed a flower that to prick was to kill; & to lure her out of her own mysterious & charming world was like picking a wood flower to decorate a room. BD1[16] The excitement, which comes with the first word spoken in a relationship long secretly sustained, which concentrates all the past in the single moment of the present. BD1[16] Sometimes it seemed a kind of hubris to look at her, which would call down the swift revenge of jealous gods. And to defy the gods, the course always the most fascinating, in this case had no charm – for to defy them, though it might mean the winning of honour, the making of a self, would also mean the end of all possibility of seeing her again. So I dare not look, dare not touch, dare nothing save melt with longing.
BD1[16] Not conscious of a specific change of affections, or change of object for affection. They were forms of one beauty, modes of one existence; and with each step I seemed to have reached a fuller & more perfect form. The sensation was of unity, of the one; not of the changing many.3 BD1[17] 1929. Ideas for a poem – The Spring is late: Persephone, as she leaves the underworld, is clutched at by Pluto – who is moved for once by genuine love of her beauty – but, because he could not really sustain it, her garment comes away in his hand & Persephone appears on earth, though delayed, more resplendent than ever before, because naked. BD1[19] Arranging my books & thinking all the while how Céline will like to look through them & her happiness in finding this or that. Putting those in front which I know will delight her. BD1[20] The first experience has a directness which is never repeated; but it has also an inadequacy which may be improved upon.
[3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Plato, Bosanquet, p. 118. Shelley’s translation.’ ‘Shelley’s translation’ may refer to P.B. Shelley, The Banquet of Plato and Other Pieces Translated and Original (London, Paris, New York, and Melbourne: Cassell & Company, Limited, 1887), which includes a translation of Plato’s ‘Symposium.’
BD1[20] The garden of Merton Lodge as a symbol of the unattainable life & beauty. BD1[20] Search for the faintest sign of response; desire to be kissed even greater than the desire to kiss. ‘The knowledge of the lips’ is true knowledge. BD1[21] Striving to get away from our past – an impossible task, yet ‘life’ is nothing else but this. The past – like a tattoo mark – which is ineradicable & brands us as a sailor whatever walk of life we may follow. Our effort to escape is like a fine spray of water, directed at a mark which, no sooner does it start on its way, than the wind dissipates it, & all is lost. Cp. how certain words, expressions, gestures remind one of the past; likeness seen in the street to people & events I wished to forget. BD1[21] As I sat listening to them singing this song which I used to love & now hated, the whole burden of my past came upon me with such insistence that I cried out. How, how to get rid of it, how shall I form a contemporary life; how shall I throw off what ties me to what is no longer me? How can we live when each movement of mind & body is governed by a maniac inheritance? How one ‘form’ of La Belle Dame becomes intolerable, gradually, until at last we are forced to fly from it. Some will fly too early, some not at all; he understands life best who understands best the moment to fly.
BD1[21] From one point of view life is but an illustration, in the form & the language of sense, of an ‘eternal law’ – ‘So on our heels a fresh perfection treads’ – but it is, I think, more than merely that.4 To me, at least, it is more. For the so-called form & language of sense has a closeness & immediacy denied to all else, and when we dig down to it, there will be few of us who will not discover that the root of this ‘eternal law’ is not for them a root of sense – ‘first in beauty.’ This, at all events, if not our completest experience of the ‘law’, is our closest & most immediate experience.
[4] John Keats, Hyperion, Bk II ll. 212–14: ‘So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, / a power more strong in beauty, born of us / And fated to excel us.’
Belle Dame Notebook 2 (1929–January 1930)1 BD2[01] There is no burial for the past; different forms simply fade out of our lives.2 BD2[02] As when we emerge from thought & seem to hear the clock striking, but when we look at our watches we find that it has struck five minutes ago just as we were losing ourselves in thought. A sort of delayed reminiscence which retains its sensual character long after the real moment of experience is past. BD2[02] What we love is a projection of ourselves, an ideal, something we imagine & then attach to somebody & persuade ourselves that we have discovered & not made it.
[1] LSE 20/1. Soft cover, black, 13.5 cm × 8 cm. Ruled. Unnumbered. Autograph, ink and pencil. Title page: ‘M. Oakeshott / 1929–Jan. 1930 / Gonville & Caius College / Cambridge. / Die Schau sucht du, und was sie stellt / When me they fly, I am the wings.’ This notebook includes notes in German on Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, at fos. 24–5. [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Arrian, vii.27. Rydberg. On Hadrian.’ ‘Arrian’ may refer to The Anabasis of Alexander, tr. Chinnock, Bk VII ch. xxvii; ‘Rydberg’ may refer to Viktor Rydberg, Roman Days, tr. A.C. Clark (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1879).
BD2[03] Like someone who had read Jane Austen at school, but years after takes up Emma to find that she has grown along with him, & he has the uncanny feeling that he is pursued by a character which he can never outgrow. BD2[03] Note how the figure of La Belle Dame grows. The first vision – unconscious, unrealized – many later ones, & then the first fruit. Like a tree which blossoms for five seasons & then in the sixth bears fruit. Cp. Proust on first hearing a piece of music. – A l’ombre.3 BD2[04] No impression is wasted; & it requires many to produce a recognizable result. BD2[07] Our anger when we are reminded of our past selves. We have no love for these selves: how, then, should we love the correlative world in which they lived – their attachments & their loves? BD2[07] Pangs of unwarranted emotion, unreasonable anxieties & anticipations, an unaccountable sense of expectation, suppressed excitement, violent disappointments & jealousies, a trivial conversation becoming disproportionately significant, an absence absurdly disappointing, a report absurdly disquieting. [3] See M. Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Paris: Editions de la nouvelle revue française, 1920), p. 95.
BD2[08] An emotional experience is uncapturable at the moment of being intensely experienced. To be conscious of it & to master it as a whole we must wait for a later time. This ‘second-experience’ is as real & is certainly more lasting than the ‘first.’ In fact an experience is never complete until the second has been achieved. BD2[09] This intense attraction we call love lasts, in its intensity, for so short a time & is followed so frequently by a revulsion of feeling that we wonder whether it is worth all the attention we give it. Is it real? If the intensity could be permanent all would be well. If it is fleeting, what is its value? Cp. Keats’ odes – the progress from a passion for dead permanence to an understanding of living permanence in change. Identity – not mere absence of difference. BD2[10] The conversation of lovers hides a seething current of emotion. We talk of anything, say everything – but what we mean & are thinking. Talk of sex often hides physical desire. BD2[10] What is the bliss of love? It is the bliss of annihilation – love is a foretaste of death. In the moment of love one loses the burden of consciousness, & tastes beforehand the pleasure of extinction, & when it is other the taste of individual existence is bitter.
BD2[15] We fall in love with abstractions; like the coarse minds who distinguish only the dominant theme of an orchestral piece & have no ear for what is going on underneath. What we are looking for is a whole person – any complete self, if only we could find it, would be oneself. But we succeed in flitting between abstractions. BD2[17] Accessibility & inaccessibility; the open & the hidden; laughter & tears; tenderness & passion – love deals with contraries & unites them. BD2[20] There is no difference between friendship & love between men & women. BD2[26–27] Can we be in love with more than one person at once – not at the same moment, but yet not successively so that one has finally gone? We are on no surer ground than in the presence of an ‘old flame’ who has, for some reason or another, lost her charm for us. BD2[27] I distinguish clearly enough between those whom I am attracted to by appearance – almost an exclusively aesthetic attraction, & those with whom I am in love; but do I distinguish between those whose company I like & desire, whose conversation & mind attracts me, & those with whom I am in love?
BD2[30] What I hate is to feel that the first sudden moment of love & its first wild response is gone for ever – there can never be a ‘first’ again, only a ‘second’ & a ‘third.’ And how I envy those whose first is still before them, & those, above all, who have it now! BD2[30–31] Apart from anyone for whom you have special affection, would you rather be in the company of those who have an obvious feeling of affection for you, or those who show no such feeling? Whose conversation is the most living? I do not mean of course, anyone whose affection is demonstrative. BD2[33–34] The remoteness of the faces which I passed in the street, the unapproachableness of those whose lives I longed to share, became for me a kind of symbol of the inaccessibility of all beauty, the heedlessness of the universe, the silence which answered all questioning, the blankness which met all desire. BD2[34] Whenever we feel ourselves to be less ourselves by living than by dying, suicide is not self-murder, but merely self-homicide. BD2[34] Incredulity at finding grief supportable.
BD2[36] The imaginative importance of women. Men have always been willing to submerge the practical importance of women in the imaginative. We never look at them for themselves, but always in order to create from them a richer imaginative life for ourselves. Man the egoist. BD2[36] The stimulus of women. The fertilizing power of contact with women – in their natural difference of opinion. BD2[37] Sexual feeling towards men. Delight in physical characteristics. All the unreasonable intensities of love of women; the desire for companionship, disappointment in not meeting him where we expected him, delight at unexpected meeting, schemes for meeting, confusion at meeting, delight of touch, the sound of voice. Willingness to forgo everything for this companionship. Desire to penetrate that world which is his. Desire to spend onself & one’s substance unreasonably on his behalf. – Martin Lloyd. BD2[37] How civilized life prevents the full expression of emotion – their intensity must always be veiled. Only when the emotions are reciprocated in intensity is an expression of them unaccompanied with discomfort, disharmony, absurdity. BD2[39] Distinguish the aesthetic and the sexual.
BD2[40] The moments when love seems to wear the appearance of hate. BD2[42] Living in the belief of the imminence of the golden age; and then, one day, waking up to find eternity in the Now, the continuous present, the extemporary contemporary life. Desire for spring always; until Autumn is revealed as Spring. BD2[43] The hypersensitiveness for youth. When I go into a room-full of men, my eye seeks out those who are the young – destined never to grow old, immortal & untouched by the hand of age. And among women I seek also those that live in an eternal spring-time of life. BD2[45] Is love some dull ‘Evergreen’? And if it be not; shall it not fade with fading spring; hither with summer’s heat & winter’s frost? Love is a Lent lily which must die before Easter. BD2[47] It is the unity in multiplicity of affection that satisfies our desires – but where can we find that for more than a moment? It must be intense, it must be conscious – but if it be these it cannot last. BD2[47] The lover like Prometheus – having stolen the fire, he must suffer unremitting pain. There is no release.
BD2[47] The gloom of deep love: the Muses themselves approach it with a timid step. Sappho, ‘Ode to Anastasia.’ Landor, Pericles & Aspasia.4 BD2[48–49] Love & the complete indifference to other people which comes with it. The others disappear: we abandon ourselves completely, reputation, position, ambition – everything to love. And if we do not – then we do not love. The difficulty of loving like this. Moral considerations. Perhaps to abandon, to forget this person, who loves us but whom we do not love, will mean her death – she will sink back into a kind of dumb despair, the feeling of failure & inferiority will sweep over her & drown her soul. And yet, when love is elsewhere, what are we to do. If it were real love elsewhere there might be no problem – all would disappear in face of it. But our moral nature clings to us & will not allow us that free flight into the life of love. BD2[49] The feeling & desire of death in love. And the incongruity of it when looked at from the outside.5
[4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘W.S. Landor, Pericles and Aspasia (Boston: Roberts Bros, 1871), p. 41.’ [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (L. & V. Woolf, 1925), p. 54.’
BD2[51] The woman’s gift of making a world of her own wherever she is. BD2[51] The faithfulness, freeness & audacity of women. Absence of cynicism or scepticism. BD2[51] Is it simply a craving for intimacy? Or is intimacy something which kills itself. Is there perfect intimacy? The charm & satisfaction of an intimacy which is not intimate – reserve, privacy, individuality.
Belle Dame Notebook 3 (January–June 1930)1 BD3[02–03] Is there no progress? Is it just a passage from one vision to another? Are there no illusions destroyed so that they can never live again? Or must we be content with the dull monotony of a gallery of characters? BD3[04] Greece. The ideal & perfect age & civilization. Greek = perfect. What Greece means to us. Each of us endows Greece with the virtues which we desire to see flowering in the present. It has become almost a technical phrase (cp. Gothic = crude, vulgar). The imaginative value of Greece & ancient Greek civilization to subsequent ages – not dependent on detailed knowledge.2 BD3[05–06] Shelley’s ‘Alastor.’ The story of the poet who seeks ever what he finds to be unattainable, & when he finds it so, & because – dies. Solitude = unsatisfied desire, homelessness. [1] LSE 20/1. Soft cover, black, 13.5 cm × 8 cm. Ruled. Recto folios numbered 1–53. Autograph, ink and pencil. Dated: ‘M. Oakeshott / Gonville & Caius College / Cambridge / Jan. 1930 / to June 1930.’ This notebook includes quotations in German from the fragments of Novalis at fo. 40: see for example ‘Fragmente über Ethisches, Philosophisches, und Wissentschaftliches,’ in Sämmtliche Werke, 3 vols. (Florence and Leipzig: Eugene Diederichs, 1898), iii.157. [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Woolf, Jacob’s Room.’ Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (L. & V. Woolf, 1922).
See Shelley’s ‘Preface’ to the Poem. The Vision of the Desired comes in sleep – a dream vision, & the poet asks ‘Does the dark gate of death / Conduct to thy mysterious paradise, / O sleep?’ Cp. ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.’ Where the ‘unseen power’ is still sought in vain. And Epipsychidion, where the poet finds an at least momentary satisfaction.3 BD3[07] How much of the beauty of the world is bound up with desire? Sometimes desire seems to stand in the way, & we say ‘What beauty there would be on every hand if we did not kill it with desire.’ But could we see it if we did not desire? Is desire the eye by which we see beauty? BD3[07] ‘Black laughter’ – The African girl in the forest. The idea of there – far from civilization – making a home & living, free from the world, with her for the rest of one’s life.
[3] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude,’ in Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems (London: Baldwin, Craddock & Joy and Carpenter & Son, 1816), pp. 1–49; ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ in Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue, with Other Poems (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1819), pp. 87–91; Epipsychidion Verses Addressed To The Noble And Unfortunate Lady Emila V___ Now Imprisoned in The Convent of ____ (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1821).
BD3[08] The feeling – after a parting or some shattering disappointment or failure – of leading a posthumous life. And how this life turns into our true life.4 BD3[09] ‘Remove sight, association & contact & the passion of love is at an end.’ Epicurus, Fragment XVIII. But why remove them? BD3[09] ‘Solitude is a certain condition of a helpless man.’5 The craving to be alone: & to be alone & yet not alone is to have grown, to have extended our being & our world. BD3[10] The abstractions we fall in love with are not always qualities. Sometimes they are features. We know nothing of this girl but her eyes, of this but her lips, of this her hair. BD3[11] De Quincey’s Ann, whom he loved & lost & for whose face he looked into the face of women as long as he lived. [4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Keats, Letters.’ [5] See Long, Discourses of Epictetus, p. 228.
BD3[13] Self-sympathy – sympathy with a past self – is rarer than sympathy with others. Sympathy of our age with our youth. BD3[21] Do not drink of the cup of love that holds far more of bitter than of sweet – but we may escape love only by escaping life itself. BD3[22] Women who loved strangers and were deserted. Jason forsook Medea; Theseus forsook Ariadne & Dido died for love of Aeneas. Men are always strangers – seeking La Belle Dame, finding her nowhere, they leave behind them a trail of suffering. BD3[22] The pleasure of love is brief, its sorrow very long; and when we suffer its sorrow we wonder at ourselves for desiring its pleasure. BD3[23] To throw all the stages & problems of life – its development & decay – into a metaphor of love. Love & sex being the most universal expression of these problems. Cp. Donne & Eliot, & the way they give to the experience of love a new expression, freeing it from the associations of the past by using a new language.
BD3[23–24] The sense of physical decay & the intimations of mortality, of death, of age in youth – passing semen, & the feeling of weakness following copulation. Can the despair, which accompanies these experiences, be overcome – can we reach the state of mind of Keats’ ‘Ode to Autumn.’ BD3[25–26] The value Montaigne places upon youth. Considers himself old at 40. Looks back with longing to the ‘state full of lust, of prime & mirth.’ ‘The last fruit of health is voluptuousness.’ He likens old age to a state of small health & hates it because it imposes upon us a moderation which he refuses to call wisdom. BD3[26] Don Quixote. The story is played out in the lives of each of us. At the expense of Don Quixote, Sancho Panzo grows in each of us & comes to dominate us. BD3[27] As we go on knocking at the door of a house we now know to be empty, because the mind is unable to grasp at once the situation, because we do not know what to do next.
BD3[28] The times when we cannot keep pace with the desires that arise in us, & cannot distinguish them. BD3[29] Effort to get free from my past. First sought that freedom in marriage, but did not find it. Found myself still tied & bound. Some more radical escape must be found, because it is not mere freedom from a past that I desired, but freedom from a past that had never been mine, freedom from a frozen environment. To break free & be myself above all things. BD3[29] How to free myself from the necessity of keeping up the myth that I have not changed, that I have not changed, that I am what I was or what I appear to be – the necessity of appearing to be what I was – or never was. BD3[34–35] This is to be a history of myself – & a history of mankind in so far as I recapitulate that history in myself. The period of extreme youth & the loves & desire of that time. The period of early youth, & its loves & desires. Then the shadow-line – which must somehow be crossed, but not without pain & disenchantment. The books that this period has produced – Housman, Shropshire Lad. And what beyond this line? That I do not know; is it to be a kind of devitalized, posthumous life, – a posthumous life like we feel ourselves to be living after every great parting only more acute, & this time permanent?
Or is it to be a vita nuova? That is almost impossible to believe, for we seem to be leaving behind all that is worth calling life. Is it a mere death-in-life? BD3[36] The great metaphors for life. Love – D.H. Lawrence. The Sea – Conrad. Melville. Desert – Doughty.6 BD3[39] Feeling that, if youth is not already passed, at any rate part of it is gone, and life can only be reformed by reforming what is already behind – which is impossible. And to determine to live in the future in such a way as to cause no regrets avails nothing. That, indeed, is not impossible to accomplish, but it does nothing to still the frantic & vain regrets for what is gone. For it is myself which mislived the past, & a new self can never throw off that incubus – for it can never be entirely new. BD3[39] ‘Innocence’ if lost can never be regained.7 Anything else can be regained – but not this. And in so far as this appears what is most worth having, to lose it will appear least worth enduring.
[6] C.M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1888). [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Innocence in Romersholm.’ H. Ibsen, Romersholm: Schauspiel in vier Auszugen (Leipzig, Reclam, n.d. [1886?]).
But we may lose it before we know what it is, & find we have lost life. But have we? To believe this, is it not to be out of touch with life & its conditions?8 BD3[41–42] Gifts as a kind of sublimation of affection. How I feel with Céline – I must find something to give her every time I see her. A kind of assertion of affection. And a feeling that I owe so much to her that I must be constantly giving in order not to be receiving. But is not ‘giving & receiving’ an inadequate antithesis – what we really experience is a single experience of giving & receiving at once – ‘intercourse.’ And perhaps this constant assertion of affection is unpleasant for her? And yet she knows how to take a gift so as to make it not ‘giving & receiving’ but ‘intercourse.’ BD3[42] The flattest of all lives is fighting for an attainable end. Despair is perhaps the last & greatest of all emotional experiences – Death. If it were abolished? And we no longer lived in fear of it. Death is a part of life – the most vital part. BD3[43] The girls who are unusually gifted in love; they are unable to do without it, they live for love – & they love greatly, passionately & without reserve, forethought or anxiety. The mistresses of revolutionaries. They understand everything without knowing anything. Every problem springs from their senses, & every doubt is stilled by their senses. Men are children to them.
[8] Oakeshott’s note ‘Cf. James Thompson’ may refer to James Thompson (1700–48), Scottish poet.
BD3[44–45] May 16. 1930 Preparing lunch for Céline; waiting, watching from the window. And she not coming. Gradual realization of the groundlessness of my expectation as I laid the lunch. Waiting. And, then like a ship becalmed, sails flapping. The narcissi turned to ashes & the lilac to dust. Their scent no longer sweet, & poetry itself sour on my lips. The whole world about my ears because she did not come – when I had no reason to expect her. Waiting for her all the afternoon. The incredibility of her not coming. And the whole thing as a kind of symbol of the pursuit of La Belle Dame. BD3[47] Love and drunkenness cannot be concealed. BD3[48] Feeling that everyone who is not in love is in prison; feeling of freedom, of the emancipation from all the difficulties of life, the worries which the faces I pass in the street speak of. BD3[48] ‘A complicated love.’ The future unknown, the present almost intolerable whether because of joy or despair. BD3[49] Love & friendship. If friendship is what knows no crisis, no waxing & waning of passion, no intense despair or hopeless joy – is it possible between men & women?
BD3[49] We are not blind to her faults – we adore them. BD3[50] The adventure of that knight-errant, who thinking himself happy in the arms of a celestial nymph, found that he was the miserable slave of an infernal hag. BD3[51] Death rather than disillusion; death rather than the realization that what has been cannot be again or can no longer be. And why? Because, after all, the alternative is death of a more deadly sort – a living death. BD3[51] Parts of La Belle Dame to be written as dialogues, or a little play – a situation. Parts in verse. Parts in the form of reflections, parts as incidents in prose. BD3[52] Stories of women who disappear on the day when they are to be married.9 BD3[53] Nature drives us to other living embraces; it cannot satisfy, it only urges us to what can satisfy. [9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Philostratus, Apollonius, IV.’ This section of Philostratus contains several stories about marriage: see The Life of Apollonius, Bk IV chs xi, xxv, and xlv.
In love there is both life and death. BD3[53] The five degrees of love— Visus, colloquium, convictus, oscula, tactus. Lucian. Sight, conversation, association, kisses, touch. But sometimes – non oculi sed mens videt.10 – Men & women fall in love with what they have never seen, only imagined or heard of. Is this not universally true?
[10] Oakeshott appears to have been reading R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1904 [1621]), iii.72– 3, where the Latin words visus, colloquium, convictus, oscula, tactus (ascribed to Lucian) and the phrase non oculi sed mens videt all occur.
Belle Dame Notebook 4 (June–December 1930)1 BD4[01] What is one more to one who has so many lovers offering her their devotion? If I ask something in return, she may not, perhaps cannot, give it. And, if I ask nothing, I am scarcely in love. The knowledge that she has lovers enough makes me feel – not hopeless, fainthearted – but an intruder. Were she to choose me all would be well, but if I choose her I am become a nuisance. And yet she may be waiting for me to ‘choose’ her. BD4[01] Why not be Epicurean – & seek not possessions but enjoyment? But without seeking possession we must seek more than a mere cras amat. I do not desire to possess, but there is no enjoyment without reciprocation – only desire & despair.
[1] LSE 20/1. Soft cover, dark green, metal ring binding, 12 cm × 8 cm. Squared. Recto folios numbered 1–34. Autograph, ink. Dated: ‘M. Oakeshott / Gonville & Caius College / Cambridge. / June 1930.–Dec. 1930.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 25, G. Komai, Fuji from Hampstead Heath (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1925); 30–1, Sir A.R. Fraser, Rose Anstey (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930); 34, L. Tolstoy, Childhood Boyhood and Youth, tr. C.J. Hogarth (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd; New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1912).
BD4[04] You love like a woman – longing to be compromised, desiring only to spend, to give, to commit yourself without committing him – you love like Heloise. BD4[07] C. as the archetype – appearing & reappearing through the book, & on each appearance changed & glorified. Each time I meet her she has grown & means more than she meant before. BD4[07] She came to me like the wind which stirs in the trees after a thunderstorm, and touched my disconsolate leaves to life once more, bending me like a willow tree is bent in summer, and whispering as the wind whispers. BD4[08–09] Jealousy & selfishness in love – Jealousy is usually considered a gross perversion of love. But there is a desire for exclusiveness, a desire to hide that which we love & to keep it to ourselves which is not purely selfish & it applies equally to a person or a thing that we love – a person or a place, a book, a piece of music, a play etc.: – It is the feeling that the person which other people will see in her whom we love is not the person we love & we fear being reminded of this. It appears to us a kind of sacrilege for something we love to be misunderstood & we feel unable to expose it wantonly to the possibility of being misunderstood. We cannot, in consequence, tell some people of the books we like, we hide them from them when they visit us, we lie about the delight a place has given us – we do all we can to cover up our real feelings – we will even go to the length of saying that we dislike that which has enchanted us &
hate that which we love. – It is ‘saying what we mean’ – for what we mean is that all this is too precious to us for us to allow it to be misunderstood or perverted. BD4[10] How difficult it is to throw off a past of love. To have loved once is to leave behind one a past we shall not easily shake off. Something will remind us of her: a likeness seen in the street; the step of someone who walks for an instant in front of us; – and the whole past becomes alive once more, there is a resurrection of what was buried but never dead. We may even hate what we have loved, but if we have ever loved we shall never be entirely free from the possibility of those intense moments coming to life again – past selves haunt us like our shadows & who shall run the race with his shadow? BD4[11–12] The experience of complete newness, unbelievable freshness – which must be the feeling at the back of the notion of being born again. To walk abroad in the fields at dawn, to see the dew on the grass, to see virgin & untrodden snow in the dawn of a frosty day, to dress after a bathe & feel one’s skin tight beneath one’s clothes, to rise from one’s bed refreshed and made new from intercourse with a lover – these all give that sensation of new birth which is one of the most precious life offers. It is to be had also in art, where the artist passes the scene through his mind and it becomes new & almost incredible to us. And in thought, when we dig & dig & come, at last, upon a beginning which clothes the whole argument with radiance. It is, perhaps, this sensation of newness which we get when we hear or see anything for the first time, & that is why the first time can never be repeated or replaced, no matter what depth of delight future & prolonged intercourse may
bring. To live a life of these first sensations is the dream of every artist, the redemption of the world. BD4[12] The elements – earth, air & water, these will always remain the elements, so far as life is concerned, no matter what they are resolved into by science. They, in themselves, offer a complete life. To lie & let the earth know you – carnally; to leap & let the air know you – carnally; to swim & let the water know you – carnally. To give oneself to the elements. It is all sex; & sex is nothing but this. BD4[13] There is a love to which happiness belongs & harmony – when to be in each other’s company is unbroken satisfaction. And there is a love which a woman may have for a man who is cruel to her, who is hard, relentless, selfish, destructive; or what a man may have or a woman who is selfish. This love, in its essence, is the greater. And where it exists without these circumstances, where happiness is not denied but is not necessary, the greatest of all love exists. For the first love thrives on submission & domination, thrives on half-men & half-women. And the second, though it is a war, offers something more complete & less servile. BD4[14] That Southern preoccupation with the relations of men & women & the most important relations of life; the delight in love & in seeing a woman enveloped in the spell of a man, or a man abandoning himself to a woman – & all this is denied, fled from by the ‘moderate’ English.
BD4[15] She had reached that brief period in her life which it is possible only to describe as a time of blossom. When to wake in the morning is to feel an inrush of sensetions, grave & gay; and to sleep at night is to be lapped with dreams as real to us as our waking moments. Every sense is alive, every moment a moment of intensest life. Soon it is over – with most it is over before they have realized its possibilities. And life dies away to its summer. BD4[16] Oh! If only I knew what I wanted! I lie back in my chair, & my mind is filled with flitting desires which will not, cannot blend. I pass from one to another, but without hope either of fulfilment or of release. My mind is a picture without a design; a chaos of warring desires. I know what I want. I want freedom. But since I can only grope for freedom blindly, not recognizing it when it appears, passing it closely but ignorantly by, I cannot be said to know what I want. I want merely all that I have not got – & until that is become more explicit, how can I find any release or any fulfilment? My life seems to be filled with duties which I do not recognize but I follow, with a weary round of frustration. Nothing I have do I want; everything I lack I desire. Oh! That I could recognize something I long for among the things that I have! BD4[18] That drying up of enthusiasm, that listless refusal of interest, that closing up of the whole self, shutting the doors of sympathy & understanding which the presence brings of one we have once loved but now no longer love. Here, here if anywhere in the universe is death – a contradiction of all that life means & should realize. This shutting of the self will take place always in the presence of people to whom we cannot show ourselves – to
parents, to blood-relations & to the world – but nothing can equal the bitterness, the completeness of that closure when the cause of it is the one to whom we have shown all – to a lover. BD4[19] Moments of real happiness are very few – to awake from a conversation & to find oneself united with another mind, to lie with a woman one loves & lose oneself to her – these perhaps are the happiest moments. And how few! Happiness is somehow a combination of solitude & society; of society which belongs so much to ourselves that it is solitude; of solitude which is so magnificently and variously peopled that it is a society. Happiness is to possess one self, not the narrow self which we can possess by flying the world, but the real self which we can possess only by becoming the world. Happiness is to be with ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ – & that no man may do.2 BD4[20] ‘How amazing are those moments when we really possess our possessions.’3 Never to understand what one has escaped in an unrequited affection – that is the secret character of youth. BD4[23] Those days, moments even, when we feel that life was made for them only, is complete in them, and to repeat, to go on, is to enter [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, on closing up the gap between men and women.’ [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘L.P. Smith, Afterthoughts (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1931).’ For Oakeshott’s review see SW, iii.73–5.
an imperfect world once more, to return from completeness to incompleteness. But to try and live one’s whole life for the sake of such moments? What then? An intensity it is impossible to sustain. Life then must be divided & the great part becomes a living death – a posthumous life, wretched & meaningless. And our days are spent seeking an opportunity to rekindle the fire; clutching at every relationship which appears to have the seeds of blossom in it – & suffering always disappointment. BD4[24] The necessity of suffering loss before our eyes are opened to what we really desire & really seek; the growth of estrangement – the mistaken desire for merely another love – the revelation that what we desire is ourselves completed.4 BD4[26] La Belle Dame, like some lovely, inaccessible Geisha. BD4[28] It was as if a fire, long laid, had been lighted. BD4[28] ‘Death will annihilate love. Love is neither deep nor sweet, if it does not know this, and the kindness of it.’5
[4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘P. Romanov, Without Cherry Blossom and Other Stories, tr. L. Zarine (London: Ernest Benn, 1930), p. 182.’ [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Sir A.R. Fraser, Flower Phantoms (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926).’
We speak of love & the Absolute. But love is a wild war of finite personalities. There is nothing absolute in it. It is, indeed, the closest to reality we can get; but it is too full of contradictions to last. It also must lose its life to gain it. BD4[29] ‘To Jean’s Breasts’ Loose now thy dress, dear Jean, And loose thy honey hair, And let those breasts be seen, That grow and blossom there. And let me lay my head, Where it has longed to lie, In that narcissus-bed. BD4[32] The morbid longing to recover an innocence which every human relationship seems to contaminate, & a liberty which every human attachment seems to restrict. BD4[32–33] To love without limit, to abandon oneself completely & demand from oneself everything – this seems to be the least that love can & must be. For it appears the only hope of bliss, the only possibility of peace. But to follow such a purpose as this, to follow it seriously & without reserve, appears to involve me in so much misery & misunderstanding, so many impossible positions, so many inextricable contradictions – for to achieve it is, at once, to have found it unsatisfying. Somehow we must learn how ‘to shun the heaven which leads men to this hell.’ A heaven which leads to a hell is a mistaken heaven, an ideal which must perish when it is attained is no ideal. And yet how inviting, how impossibly attractive, is this vision of love!
Belle Dame Notebook 5 (December 1930–April 1931)1 BD5[02–04] Literature has always left out a part of ‘life.’ The ‘life’ of literature has always been an abstraction. Attempts have, indeed, been made to alter all that: but the result has been ‘realism,’ ‘representationism’ that is, the negation of art. But exactly what has been left out – that has often changed. A large body of writers in the 18th & 19th Centuries left out everything that was obviously physical. But against this there has recently been a revolt. But the revolutionaries, no less than their predecessors, deal with abstractions – at least, those among them who know their business do so. D.H. Lawrence, for example, does not abstract the non-physical, he abstracts from life what appears to him the most important part of life. His people follow no calling or trade, they are not concerned to eat & drink, they make no money – but they live. We hear little or nothing of their professions – much of their loves, their feelings, their desires, hopes & fears. His schoolmistresses do not teach, his miners do not mine. His ‘world,’ in short, is an ‘other-world.’ [1] LSE 20/1. Soft cover, blue, metal ring binding, 10.5 cm × 6.5 cm. Squared. Unnumbered. Autograph, ink and pencil. Dated: ‘M. Oakeshott / December 1930 / to / April 1931.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fos. 8–9, Lady Murasaki, The Sacred Tree: Being the Second Part of the ‘Tale of Genji,’ tr. A. Waley (London: Allen & Unwin, 1927); 18–19, Lady Murasaki, A Wreath of Cloud; Being the Third Part of ‘The Tale of Genji,’ tr. A. Waley (London: Allen & Unwin, 1927); 36, notes in French on François de la Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1665).
But what is the result when we attempt to live such a life – when we count this world well lost for love, when we ignore our profession or neglect our career? Is it mere foolishness, an attempt to reduce life to art, no less preposterous than the attempt to reduce art to life? Or what? It is this ‘life’ which I live; the other, how little it means; how small is the actual sum of attention I give it. BD5[07] Sex as predominant in life – a sexless life being a living death. Sexual activity comprising the symbol & the actuality of life. Age & impotence – death. The man who follows this to the end: in age & impotence turns to homosexuality: a eunuch. BD5[10–11] The point in the course of each love affair in which any prolonged separation or lack of news produces the imagination of death. This imagination grows; until it almost begins to dominate the actual presence of she whom I love. So that when she is present I begin to imagine what life would be were she dead, to picture to myself the waste of life, the desert of existence without her, & to imagine by what philosophy, by what access of courage or insensitiveness I could go on living at all. This somehow heightened with C., because I know that she has been near to dying, & carries about with her some of the seeds of death. Should I have heard from her sister had she died? Or will her death leave only a silence which will never break until I break it? BD5[12] When we try to invade the integrity of those with whom we are passionately in love, when we attempt to tear away the
inaccessibility with which she seems to be clothed, do we not merely exchange a life full of contemplative delights, for one of torture, disenchantment & despair? And, even so, is not this torture happiness & this despair inseparable from all love? BD5[13] Like a comet, flashing its fiery way through space, & caught by the charms of the sun & lured from its path, lured even into the solar system & there held prisoner. BD5[13] As if some comet, passing close to our world, were to absorb the azote from our air & leave us an atmosphere so rich in oxygen that life would end in a few hours of delusions, intoxication & happiness – a happiness impossible to imagine, for it would be shared by all alike. BD5[14] As if his lost light were restored to Jupiter by some cosmic crash, & we, lighted by two suns, should enjoy continuous day. BD5[14] As if the thin crust of the earth’s surface had become suddenly too thin to contain & shield us from the incandescent world beneath, which, breaking through, swallowed us instantly in a white-hot death, too sudden to be feared, too immense to be imagined, too tremendous to be enjoyed.
BD5[15] Life as the beloved: the love of life, fear, hate, jealousy, despair, neglect, coldness, passion; the sexual relationship with life. To abandon her is to abandon oneself. Suicide. To be abandoned by life. BD5[17] To have time for the things we really enjoy – flowers, autumn leaves, the sky, all those day-to-day changes & wonders that a single year brings forth. Each person has his ‘season.’ BD5[18] The feeling that happiness is to be found only in the society of a few indispensable friends. BD5[19] How, when we become acquainted with some lovely creature, we imagine ourselves spending hours of enchanted bliss, not with her, but with someone in every respect exactly like her. BD5[20] Love begins with the assertion of a personality, an unsatisfied desire; it leads to the abandonment of that personality, but at the same time it assumes the continuous existence of the personality. In love we seek to lose ourselves in another: but ourselves & the other must always remain distinct.
BD5[21–22] We read in intimate letters & autobiographies of the remorse & torture suffered in later life by men who have spent their youth, or a period of it, in violence & fornication, lawless living, drunkenness, even murder – we read of such remorse in the Confessions of Tolstoy, for example. But what of the more subtle remorse, felt by a man who looks back upon an almost unconscious youth – years, which can never recover, passed in blindness, deafness, & inconsequence? And such years, not less than those spent in violence & lawlessness, carry their effects into later life. Perhaps we married during those years, or chose our profession, or undertook some obligation which still binds us. And we are not less lost & haunted than if our youth had been an orgy of excesses – indeed, we are more lost, more subject to a fruitless quenchless remorse than the greatest sinner imaginable. BD5[22] The envy of the old who have no harvest of youth for the young who have merely a harvest of wild oats. BD5[23] The old doctrine – live in such a way as to make you always fit for death. But this does not explain death; or put it in its place. It puts it outside life & makes life conform to this external principle. BD5[27] The construction of a scene or a conversation in advance. How everything falls into its place. Whatever is said is understood. But when we come to the scene itself; – all is different. That which we had planned to do & to say cannot be done or said. The person
who we have met is not the person we have imagined: for she whom we imagined was a dream – was ourselves. This takes place to a lesser extent when persons are not concerned. The actual accomplishment or experience falls short of what we had imagined. BD5[28] The sleeplessness of love cannot be compared with that of jealousy or disappointment.
Secularism (c.1930)1 SC[01] Secularism = seeking human improvement by material means alone. Morality based solely on the well-being of mankind in the present life. SC[02] ‘Kingdom’ = an exclusive territory. This is misleading. ‘Kingdom’ = a rule, a way of life, not a locus of life. SC[02] Christianity spiritual, not temporal. This not true of primitive Christianity: it was temporal in the sense of belonging to the next age. SC[03] The world – ‘the lust of the flesh & the pride of life’ – who is John writing to?2 Not Jesus – this is a new conception of the world – not temporal, but moral. Foreign to the Jewish use. Church at Ephesus?
[1] LSE 2/4/5. Soft cover, blue, exercise book, 22 cm × 14 cm. Ruled. Unnumbered. Autograph, ink and pencil. Title page: ‘SECULARISM.,’ undated. [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘1 John 2:15–17.’
SC[03] What is life without what one desires? SC[03] What is the forbidden world? SC[03] Something must be said about the nature of God = what we desire. & Nature of Religion = the desire of communion with what we desire; God.3 SC[04] Secularism. Taken to mean a love of the finite world & all that goes with it for its own sake. The material world. But the love of this ‘world’ – material things, wealth etc: is not anti-religious because these things are material in the moral sense (but because they are material in the physical sense – mere abstractions) but because attachment to them involves a belief in progress, setting our hopes upon the future, & not satisfying them in the present – Evolution. SC[04] The idea of the Separation of Christians from the world most developed in 4th Gospel.4 [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See ‘D’ Society Paper on “Deity.”’ [4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘W. Hobhouse, The Church and the World in Idea and in History Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the year 1909 on the Foundation of the Late Rev. John Bampton, M.A., Canon of Salisbury (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1910), p. 22.’
SC[04] Effect of abandoning the belief of the immediate parousia. Development of church organization. Drawing together of the church & the world. More settled character of Christian society – children etc.5 SC[04] ‘The world’ is not ‘the secular power’ for that is a pure abstraction and exists nowhere. SC[05] Christianity & Civilization The only world we have is this world, & it is the only Christian world – to separate a part of it off & call it Christian, is to condemn religion to imprisonment in abstraction, & to make Christianity a fiction.6 SC[05] ‘The chief rival to Christianity is secularism.’7 If we knew what secularism is, we should know what Christianity is & vice versa. So in considering this subject, we may hope to get some clearer view of what both are: we shall be clear on the one only by being [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Hobhouse, The Church, p. 364.’ [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See end of “Religion and the Moral Life,” in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, pp. 39–45’. [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘W.R. Inge, Outspoken Essays (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1919), p. 33.’
clear on the other. We shall not see the whole of religion by contrasting it with the ‘world’; but an important aspect of it. SC[05] Do not imagine that this is an easy gospel with little to renounce & less to adhere to. There is plenty to renounce – & it is what we often value most; what is most ingrained in our senescent way of life. SC[06] To stumble at the entrance of life. SC[06] Humanity But it is humanity which dies. Much modern ‘humanism’ is the worship of this perishing humanity. Show difference between humanism and otherworldliness. SC[06] There is no other world.8 SC[06] Clogging Anglo-Saxon prosperity.
[8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 9.’
SC[06] The danger of a derivative, non-contemporary life.9 SC[06] The view of the Last Judgment which goes with ‘humanism’ – cumulative; not automatic. SC[07] Morality & the World Ecclesiasticism always conservative. Religion always revolutionary. SC[08] There is nothing secular except sin. Yet what is sin? It was the old view that there was nothing sinful except secularity & we get no further by transposing the proposition. E.g. To dance was sin & it was ‘worldly.’10 SC[09] Religion to the Greek was made at home in his world.11 Not the ‘natural’ world only, but society. ‘The religion of the Greeks was the presupposition and bond of their political life.’12 [9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Conrad, Lord Jim.’ [10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Goethe, Faust, 279.’ [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lowes Dickinson, p. 4 sq.’ See G. Lowes Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, 5th edn (London: Methuen & Co., 1906). [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, p. 11.’
Christianity cut itself off from the normal life of the ‘the world’ at the beginning for reasons of history (the end of the age), later for reasons of morality (evil & good), but I do not think it inherent in its nature to be so cut off, or to be cut off in exactly these ways. The new synthesis of Christianity with civilization – which is a fact however little we recognize it – will not mean the destruction of Christianity. It is an illusion that it has ever been so cut off. Yet a fatal illusion, for it has bred a solitary theology which knows nothing of the learning of its contemporaries, & an abstract ‘religion’ knowing nothing of the life of its contemporaries. SC[10] ‘The Christian is that within us that is not ourselves but Christ in us.’13 Cp. the desire for another society, different, separate – the Kingdom of Heaven wholly separated from what we now know. A discontinuous personality & universe, the aloofness of religion from the world is regarded as mere religious indigence. God is something whole, complete in itself, a contrast to the world. SC[10–11] Introduction §1. I wish to try & carry an old subject a little further than it has been carried. No originality: desire to speak for the present. ‘Il
[13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Barth, p. 273.’ Possibly K. Barth, The Christian Life, tr. S.J. McNab (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1930).
faut être absolument moderne.’14 Limitations of the view from this standpoint. But it may help. I can see, also, that whatever I say about religion & the world will involve views on many other subjects – Nature of religion, future life, kingdom of heaven, etc. – but while I cannot avoid these implications, I must avoid them in so far as they have immediate bearing on the subject in hand – This shows us how intimately related are all the topics of a theology. Our ideas in one affect those on another, & we are constructing a whole theology every time we build up our ideas on one topic. See ‘D’ Society papers. §2. Two facts stand out. (i) Religion implies some standing over against. (ii) The particular standing over against which we are told it implies today does not satisfy us! SC[11] Why all the fuss & pother about Christianity, why cannot we let the thing go, as others have done before? Because it is an illusion that we can let it go. It is our civilization, our world & environment, our selves. We cannot escape it. We deny part of it only on the assumption of another part. It is the ‘medium’ through which all else reaches us & in which all else is embedded. It is that – & more. If Christianity were for us escapable, we should long ago have escaped from it.
[14] See A. Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer (Brussells: M.-J. Poot et compagnie, 1873), ‘Adieu,’ and cp. p. 293, below.
SC[11] Historicism & cosmopolitanism – worldliness We listen to other people instead of thinking for ourselves. We appropriate but do not enjoy or use, we watch other people & forget that without action life perishes. SC[11] Moral notion of worldliness – i.e. matter = evil etc. Not Jewish & primitive Christian; Eastern in origin & only percolated gradually into medieval Christianity. SC[12] Distinguish my religion from humanism – progress. SC[12] It may be said that this ‘world’ is a very academic temptation – one which has little here for the ordinary man – & yet is it so? Show how our whole life is usually governed by this ‘world’ & its conventions – how when courage departs it swallows us up, when energy dies, it offers us rest, when sincerity is abandoned, it rules us, it is the attitude which we of the West naturally assume unless we assume any other. SC[13] ‘The characteristic feature of the age was not irreligion (the term would be too strong) but the religious indifference of the masses.’15 [15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Halévy, p. 380.’ Possibly a reference to E. Halévy, History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, tr. E.I Watkin,
It is clear that the ‘religion’ opposed to this secularism is Puritanism, & not religion, & consequently this secularism is not that which opposes religion. SC[13] ‘Living like gypsies a life ignorant alike of permanence & stability, living, so speak, not on the products of civilization but upon the slender fruits of nature.’ The Early Christians literally ‘temporized.’ SC[14] We easily recognize the rights of other personalities & deplore the tragedies which result from tampering with them.16 But what of the results of tampering with our own? SC[14] The notion of posterity. When we speak of such & such an age, or such & such a people or person not contributing to civilization, we speak in an irreligious or non-religious manner. Cp. Inge on progress. SC[14] ‘Pot-hunting’ is the world.
6 vols. (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1931–2), but the quotation has not been traced. [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Hebbel.’ Possibly Christian Friedrich Hebbel (1813–63), German poet and dramatist.
SC[14] Whatever we say about the world, implies an idea of God; & just as everyone has his idea of God, so every man has his view of what the world is which stands over against God. SC[14] The doctrine of the world must necessarily be largely negative – for the world is what is to be negatived, denied, despised, escaped. SC[15] This is not a worship of what is transient – this passing sub-lunar life – it is an attachment to what is eternal – for what is actually achieved, enjoyed, won is eternal because it belongs neither to the past nor to the future but to a permanent present, a present at least as permanent as ourselves.17 SC[15] Becoming as little children Capacity of children for living in the present, so that life in company with them has neither hopes nor regrets. It is the life of the birds. SC[15] Living in the present – the difference between mere inconsequent flitting from one occupation indifferently pursued to the next as lazily followed – the present for the sake of the present – & the present for the sake of life, for the sake of freedom. [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Atkins, p. 104 top.’ Not traced.
SC[16] This is not a purely emotional religion – no religion which is wholly connected with a whole man is merely emotional, though of course it is personal in the fullest sense. SC[16] Secularism is on all hands acclaimed the enemy which religion in England to-day has most to fear, but I have seen little consideration of the question what that secularism really is? Conventional view usually assumed.18 SC[17] Religion is always the highest which any individual or society knows. What matters is not so much whether it is better or worse, more primitive or more developed – for these are things which do not occur to the religious man – but whether it is the highest, whether it does actually make him at home in his world. And in order for religion to do this it must change – in order to remain the same it must change. SC[18] If the world is what the middle ages thought it does not stand over against our higher self absolutely. Always a conflict of which we can never permanently rid ourselves. Cp. Keats on ‘the world’ & retirement from the world.19 [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Halévy.’ [19] Oakeshott’s note: ‘in Spirit of Man.’ Robert Bridges (ed.), The Spirit of Man An Anthology in English & French from the Philosophers & Poets made by the Poet Laureate in 1915 & dedicated by gracious permission to His Majesty The King (London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras:
It gives us two souls – M. Arnold, Faust. Our conception of the world must be something which will not dissipate our energies or divide our powers. SC[18] Religion makes us at home in this world, this life: & this may not mean that it will make us at home anywhere else. It is conditioned by this life. E.g. an Englishman is not at home in China. And a cosmopolitan is at home nowhere. SC[18] Eternal life – the religious life – where the extemporary & the contemporary meet & are one. SC[19] Integrity Whole secret of true education lies in the avoidance of this dichotomy or division of the child’s self…So that the child grows up a single self. SC[26] Preface. Primitive Christianity. Medieval Christianity. Modern Christianity.
}
More or less. See Hutton.
Longmans Green & Co, 1916), contains a section on ‘Retirement’ and selections from a number of poems by John Keats.
20
Yet we are not satisfied with that: a religion which is the mere denial of that is nothing to us. Examine the nature of the religion opposite to this – it is an abstraction – the soul. So then we must start again. But will we be producing Christianity in this way? Two changes so far – why not a third? Christianity as this given – this is impossible. There is no given save the whole.
[20] Possibly Richard Holt Hutton (1826–97), journalist and religious writer.
Belle Dame Notebook 6 (March–June 1931)1 BD6[03] To those whose life is spent in love, death is a sweet sleep, passions consummation. Love & death explain one another: apart, life is without meaning. BD6[05] To be in love with love is to be in love with ‘wandering shadows.’ To be in love is to have found ‘the shadow of stability.’ BD6[07–08] 22/4/31 Like everyone else, I find myself full of contradictions. For example: how much I desire to dominate those with whom I come into contact, how brutally do I wish to deprive them of themselves, eat them up & include them in myself altogether – & on the other hand, how little can I justify to myself this desire, how foreign it is to some of my moods & all my principles. Like some others, also, [1] LSE 20/1. Soft cover, dark green, metal ring binding, 13.5 cm × 9 cm. Squared. Unnumbered. Autograph, ink. Dated: ‘Michael Oakeshott / March 1931.–June 1931.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 1, notes in French on la Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales; 29, 32, notes in French on A. de Vigny, Journal d’un poète, ed. L. Ratisbonne (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1867); 33, quotations in French from de Musset, La confession.
I try to resolve these contradictions, I try to curb what I dislike in myself, which (of course) is not always, perhaps ever, what other people dislike or what the world dislikes – this is no attempt at moral reformation. But, at the expense of one impulse I try to develop another which I like better. Others, however, attempt no such work upon themselves. Either their impulses are so strong that it were vain to attempt it, or having attempted it, they have found themselves to fail so constantly that they have abandoned it altogether. D.H. Lawrence, for example, again & again shows himself not as a unity of resolved contradictions, but as a seething mass of unresolved contradictions, impulses which deny one another, desires which oppose one another. This may be ‘honesty,’ an attempt to give us himself as he is, or it may be mere inability to give to himself a unity in which these contradictions are resolved, simply evidence of the overmastering strength of his impulses. But, in any case, why should we attempt to unify our selves? What is it bids us balance our impulses against one another? The man who knows himself best, knows that, even if he has spent the greater part of his life in this attempt, he has succeeded only because his impulses have with age became less insistent or he has failed altogether. BD6[09] 23/4/31 Love is the most selfish thing on earth. How we imagine the beloved to be set about with enemies – that we may protect her. Ill, that we may nurse her; poor, that we may spend for her; unhappy, that we may comfort her; slighted, that we may fight for her; lonely, that we may be a comrade to her. In short, unsatisfied, – that we may love her.
BD6[09] How, when we are in love, the ordinary business of life seems to go on independently of ourselves, or at times is merely transformed into material for our imaginations. Everything is referred to her whom we love, every letter we open we expect to be hers, every footstep, every knock at the door, the sound of every voice. She becomes the world, & the world is well lost in her. BD6[11] Must it fail? Is it absolutely impossible to find a relationship with another which satisfies? Must we always & inevitably & not merely by chance or incompetence – fall short of unity? Yes; if we ask too much, if we ask that all relationship should be what any is at its highest moments, or that any can be for more than a moment what it is at its intensest moments, if we ask this, we are bound inevitably to be disappointed. And if we expect to find another who will understand & who knows how to accept the whole of ourselves which we want to give – there again, we shall be disappointed, probably. O Céline; why did I not meet you before! BD6[12] ‘The first thing one must make up one’s mind to is that we will not be loved in the same way as we love’; – few, few, if any, will do that for us. But can we be satisfied with any other love; can we understand any other? And if we find ourselves asking for something – is it not a sign that our love is withering? And if we find ourselves asking for something which is never given, how difficult it is to understand that what is given is love. For, in love more than in anything else, we understand only that which we have imagined or experienced, we want what we can give. For our very giving
is a sign that we are seeking; & what we give, we give because it is what we desire most to have given us. And when, not this, but something else is given us, how difficult it is to recognize what is given as love. And, indeed, is it love? BD6[14] How is it possible to go on living conscious all the while of the gulf which separates my life from what I desire it to be? And how the imagination fails when I try to contemplate the waste of life which lies in the future: life & disappointment made one & indivisible. BD6[15–16] How I long for her whom I love to be ugly, deformed, to lose her beauty, to become, indeed, not even ugly, but to lose all outward charm & attraction. And why? So as to test my love? But it needs no testing. So that the world shall know that my love is really love & not the passion which beauty provokes, the intoxication of what is fair? But what do I care for the world’s thoughts & opinions? Why, then? Because I believe that with this transformation might come a freer love, a love less tramelled with what is not love, less confused with what is not itself. A less limited, less obscure, clearer & more extreme love. Not a love less burdened with desire, not in that sense poorer; but poorer in the sense of being unadulterated with what is not love itself, absolute, separate & self-complete. For, what have I now which promotes, which provokes, fosters, educates this unadulterated love? What have I which points & leads me away from the attraction of what is beautiful, the longing for what is fair? Yes, but I have something: & it is hard. For I love her who loves me not, a love without hope or prospect of
satisfaction, a love which has had refined from it any tendency or instinct to ask for something in return. Oh! But I am hiding my desires from myself. This is why I want her to be ugly & deformed – so that she should be mine, alone & utterly. BD6[16] Must, do love & jealousy always go together? Is one the complement, the implication, the part of the other? Or are love & jealousy parts of what is greater than either? Or are they contradictions, contraries? Are we jealous in proportion to our love? Or is it a modification of love? BD6[17] Feeling that I must reserve of my physical, sexual resources for that impossible event – when she whom I love comes to me. Feeling that I have worked out the necessity in me of finding satisfaction in what falls short of perfection, & henceforth reserve myself only for La Belle Dame sans merci – who can never come. Perversion, yes! But who is not perverted? Where is the normal sexual life? BD6[18] Turn it all into an autobiography. Marriage & the discovery that what I wanted was something that marriage had not given me, something more dangerous, uncertain, alive. Seeing in marriage just that giving in to physical necessity, of taking a lower satisfaction in place of a higher. And finding in this relationship with C. the shadow of what is wanted, & at the same time the impossibility of ever achieving it. Hopeless, frustrated, inaccessible love.
BD6[19] The days when we are intensely, exclusively in love. Our feet scarcely touch the ground; it is something that belongs almost alone to adolescence. Or, it is as if our adolescence had followed us & become like a renewal of spring in the midst of summer. BD6[19] There is nothing to compare with the torture of seeing one with whom we have been intimate false to the idea we had formed of her. BD6[19] Feeling at the intense moment of love that life, even if in the future it had something comparable to this to offer, cannot be endured longer. This, this is the moment to die & so become felix opportunitate mortis. Life, after this, can only be posthumous. BD6[20] Love is found more often & more intensely in the pensive & the melancholy than in the lively and active. BD6[20] Love is sudden, eager, keen, exclusive & filled with jealousy. BD6[21–27] C. has been here this morning, and we have talked for an hour about our relationship. And, as we talked, I became more & more aware that somehow it must all end. But how & when? And then there flashed before me what a barren wilderness life without
her would be. Underneath my consciousness I have known that everything I have done & everything I possess was done for her & valued for her. If she were to go, with her would go all the happiness of spring & summer, all the brightness of the sun & the beauty of the night. With her would go every delight I have in the flowers in my garden. For they were planted for her; this cherry tree is hers, the lettuces are hers, & every seed I sowed was sowed to produce an image of her. Money no longer would have for me any attraction or use, ambition would be dead, life extinct. What use a car? – it was bought for her – What use books or pictures? For two years she has been the centre & the limit of my life, and all shut up in my imagination. Everything I have done I have done for her; everything I have thought – she has been thought with it. Everything I have desired, has been a part of her. Every step I have heard, I have imagined to be hers, every letter I have received I have hoped was from her. She & beauty have been identified. She & life have been inseparable. Unless she were there, I preferred to be alone, so that I might be with her. No-one has ever been to me what she has been – & this without her ever showing to me more than the moderate affection of a friend. Life before I knew her is now impossible to imagine. Life when she goes is indistinguishable from death. I have never loved any save her: my life with her has shown me what love is. And what greater revolution could anyone create in the life of another? I know that she can do without me, I know that I am in no way indispensable to her. But she is utterly indispensable to me. What is there that I have done which I have not done for her? What is there that I have hated that I have not hated for her. Is there any country I have wanted to visit – I have thought of myself with her. Is there any life I have wanted to lead? It has been with her. I know how I can keep her: – If I can succeed in concealing my real thoughts, if I were to keep under my real feelings, and appear only a friend or an acquaintance. But can I keep her on these false pretenses? Must she not inevitably disappear if I try to keep her by pretending my feelings are other than they are. Must I not say
to her – ‘This is what I am, & what I must ever remain; I ask from you nothing that you have not already given, no consideration you have not already shown, but I must not conceal from you what you are to me?’ And I know that if I tell her all, she must decide to leave me, & the light of my life would be gone out. And how long could I go on asking for nothing from her? And dare I risk this utter blackness of death which must follow were she to go from me? And I who have longed for youth; what use then would it be to me. I who have feared death; death would come as a release. For I have prized youth because you are young and I would share it with you. And I have feared death because it would take me from you. But now you are going – and what is that save the death I have feared? But do not think when you go I shall be able to return with my affections to her from whom you think you have stolen them. For you have stolen none from anyone; they have been waiting, unawakened, for you since the day I was born. To love you less can never mean that I can love J. more. Why redecorate my room? Why plant flowers or gather blossoms? Why write or think or act or live? But why must it all end because I am in love? Why must this relationship end; this which has given to me everything I value, everything I desire. Cannot we be reasonable, cannot we be friends & forget our love? If it were our love, that would be impossible, but since it is only mine, & since I have kept it to myself so long & never desired any answer, cannot we continue friends? Perhaps; but I have desired an answer – I have desired to see & to talk to you, to share your thoughts & feelings. And because I have not desired more than that can I say that I have asked for & desired nothing from you? But oh! To think of never again seeing your writing in a letter. O Céline, all I can think of is why did we not meet before; meet when I could ask your affection? Why did we not meet when I
could give you everything of myself? And now that we have met, it is to give me the shadow of happiness & the body of misery. The more it becomes clear that C’s body is another’s, that I must love her forever in vain, the more I find myself desiring to be master of her mind, to capture her soul. I am jealous not of him who has her body, but of her friends with whom she shares her mind. I am jealous not of those whom she loves, but of those she has intellectual intercourse with, those whom she understands & who understand her. And, perhaps sexual intercourse, instead of being as I had always supposed, a kind of climax, end, completion of all other relationships, an act which includes & supersedes all other intercourse, is really a substitute for this communion of minds. Perhaps even, the one so far from finding its completion in the other, is actually contradictory of it. She may do what she will with her body; let me only be a necessity to her mind. But is this so? Whither our bodies go; there will our minds be also. But might we not dominate the body through the mind. Where the intellectual life requires one for its existence, there is the beginning of love. My craving is to be always with her; to share everything with her, share myself; to give everything to her; do everything for her. I love like a woman. And oh! How jealous I am of those with whom she shares herself. Jealous of that intellectual intercourse with her friends; more jealous even of that than of the clothes she wears, the food which passes her lips, the bed she lies in. BD6[28] C. unwilling to see me because of Joyce. The war within the person of La Belle Dame sans merci. Cut off a part & treat it as if it were the whole & at once disharmony is created.
BD6[28–30] Passing through all this whirl of life – life lived in the present, felt every moment, alive in every part – must we not, in the end, come out on the other side. To attempt to find in life something which corresponds with our imaginative desires, is vain. It is certain of disappointment. Shall we not then, retire into our imagination, & there build freely, a life unrestricted by the conditions of the external world. And instead of tying our imagination to this world; rise freely above it, into a world where we can be master of our fate & not subject to the shattering disappointments & vain hopes of practical life? Symbolise this: movement from my house, which signifies this ‘present’ life & the attempt to find satisfaction in the achievement of what I hope, to my room in college, which represents a retirement into the imagination, a retreat into the world of mind. Sense & the satisfactions of sense are abandoned; they give no satisfaction. (Or, perhaps, to some other place; cp. Portrait in a Mirror, not the room in college.)2 But then, never being free from the seductions of sense. How a phrase of music, or the vision of a passing cloud in the April sky, will recall all that has been abandoned, and once more unsteady this life of the imagination. Is it possible to rest anywhere, to find La Belle Dame anywhere. Is there no world, no place, no time, no country of the mind, where satisfaction can be achieved? Or must we, to the end of our days, be thrown between satisfactions which do not satisfy? BD6[30–31] To be cut off from communication with one’s fellow creatures, from the sweet sound of human voices, from the intercourse [2] Charles Morgan, Portrait in a Mirror (London: Macmillan, 1933).
of minds, from love itself – is this to be utterly bereaved, to be cut off from everything, to be a prisoner? – or can the life of the imagination satisfy all the cravings of the mind & body? If it could, the satisfaction it would give would be surer & less random – but how intense? But there will always be restlessness, gnawing desire, dark annihilation. Dante met somewhere in hell a man whose crime was that he did not love the sweet light of day – was he one who had retired into this life of the imagination? BD6[31] ‘Women worship a successful poet.’ Do they? They worship success; but it is a practical success, the success of a man of action which they most readily fall for. BD6[34] The contradictory feelings which love creates & intensifies in us – first the sensation of, for the first time, being an individual, of existing at all; but also the sensation of losing one’s individual, separate existence, & the desire to lose it. BD6[34] To seek solace from the hopelessness of life between a woman’s thighs. BD6[34] The Brothel Why have I come? The consciousness, in this imitated play of love, in this false representation of love, of the futility of seeking
satisfaction in what is merely physical. Know nothing of the mind of her with whom I am lying. No love: and now that I am here, I find no substitute for love either. Sordid. BD6[37] To be married is to awaken in a morning in early spring to find the sun shining, and to wonder whether it will last until midday. BD6[37] When her incompetence no longer delights you, it is time to take a holiday.
Belle Dame Notebook 7 (June–July 1931)1 BD7[02–04] My past, what I have experienced, is not endeared to me because it is my past – it is hateful. The things we have loved, no less than the persons, must be hated when they are no longer loved. I feel myself, all the time, growing out of myself, & what is behind I would fain leave behind – but I cannot. O to be free, free from this intolerable burthen of past selves! The self is not made of its past selves, it is made & maintained in spite of them. It is they which stand in the way of satisfaction – yesterday’s self, no less than the self of ten years ago. And what are wives, children, possessions, save reminders of what we once were & desire to forget? And how, in each present moment we attempt to realize ourselves in these things which, a moment later, turn from things loved to fetters, from the instruments of freedom to chains. And life seems to consist in a continual emancipation which inevitably involves imprisonment. To be obsessed, to be enchanted, to be in love – this is the condition of freedom, & a moment later is the sign of bondage.
[1] LSE 20/1. Soft cover, black, 11 cm × 6.5 cm. Ruled. Unnumbered. Autograph, ink and pencil. Dated: ‘Michael Oakeshott. / June. 1931. / to July 1931.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 16, notes in French on La Bruyère, possibly from Les caractères de Théophraste; 23–5, Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious.
BD7[05] To be alive we must be obsessed with something; to be alive fully we must be obsessed with a person. But all obsession is fruitless except it be with a creature of the imagination – & that is not obsession. BD7[06–08] How, when a period has been set to intimacy, when we know that in a few days or in a few weeks a friend is going away & there is little chance of seeing him or her again, or when we know that in a short while the whole character of the intercourse will be changed by him or her entering upon some fresh relationship elsewhere – marriage – how, when we know these things, present intimacy is intensified. Sometimes we sense an acceleration of intimacy as a first premonition of the end. We draw together, flow together, the world grows brighter with a hectic glance & then the collision – & all is over, our life, our self falls in pieces about us. And the only foreknowledge we had of this end was the growing intensity of the intimacy. Press intimacy to its end – & it must end in a consuming fire. What has taken a year to build up is surpassed in a few hours, each day, each hour & minute opens up fresh delights & life becomes accelerated – but not unbearably, except when we contemplate the end & wreck of it all that is to follow. Life becomes intensely aware of itself & our personalities grown in this summer sunshine of vivid intercourse. Like plants which have taken all the winter to root themselves & suddenly in early summer spring forward with rapid growth, our relationships wax & extend themselves. Cp. all this to the end of the world. This is what early Christianity did for life, this is what any religion must do. It can be done for a short while, but when the event does not come, how impossible it
is to readjust the intercourse, & bring it again within the bounds of time & place. BD7[09–10] The Caius Ball 1931. Now secure; it is mine, it is permanent, because it was never experienced. All that I imagined can stand, time cannot wreck or memory transform what belongs neither to time nor to memory but to mind & imagination. I suffered no disappointment; not only was it exquisitely suitable that this frustration should take place, not only was it of a piece with my relationship with Céline, that nothing should be brought to fruition, nothing achieved, nothing satisfied, but it is better so. This surely is the only satisfaction life has to offer – the imagination of satisfaction. BD7[11–13] To the man, after the pleasure of intercourse, comes coldness, indifference, remoteness. It is a physical reaction; to the woman there comes no such reaction, & often she cannot understand it, she does not forgive it. To her, if she is capable of deep feeling, it is cruelty. The man turns his back & loses himself in sleep; & this the woman neither can do nor desires to do. To some women this appearance of cruelty is the most intolerable experience of their life. This, & this only, is the root of disenchantment, the poison of the affections. And even when she can understand it, even when she can forgive it, it remains a qualification of delight, a mitigation of pleasure. She must remain for ever unsatisfied; the man alone has his full satisfaction. And consequently intercourse is happier, for her, in anticipation & in retrospect than in fact. For her the perfection of pleasure is followed always by, not oblivion & satisfaction, but by dissatisfaction. And here, as everywhere in
love, unless cruelty can be turned to delight, unless love can find its pleasure in suffering, delight & pleasure can never be perfect. BD7[14] I am like the river Jordan, my course has ended in a Dead Sea – a sea in which nothing moves, beside which nothing can grow, & in which no memory can sink & be forgotten. BD7[14] I discovered her, though a stranger, as one discovers, at a glance, a friend in a crowd. BD7[17] Werther’s suicide followed upon partial satisfaction, not upon complete denial. But this momentary satisfaction, which was isolated & consequently unreal, only made his disappointment more intense & his despair more complete. His death was an escape; but also a sacrifice, a consummation, a fulfilment. He died at the height, not in the depths. BD7[18] To make this book a series of pictures or studies of love. Types of love. The style of each study to be modeled upon the view it is presenting. Cp. Ulysses by J. Joyce. E.g. Romantic love. Modern love; the unquiet, subtle, conflicting, self-criticizing love. Lawrence, Hebbel, etc.
BD7[19] Those hours when our life & its activity seems to take on the actual character of time. Time does not wait for us. We sleep & we have grown older in our unconsciousness. So it is with moments in our life; with some of the things we do as well as with what we suffer. We cannot imagine ourselves getting to the end, but, as if we were suffering instead of doing, we arrive at the end almost without effort. BD7[20–21] The new birth, the resurrection which comes to most boys at puberty, came to me not until I was of age. I do not mean that it was not until then that I felt the sexual urge – I felt it younger than most. I can scarcely remember a time when I did not feel it – but that it was not until then that I recognized it, admitted it, welcomed it & made no attempt to sublimate it. All this sublimation is the devil. The impulse comes & we are taught to turn it into something else. And this is worse even than to be taught to stifle it. For if we attempt to stifle it, it will arise stronger than ever. If we sublimate it, it will perish – & we perish with it. BD7[21–22] And what is the use of all this knowledge about sex. The facts of sex. This is a side-track. A peculiarly Northern or Anglo-Saxon side-track. What we want is experience, not knowledge about the facts. And to substitute this knowledge for a free experience, is to sublimate & to kill. No harm in knowledge. What is dangerous, deadening, monstrous is knowledge in place of experience; knowledge as a means of precluding experience.
BD7[26] I seem to have been in love, not with a star of benign influence, but with a bright consuming comet which has born down upon & has consumed me with its fire. And now that we have collided I am fallen altogether in pieces. BD7[26–29] 14 July. Goodbye to Céline. How I have felt this fatal moment drawing nearer for months past. And now it is come, & I do not realize what it means. Never to see her, talk with her, write to her again, never to know where or how she is living, never to know that she is married, never to see her children, never again to share or contribute to her happiness, never to know when she is ill, or sad, or disappointed – never, never, never. ‘There is the seed of madness in every great parting,’ says Goethe. And we are saved from madness only by the limits of our imagination. If at this moment I could realize what this parting means – more than just know what it entails, but realize all the bitter blankness of the future, realize what next Spring & Summer will be like without her, realize the loneliness of never being able to write to her – there would sweep over me such a wave of despair, that madness, even unconsciousness, must ensue. But I cannot yet realize this; the realization will come gradually, there will be moments of black despair, moments, days, nights of delirium – & then forgetfulness? Will that ever come? It was different when she was merely away – now she has gone & there is nothing more to hope for, nothing to expect. I am dead, perished, buried – oh that I could forget myself. But that could be only if I lost myself – & now C. has gone I have nobody in whom I can lose myself. And a self can be lost only in another self – never in anything else.
BD7[33–34] I am like one who suffering from an incipient disease is suddenly one day struck down with it. The fire is laid, the foundations are rotten, the earth is hollow – everything was there for the collapse. And now it has come. Perhaps it could have been warded off, by prudent living the disease might have remained latent, but (in any case) nothing could happen the materials for which were not already prepared within. These things do not befall any to whom they do not belong; where there is none laid, a fire cannot be lighted. BD7[36–37] I imagine to myself that because I love C. I want her to love me; but no. I have had enough of love – I want to love & be responded to with something else – what? I call it ‘love’ because that is what one is taught to expect in return for love; but to be loved is to be in bondage – unless one can be alone – & that I have found impossible. So then, I shower my affection upon C. whose affection is directed elsewhere. And I want to continue like this for ever (though I imagine I want a consummation). But to C. that is impossible. I will give without taking – but cannot take without giving, & that she cannot do – to me I tell her – ‘You are free, free, free: no obligation, none at all.’ And then set about building up a relationship in which I am free & she a slave. BD7[38] There is something wild in me to which my life gives no answer. One can fob it off by buying cars, spending money – spending more than one has – sleeping in the garden, climbing mountains, taking holidays – but not for ever, not for long. But what life will answer it? And how, now that I have committed myself to this life,
can I free myself from my obligations. And yet the very sense of obligation belongs to this, & not that life. BD7[39] Craving for a perfect relationship, a perfect intimacy: & this symbolized in incest. To love one’s own sister, one’s own blood; – one’s daughter. BD7[39–40] Oh, if I could somehow compromise myself with the world – show that I do not belong to it, show that what I value, it rejects, & that I reject what it values. Ruin my reputation. Love, affection, intimacy – these are what I value, & the world hates & qualifies them all. And yet the world’s hold is strong. What it obliges me to, I feel an obligation for. Oh, to be free from the feeling of obligation. And because I have given myself so much to the world, it would seem that I could show an even greater contempt for it. I am obliged to it – throw off the obligation. I have got money: throw it away. And position & reputation. All these are weapons; if I had not them, I could not show my contempt so easily.
Belle Dame Notebook 8 (July–31 December 1931)1 BD8[01–04] All my life there has been this distrust of intimacy – at home, parents, brothers, friends. No frankness, openness. But all inside, seething & alone. I have always been alone. And when most alone I have wanted intimacy; when I have most distrusted it I have desired it. No freedom: only death & frustration. Marriage: the attempt to free myself from the foreign world in which I lived & which I hated. But that too has failed. I am now as much a prisoner as ever. Glimpses of freedom. With Céline. Moments of freedom with others – Beth. But nothing permanent, nothing lasting. Freedom, I know, can be obtained either by finding an answer, or by refusing to ask. The first way I have tried. Asked & asked. Now, must I try the other; & retire for ever into myself & be alone there. It is a desperate remedy. How difficult it is to live with other people – & how impossible not to. Intimacy, intimacy – & all I get is acquaintance. And when I press for intimacy – the world goes to pieces. If it is refused I am [1] LSE 20/1. Soft cover, black, 11 cm × 6.5 cm. Ruled. Unnumbered. Autograph, ink and pencil. Dated: ‘M. Oakeshott. / July 1931.– / Dec 31st 1931.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 16, quotations in French from La Bruyère, possibly from Les caractères de Théophraste; 23–5, Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious; 28–9, G. D’Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure, tr. G. Harding (London: William Heinemann, 1898); 31, notes in French on F. Ponsard, Les Charmettes – Souvenir de Chambéry (Turin: Botta, 1856); 32–3, notes in French on HenriFrédéric Amiel, Journal intime, ed. B. Gagnebin and P.M. Monnier, 12 vols. (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1976–94 [1882–4]).
lost; if it is given, it turns to dust & ashes. Intimacy is impossible? Then why do we crave it? Is life a radical contradiction? Oneness, oneness; & always plurality. To be alone & yet to be intimate with another. To find one’s aloneness with another. Once it seemed as if life would offer what I asked of it – with Céline; but now that appearance of satisfaction has gone. Even this ‘shadow of stability’ is gone. I want ‘stability’ & I want freedom. Intimacy & aloneness. A world & freedom. And these, it seems, can never be had together. Satisfied love? – but can love be satisfied. Love is ever unsatisfied. BD8[05–06] Revival of confidence since C’s letter of parting. She belongs to me; I am her master. Previously, I had asked nothing of her, been dependent upon her. But now I know that she belongs to me – & I can wait. She must return, because she is mine. And even if she does not return, she is mine for ever. I am master of her dead, if not alive. R. may have her body; but I have her mind & soul. And some day she will awake & know it. I shall go to her no longer as a servant, no longer to give myself to her, to abandon myself to her, but as a master. I am her home. And when I go to her again it will be to ask when she is coming to me. I can wait: wait for her to awake. BD8[07] A woman doesn’t like being made love to except against her will. BD8[08–10] I want a relationship without a name. Something profound, dangerous, risky, incomplete & yet satisfying. Mother, sister, wife, mistress – we know what all these are.
I want something which has no name, is ruled by no convention. Something experimental. Something in which there is no routine. This is what I mean by love. I want a lover, someone with whom love – this unnamed relationship – can grow & blossom. I have often, continually sought this lover, & never found her. My life has been spent in seeking her; indeed, I believe the purpose of life is to seek her, & the satisfaction of life to find her. Is she a phantom, this Belle Dame? Is she a Chimera, a creature of fancy? And is this relationship merely an expression of dissatisfaction with all relationships? She gives me no peace; each year, each month I must set out again to find her. And if I did not identify this search with life itself, the number of my disappointments would long ago have made me hopeless. But, as with all lovers – I must have her or I die. For to be without her is not to be born, & to lose her is to die. For not until I have found her shall I have found myself. BD8[11] 1. ‘Secularism.’ 2. La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Two parts of the same work. Two things – (i) to keep one’s self whole, complete, untouched – to keep oneself free from the world. This is the otherworldliness which is essential to life. (ii) To find a way of losing oneself in order to become oneself. And this is love. Hardness, imperviousness to the world. And a disintegrating love in which one can lose & find oneself.
BD8[12–16] Each of us creates an ‘ideal’ woman, a type. & those with whom we are intimate begin to live up to this pattern. They become what we want them to be. And this ends in disaster. For they become part of ourselves & in the end they become a past self – a self which we look upon with distaste & loathing, something from which we wish to escape. To identify a person with oneself leads in the end to identifying him or her with something which must perish. This is the mistake – or the inevitable contradiction of life. And the worst end is to marry such a past self – that brings with it only disenchantment. But the fault is on both sides. Women love living up to the type we insist upon, the type we insist that they belong to – & they are in love with death. Neither men nor women know what belongs to their peace. But all this is different with Elisabeth – I have tried to make her a pattern, to give her a type – & she has refused it. She has refused to become identified with a fleeting self of mine. She has insisted on being herself & no other: she is in love with life, not death, & knows what belongs to her peace. It is a hard lesson for one to learn; the habits of the years of thought must be overcome & banished. Even (Sigma) submitted to type, or nearly did so. Elizabeth never. This does not mean that Elizabeth will not submit to my will, give in to me; it means far more. And it means that she could retain her own individuality even though she submitted to me & belonged to me. It is our habits of thought that are wrong: we think in terms of labels, names, types, classes, patterns – we do not think in terms of a clear view of what is there; we think in terms not of living experience but of dead, inherited habits. BD8[17] Oct. 1931.
(Sigma). How she came back to me, confessing her inability to stay away, confessing her affection. It was as if she belonged to me, & I to her, and we could not stay apart. Shall we in old age, when life has passed over us, when other relationships have perished, shall we come back to one another, and experience a relationship of spirit? BD8[18–19] 24 Oct 1931. To London to see Elisabeth. The whole scene. E’s room. The firelight, the bed, the tea on the table & the candles. And all this sordidness, which love should transform, remaining sordid. The persuasion, the surrender. The promise, the expectation of happiness – & the result. The inherent impossibility of satisfaction, the impossibility of penetrating another self, & the foolishness & the misery of attempting. A symbol of this foolishness & misery; a symbol of the inherent impossibility of two meeting on earth. Surrender is no answer, no solution. It is a fence & not a way, a bar & not an entrance. And all the misery following it. Fruition is death; & we must wait for a new life to blossom in spite of it. BD8[20–21] How we are satisfied with a low standard of friendship. It is so with everything which is universal. Friendship is a human need, & is found wherever men are found. But the standard of subtlety in a life of friendship is taken from what is commonly achieved, & not from what might be achieved & is inherent in it. It is a passtime, a relief from the practical business of life, a thing for leisure hours, a parerga – instead of being the one thing in life worth achieving, instead of being the whole of life. This is the radical irreligion of our civilization, & of every civilization ever invented,
that love & friendship are not life itself, but a part, a support, a by-product of life. BD8[22–23] How each relationship brings with it a new experience. The freedom of (Sigma); the profundity of E.; & the light gentleness & simplicity of Effie. But what does love mean to each of them? Oh, that I could love without thinking of love; love without wondering what they think love is; love without talking of love. But always this contradiction, which arises from the attempt to achieve a relationship which is wholly satisfying, instead of being content with the experiences of immediate satisfaction – which each offers – if only for a moment. BD8[23–24] The emblems of love. The phases – moments – of love. 1. Man made for the mastery of the world, & woman for the delight of man. Man, wearied may find quiet & peace with woman, wash himself clean from the world, from toil & noise & renew himself for fresh endeavor. 2. A relationship – man & woman – toil, work, subordinate to this relationship. Love & friendship the being of life, not its recreation. BD8[25] Love is the element of dissatisfaction in life. And thus, it is the life of life. Routine, habit, profession – all these are the death of life; these offer & sometimes afford satisfaction, quiet, certainty. Love offers only endless disquiet, war, dissatisfaction: but it offers a life
which is complete though dissatisfied. Love is at once that which is limited & complete. BD8[26] Lust – the desire to dominate physically. Rape. No intercourse; taking without what is taken being offered or given. But taking only a physical satisfaction. Spiritual Lust: the desire to own, dominate, possess the mind, the person, the soul. The Rape of the soul. And this is the last death. BD8[30–31] In prospect, & increasingly as we draw near, love seems to answer all the questions of life, to cure all its maladies, solve all its riddles. And we go on believing this only because what we experience we will not admit to be love. BD8[34] With me friendship tends inevitably to become love. BD8[34–35] Love & death. These are together in our minds, because they are together in life. Love is always a self-immolation. And when it is not this, it is an attempt to escape from death. And when it is not this, it fears death most – death & parting. BD8[35] It is men who make women. And in order to please, women become what they are desired to be. Woman represents the customs of the times.
BD8[35–36] 1. Lust; the pure physical desire & its physical satisfaction. Here. 2. Romantic Love: La Belle Dame sans merci. Always somewhere else. There. A hopeless quest; but still a quest, a movement; & always unsatisfied. Beyond. Always somewhere else. (a) Future. (b) Past – satisfaction in a memory. Melancholy. Shelley. D’Annunzio. Heine. The end of Romantic love is death. 3. Nowhere. Despair, hopelessness. The death of desire. The abandonment of the Quest; but still a quest. 4. The hermaphrodite ideal. Die Schau sucht du, & was sie stellt.2 The circle: satisfaction. Here, always here, but not in lust – of body or mind – but in communion & singleness. Not in the past, or in the future; but in the present, a continuing ever present, changeless present. No putting off; no hope to meet again – no craving to remember what is gone; but always in the present. The end of this is the triumph of life over death. BD8[36–37] The escape from Romanticism – either to so-called Realism – or to satisfaction in dissatisfaction. The acceptance of life as incomplete.
[2] See Belle Dame Notebook 2, n. 1, above.
BD8[37] Is it possible, in the end, to escape from Romanticism? To be discontented with R. is inherent in Romanticism – to look beyond. Beyond is the word of Romanticism. BD8[37] Romanticism is sometimes represented as sentimentalism. But, it’s not that. It is something stronger, & truer. The truth of Romanticism is profounder than that of sentimentalism – but both have a truth.
Notebook 11 (October 1931)1 11[01] Love is what is at once limited & complete – the whole & yet not all. Perfect love is to have lost & found oneself in another – not in everyone else. It is, then, at once imperfect & perfect. And a view of life which would take love as the symbol of the good life, would recognize the perfect life not as that which achieved most, nor as [1] LSE 2/1/11. Hard cover, blue, 17 cm × 11.5 cm, squared. Recto folios numbered 1–91. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘Michael Oakeshott. / Notes. / XI / La joie de l’esprit en marque la face / Ninon de l’Enclos. / Qui n’a pas l’esprit de son âge, / De son âge a tout le malheur. / Amiel? Joubert? / Nous perdons en projets les plus beaux / de nos jours. / Voltaire. / October 1931.’ [Ninon de l’Enclos (1620–1705), French courtesan and writer; the saying with a doubtful provenance is ascribed to Voltaire in Joseph Joubert, Pensées, maximes, essais et correspondence, ed. P. Raynal, 2 vols. (Paris: Didier et Co., 1861), i.229; the saying by Voltaire is quoted in Amiel, Journal intime, x.341.] Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 2, Lascalles Abercrombie, ‘Emblems of Love’; 5, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Author of ‘Erewhon’, ed. H.F. Jones (London: A.C. Fifield, 1913); 6, notes on Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, aka Chamfort, possibly The Cynic’s Breviary Maxims and Anecdotes From Nicolas de Chamfort, ed. W.G. Hutchinson (London: Elkin Mathews, 1902); 20, R.M. Scott, Misogyny over the Weekend (London: Macmillan & Co., 1931); 30, J. Maritain, The Things That Are Not Caesar’s, tr. J.F. Scanlan (London: Sheed & Ward, 1930); 42–3, A.A. Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. In three volumes. Vol. I. I. A Letter concerning Enthusiasm. II. Sensus Communis, or an Essay on wit, &c. III. Soliloquy, or Advice to an author. Vol. II. IV. An Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit. V. The Moralists: a philosophical rhapsody. Vol. III. VI. Miscellaneous Reflections on the said Treatises, and other critical subjects (London: John Darby, 1711); 69–70, St Augustine, Confessions.
that which achieved a little, and that perfectly & as a contribution to the whole, but as that which achieved the whole of itself at every point; that which is limited but not a part, which is limited & yet the whole. 11[04] We carry death within us as a lethal germ. Death is a part of our existence, an element of our life. 11[04] The two necessities of life – love & loneliness. And the major problem – how to adjust them. 11[04] I wish to substitute a view of life better adapted to the conditions of life than that which satisfies the majority of mankind. 11[07] Modern Christianity By temperament I should be disposed to throw over what I could understand & build for myself a religion freed from the trammels of tradition. But the circumstances of my education set my feet upon another track, & prevented me from dismissing from my mind, what no one who is not taken up with prejudice or pride can altogether forget – the history of Christianity.
11[07] Attempt to restate the doctrines of Christianity for the contemporary mind. And see where the Christian festivals, worship, prayer etc: fall into place. Popular theology – to remove from it that appetite for absurdity which Hume found there. The Hymns etc. 11[07] Christianity is something which we have made. 11[07–08] Note the entirely different approach of to-day from that of yesterday – both science & history have shot their bolt – Under their influence Christian doctrine has been cleansed from irrelevances – but, by the nature of these studies – it has not been reconstructed for the modern mind. 11[08] Christian Evidences The notion of establishing Christian evidences. Cp. Paley. They were defended, not because they mattered, but because they were attacked. Cp. Johnson on Hume – He admitted he had never studied the New Testament with attention. Attempt to defend: (i) Too much.
(ii) What was indefensible. (iii) What was irrelevant. 11[08] ‘Evidences’ The ‘unbeliever’ went with the ‘free-thinker’ – that most prejudiced of beings. 11[08] Christianity will be stronger for the removal of what is not essential to it: not weaker. 11[08] The notion of defending Christianity. This is out of date, but not entirely so. We should defend Christianity by defining it, by understanding it. But perhaps beyond this, defence is still needed. But it must be a wise defence, not a conventional defence. We must defend it (i) where it is attacked now, not where it was attacked. (ii) where it needs defence, even if it is not attacked there. 11[09] ‘Either Jesus was the son of God, or He was not.’ Butler, Fair Haven.2 [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘p. 124.’ See S. Butler, The Fair Haven A Work in Defence of the Miraculous Element in our Lord’s Ministry upon Earth, both as against Rationalistic Impugners and certain Orthodox Defenders, by the late John Pickard Owen, with a Memoir of the Authors by William Bickersteth Owen (London: A.C. Fifield, 1913), p. 169.
This is the standpoint which is entirely out of date. We must get to the presuppositions of it. Find them, understand them, & defend them or reform them as we may find necessary. ‘Faith is the “evidence of things not seen,” but it is not “insufficient evidence for things alleged to have been seen.”’3 To accept historical facts upon insufficient evidence is not faith; it is credulity. Instead of asking about the reliability of this or that passage in the New Testament, we ought to enquire into the general character of the New Testament; what the New Testament says, & what it is silent about; & the value of these, depends upon its general character, the purpose for which its books were written, etc. 11[10] We are told that Christianity rests upon or consists in, not a bare belief in facts, but a love of Jesus himself. This was clearly possible to those who knew him. But in what sense is it possible to ‘love’ someone whom we have never seen in the flesh? Some kind of love is possible; but not the fullest. And it is always an uncertain love. What we have is conclusive evidence of the love of those who knew him, & their picture of a man who, if we had known him, we could scarcely keep ourselves from loving. But love cannot exist on ‘Report’; and if it is said, ‘Jesus lives; we love someone whom we have known.’ What is the meaning of this? Do we know him, as we must know a person we love. We cannot love a merely perfect character. Perfection does not call forth love; & we can love only persons, not ‘characters.’
[3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘ibid. p. 137.’ See Butler, The Fair Haven (1913), p. 180.
11[11–14] Modern Christianity Whenever there is a change in our surroundings we must change ourselves, our ideas, desires, ideals, or remain in a state of chronic discomfort, contradiction, which ends by being self-contradiction. And it seems that Christianity is among those things which must change with circumstances. Christianity is what we think it is; it has always been what we thought it was. But we almost unique among the Christian generations, have submitted it to the principle that Christianity is what someone else thought it was – what Jesus, the Apostles, Paul, Augustine, Luther, thought it was. This principle was tacitly accepted sometime in the last century, & more, it was acted upon. Other centuries had tacitly accepted, but none had acted upon it. It received a severe testing when the evidences of Christianity began to be studied critically. But with various modifications it has survived that test. Indeed, there was nothing lethal in that test; it could never have shaken the general principle. What we must do now is to follow, like good conservatives, the generations before us & make our Christianity, as they made theirs. There is no external test – an external test of truth is a figment of a false logic. A thing is what it develops into – & this development at this point is in our hands. General principles of how Christianity can change & yet retain its identity. Nothing essential, no detail, doctrine, moral or religious. If we do this we shall be in one sense unique among the Christian generations – no other has consciously & systematically adapted what came to them. It has all been under the surface, & would have been denied if it had ever been brought to light. But to do it consciously & systematically will save us from some mistakes. E.g. the mistake the middle ages made when it
incorporated Aristotelian semantics into the Christian view of life. This process of adaptation cannot, of course, be undertaken by every generation. It goes on under the surface all the time, but the moment for bringing this change to the surface, fixing it, defining its limits for the time being, crystallizing it – this must come but rarely. Indeed, with a religion, which must necessarily be conservative in its general view, however revolutionary its practices, this admission of change must be rare. But its seriousness, its apparent cataclysmic effect, the disorganization in which it is likely to result, is naturally proportional to its rareness. This disorganization, however, is much lessened if the attempt to seek out the extent & nature of the change is not made until the change has been effected & established so firmly in our unconscious minds that to bring it to consciousness, though a serious step, will be or appear less revolutionary. A philosophy or theology must always follow, never precede a development in the religion itself. Danger, however, in putting it off too long. Disorganized dissatisfaction; doubts unanswered, concealed, denied, stifled. Disharmony of life. What I propose, then, falls into two independent, or semiindependent parts. First, an exposition of the general nature of religion & Christianity to show the necessity & the ground of change. And a consideration of the limits of change consistent with the retention of identity. Secondly, a project for the reform of Christianity based (i) upon this view of Christianity; (ii) upon the present situation of Christian doctrine & practice. I may be wrong in supposing that the time is ripe for this second project; and what I have to say under that head, depending as it does upon so many & so various contingencies, is less certain than what I have to say in the first part – which is a question of logic & of definition.
The second part should contain a review of the present situation; showing particularly how the attacks on Christianity of the last century have mainly been irrelevant, & the defences misconceived. It is a work of apologetic; but with a new principle of apology – i.e., to admit everything that must be admitted, but to enquire into its bearing. To reconstruct rather than to buttress; to rebuild rather than to reconstruct; to reform rather than to rebuild. One of our problems – by what criterion are we to decide whether a certain growth belongs to the main stem, or whether it is parasitic? For all religions & moral ideas which have currency in Western Europe are somehow attached to or derived from Christianity: ours is a Christian civilization in that its formative conceptions, its atmosphere etc are derived from Christianity. I do not meant that every idea we have can be traced to a definite source: I mean that the whole to which our ideas belong is dominated by the name Christianity. And those who have rejected the particular brand or phase of Christianity professed by their generation are not less influenced by it, than those who accept it. But which is apple-tree & which is mistletoe? The mistletoe feeds on the same sap – though it may modify it at the last moment – & is organically attached to the main stem. Is Nietzsche mistletoe or apple-tree? Or again, is there any mistletoe? Is this metaphor misplaced, misleading? 11[15] Suicide is rare; compared to the miseries, pains, losses & complaints of men, it is surprisingly rare. Why? (i) Men, though they suffer and complain, really enjoy life more than they think they will enjoy death – whatever they believe about death.
We do not commit suicide because we enjoy life, rather than because we fear death. (ii) Men fear death more than they love life. (iii) Men are ignorant of methods by which death may be compassed easily. (iv) Men remain alive because they think thereby to fulfil some responsibility to others, rather than from any desire to remain living. 11[16] Love & death Love as the attempt to overcome death. Indeed, love is all that can overcome death. It is the denial of death, because it is the assertion of the present. 11[16] Love & justice Love is the opposite of justice. Justice has no place in the comity of love. Love is always lavish or ungrateful. Where one has lost favour, one need not attempt to deserve it. 11[16] A man who has a fatal taste for the useless, a scorn of worldly wisdom, an aversion from his own interests. Where profit offers itself, he flees. To think of a career appears base. Love of what is unproductive. Fear of personal interest. Passion for
disinterestedness; horror of shrewdness. A Quixotic character. From the horror of one extreme he goes to the other. 11[17] Modern Christianity The conception of apostasy. When does a change of faith amount to an apostasy? What separates the apostate from the reformer? Matter of degree – if we put aside the question of motive. Cp. Bentham, Fragment on Government. 11[18] Death The connection between death & necessity is one which we have been slow to make. For some primitive races, each death is a separate phenomenon, to be accounted for separately. This perhaps reflects the fact that one death does not, & never will, explain another – each is an experience which is overwhelming to those who survive. But we have not yet fully grasped the notion of death & necessity. The idea of premature death is still current & still dominates. 11[18] Eternal happiness is a compensation accorded to human sorrows. The connexion between justice & immortality. 11[18] Glory = posthumous reputation; & this must usually be infamy rather than fame if these later times were to take account of their
own needs & not clutter themselves with what they have no need or use for. 11[19] The fact that the women’s freedom movement has followed in the steps, exactly, of the mens; shows the essential lack of initiative in women. A vote!! 11[20] ‘True aesthetic satisfaction is not the satisfaction of the senses, for the senses are never satisfied; it is the satisfaction of the coordinating judgment of the intellect.’ Consider this tradition which connects the senses with art & aesthetic satisfaction. Not only are the senses never satisfied; but they do not exist; they are abstractions. 11[21] Why are we less severe upon those who prostitute their minds than upon those who prostitute their bodies? 11[22] The invulnerable philosophy of unambition. 11[22] To be master of one’s fate both in dying & living. 11[22] The idea that it is ‘morbid’ to discuss or think about death.
11[22] Death is thought to be suitable to a funeral sermon; & out of place elsewhere. 11[22] Because we have left Death to be considered only by the elderly, our ideas of death are full of horror. He is old, the friend of Time, & forbidding. 11[22] Because we have refused to think about death until somebody dies the thought has been disconnected, vague, directed toward winning comfort rather than truth. 11[22] Mortality ‘The man who has found the work that suits him & a wife whom he loves has squared his accounts with life.’ Hegel. Has he? Has he squared his accounts with death? And if not with death, then how with life? 11[22–23] It is sometimes considered that while an elderly man may be permitted to think directly, even concentratedly about death, direct reflection upon death is out of place in a young man. His business is with life & how he is to love it; death he should leave to the moribund; to those who have already lived or who have
reached the stage in their existence when they are obliged to admit that they have never lived. But this is a foolish notion, & moreover harmful. To leave our thinking about death to the elderly is to leave it to those who have least, not most, reason for thinking clearly, courageously & concentratedly about it. And further, death is, so to speak, the natural subject for a young man to think of – to think of sometimes. For, when the elderly think of death it appears to them as something unavoidable, natural, inevitable, to be suffered even if not understood. But to the young man it appears either his greatest enemy, or his greatest friend. Something to be avoided, banished, thwarted; or something to be embraced. It is not the old who contemplate suicide. After a young man has experienced to the full what Hazlitt calls ‘the feeling of immortality in youth,’ after he has briefly considered death & dismissed it as impossible, unthinkable, a mistake which, though others have committed it, he will avoid, there comes to many the impulse & the necessity to consider more closely what had been hastily dismissed. And it is at this time, if ever, that he will consider the merits of suicide. The middle aged may commit suicide because they are tired of life; the young man will only abandon life because he is in love with death. So then, to be young & to consider death, to reflect upon it, to attempt to understand it, so far from being contradictory, are correlative. Moreover, if we wish for thoughts about death & mortality freed from sentimentalism, clear-sighted, direct & without the prudery which is liable to attack, like a palsy, everything which is most important in life, we have to go (in England for example) to the most vital, youthful age of our literature, to the Elizabethans. The Elizabethan’s terror of youth’s departure is felt & expressed without sentimentality.
11[23] ‘The shadow line.’ 11[23] Religion, as I see it, must have some answer to the questions of youth, as well as some comforts for the fears of old age. It must have some suggestions for those who are beginning upon life, as well as some consolations for those whose life has been misspent – & whose life is not misspent? 11[23] The forerunner of death is love. Love creates & separates. Death destroys & heals. It is love which marks out those who are the friends of death. Passionate love can have no other appropriate end, save death. 11[23] We must see death as young & beautiful – this is how lovers see him. To others he is old, forbidding, full of horror. He is the friend, not of love, but of time. Only a lover knows death as beautiful. But lovers have not been influential in the moulding of the ideas which govern our civilization, & death consequently is dark & forbidding. 11[24] Tragedy degenerates into mawkishness (sentimentality) through deficiency of intellectual content. This is the character of all sentimentality.
11[24] The Anatomy of Romanticism/Sentimentality & Cant Sentimentality is the cant of Love. The origins & cause of Sentimentality. Its forms, degrees & moods. Mawkishness; immaturity; bogus & derivative sentiment; insincerity: Sentimentality in art, in literature; in life. Cp. D.H. Lawrence. ‘My room is number 32.’4 Sentimentality & Romanticism. Blindness to the facts of life: the Greek desire for youth? Hoarding one’s past as a form of sentimentality. Unreality as the master principle of sentimentality – not that these feelings are not felt, but that they cannot stand the criticism & test of coherent feeling. Sentimentality as periphrasis – death; ‘to pass over’; ‘to pass away’; etc: ‘If he had not heard of Love, he would never speak of it.’ Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. La Rochefoucauld. 11[25] ‘Contemplative stillness is but the name for a state of invulnerability, & to be invulnerable is what all men desire.’5 [4] See D.H. Lawrence, ‘Do Women Change,’ in Late Essays and Articles, ed. J.T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 151–4, at 152. [5] Charles Morgan, The Fountain (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1949 [1931]), p. 27.
The desire for immortality is only part of the desire for invulnerability. 11[26] Men stupidly say ‘death is the answer of all things,’ but they mean only that they are tired of thought. We cannot put off the answers to any of our questions, in the hope that they will be answered by God, when we meet him; if the questions are worth asking, they must be answered – somehow – this side of death. But in another sense death is the criterion of all things. What does not stand the test of death is worthless for the purposes of life & living. Death puts us in a ‘second place’ absolutely. It reduces everything in life to its proper level & importance.6 Cp. the vulgar saying, ‘the best preparation for death is a good life.’ What is a ‘good’ life; – that depends on what we believe death to be. 11[27] Christianity To defend Christianity is always to transform it. Each defence has been a readjustment.7
[6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Morgan, The Fountain, pp. 317–8.’ [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. F. de Chateaubriand, Le génie du Christianisme, 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1844).’
11[27] Mortality In general, since the beginning of the Christian era, the way in which men have attempted to overcome death is by denying it – a doctrine of a future life. Death, as even Spinoza said, is a thing which the good man thinks as little about as he can.8 This overcoming of Death may still be of value – but it has certainly lost its power. Even those who still believe in a future life are not so easily persuaded that this denial of death is a real overcoming. And a new attempt must be made. In the past – in the 18th & 19th centuries e.g. – a great number of men asserted their disbelief in a future life – but they did not replace this belief with any other which could overcome death. Their disbelief was largely mere denial & negative. The positive implications of it were never thought out. 11[28] Immortality Is it possible to believe in a future life but to have no belief about the particular form of that life? If not, what we have to consider is the forms which this life has been held to take & forms which it might be held to take. [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Bevan, Christianity.’ Possibly E.R. Bevan (1870–1943), historian and religious writer, author of Hellenism and Christianity (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921); The World in which Christianity Arose (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1924); and The Hope of a World to Come Underlying Judaism and Christianity (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930).
11[29] ‘Human life’ is not a constant to which all else must be related – it depends how it is lived. What we require is a way of living consonant with the facts of life. A doctrine of ‘after-life’ is insufficient, in itself, to reconcile us with this life. We must be reconciled to this life by this life itself.9 11[30] Sentimentality can be bona fide sentiment – To accuse a man of sentimentality does not entail a judgment about his motives; it is an objective judgment. He may feel this; but this feeling cannot maintain itself in the objective world of sentiment. Good & Right. 11[31] We have not yet adjusted our view of life to our conception of the ‘naturalness’ of death. This is what I wish to attempt. 11[32] Death Primitive myths, customs & ideas about death seem all, in the first place, to recognize & emphasize its unnatural character. Death comes into the world by mistake. Cp. Melanesia. The great foremother of their race sloughed her skin at intervals and remained eternally young. The catastrophe of death occurred because she was once disturbed in the operation
[9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘F.L. Lucas, p. 18.’ See F.L. Lucas, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932).
by the screaming of her child & it was thus that death made its appearance.10 ‘No such thing as a natural death is realised by the native; a man who dies has of necessity been killed by some other man.’11 Death from old age first recognized as the only kind of ‘natural’ death. Again – it is almost universal among primitive peoples to believe that unless a man’s body is disposed of with an appropriate ceremony – the dead will ‘walk.’ The natural tendency of the deceased is to find his way back to the place in which he lived. This is a corollary of the belief in the unnaturalness of death – & both may be seen as expressions of the will to live. 11[33] Sentimentality & Romanticism Romanticism, at variance with life & the conditions of life, proclaims the sovereign authority of dreams. Denial of any standard of coherence. The merely subjective. Pessimism. How far is a life spent in clinging to an old, unsatisfied love sentimental? Just in so far as it is not avoidable. It is true & not sentimental when & only when this surrender of life is really (as it may be) an appropriation of life to its satisfaction.
[10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See A.C. Haddon, review of C. Ribbe, Zwei Jahre unter den Kannibalen der Salamo-Inseln (Dresden and Elgbau: H. Bayer, 1903), Folkore, 16 (1905), 113–16, at 115.’ [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘B. Spencer and F.J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London and New York: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1899), p. 48.’
11[33] Romanticism as wedded to the Infinite (& the infinite mistaken for the Spiritual). Romanticism – Classicism as a part of the battle between spiritual & sensual – Cp. Heine, Jean Paul Richter. 11[33] Two views 1. Life is an evil, the conditions of life are at variance with the necessities of life. To make them agree is impossible. To attempt it is itself defeat. 2. Life must conform to the conditions of life. All that we can live is a life according to these conditions. The Romanticist is the man who, trying to get outside these conditions, fails to live – e.g. the man intent on making a ‘contribution,’ dies before it is achieved: the man who lives in the future or the past. These are the Romantics; & our usual view of life is hopelessly romantic. But this view (2) does not imply that we should at all points make our way of life conform to the present conditions of life. These socalled present conditions are often not conditions at all, but the results of our false view of life. The true life must be one which conforms not to what is merely present, but to what is inherent and unavoidable. We ought to adapt ourselves to those conditions which are unalterable e.g. the fact of death. But alterable conditions – e.g. the actual length of life – should be subject to our moral requirements & not to the blind operations of nature.
11[34] A race of men who, when they had experienced the abyss of love, knowing that they had reached the climax of life, chose in that moment to die, rather than to experience that slow decline which is the lot of all who either do not know, or are afraid to admit that the natural term of life has no relation to the moral needs of men. 11[34] It is the fortune of the philosopher to be an outcast, useless to men of business & troublesome to those of pleasure. 11[34] The abstract thinker is like those Indians who believe the world to be supported by an elephant & the elephant by a tortoise, but when you ask them on what the tortoise rests, they can answer you no further. 11[35] The only knowledge worth having – or rather, the only knowledge relevant to life is a knowledge of ‘le vrai rapport des choses à l’homme.’12 11[35] The relation of the vulgar meaning of ‘Savoir vivre’ with a more profound meaning. Is there a more profound meaning than the vulgar meaning pressed to its conclusion? [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Rousseau, Julie.’ J.J. Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse [Lettres de deux amans habitans d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes], 6 vols. (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1761).’ The quotation is from Pt V, Letter I.
11[35] Love & Marriage Always the view that somehow there is something else & more important to do in life than to be in love. Love must be a mere recreation, a mere means for some ulterior end. It must not be allowed to interfere.13 11[36] Otherworldliness The invulnerable, untouched soul – the soul unimplicated. This is an abstraction. We must have something more than mere conscience.14 11[36] Liars usually escape the vice of dogmatism. 11[36] Why do we always attempt to make our passions appear other than they are? Why do we attempt to moralise them & to make them consistent?
[13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, i.306.’ [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes; Philosophie des Rechts.’
H.A. Reyburn, The Ethical Theory of Hegel A Study of the Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), p. 191 etc.’
11[37] Gratitude Men hate those to whom they owe an obligation, says La Rochefoucauld. We insist upon gratitude & are paid with hatred. Or is gratitude one of those virtues which we may insist upon only in ourselves & not in others? Are there any such virtues? 11[37] Death (1) ‘Of all the enemies of human happiness none is so destructive, none is of so cussed & forward a disposition, as is death.’15 (2) ‘It is the knowledge of death which gives a special tang to the taste of life…If we did not know our days were numbered then the water we drink & the bread we eat would lose something of their flavour.’16 How to reconcile 1 & 2? They are contradictory. We must become friends with death before we can be friends with life – Mors janua vitae, not in the old superstitious sense; but as a real & present fact in life. We must overcome death before we can begin to live. 11[38] To see that one has failed would create in some a desire to begin again & succeed; in me it creates the desire to prove to myself that
[15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘L. Powys, Impassioned Clay (London: Longmans & Co., 1931), p. 100.’ [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Powys, Impassioned Clay, p. 101 sq.’
failure is inevitable & therefore not failure at all, but the stuff of life which requires only be understood in order to be conquered. 11[38] We may construct a view of life which shews that value does not & cannot belong to my world merely as mine – e.g. Powys, The Meaning of Culture, etc. – to shew that completeness rather than personalness is the only tenable criterion.17 But when we have done it – there comes death. This view of life, & the view which takes the meaning of life to lie in extent of achievement, have no answer for death; & in so far as they have no answer for death, they have none for life.18 Freedom and Perfection – is there a contradiction; or how can it be resolved? Perhaps ‘freedom’ is an abstract, incomplete, idea when severed from perfection. 11[39] The Apocalyptic or Eschatalogical expectation acts upon us by heightening our sensibility of present life. It is the same as a consciousness of death. It is like being aware of the seeds of death in one. It is like having consumption. 11[39] Love gives intensity to life – but how far is it a false & exaggerated intensity. When we are in love we are dead & blind to everything else, nothing else exists, nothing exists except in relation to her whom we love. [17] J.C. Powys, The Meaning of Culture (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930). For Oakeshott’s review see SW iii.58–60. [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts.’
Looking back, when love has passed – if it does pass – this intensity seems bogus. The scale of importance seems unreal – but then, life also becomes unreal when we are not in love. We are still animal through and through, and we touch the universe only in love. Love is what gives meaning to life, the world & everything in it. The man in love is the man who has found & understood the universe. The man who is not in love fails always to achieve a satisfactory experience. But then – Bradley, Aphorisms.19 11[41] Among the Stoics to despise ambition & to be free from the world had become a cult – a negative cult. But with Epicurus it was a positive way of life – ‘Live Alone.’ The freedom of the Stoic was an escape; that of the Epicurean a fulfilment. 11[44] Consider how much of modern scholarship, learning etc. is expended not in a man making up his own mind upon a whole subject or a small portion of it, but in giving expositions of this or that subject (or part of it) for the sole benefit of other people – certain classes. E.g. popularization. The aim here is not to make one’s own mind clear, but to modify that clarity & completeness of experience for the benefit of somebody else – & what benefit? Is there any? Is it not all a delusion? The scholar can do two things; he can make up his own mind; and he can give an exposition of his own views. Beyond this – all [19] Oakeshott’s note: ‘F. Bradley, Aphorisms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 100.’ For Oakeshott’s review see SW iii.73–5.
these expositions of other’s views, these abridgments, resumés etc. – all is pointless & meaningless. 11[45] Nil admirari The positive value of disenchantment: disillusion as a principle, not a failure— Turgenev, Smoke.20 Tennyson, ‘Lotus Eaters.’21 Landor. Romantic disillusion, i.e., disillusion as an end, as a principle. Not as what is negative & safe – (Cp. Horace), but as what is vital, positive, happy, successful.22 11[46] The Homeric Greeks, & others, have tried to explain death, have tried to make death accord to life, & their way of life accord to the fact of death, by means of the notion of fate. We cannot die before our time. ‘Our time’ clearly does not mean, ‘when we have achieved all that we believe we can achieve.’ It is an attempt to understand life apart from achievement. They were not in complete possession of this notion – the notion of posthumous
[20] I.S. Turgenev, Smoke, tr. C. Garnett (New York: The Macmillan Company; London: William Heinemann, 1906). [21] A. Tennyson, ‘The Lotus Eaters’ in Poems (London: Edward Moxon, 1832). [22] 11[45] includes a quotation headed ‘Disillusion’ from Scott, Misogyny over the Week-end.
fame was something added & contradictory – another & different attempt to understand life.23 It is not the briefness of life which is disconcerting, but its uncertainty – & fate & fame are two notions which attempt to remove this uncertainty from life. 11[47] A long life does not, itself, give happiness. And to be allowed to remain alive is not a sign of being valuable. The Tower of Siloam. 11[47] We must conceive mortality widely – it is not merely human mortality, but the death & passing away of every element in life. Mortality of affections, emotions, desires, achievements. It is these which leave us aghast, & not mere death. It is these we fear, & not mere death. 11[47] Mortality ‘Gloriously unprepared for the long littleness of life.’24 Not merely unprepared; but prepared to refuse the littleness of life. To lead a life devoid of the littleness of life. How shall we achieve this? [23] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Homer, Iliad, XXII, 300 sq.’ [24] A misquotation from a poem by Frances Cornford (1886–1960) inspired by her fellow poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915): ‘A young Apollo, golden-haired, / stands dreaming on the verge of strife, / magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life.’
It is not great pains & great disappointments which cause us to contemplate suicide, which pollute life – it is the littleness of life. How to be content with the nauseous intimacies of ordinary life, the petty intimacies, when we have known what it is to be in love. Rather a life devoid of intimacy. 11[48] Three Essays— The prospects of Theology. 1. The present position in Theology. 2. What is Christianity? 3. The civilization of the Book of Common Prayer.25 11[48–49] Mortality 1. Life is insufferable unless it is freed from fear and care. Death.26 1. Man is capable of living a godlike life & the life of a god is a life of peace & serenity & freedom from care.27 [25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See L. Powys, “The Book of Common Prayer,” Cornhill Magazine (159), 1934, 580–7, reprinted in Essays of the Year, 1933–1934, ed. F.J. Harvey Darton (London: Argonaut Press, 1934).’ [26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, Bk I, 31, 106, 111, 146; Bk II, 14, 45, 46, 48, 60–1, 343, 363; Bk III, 36–94; Bk IV, 908; Bk V, 1180, 1202, 1207; Bk VI, 14, 25 sq.’ [27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, Bk III, 319; Bk II, 343, 1093; Bk V, 58, 69.’
2. Epicurus was the first man to set about freeing mankind from this ‘terror of the mind.’28 3. For the only thing which will give this freedom is reason, knowledge, knowledge of the nature of things, knowledge of causes.29 4. Not religion – that merely enslaves, & creates fear.30 5. Not love – this brings care with it. Like ambition, it is never satisfied.31 Sleep – insensibility – may banish care – but then: (i) We may wake. (ii) We may dream. Dreams. Fear of Death. How does knowledge free us from care?32 Plato believed that knowledge of the Good would give us life. Lucretius believed that what we need is a knowledge of the nature of things – causes.33 [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, Bk III, 1 sq, 1042; Bk V 1 sq, Bk VI, 1 sq; Empedocles, Bk I, 716 sq.’ [29] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, Bk I, 130, 145, 368; Bk II, 169–183; Bk V, 1211; Bk VI, 54, 83; Bk V, 15, 43, 1455; Bk IV, 908.’ [30] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, Bk I, 62–101; 102 sq; Bk III, 36–94; Bk IV, 19; Bk V, 113, 116 sq.’ [31] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, Bk IV, 1060 sqq, etc.’ [32] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, e.g. Bk IV, 580.’ [33] Oakeshott’s note: ‘But cp. Augustine, Confessions, Bk V ch. iv.’
Death must be shown to be natural & felt as a friend – Mortality is not to be fought against.34 Ways in which we fight against death – mortality. (i) Idea of Immortality.35 (ii) Ambition; the feverish life. Attempt to complete life.36 A plan of life – difficulty & importance. 11[49] Love & ambition: the difference: (i) Is to be satisfied at the moment. It lives in the present. (ii) Is never satisfied. It lives always in the future. Or is there no difference? 11[49] Of course, you will say, the Aswan Dam would never have been built if everyone lived on the principle I have suggested.37 But what then? There would, also, have been no Great War.
[34] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, Bk III, 530, 1091, 612.’ [35] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, Bk III, 612, 775, 851, 926. cp. Bk III, 830.’ [36] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, Bk III, 912, 956, 998, 1076; Bk V, 1118–35.’ [37] Now known as the Aswan Low Dam in Egypt, completed in 1902.
11[50] Mortality How can we outflank pessimism? (i) Suicide. (ii) By conceiving life as essentially mortal – by refusing to contrast it with what does not belong to life. For pessimism can exist only if we contrast this life with another. What is this other life? It is a life given to us in our emotions & affections; if we abstract that feeling of immortality which goes with every strongly felt emotion, or affection, & make, on that basis a world – a perfect & eternal world – we have then something to contrast with this mortal life. But it is an abstraction: – whatever we feel, emotions are not eternal. They will always appear so: love must always assume its own immortality. But must it? And if it doesn’t it becomes at once more satisfactory – for it is on account of this assumption that it is always disappointing – & at the same time, this imaginary perfect world disappears – & with it pessimism. Cp. Solipsism. Has meaning only when we assume two worlds. Abolish the second, & solipsism goes with it. 11[51] To appreciate, to love the gay appearances of the world, & to know them as illusion. To experience at once the feeling of immortality in love & the mortality of love. To yield neither of these; to hold fast to both. Can this be done? How can this be done? But if it can be done it brings us within reach of the only sort of certainty (a mortal certainty) & the only sort of happiness (a mortal happiness) possible. All else is unprotected against
disappointment & disenchantment. But in this there can be no disappointment, for we expect nothing; no disenchantment, for we are never enchanted. 11[53] ‘Alas, we scarce live long enough to try whether a true made clocke run right, or lie.’ Donne, An Anatomy of the World.38 It is not the briefness of life; but the fact that it ends. ‘All casual joy doth loud & plainly say Only by comming, that it can away. Only in Heaven joyes strength is never spent; And accidental things are permanent.’ Donne, ibid.39 Somehow, accidental things must be seen to be permanent here. 11[54] Mortality To become friends with mortality, to defeat death, it is necessary to live an extemporary life. In such a life there is no death, for there is no recognized change. Each moment, instead of being the successor to the last & the predecessor of the next, is complete in itself. Life becomes continuous, without breaks or lacunae. We no longer move from point to point, but are complete at every point. [38] Oakeshott’s note: ‘John Donne, An Anatomy of the World. Wherein, by Occasion of the Untimely Death of Mistris Elizabeth Drury the Frailty and the Decay of this Whole World is Represented (London: Samuel Macham: 1611), I. 235.’ [39] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Donne, An Anatomy of the World, I. 263, 265.’
Two things stand in the way of this. (i) The future. How to free life from the despotism of the future. Take no thought for the morrow etc. This is comparatively easy. It may be difficult, but we can see how it can be done, & we know people who have achieved it. (ii) The past. Is it possible to free life from the despotism of the past? This is the major & most difficult problem confronting anyone attempting to live an extemporary life. And Christianity (for example) has little to tell us which will help us. To be continuously and certainly free from one’s past? How? Each moment to be a genuine beginning as well as a genuine end. We can free ourselves temporarily from our past. But how can we be certain that the past will not break in upon our freedom? Has Christianity no doctrine about freedom from the past as well as the future e.g. sin & freedom from sin, & its consequences. Luther’s attempt to free us from our past. & the Doctrine of Divine forgiveness. To forget is no permanent solution. 11[55] If we could not forget, & free ourselves from the past to that extent, our life would be short & mean. For wherever experience is dominated by the past, it is qualified, modified, distorted. For there to be a beginning there must be a forgetting – though not a total forgetting. 11[55] The religion of all lovers is just their love. When we are in love & the world is in flower, when every action & every word &
thought is thought of in relation to the beloved, when the whole world is simply the scene of our love – what religion could be superimposed upon that? There is no room for a religion; it is there already; & no man can have two religions. 11[55] We feed upon the beloved. 11[56] There is nothing so romantic as Hellenism. 11[56] The relation between melancholy, sadism & masochism. 11[56] To be invulnerable – with the single necessary exception of those whom we love – those, because we love them can always wound us. Is, then, love something to be avoided? No: it is neither to be avoided, nor to be considered as something outside or contradictory of the good life – which is that of the invulnerable lover. For the lover is vulnerable to the beloved, & on this account invulnerable to all the rest of the world. He who is vulnerable to one is more invulnerable to the rest, than if he were wholly invulnerable. 11[57] Has the human race ever set itself seriously to follow any end which it knew to be spiritually desirable? Has it ever conceived that life should be lived for itself, thoroughly & without encumbrance?
Beauty, peace, happiness, health – have these ever been the immediate ends of human life? Cp. Athens. But, as a rule, these ends have always been put on one side, or thrown into the distance. And their place taken by material prosperity, fame, wealth, etc:— The view of life implicated in our proverbs etc. ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ But who wants to gather moss? 11[58] Romanticism Romanticism as the antithesis of classicism. Romantic movement – an escape from restraint. The Romantic movement was something else besides Romantic: other characteristics: time & place & specific reaction against a particular classicism. In literature; a new technique. 11[58] Characteristic: of French Romanticism: Anti French classicism. Vitality. Melancholy – fashion of sickness, consumption.40 Love of the grotesque; picturesque. The past – historical bric à brac.41 Enjoyment of crime, passion, cruelty, violence, outlaws, brigands. [40] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Carr, p. 129.’ Possibly E.H. Carr, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-century Portrait Gallery (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933). [41] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Scot.’ Possibly a misspelling of the surname of historical novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832).
French Romanticism coming after the Napoleonic Empire. A lost generation. Cp. de Musset. Painting: influence of English painting – especially Constable on Delcacroix. etc: The French Romantic movement began with painting. Cp. The picture-writing – word-painting – of the Romantics – Gautier.42 The Romantic willingness to pursue an image.43 11[59] Romantic love To enjoy & to glory in the conflicts, the fire, the passions of love for their own sake. To be in love with love. Opposite to the ‘classic’ notion – love as a demon to be fled from & feared – to be endured. Racine, Phèdre.44 11[59] Romanticism & escape – two ways: (i) To escape from life into poetry. To leave life behind & find a new life in imagination. (ii) To make life itself Romantic: to force life itself into the Romantic mould. – Balzac.
[42] Possibly Théophile Gautier (1811–72), French poet, playwright, and critic noted for his defense of Romantic ideals. [43] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Gérard de Nerval, Les filles du feu [Sylvie] (Paris: D. Giraud, 1854).’ [44] J. Racine, Phèdre: tragédie (Paris: Bordas, 1966).
11[59] To die like a Greek runner, at the moment of reaching the goal. To die before the disenchantment of success sets in. 11[61] Mortality Most men live as circumstances direct: a few live according to a plan. Cp. Bentham, Mill – Utility – a principle; & not mere chance, sympathy & antipathy. ‘All detached ethical precepts, all single & limited ethical ideas, all detailed moral standards have in them elements arbitrary, provincial, temporary.’45 Some, however, who fail to live according to a plan, have a plan of life, a view. They see life as a coherent whole, & fail to carry it out only through indolence or lack of faith. They, however, lack the rigidity & hardness of those who practice, & the inconsequence of those who do not think. Plans of life— (i) Strict code of morality: absolute. Cp. Cato. (ii) Altruistic. St Francis. [45] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Nietzsche, Zarathustra; cp. M. Jaeger, Experimental Lives from Cato to George Sand (London: George Bell & Sons, 1932).’ See William Wallace, ‘Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra,’ in Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics, ed. E. Caird (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), pp. 530–41, at 533.
(iii) The man of the world. Chesterfield. (iv) Nature – Rousseau. Day. (v) Freedom – Georges Sand. (vi) Withdrawal. Buddha. (These are not absolutely exclusive of one another – or, not all of them.) The man of the world, intent upon succeeding, who knows he must use every advantage he can get, or else go under. And the man who happily goes under because it bores him to be clinging always to his advantages; who throws them away because they nauseate him; the man who does not care whether he ‘succeeds’ or not, so long as he remains happy in himself. 11[62] Two opposing impulses— (i) To make and keep oneself independent of circumstances. To preserve oneself. To regard circumstances as hindrances, as enemies. Nature the enemy. An absolute standard. (ii) To live a ‘natural’ life; to conform, to find oneself in conformity. To discover that one’s plan & way of life is actual self-realization. To make one’s life conform to the conditions of life. A life opposed to the conditions of life is dissipated. But what conditions? Reconciliation— Some ‘conditions of life’ are real & unchangeable conditions. E.g. mortality. Others are circumstances which our actual way of life creates.
We must conform to the first; & be free of the second, whenever these conflict with the first. Our life, will, then, be at once free, selfcentred, other-worldly; and in conformity with the conditions of life which belong to living itself & are inseparable from it. E.g. To be true to one’s love for someone whom one can never possess & who does not return it. This would appear foolish; but does it actually contradict the conditions of mortality? The bitterness of love not returned; is it even love?46 11[65] Who is felix opportunitate mortis? Cp. Parnell’s father, a devotee of cricket who died from a chill contracted while playing. The beau who died rescuing his favourite pair of boots. The Greek athlete who died at the moment of victory. The bride who dies on her wedding night. Ovid’s wish to die in the act of love. 11[66] Romanticism Nature. This romantic feeling for Nature is probably possible only in conjunction with a feeling of separation from nature.47 Tolstoy & Goethe, both children of nature – sensual, elemental; & their problem is how to become children of spirit. A moralizing problem. Schiller & Dostoevsky, both children of spirit & content to remain so. [46] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Alan Porter, The Signature of Pain, and Other Poems (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1930).’ [47] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. T. Mann, “Goethe & Tolstoy,” p. 31 sq.’ See T. Mann, Three Essays, tr. H.T. Lowe-Porter (London: Secker and Warburg, 1932).
What happens when a child of spirit wants to be joined to nature? 11[66] Mortality ‘Life requires discipline & rules, but the thoughts which underlie & determine the discipline & the rules must in the last resort have been extracted from life.’ Harold Höffding.48 Yes; & if we listened to life – what sort of discipline & what rules should we follow? But we must escape ‘Naturalism.’ 11[67] Mortality The conception of man as a ‘stage,’ a ‘bridge’ & not a ‘goal’ (Nietzsche), unsatisfactory. Human life must be seen to be complete in every moment before it can be conceived to be tolerable. A stage in a process, a means that is not an end, is not merely immoral, but death. 11[67] Romanticism Rousseau’s marriage to Thérèse la Vasseur. He did not take as a mistress some brilliant member of Parisian society, but this child of the people. Something untouched by the corruption of that society – or so he thought. [48] Harold Höffding (1843–1931), Danish philosopher and theologian.
To us Rousseau, especially in his relations to women, may strike us as sentimental. But sentimentality is the attempt to follow an old, outworn fashion in feeling; & of this Romanticism Rousseau was the originator – in revolt against the sophistication of Parisian society of the 18th century. But Rousseau is less out of place to-day than then; for it is the sophistication of France in the 18th century which is the sentimentality of to-day, it is classicism which is Romantic. There is more genuine Romanticism, & less genuine classicism, than ever before. There is doubt, criticism, complexity – the ingredients of the Romantic outlook. 11[68] Irving Babbitt. Modern Romanticism49 The attempt to recreate the disillusion of Horace in place of the faith & vigour of Rousseau. He does not see that the disillusion of to-day must include the Romantic spirit & not merely deny it. We must have a Romantic disillusion – all else is derivative, dead, sentimental, bogus. 11[68] It is impossible to get happiness by following a plan. Everything about us, & we ourselves change continually. To attempt to capture happiness & keep it is foolish. To put away this illusion is to be disillusioned; but at the same time happy. For then only can we enjoy the happiness which comes to us, without regret or pain.50 [49] Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), American critic of Romanticism, author of Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1919). [50] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. J.J. Rousseau, Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in Confessions de J.J. Rousseau, suivi des rêveries du promeneur solitaire,
11[72] The Philosopher & the Moralist The one engaged in the analysis of the moral consciousness & its acts & the ideas of value, good, & right. The other concerned with, ‘What things are good?’, ‘What in detail & in fact is valuable?’ Nietzsche – warning us that we have never yet known what good & evil are. The re-valuation of values. An inspection of our values. Cp. Romanticism of the 19th century & how it it has silently created a world of value for us – innocence etc. Virginity. That is the way our values get changed – silently, surreptitiously. What we want is to become conscious of our values, & then forget them. ‘The moralist’ – misleading; the abstract meaning attached to it. – The preacher & evangelist. Get away from this; something less noisy than a gospel, something more complete than a creed. Not aiming to convince & persuade, but to see clearly & to speak unambiguously. 11[74] There are various possible retreats. The safest of them is death. This is too drastic. What people want is a ‘death-surrogate’ – a state of being that combines the advantages of being alive with those of being dead. Drink, sensuality, dreams – None of these is a perfect refuge. Religious meditation, science, knowledge, philosophy. But what of the life which refuses substitutes? This, that & the other – business, learning, hobbies, religion, drink – are all substitutes, good & bad. Adolescence is distinguished by the 2 vols. (Geneva: 1782), Ch. IX (beginning).’
refusal of all substitutes, it must have all or nothing. And those who never rise out of that state, go on refusing substitutes. The end, I suppose must be suicide; for we must die or find some substitute for death. The poet, I suppose, finds his substitute in poetry, & that perhaps is the least qualified of all substitutes. 11[77] Romanticism Romanticism & liberalism.51 View that besides the pathological element in R. there was an urge towards liberty, humanitarianism, justice, purity. But that is a superficial view. ‘Approximate terms such as “baroque,” “romantic,” “decadent,” have their origins in definite revolutions of sensibility, and it serves no purpose to detach them from their historical foundations & apply them generously to artists of varied types.’52 Classic & Romantic.53 Hellenism a form of romanticism. Nothing so romantic as ‘classicism.’54 [51] Oakeshott’s note: ‘P. Lasserre, Le romantisme français: essai sur la révolution dans les sentiments et dans les idées au XIXe siècle (Paris: Mercure de France, 1907).’ [52] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Praz, Romantic Agony, pp. 6–7.’ Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony. A Study of the Morbid Tendencies of Romantic Literature, 1800–1900, tr. A. Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). [53] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Sir H.J.C. Grierson, The Background of English Literature, and Other Collected Essays & Addresses (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925).’ [54] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Praz, Romantic Agony, pp. 10–11.’
The inseparability of pleasure & pain – especially in love; & the search for tormented beauty. Beauty is not beautiful except it be sad, tormented, painful, ugly, accursed.55 Medusa. Beauty tainted with corruption and death. 11[77] What in the 17th century – e.g. Donne – are conceits, literary devices, in the 18th & 19th centuries with the Romantics, are real feelings. 11[77] ‘Ennui is not only the most generic aspect of the mal du siècle; its specific aspect is – sadism.’56 Masochism & sadism. 11[77] Exotic & erotic ideals go together. The fatal woman – Spain: Carmen. Russia. A love of the exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire. How far was the fatal woman the projection of a fear of lack of potency in the male – fear & pride. The masochistic attitude is a defence against fear.
[55] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Praz, Romantic Agony, p. 28.’ [56] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Praz, Romantic Agony, p. 144.’
11[77] Romanticism – fury of frenzied action. Decadence – sterile contemplation. 11[78] The modern Epicurean – the spectator – disillusioned.57 Positive disillusion – happiness something not to be expected.58 11[79] Mortality59 If you are interested only in the destinies of yourself & your friends – you will live a purposeless old age – friends gone & your own aims either already achieved; or, what is more probable, failure. (therefore) For a happy life, it is necessary to have at heart the destinies of the race, of mankind in general. But what, & all that is necessary, is to be without this sense of purpose. To banish the word ‘achievement’ banishes also ‘failure.’ If your life is taken up entirely with the immediate joys & sorrows of your friends & yourself; old age will not be subject to the lack of interest Mill predicts. For this is a continuous & unexamined interest, whereas all others may work themselves out before the [57] Oakeshott’s note: ‘p. 147.’ I.S. Turgenev, A House of Gentlefolk, tr. C. Garnett (London: William Heinemann; New York, The Macmillan Company, 1915). [58] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Turgenev, House of Gentlefolk, pp. 264–5.’ [59] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 13.’ J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, first published in Fraser’s Magazine, 64 (1861), 391–406, reprinted in CW, x.203–59.
end. This is the only invulnerable state. Interest centered upon nobody’s destiny, upon no future aim, no purpose. A life unimpeded by this fatal, but seductive, mistress – achievement, purpose, destiny, progress. Cp. Liberalism: progress. 11[80] Mortality It is said that the fact of immortality is so clear & obvious, that not to take it as the criterion of value in life would be foolish & stupid. E.g. Shakespeare is immortal. But this is merely a question of fact – which may be left to look after itself. The point for us is not how to reconcile the fact that Shakespeare is immortal with our view of life. But whether to make this socalled fact the central belief results in a happy life or not. Or, in other words, are we, because of our immortality, to govern our own lives by this concept? E.g. Shakespeare is immortal: but did he live as an immortal? Many men have lived as immortals— Expressly: (a) fame, name, reputation etc: Anonymously: (b) Descendants, the next generation, etc: This can be done; it has been done: but the question is whether or not it enables us to ‘overcome’ life? Put it another way – immortality is the name we give for the principle by which we ‘overcome’ life. How is it to be attained? (i) By seeking it in its most obvious form – the future, the race etc. (ii) By seeking it in the present – in mortality. Positive mortality is a form of Immortality different from mere negative mortality. Cf. positive & negative disillusion.
11[80] The idea of ‘innocence,’ ‘virginity’ & the principle of keeping yourself pure for the one great & satisfying event. This is true & genuine – the ‘first’ time may well be the greatest & most profound. But knowledge & practice essential – best perhaps if knowledge can be had without practice, but no enjoyment without knowledge. Sometimes those who prize the ‘first’ beyond everything else & are (consequently) disappointed, never try again. It is these who lose their lives ‘par délicatesse.’60 11[80] We are always either surprised or kept waiting by death – (as birth). Birth & death are alike unexpected; and our view of life should take this into account. Live each day as if it were your last. 11[80] Perhaps it is the ‘sting of life’ rather than of death – the sharpness of life – which is most difficult to overcome. But if we have overcome that of death, the sting of life is also overcome. 11[82] It has been said that a religion must suit & recognize both good & bad times, times of adversity & times of prosperity, peace & trouble, progress & decadence. But there is something more profound than these; there are the universal & unvarying conditions of human life common to both adversity & prosperity & of which these are merely superficial [60] See A. Rimbaud, ‘Chanson de la plus haute tour’: ‘Par délicatesse j’ai perdu ma vie.’ Cp. p. 325, below.
variations. It is these which a successful religion must recognize, and when it recognizes them it will be more than a consolation in times of adversity or an encouragement & a sobering influence in times of prosperity. And Mortality is what I mean by these universal conditions. 11[82] Epicureanism Epicureanism represents a way of looking at the world & human life which possesses permanent interest for the human race. Cp. Zélide.61 How she ‘lived alone’ – contempt of pretention, display. Preference for simple people, and close, personal relationships. A private life. 11[82] The mixture of melancholy & gaiety in Epicureanism; the response both to adversity & prosperity. This is, at first sight, contradictory; but it is the contradiction of life itself – the contradiction of activity. See Experience & its Modes. Encouragement in the face of adversity; stability in the face of prosperity. (The second the more difficult.) 11[83] Two questions to be answered, two related & inseparable questions. [61] Possibly Isabelle Agnès Élizabeth de Charrière, aka Zélide (1740– 1805), Swiss novelist. Oakeshott may have been reading Four Tales by Zélide, tr. Sybil Scott-Cutting (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1925).
(i) What to believe about the world. (ii) How to live. 11[83] Stoicism & Epicureanism What really matters depends upon you yourself alone – Stoicism – Everything else is external & negligible – pleasure & pain, health, wealth & position. The abstract, separate, invulnerable self. Epicureanism – What really matters depends upon you alone – & your friends. The self is not isolated: what is isolated, or whole & stands out against the universe is self & friends. A man & his friends are complete, free, inviolable, invulnerable. A man can be wounded only by his friends. This is a concrete self; Stoicism tends, at least, towards the worship of an abstract self, a self which can never be self-complete, a self created merely by separation, subtraction, isolation. To be invulnerable – but without the crass armour of selfesteem. 11[84] Physical death is an instance of mutability – it is mutability itself which has to be overcome. 11[84] How to be reconciled to mutability’s theft of all beautiful things?— Keats – each moment is fulfilled of beauty, and we must live in each moment. cp. his life of sensations rather than of thought. With Keats this was first an emotional solution; which later he attempts to make philosophical in the ‘Ode to Autumn.’ But the great thing for Keats is that he was able to feel it, & so find
happiness. Shelley never really felt it; his faith in the future – gradually waning. 11[85] Mortality & humour Humour is the attitude which a full realization of mortality induces, and which is the only answer to mortality. Humour – the maturity of sentiment. Impossible in adolescence – age impossible without it. The only substitute which has a positive quality. 11[86] The Suicide of the lover – the last consummate flattery of the beloved. 11[86] Love & desire are signs of the insufficiency of the self for itself. Stoic: we must school ourselves to self-sufficiency & become independent of what is outside us. But this denies human nature. ‘We are too weak to live without love’: Spinoza. But that again is an error; it takes mortality not to belong to human nature. We must love & desire, but we must conquer desire not by denying it & withdrawing from it as much as possible, but by admitting its inevitable unsatisfactoriness.62 11[87] The moral courage which permits us to recognize what does not coincide with the purpose of our lives – a moral courage which, if followed, may lead to the disintegration of that purpose. [62] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Duff, p. 114.’
11[87] ‘Man lives between two desires – his desire of spiritual peace & happiness, & his desire of earthly experience.’63 And somehow we have got to get our spiritual peace & happiness out of this earthly experience. To let it remain something extraneous to that experience – e.g., in a religion or religious belief unrelated to, perhaps in contrast to experience – is to leave it always insecure. 11[88] Death is like the virus of leprosy, which lies within a man for years before it becomes active. We are born with this germ within us, in childhood & youth it is unrealized, in early manhood we become acutely aware of it, as age advances we get used to it, & if we are wise & fortunate, master it. Its terrors are controlled, its horror mastered. Period of incubation of leprosy can be as much as 20 or 30 years. 11[89] The transformation of moral values into facts. Good & evil – moral. Yin & Yang – non-moral.
[63] Oakeshott’s note: ‘George Moore, Evelyn Innes (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), p. 237.’
11[89] Confucianism The central concept – ‘jen’: humanity, mankind, kindness, sympathy. The feeling of one man for another. This ‘jen’ is the original gift of nature; it is the spirit which man has received in order to live. It is what is common & most fundamental in all men. Public service insisted upon by Confucianism – the reaction of Taoism. The ‘superior man’ of Confucius. Cp. The ‘homme habile’ of La Rochefoucauld. The ‘wise man’ of the Stoic. ________ of the Epicurean. and Nietzsche? & other moralists. The ‘free’ man. The ‘righteous’ man. 11[90] Reaction to disillusion, to the troubled state of the world, to failure & to despondency. To find a life which is expressed & satisfied in some intensely personal experience.64 11[A] Social substance of religion65 – yes, but society itself is a particular attempt to answer these questions about life, & it is an attempt [64] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J.B. Leishman, The Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), p. 3.’ [65] On a loose sheet inserted at 11[16], numbered 11[16a].
rather to be subsumed under religion, rather than religion under it. For religion is the force which makes society as well as that which reforms or destroys it. The view that nature makes, & religion destroys is meaningless. We must see religion as the ground of both: (i) The disruptive forces in society; (ii) The integrative & conservative forces in society. It is something much more fundamental than either of these taken alone. It is energy itself, the manifestation of energy for whatever purpose – & these are the two great conflicting purposes – rather than a peculiar type of energy. It is energy – mental & physical – directed towards a practical union with life, towards finding the world a home & giving life a meaning. 11[A] Rationalization – Heard sees in it only something ‘after the fact.’ But it is inherent in self-conciousness.66 Self-consciousness, experience, makes the ‘fact’; & Rationalization is merely carrying this process to its conclusion – The determination to satisfy selfconscious experience for its own sake. The normal, civilized man to-day does nothing but rationalize – experience is itself rationalization – & the trouble is that he stops too soon. Man has made many mistakes in his rationalizing e.g. when he mistakes his thirst for immortality for a desire for a life hereafter, rather than as a desire for a life harmonious here. And, perhaps, one of these mistakes is that he mistakes the ‘sense of the group’ & the satisfaction he hopes to get from that, [66] Oakeshott’s note: ‘G. Heard, Social Substance of Religion: An Essay on the Evolution of Religion (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931), pp. 120–1.’
for a desire for something beyond the group – the group, so to speak is the symbol for something beyond the threshold of explicit experience, but inside his world of volitional experience.67 11[B] Mortality68 To overturn & abolish the criterion of life which prizes what has been accomplished, the static world of what is achieved, possessed, won; to which the flower is merely the promise of a fruit. To overturn it because it is out of touch with the real facts of life; to abolish it, because to retain it involves the abolition of life. The superiority of present, extemporary experience over knowledge which has already been acquired – ‘classed & donewith.’ The superiority which we recognize belongs to one who has just now discovered, for the first time, something which to me, as I stood by, was merely already known, remembered. He is living in the May-morning of creation; I, in the drowsy decline of afternoon. The superiority which belongs to what is first experienced. To recognize this superiority, & to plan our criteria of life to be consistent with that recognition, instead of, as now, inconsistent & contradictory. 11[C] Ibsen69 Subject of his plays— The sacrifice of the natural good to some ideal – dead or living. [67] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Heard, Social Substance of Religion, p. 94.’ [68] On a loose sheet inserted at 11[16], numbered 11[16b]. [69] On a loose sheet inserted at 11[19], stamped: ‘GONVILLE AND CAIUS COLLEGE / CAMBRIDGE,’ numbered 11[19a].
E.g. Ghosts – respectability. Brand – all or nothing Religion. ^ Kierkegaard. ‘The jury of life,’ ‘the love of life in the individual’ – this must be asserted & maintained at all costs. Ibsen is not simply the idealist critic who castigates a Peer Gynt or a Berkman; Brand also denies what Ibsen asserts – or wants to assert. On which side is he in Romersholm? Conflict – how unreal any cause is beside a human being. How trivial a human being is beside a cause. The solution lies only in a unification of these: – the cause seen as the self realization of the human being. Both are abstractions. 11[D] What I want to achieve is a view of life which has got rid of everything doctrinaire.70 Most of us live with a doctrinaire view of life, a view which is not in correspondence with the facts of actual life, but with the facts of an imaginary life. Life & death we see through a haze of inherited & half-understood conceptions & words. Let us get back to the facts & construct our conceptions anew. But to get away from what is doctrinaire is not to do without a doctrine. Nor does it mean that life is lived without a doctrine.71 Even the view of life which is ‘pagan’ has an aim, a doctrine, a logic.
[70] On a loose sheet inserted at 11[19], numbered 11[19e]. [71] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Brewster, pp. 43 sq.’
11[E] Mortality72 The question used to be put in the form, What am I here for? But this form makes too many presuppositions for it to be satisfactory or radical. The position to-day. The good life wanted by everybody. Mass. Cp. 18th century civilization. Organization; large communities; prosperity. Everything infected with this ‘achievement.’ Ideal – And nothing can be abolished. Culture, education, etc. Answers— (i) Drugs. Our whole way of life a drug. The problem insoluble: so it must be avoided or forgotten. Enter the system & forget what lies outside it. (ii) Revolution. But is this possible? And what do we want? Our needs complex; would be better if simplified. Can they be simplified. We want some things that civilization provides – & we must take the rest with them. (iii) Suicide. 11[F] What do we want?73 What is satisfying? [72] In pencil on a loose sheet inserted at 11[19]. Numbered 11[19f]. [73] In pencil on a loose sheet inserted at [11.19]. Numbered 11[19g].
Certain physical enjoyments; what more? Bondage – we are tied & bound. We have no freedom to plan our lives, deaths. There is no consonance between our desires & our circumstances. Only disharmony. Is this at the root of life? Should we be always like this? Powerless to alter our circumstances. Frustration everywhere. Forget it? Nostalgia. Monasticism. 11[G] The Prospects of Christian Theology74 The Catholic Reaction. Cp. Gore’s Commentary.75 But this is less significant than it would have been 20 years ago, because we no longer think of Christianity as resting upon the Scriptures in the old way. Introduction Wherever I have become conscious of a presupposition I have questioned it.
[74] On a loose sheet inserted at 11[19], numbered 11[19h]. [75] Possibly C. Gore et al. (eds), A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, including the Apocrypha (London: S.P.C.K., 1929).
Belle Dame Notebook 9 (January–October 1932)1 BD9[01] C’s poise of manner. Superiority, mastery, confidence, integrity. Clothes contribute to this poise. Balanced, not rooted, growing, resilient, ready & yet specifically unprepared – extemporary. A virtuouso. Slow, fashionable indifference. C’s hardness – eye for the main chance – money – ‘you’ll pay for that’ – venom. How it can slip out under the appearance of friendship. Ruthless in a quarrel. BD9[03] The moments when memory breaks in & ruins everything. Just as we are setting out upon some new life, memory steps in & lays it waste before we can begin to enjoy it. Never, never, never can we begin again. Always ourselves, & always what we were haunts us, hinders us, makes us impotent. BD9[04] First stage— To lie with a beautiful girl because she is beautiful. To have the pleasure of beauty. To realize the desire of the eye & the happiness [1] LSE 20/1. Paper cover, brown, exercise book, 13.5 cm × 8 cm. Ruled. Unnumbered. Autograph, ink. Dated: ‘M. Oakeshott. / Gonville & Caius College / Cambridge. / Jan 1. 1932–Oct 1. 1932.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 2, Lawrence, Women in Love; 15, Rousseau, Julie.
of the body. To delight in her lips, her cheeks, her hair, her skin, her thighs. This is beyond the primitive, animal desire. BD9[04–05] Letters to the unknown. Attempts to satisfy desire by denying it. To be free by suppressing desire. Margaret – the red-haired girl. Her grey eyes, solitude, selfcompleteness. This is to follow Romanticism; it arises from a failure of Romanticism, but is, itself, a form of Romanticism. It lies between the ‘Beyond’ & the ‘Nowhere’ as the satisfaction of desire. BD9[05] In these last months before C. is married & goes to Greece, I seem to be like a man who knows accurately the date of his death. Not merely a moribund man, who may hang on to life for an indefinite period & the end of whose life will come as unexpectedly as anyone else’s; but a condemned man, to whom reprieve is impossible. And this experience gives a new standpoint to life, a new intensity to the enjoyments with C. I am on a ‘magic mountain.’ BD9[06] The awakening of love is accidental. One may marry, one may lust, one may lie with a girl & have pleasure from her – without love ever awakening. Two may lie together, but love is not always there. But when love is awakened, then the world is transformed, & every item of life blossoms.
BD9[07] The Pattern of Mortality To see love as the middle moment of a search for completeness, realization. First: disinclination, refusal to be drawn into the world. To remain untouched. Desire to be stilled by refusal. Ascetic religions. Second: out into the world: the love of women, in all its phases. Attempt at completeness. Positive freedom sought. First failure of love owing to having taken into this new attempt the old conceptions of asceticism. First love the love of a dead self & so, when the fact that the self is dead is realized, the love perishes also. The possibility of completeness, revealed, seen – but refused – Céline. But, in this second moment, completeness is possible to see; & that vision must be a vision of disquiet for the rest of life. Third: Retirement: failure of completeness: & adoption of an ideal in invulnerability instead. Negative freedom. Nothing more than this is possible in life.2 Fourth: War – unending strife between second & third. But always a reluctance to leave the second moment – love – that seemed to offer completeness – the rest is the admission of failure. The perpetual war between the third & the second is the pattern of life. BD9[08] Qualities of mind are more stable than the beauties of the body – I have not found it so. I am a different person from the person who married four years ago. The change has not been a physical change – it has been a change of the mind. The mind is the least enduring of all the stuffs of men. [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. The Fountain, p. 148.’ Probably C. Morgan, The Fountain: see Notebook 11, n. 5, above.
BD9[08] The intimations of mortality The fingers become hard, the skin less supple, the nails dry up & become brittle. The mouth no longer waters at the sight of food. BD9[11] The parting of lovers has been compared with death – but it is not that. The death of the beloved is final, complete; it has meaning. But there is no realized finality in mere parting. It has the feverishness of life & the emptiness of death in one. BD9[11] Love & friendship & every intimate association has a kind of underlying substance, to preserve which & to maintain it every activity is directed. BD9[12] I had a wife, & now I have a mistress – but where is happiness? Where is love? BD9[12–13] March 1932. C. gradually slipping from me. The time drawing near when I shall neither see her nor be able to write to her: when I shall neither hear her voice nor see her writing. Like a man condemned to death; believing always that a last minute reprieve will come but believing without either ground or hope.
And, with it all, the presentiment of the loneliness which will follow her departure. How I make plans to avoid that loneliness; beg C. to find out the name of the girl with the red hair – all the while knowing that no new relationship can ever relieve the loneliness or mitigate it. The pathetic illusion that we can banish this awful solitude by making fresh acquaintances or friends. BD9[13–14] The discontent inherent in every satisfaction. The desire always to oppose, to strive against, to hate in the midst of loving. The only satisfaction lies in being denied, continually denied, but denied in such a way as to be led on. A continual, subtle movement to & fro. A warfare, a struggle. Continual temptation, continually overcome. A relationship which is never formulated, or established. Fluid, moving, flowing & ebbing, ceaseless, unsatisfied, but final in its dissatisfaction, & absolute in it. BD9[14] We fall in love with a friend; we lie with her, & wake to find beside us a stranger. BD9[16] To be in love is heaven itself – to be loved is hell, or at least insufferable boredom. BD9[23] I married, not without love, but not knowing what love was.
BD9[23] I wanted a disciple, a follower, someone to teach, to enthuse, to lead. But if you love anyone it is only for what they are and not for what you want them to be. BD9[23] To be primesautière – to expend terrific energy, or to do nothing at all. BD9[24] Times, 8 August 1932. ‘(Sigma) is dead – No; I mean she’s been married.’ ‘Which do you mean?’ ‘Both.’ BD9[25] The symbolic failure, lack of complete success, in all my relations with (Sigma). E.g The Ball, 1931. The growth of the notion that she is mine because I have never possessed her. Lack of achievement. BD9[26–27] My conscious life came into being like a late & sudden spring. One day all was hidden; the next I was overwhelmed with an inconceivable wealth of sensations. Sensibilities in every direction – nature, style, love. What previously had been ideas, now were experiences. The torrents of spring! It was like a Russian spring; a sudden & complete change. Cp. Persian spring.
BD9[27] The notion of parallel lives, which never meet, but are never very far distant from one another. BD9[28] I was happy in those few months – if happiness consists in a swift life, in a strong, all-obscuring love, without anything to regret, or anything to hope for. BD9[28–29] The quiet, strong self-possession with which (Sigma) met me always. Full of sympathy, frankness, abandon; nothing withheld, yet nothing given: everything given, yet no encouragement. It was as if she knew what she had to give, what she could give, knew its limits, but gave what she had always & without reserve. No promises, but all fulfilment. No fulfilment, but nothing promised. She raised between us a wall of glass: cold, impenetrable, inexorable – yet intimate, sympathetic – concealing nothing. BD9[29] Like Marpessa, she chose the mortal, fearing lest the god should prove faithless.3 [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Homer, Illiad, Bk IX, l. 560 & Lang’s note.’ See The Illiad of Homer Done Into English Prose, tr. A. Lang, W. Leaf, and E. Myers (London: Macmillan and Co., 1883). According to Leaf ’s note at p. 513, ‘Idas son of Aphareus carried off Marpessa from her father Euenos; and Apolla wished to take her from Idas. So the two came to fighting, until Zeus separated them, and bade Marpessa choose which she would have. And she chose the mortal, fearing least the god should prove faithless.’
BD9[30] A history of how love found me & what she did with me. Each has this history; with some it is simple, & they are happy. With others it is complex. Venus brings to some peace, & to others war: to some satisfaction & to others endless unrest. BD9[31] Love & care are insperable: it is always mixed with pain, always unsatisfied. Successful love is never free from pain; unsuccessful love is worse.4 We must then avoid love: intercourse without love is at once less disappointing & free from care.5 BD9[32] Nature arouses in us the need for love; but it cannot satisfy it. BD9[32–33] Suddenly he became aware of all the frustration & insignificance of his life. Frequently this sense of frustration had almost overwhelmed him, but now it overtook him altogether. The lack of fulfilment, the failure – the love unsatisfied which filled his life. And in a sudden fit of utter exasperation, he drove the car at the gate post. Fire; nothing left. He had disappeared.
[4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, Bk IV, 1057–1087.’ [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucretius, De rerum natura, Bk IV, 1073.’
BD9[33] She is dead. The end of the world. What was looked for & has been dreaded has happened. No more debate – by heat? By cold? It is by heat & cold. The world ends with her death. BD9[33] Death is no more: she, being dead, has killed death. There is no more death for there is no one more to die.6 The world has gone. Life is now posthumous. And to know only the empty kisses of whores. BD9[34] To die like Alcibiades – protected by a whore. Timandra. BD9[35] If I went with a prostitute I should want to bring her flowers. BD9[35] The man who has no lust will have no intense love. Lust & love may be differ–ent; there may be very many different kinds or degrees of love, but they are not entirely separable. Lust is not love, nor love lust; but they cannot be separated absolutely. BD9[37] Love: obligation: gratitude: – the irreconcilable.
[6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. 1 Corinthians & Amiel, Sa vie.’
BD9[37] Love and desert: ‘He won her & he deserves her.’ The notion of a long labour, the performance of some great task in order to prove desert. This often a myth for wooing: but where it is not, it contains an entirely false notion of love. BD9[39] Any profound, jealous, exclusive indiscreet sympathy is love. Love is the desire and the sensation of living in another person more than in ourselves. BD9[39] E.g. love of God. What we desire in that, as in all love, is happiness. And the happiness which the beloved has to give is not a fixed quantity, & is not a fund attached to her person or belonging to her – it is something created in the intercourse of love – it is the Einheit von du und ich. BD9[40] ‘A single person is missing, & the whole world is unpeopled.’7 The streets are empty & colourless, the air dull & heavy, the sun clouded & there is delight neither for the eye nor the ear. BD9[41] 1. The Frenzy of love. Love which knows nothing save itself & desires nothing else. [7] See Alphonse de Lamartine, ‘L’isolement’, in Méditations poétiques, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Hachette), i.13: ‘Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé.’
2. The Peace of love – flowers, smiles, fine clothes, happy feasts, etc. BD9[42] Love & the desire to find oneself and to be alone. ‘O last delight; I know I am alone.’ Mallarmé, Herodias.8 BD9[42] Dante called upon all beautiful women to praise his lady – I would hide my beloved in myself: the praises of another are impertinent; they add nothing & they break into that absolute invulnerability which comes with love. We are not interested in the world’s opinion: we are free from the world.
[8] S. Mallarmé, Herodias, tr. C. Mills (New York: AMS Press, 1940).
Belle Dame Notebook 10 (October 1932–March 1934)1 BD10[02] Love as the absolute category of experience; as perfection.2 Is not love essentially unstable, practical, mortal, inseparable from pain, movement, change? BD10[03] See, I have pricked my finger picking roses for you; & my feet are wet with the dew. BD10[03] October 1932. Oh (Sigma), how empty is this place without you. The streets are deserted, it is a city of the dead – a desert & deserted place. Now is the time when I should be sending flowers to you. Your room should be filled with daisies & chrysanthemums; and soon [1] LSE 20/1. Paper cover, brown, exercise book, 13.5 cm × 8 cm. Ruled. Unnumbered. Autograph, ink. Dated: ‘M. Oakeshott. / Oct 1. 1932. / to March 1934.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 5–6, T. Mann, Death in Venice, tr. K. Burke (New York: Knopf, 1925); 12, St. Augustine, Confessions; 13, R.M. Rilke, Advent (Leipzig: Friesenhahn, 1898) and Das Buch der Bilder (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1913); 32–3, L.-F. Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Paris: Deonël et Steele, 1932). [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Plato, McTaggart, & cp. Bradley, Essays, p. 10 note.’
the beech leaves will turn red – but there is no-one here for whom I may gather them. Komm süsse Tod. BD10[04] L’amour et la mort, c’est la même chose.3 BD10[04] Oh love! Who gave thee thy superfluous name? Loving & dying – is it not the same? Japanese. BD10[04] The moments in life when we have to choose whether we shall live or die. BD10[06] The passionate desire to be compromised, to lose everything the world regards & values – reputation, wealth, health – everything – this is inseparable from passionate love. BD10[06] Passion paralyses good taste – the door is open to sentimentality & he must have a very firm-rooted taste who is to avoid it. BD10[07] To be in love is to be tortured; not to be in love is to be bored. [3] Octave Mirbeau, Le jardin des supplices (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1899), p. 158.
BD10[07] Like a weak swimmer – not out of his depth, but in shallow water. I swam in shallow water. BD10[08] The primacy of the ‘first’ experience. But the incomparable intensity of a first experience for which one has somehow been prepared – but prepared without the actual experience itself. This was my experience of love with (Sigma). BD10[08] The heavenly early morning freshness of the Elizabethans. BD10[11] It is that force of sensuality which overcomes boredom – the great enemy of life. Sensuality perhaps, alone produces a fundamental aversion from death. Ambition may easily fail; but it is only when sensuality fails that life goes with it. The life of a man or the life of a relationship. This aversion from death is felt, is a matter of emotion – the rest are matters of principle. The actual & felt satisfactoriness of one’s present existence may also breed an aversion from death. BD10[11] What has kept me alive during these last few weeks is the sheer force of sensuality, a meaningless but strong vitality. The nervous energy of youth. How long can it last?
BD10[12] Brought up as a child of spirit, ascetic etc: sublimation of natural & physical impulses. Sensitive to this upbringing. But with a fully awakened self-consciousness finding it barren & empty. Goethe & Tolstoy were children of nature who tried to find spirit – to moralize their impulses or to deny them. Schiller & Dostoevsky were children of spirit & content in the main. I am a child of spirit attempting to become a child of nature. Spirit is education in me; nature is impulse & myself. Marriage while under the dominance of spirit. And it was that which awakened this slumbering, merely sublimated self, the strongest self in me. BD10[14] I confided my ambitions, my ideas, my self – & when they & this changed, I must leave her with whom I confided them. A young man in love should not too readily confide anything save his love. BD10[14] I thought that to be in love was to confide myself; & that to confide myself was to be in love. I dreamed that the sweetest thing in love was to give myself up, freely to my beloved, to express my devotion at any moment. But to do this is to play one’s part badly: love exists upon pretence, duplicity. To let oneself go is to be a clumsy lover. BD10[16] The attraction of incest. The regenerate, beautiful prostitute.
Beauty tortured, spoiled, killed. Sacrilege, profanity, blasphemy. Death in love. BD10[17] I loved her, & my love destroyed her. BD10[17] ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’4 & perhaps also the thing that loves him. Terrifying desire for depredation, squalor, humiliation, vagabondage: outcast. BD10[17] Sexual intercourse with a dead body: like you to be cold so that I can imagine you dead. Death-coldness of a body after bathing. BD10[17] I should like her to beat me, to kill me – no, better to ruin me – morally, in reputation, financially – completely. BD10[17] Botticelli’s Primavera – Satanic, terrifying. __________ Venus – cold, distant, unapproachable.
[4] Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (London: Leonard Smithers, 1898), l. 37.
BD10[18] Black narcissi. BD10[18] To reach the turning point in life when a man has ceased to think of his own happiness, personal ambitions. To have let the heart grow old with the head & the body. But is this the real turning point? – the shadow-line? BD10[19] Looking back at it now I can see the whole of this period of my life dominated & unified by Céline. If I were unfaithful to her – it was on account of my relationship to her. If I forgot her, it was because she made it unbearable for me to remember her. If I tried to escape from her, it was because my relationship with her was intolerable. If I flew from her, it was not because I wanted somebody else, or to be somewhere else, but merely to be away from her. Positive & negative alike – she dominated all my life & actions. BD10[19] Our actions, even our ideas & feelings have only a symptomatic value. It seemed to me that I was forgetting (Sigma), when I decided to seek elsewhere someone to love, whereas it meant that I loved her still. The desire for love was part of my regret, was an expression of it. Perhaps we can only love once, & one person; even though we fall in love many times, & even though we find satisfaction in the end, with a person other than she who first awakened love in us.
It is not as a balm or a consolation that these other ‘loves’ should be regarded; they are a fulfilment, a partial response. BD10[20] A relationship must be kept at a certain speed, or, like a gramophone which is running down as it plays, it goes out of tune. And when the relationship is one of love, the speed is more difficult to keep, and the least falling-off is at once evident & disastrous. BD10[20] How a relationship gradually cools. Without any sudden break or calamity, without any crisis or catastrophe, it goes through that painful process which, we are told, will overtake this planet, until an age of icy-death finally overtakes it. BD10[21] When Elizabeth & I made love together, when she would slide (as I taught her) her tongue between my lips, it was to me, as if were enjoying these delights with Céline, & at the same time as if I were betraying her; and my delight lay in both these feelings. BD10[22–24] (Sigma) asleep Description of how she lay on her side, with her face towards me. Summer; she had taken off her frock, but not shoes or stockings. Feeling that she at this moment belonged to me more fully than ever before. All that resistance was gone, the coldness which she assumed towards me, the intentional withdrawal of herself which was evident whenever we were together – all this was gone. And in its place, passivity, an almost welcoming passivity. Her personality
& her relationships no longer stood as a barrier between us. It was my desires & my affections & love which counted, because nothing save that was positive & present. She was to me, then, the same as she was in the first moment that I saw her, before she was conscious of me, before I had made any impression upon her, before she was obliged to take up an attitude towards me. By shutting her eyes, & losing consciousness, she had become mine again, as she was before she knew me. The rain outside seemed like a curtain cutting us off from the rest of the world, a barrier against disturbance, a sea which surrounded us excluding sight & sound – everything but ourselves. An island. This was the first, perhaps, the only moment when I found her brought down to my own level. She could become mine; I possessed her because her spirit could no longer resist me. BD10[25] Sometimes when we have committed the madness of having thought at all, we wonder whether we are in love at all; and it is futile to attempt to prove love by the idea we form of our lover. Love is proved by action. Are you ready to give up everything you have – your wealth, health, reputation, work, friends – everything for her, simply because she asked you to do so? & for nothing in return, not even her approval. If not, you are not in love. BD10[25] Love without possession must remain a cruel bondage, a horrible, painful, disintegrating pleasure. But in love, where possession & realization destroys the faculty of imagination, the pleasure becomes at once insipid.
BD10[26] To be in love with one, makes it possible to admire many without the torture of desire – restores to us a world of beauty & calm delight. BD10[26] At parting, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches: pity has succeeded to love – or perhaps merely fear. BD10[27] In my relations with Céline I never had to overcome the passion of jealousy. It was as if I had got beyond jealousy at one stride, without even recognizing it or knowing what it was. Only later, & in relation to another girl, did I come to feel the force of jealousy. With Céline my love was at once unsatisfied & free from jealousy – & it has remained both to this day. BD10[28] If what we seek is freedom from suffering, then we know where it is to be found – in oblivion, in forgetfulness. While there is memory there will remain desire, and desire is never stilled by possession. Eradicate desire, extinguish it, for it can never be satisfied. But in order to extinguish love, one must extinguish oneself. To forget one with whom one is in love, is to forget oneself. A new self, a new world, a new universe must be created & grow. The death of oneself is neither impossible nor extraordinary; but it is not easy to learn the world again. BD10[29] The world seen in grief.
BD10[29] Like the elderly husband of a young girl, I thought only of the ‘kindness’ which she showed me; & I interpreted everything she said to me in terms of this kindness. And as such a husband will be satisfied with ‘kindness’ & will scarcely expect faithfulness, & will moreover find added reasons for gratefulness for kindness where he is betrayed, I limited my ambitions to those of senility. BD10[29] To read the newspaper & find everything in it insignificant. Sympathy extinguished. The greatest calamities are reduced to insignificance; the greatest triumphs are at once petty & insignificant. BD10[30] No despair; for to feel despair is still to be attached to a life which has not ended but to which we anticipate a disastrous end. When we have left that life altogether, there can be no despair. Disillusion. BD10[30] To imitate age, and allow our griefs to beget our attachments & loves, rather than our joys & desires. BD10[32] Love is not blind; it searches out imperfections, & each defect is an added reason & impulse for loving. There is no love which does not include a love of defect as well as an admiration of goodness – there is no love which is not immoral.
Indeed, it would appear that women in love search always for the ‘eternal bounder’ – virtue is far less an incentive for love than vice. BD10[34–35] Love is desire; and mine was love to the end, for desire was never satisfied. It was love too, in a kind of generic, essential sense, because it was accepted defeat from the very beginning. This gave it a certain flavor of disinterestedness; but not a genuine, moral disinterestedness; but a disinterestedness arising not from an absence of personal desire, but from acceptance of defeat. I desired & simultaneously qualified desire by recognizing the impossibility of its satisfaction. It was love in a kind of immaterial, generic, essential sense, also because it was at once first love, and a love for which I was prepared, which was anticipated & understood: Like a candle, lately lighted but extinguished is prepared for the flame which relights it, as love itself can be said to anticipate death. BD10[36] As we grow more mature & experienced in human relationships, one thing we lose is the sense of disintegration, sometimes amounting to an actual loss of consciousness, but always depriving the occasion of normality (etc.) which is felt when one is first brought into contact with another human being. Physical sensation; rush of blood to the head, loss of control of speech & limbs, etc: The sensations on first touching a person with whom one is in love. Great waves of blood surge through the body. The world floats around us; or we float in a stable, but strange world. Movement is floating.
Cp. the sensation which, as a boy or young man, we receive praise for first successes – or on the sudden assumption of a new responsibility or office – or when some half-unexpected honour or office is offered – the world turns round, speechlessness, pleasure, bewilderment, giving place to wild excitement or to unconsciousness. Reading examination results, receiving news of an appointment, or a legacy, or a death, an unexpected meeting – anything, however expected, which brings to the system a shock. Astonishment. All this belongs to ‘falling in love’; and it is something which can scarcely happen twice: & can only happen with a stranger. Replaced later by calm self-possession, command of the situation, calculation of chances, choice of tactics. Shockproof: balance. BD10[38] Les filles que vous ont presque aimé. The condition of being ‘nearly in love’ – possible only after having been completely in love with another person – not possible in extreme youth – not possible after having been in love. Tantilizing. Desire to find oneself in love and yet being unable to fall in love. More unsettling, more disintegrating than the condition of being in love. Without any positive satisfaction; a negative condition. BD10[39] 1. Begin by describing present position – all that is left is to write about this love. The reasons for writing – exorcism. Cp. Goethe, Werther’s Leiden. Impossible to live until this life has been put behind me – the effort to throw off the sense that the life I live is a posthumous life.
2. Then; my position at the beginning – marriage & married life, & my character then. 3. The four years. The continual contrast of: (a) The dying relationship. (b) The living relationship.
Belle Dame Notebook 11 (March 1934)1 BD11[01] Carrying adolescence into later life – the intensity of adolescent feeling, its unreasonableness, its overwhelming power, blotting out experience, extinguishing sense and humour – this is the fountain of poetry, the source at once of the intensest happiness & the intensest misery, melancholy. BD11[02] To see a door close which has been opened is a far more devastating experience than to beat for a lifetime upon a door which never opens. BD11[02] A love affair which ends in death is one which has not ended, & is therefore satisfying & complete. BD11[02] Second adolescence. BD11[02] Adolescence – the refusal of substitutes; the demand for complete satisfaction. [1] LSE 20/1. Paper cover, brown, exercise book, 13.5 cm × 8 cm. Ruled. Unnumbered. Autograph, ink. Dated: ‘M. Oakeshott. / 18 March 1934.’
BD11[03] Self-centred love.2 BD11[03–04] What is unsatisfied love? What does love require to satisfy itself? If love, in its extreme treats its own devotion as worthless, if it prostitutes itself to its object, then it can never be unsatisfied – it is always one & self-complete. It requires neither expression nor reply. But love is a relationship, and the lover must & does make demands – what are they? Not for sympathy or understanding – these he might like, but as a lover does not require. Does he demand love. Yes, I suppose so – he demands somehow to find himself in his beloved, & this is the sole element of self in his love. And it is difficult to see either how love can be satisfied without this, or how this can be unless his love is returned. It is not love, it is something else which demands no return, & which, consequently, is never from beginning to end unsatisfied. BD11[05] Werther’s love for Charlotte was his second love; the first had died before the book begins. BD11[05] Love & the world.3
[2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Goethe, Werther, LVII, p. 148.’ [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Goethe, Werther, pp. 19–20.’
BD11[05] The desire for insensibility.4 BD11[05] The impossibility of describing the person with whom you have fallen in love – the kind of things you say – all irrelevant. What are the relevant things?5 BD11[05] Werther heard of the girl before he met her; heard she was beautiful. BD11[05] Love is a very dangerous state to be in, you must control it. It is no compliment to the girl to be in love with her. You are thinking only of yourself – ‘your little emotions’ – instead of thinking of her; you are still entirely self-centred; you have made a great picture to yourself of your emotions, you exaggerate them, & they have blotted out everything else – including W.6 BD11[06] A relationship in which jealousy can scarcely enter.
[4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Goethe, Werther, p. 32.’ [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Goethe, Werther, pp. 24–5.’ [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. George’s advice. Goethe, Werther, pp. 79–80.’
BD11[06] How, against our intentions, our steps turn towards the place where she whom we love is – even when it is impossible to see her, even when we are afraid of meeting her. BD11[07–08] While we are in love, there may be disappointment if plans go wrong, or have to be abandoned, if we are hindered from meeting her, or are separated for a short while, but, afterwards, there is no real regret, there is no room for regret. We live as much, almost, in the future as in the present, ‘time’s winged chariots’ go unheard, & we are unconscious of the passing days. For while we are in love we are satisfied completely with that state of mutual understanding. But when an end comes in sight, then a tide of regret begins to flow in our minds, and every opportunity lost seems to be more important, to have held out the possibility of greater happiness, than those actually enjoyed. And melancholy takes the place of joy. So it was with my proposal to visit Winifred early in the morning on her birthday – at the time there was no acute regret & little disappointment; but now it seems as though that occasion held out a more intense happiness than any we enjoyed. How I pictured the whole thing to myself in advance – how I actually experienced it. And I wonder now if the actual event could have added more. Creeping toward the house, avoidance of noise, the window, the climb, the flowers in my hands, entering the room, W. waking – her smile – or frown – her welcome, throwing off my clothes & getting into her bed – & then; yes, the rest. Whatever the force of imagination, the rest because it was not physically enjoyed was not experienced, but only that.
BD11[09] ‘R. might die’ – suggested to me, but I was unable to entertain the idea. It did not fit into my world – I knew (Sigma) was happier with R. than ever I could make her happy. And besides, the notion that my love for (Sigma) would never be fulfilled was so firmly fixed, was so to speak so much an axiom or postulate of our entire relationship, that even if R. were to die, I could not imagine myself as taking his place as her actual lover. BD11[10] The peculiar & bitter sweet sensation of spring – for the young a sensation of expectation, for the old, regret. This, indeed, is the difference between youth & age – age has arrived when the spring brings with it regret rather than anticipation. BD11[10] Love & gratitude – these are the incompatibles. Love demands love or nothing: gratitude is an insult, a form of insensitiveness. But does love demand love?7 BD11[11] Suddenly to wake up & find ourselves bound to another person by chains stronger than even ourselves, chains so strong that sooner than break, they tear themselves free from their moorings & carry a part of ourselves with them.
[7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘I.S. Turgenev, Virgin Soil, tr. C. Garnet, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1913–15), ii.85.’
BD11[12] To love is not merely to subject oneself to another’s personality, to refer everything to that person’s tastes & desires, but it is to subject oneself to another’s moods. And no man is genuinely in love who finds hardship in this slavery to the mood of another. To the learner this subjection appears more difficult than anything else he has to encounter: it is more wholly immoral, it more completely places the relationship outside & beyond the conditions of reasonable social relationship. Indeed, this perhaps is impossible to learn; the lover, in this respect, is born, not made. BD11[13] Love, perhaps, is not a relationship, & that is why, as love, it is satisfied & never satisfied. BD11[14–15] (Sigma). Sometimes I was conscious that my love was too much like the love of a woman to be welcomed or even appreciated by a woman. This desire to perform the simple services of life, to welcome her, to find her tired & wait upon her, to listen to her, to sympathize with her tenderly, to admire her, to comfort her – was too feminine a desire to satisfy a woman’s emotions. And yet it was often so strong in me that to attempt to replace it, at these times, with something more acceptable must have failed even if it could have been made. The occasions when this mood & these emotions held me seemed to become more frequent. And before long I came to regard it as just one more symptom of that emasculation which the tacit conditions of our relationship involved. If C. had dictated those conditions, it might have been said that in insisting upon them she was insisting upon a form of conduct in me which must
inherently leave her unsatisfied & which, in the end, must become tedious & intolerable to her; that she was insisting upon a form of conduct in me which must before long lessen her affection & respect for me: For she would have been demanding from a man an emotional response which she must more readily & more appropriately find in other women. But, in fact, it was not her insistence which created & fed these emotions in me, & this form of behavior; they appeared in me independently of any conscious desire or effort on my part, and independently of my character, but merely as an intuitive response to the situation in which we found ourselves. A desire to win her for myself, a desire, even, to insist upon my own desires would have made their appearance impossible. BD11[17] C: ‘Looking back on it now the thing I am ashamed of is my lack of response. I had affection for you, but I refused you any demonstration of your affection, & that, after all, is unpardonable. It is all very well to refuse it to a man whom one dislikes, however much he may desire it or be in need of it; but to refuse it simply from lack of courage is a mistake. We must help one another; & I could have helped you & I am sorry now that I didn’t.’ ‘But you did help me. To have given me a little would have been worse than to give me nothing. After all, you made me feel that I was in something of a privileged position with regard to you – I was a person to whom you would not stoop to give a little. You gave me happiness because you gave me great pain.’ BD11[18] The wild desire for amusement & pleasure which is one of the symptoms of the onset of leprosy.
BD11[18] Don Juan & Werther? BD11[18] Like a leper, condemned never again to see the girl he loves & condemned always to think of her with an ever intensifying desire & longing. Leprosy, the disease of which we cannot be cured & of which one cannot die. BD11[19] The legend that if one can infect another one will be cured of leprosy – if we can infect another of this disease of love one will be cured oneself. BD11[20] An idealized, complicated love, enriched by a thousand embellishments of subtle feeling & motive; magnanimous affections, unwillingness to conquer, disquieting, ever-unsatisfied love: sensitive, imaginative, egoistic, expecting, requiring no reply; refined, indulgent of every character & quality of the beloved, unindulgent of itself. Universal comprehension & compassion, morbid: complete, egotistic alienation of one’s own person; sublime, imaginative devotion. Is this the first growth of the seed of impotence? BD11[21] Not the absolute ennui of René; I was not chaste as Werther, nor as ruthless as Don Juan – I had neither the purity, nor the strength.
BD11[21] Love & life ill agree. Life is at once too short & too long for love. BD11[22] The first experience8 No experience is a first experience: the experience of infancy we forget, & perhaps of the race, and when we meet it again it is new & yet not strange. E.g. sex knowledge. BD11[25] Mother of God, how lucky you were having the Holy Ghost for a lover. BD11[27] To make abstinence easy by making life hateful. BD11[27] Anhedonia. BD11[28] Marriage Two stags with their antlers locked together dying in a knowledge of one another that they never wanted, dying of starvation. [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Leopardi, Parini on Glory, pp. 92–5.’ See G. Leopardi, ‘Parini, or Concerning Fame,’ in Moral Tales, tr. P. Creagh (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1983).
Notebook 12 (December 1934)1 12[01] The sailor’s life contains in itself a paradox which enables it to satisfy the contradictory needs of human beings. A death surrogate.2 12[01] To spend one’s life for another person because we know his need of us. To believe in him more than anyone else, more than himself. To spend one’s life treasuring up every word, glance, sigh, sign. 12[01] To feel the need of ‘the illusion of affairs.’ Not to feel it is to triumph over death; the illusion of affairs is a way of putting off mortality, forgetting it. [1] LSE 2/1/12. Soft cover, green cotton, 16 cm × 10 cm, ruled. Recto folios numbered 1–35. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘Michael Oakeshott. / Notes. / XII. / December 1934 / denn liebend gibt der Sterbliche vom Besten / It is in love that mortal man gives his best. / Hölderlin.’ [See Friedrich Hölderlin, Der Tod des Empedokles, Act II sc. iv.] Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 7, F. Dostoevsky, The Possessed, tr. C. Garnett (London: Dent, 1931); 11–12, G. Leopardi, Parini on Glory; 19, V. Woolf, The Common Reader (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1925); 26–8, F. Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, tr. T. Common (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1910) and Human, All Too Human. [2] Fo. 1 contains notes on Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness,’ first published in Blackwood’s Magazine (1899), reprinted in Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories (London: William Blackwood, 1902).
12[02] Attempts to banish the principle of failure:— (i) In practice – social reform. Communism. (ii) By a new comprehension of mortality. 12[02] ‘It is only in degree that any improvement in society could prevent wastage of human powers.’3 If it is accepted, then it is no longer waste. The negative is turned into a positive. It cannot be accepted so long as it is seen as mere waste – failure. 12[03] Men have become aware— (i) That they exist in a physical world which, in the physical universe, is insignificant. 17th century astronomy: but the length of time taken for this idea to penetrate.4 (ii) That they exist in a period of time, insignificant in the whole length of history. Ice age.
[3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘W. Empson, “Proletarian Literature,” Scrutiny, 3 (1935), p. 333.’ [4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Jeans.’ Probably J.H. Jeans, EOS: see Notebook 10, n. 3, above.
Conclusions they are tempted to draw from this – the insignificance of: (i) Man; (ii) The present. But these conclusions false. Previous awareness – Religion: the insignificance of man compared with God. This on a different basis from the others; & relevant to human life. But still capable of being falsely construed. 12[04] When love finds one weary & disillusioned & hopeless, enduring a life without sympathy or meaning, with people who awake no spark, it gives, suddenly, a meaning & a vision of freedom and it gives the strength to throw the past behind & to begin life, not again, but for the first time – to begin a life which is one’s own. Everyone is born twice – once from his mother, & once from his lover. Incipit vita nuova. 12[05] Different beliefs in immortality Belief in a future life because of a belief in immortality. Belief in immortality because of a belief in a future life. E.g. Japanese. Belief in personal immortality. Memory. Das Fortleben der Personen. Belief in the immortality of Spirit or mind.
Ewigkeit des Geistes e.g. Plato. 12[05] There is only one absolute certainty in human life – & that certainty is death. The future of a man may be obscure; but one thing is clearly before him – death. 12[08] ‘To any individual the evil of his own death lies in the present dread of his future annihiliation, & the good of a future life lies in his present relief from this dreaded prospect.’5 That is, the question of immortality is a question which must be considered even by those determined to life only in the present. 12[08] Does, in fact, a belief in immortality take from life the sting & pain of mortality? Death; & parting. He lives elsewhere – but what of that? We must live without him. Death is always a palpable & certain loss. 12[08] The death of others. If death is the end, then the death of others is insupportable, the worst of evils.
[5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘R.B. Perry, “The Meaning of Death,” Hibbert Journal, 34 (1935).’
But here again, does it relieve the loneliness, the desolation of parting, to believe, or to know, that the dead lives elsewhere, another life? How is the feeling of a mutilation relieved? 12[09] Is it good that men who die should live again? ‘Whatever philosophy praises the creation of man must deplore his annihilation’ Is this true? It depends upon the view taken of creation. A mature person is the result of time, effort, discipline etc. – he is unique. Is it not waste, intolerable waste that this should be destroyed? Futility. ‘A personality cannot be transmitted to posterity merely through the fact of having been.’ Memory, history. Tangible works, ideas, deeds – these can remain; but they are all perishable, & in any case something different from the survival of the person. ‘Our normal sense of the fitness of things is based upon the assumption that death is the end.’ – i.e. we divide life into youth, middle age, & senescence – a pattern of mortality. 12[10] The terzo incomodo; a third person when two are in company. 12[14] ‘It was a delightful visit – perfect in being much too short.’ Jane Austen, Emma.
Mortality And what contentment can I have, & how shall I order my conduct, when I know not how long my visit is to last? 12[15] Theory follows practice.6 Not suggested that to think out reasonably from the beginning will make much difference to how we behave. We behave from instinct. But instincts change in time. But our Weltanschauung has to be instinctive before it will affect practice. 12[17] Mortality What have we to put in place of the belief in Immortality & its implications? Very little that will attract those still satisfied, or if not still satisfied, still encumbered with the tradition of a 1000 years and a civilization. For it is something simpler, less grandiose, almost prosaic, though the soul of poetry— Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man, How angrily thou spurn’st all simpler fare!7
[6] Fos. 15–16 contain notes on M. Scheler, Philosophische Weltanschauung (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1929). [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘M. Arnold, 396.’ See M. Arnold, ‘The Better Part,’ in Poems, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1877), i.260–1 and p. 305, below.
12[17] Mortality It is not death which is dismaying, but that which is more mortal than ourselves. We die, & there is an end; but our life is filled with death & decay. Death, in the ordinary sense, is endurable; which is difficult to endure is the deaths we suffer before we die. 12[18] Mortality View of life based upon the 7 Cardinal Virtues: Natural: (i) Pagan: Plato – Prudence, Courage (Fortitude), Temperance, Justice. Theological: (ii) Christian: Faith, Hope, Charity. 7 Deadly Sins: – Pride, Avarice, Anger, Gluttony, Unchastity, Envy, Vainglory, Gloominess (tristitia), Languid Indifference (acedia). 12[19] Mortality Changes of appearance – not merely ageing. On marriage, or change of occupation or company changes for better or worse. Growth: but growth in human beings mean death, implies it. There may be the same person there, in spite of the changes, as there may be the same tree there, in spite of growth, or lopping; but with the man, a change in appearance is a death, or loss. Usual to welcome or to regret these changes. But to master mortality there must be no regret. Each present appearance must be appreciated for itself.
12[19] The most wonderful experience – to discover a virginity in oneself which we believed to have been lost. To know & feel for the second time as if it were for the first. And to discover this in another. Some people are always virgin until they meet what they are looking for: they preserve their integrity of feeling in spite of anything circumstances obliges them to undergo. 12[21] A battle with this established society, which kills all that is lifegiving in us. But with no conception of winning, of reforming; only now & then to score. 12[22] Mortality End with a myth: gods give to man the desire of immortal life – why? 12[23] Mortality Integrity (Redlichkeit): a refusal to be deceived about the significance of human existence, & personal existence.8 12[23] The abominable cult of culture. [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Nietzsche, Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Kap. 2.’ Fos. 24–5 contain notes on F. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Schloss-Chemnitz: Steffen Dietzsch, 1874).
12[25] When the lover finds that his rival is a love of solitude, surrender is his only chance of victory. In some women a love of solitude is so deep a part of their character, that not to respect it is to win their lasting hatred. 12[30] But whether death is sweet or bitter, sought or avoided, loved or hated, it is misunderstood.9 It is not part of life, but the end of life. It is the opposite of life, not an element of life. 12[31] My Physiology 1. Physical autobiography. 2. My physiological theories & ideas. The old wound. The Parts. The Roughage Theory. The Germ Theory. The central nervous system. Most autobiographies are abstracts, in the sense that they leave much untold. Cp. Montaigne; Rousseau; G. Moore; Pepys. What a man’s body has done for him, its history & the history of his health & sickness; and what a man has thought & thinks about his body – both highly important.
[9] 12[30] is headed ‘Mortality’ and contains a list of ‘The epithets by which Death has been described,’ including the phrase ‘Sweet death. Süsse Tod.’ Cp. p. 259, above.
12[32] Mortality10 Mortality is not a ‘fact’ – in that sense there are no ‘facts’ – it is an experience, an invention of the human mind, it is a statement of what experience signifies. Some never experience mortality. It requires a high degree of self-consciousness before the idea of mortality has any meaning. We may see the seasons change, we may suffer the loss of friends & the death of affections, & yet never know the experience of mortality. The deadness of death. 12[32] Death in Life The most comprehensive experience of death in life is in ‘dejection.’ The death of desire; utter inability to exert desire or mind. The sharpest experience of death in the sexual act; but that is death with the hope of resurrection: that is sweet death – not sweet because it ends all finally, but because it is death & yet doesn’t end all. 12[33] Mortality Shakespeare’s ‘Negative Capability.’
[10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Hopkins, Margaret.’ Presumably Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Margaret Clitheroe.’
‘When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any unstable reaching after facts & reason… remaining content with half-knowledge.’11 ‘Half-knowledge’ conceived positively – & (therefore) not halfknowledge, but complete knowledge in relation to the total situation. 12[33] Mortality & Humour Humour: being satisfied that you are right. Irony: being satisfied that they should think you wrong. Humour takes away all apprehension & dread: courage. ‘Humour is like a silly vow of virginity.’ A hard surface, our habitual reaction, which takes the sting out of experience. The humourlessness of the young & adolescent. 12[34] Epicurus His attitude to science. No value except in relation to human conduct.12 This does not mean that science is nothing except in relation to human conduct, has no meaning (cp. Pragmatism); but just that it has no value – value being relative to human conduct & the end in human life.
[11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Keats, Letters, p. 48.’ [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A.E. Taylor, Epicurus (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1911), pp. 1, 67, 80.’
Epicurus tended towards the doctrine of pragmatism, judging the truth of science but its contribution to human conduct, not merely its value. 12[34] Secularism (i) Rejection of a belief in a god-ruled world. (ii) Rejection of a life lived for the sake of illusions & in the guidance of false doctrines.13 12[35] Mortality The world – the Western world, for example, has already settled its way of living, its standards, its values – of what use is it to propose another; of what use to any save oneself? None. If one proposes another way of living it must be for oneself & for any others only who find it attractive. But the way of living which the Western world has settled for itself, is by no means fixed. And, if it is nothing more, this way of living has produced this criticism of itself. There is discontent. Nobody imagines that we will be thanked for pointing out inconsistencies in this way of living: & to point out failures is futile, failure is what everyone can observe. No: this must be a personal expression of a personal faith, a reasoned expression, but neither a dogma, nor a gospel.
[13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Taylor, Epicurus, pp. 97, 104–5.’
12[35] Ways of living, sets of values, standards are the product of a civilization, of a social experience – what does a single individual imagine he is doing in questioning those of his civilization & suggesting others? He too is a product of that civilization; in him the civilization observes & examines itself. No man can hope to devise a way of living wholly different from & better than (& livable) the way of living which belongs to his civilization. The most he can do is to apprehend some of the failures & inconsistencies of his civilization & set them right in his own mind – &, if he is fortunate, in his own life. 12[A] Spectator attitude.14 Money has always come to me; I never seek it, scarcely expect it. Cp. Le Neveu de Rameau.15 The modern parasite. The necessity of some object, but complete indifference what object in life. Cp. Votes for women. The careerist: the denial of a ‘career.’ Denial of the value of ‘knowledge.’ Cp. Novalis. All books in the end disappear except ‘literature.’ D.H. Lawrence. [14] On a loose sheet inserted at 11[23], stamped: ‘GONVILLE AND CAIUS COLLEGE / CAMBRIDGE,’ numbered 11[23a]. [15] D. Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau satyre publiée pour la première fois sur le manuscrit orginal autographe, ed. G. Monval (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1891).
The position of a non-careerist in a careerist civilization. Secularism. Absurd notion of progress. Cp. The ‘Christian’ view of life. Otherworldliness. Death. Love. The life given over to love. Bradley. Gratitude. – (see Santayana in Life & Letters).16 How you spend matters, not how you get. Those who know how to spend. The disparity between the natural term of life & the moral. Suicide. The Beloved so inaccessible that we must find our satisfaction in what is less. The conception of Good: as against that of desire & satisfaction. Do you not sometimes wonder if your moral, sober life is not really all a waste? Do you not wonder whether it is all fruitless. The notion that our past dogs us – ‘B.V.’ Life for (i) future life. (ii) the generation to come. 12[A] After all, is not an increase in income, more money, as good a thing to work for as anything else. Compare the life & satisfaction of a business-man whose criterion of success is money (to be used for fulfilling his satisfactions) with that, say, of a writer or a teacher, whose success is in his work, or in the future, in other people or humanity in general. The one has a life of immediate satisfactions; the other a life of ever deferred satisfactions bound up with a belief in progress or in general enlightenment. The man who works for himself, & he does not work for money, is rare; but his, perhaps, is the perfect life. [16] Possibly G. Santayana, ‘Proust on Essences,’ Life and Letters, 2 (1929), pp. 455–9.
Notebook 13 (April 1936)1 13[02] ‘That faith in the purity of his motive which is to self-confidence
[1] LSE 2/1/13. Stiff card cover, turquoise cotton, 17 cm × 11 cm, unruled. Recto folios numbered 1–86. Autograph, ink with occasional pencil. Title page: ‘Notes. / XIII. / April 1936.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 12, poems by Margot Ruddock (1907–51), lover of W.B. Yeats; 13, L.A.G. Strong, The Brothers (London: Victor Gollancz, 1932); 17–18, M. Granet, Festivals and Songs of Ancient China, tr. E.D. Edwards (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1932); 21, R. Wilhelm, Confucius and Confucianism, tr. G.H. Danton and A.P. Danton (London: Harcourt, Brace, 1931); 22, W. Bagehot, Estimates of Some Englishmen and Scotchmen A Series of Articles Reprinted By Permission Principally From The National Review (London: Chapman and Hall, 1858); 23, S. Butler, Hudibras. In Three Parts (London: H. Herringman et al., 1684); 25, T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (London: Faber and Faber, 1935); 41, A. Huxley, Ends and Means. A Enquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for their Realization (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937); 48, G.C. Lichtenberg, Reflections, tr. N. Alliston (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1908); 59, W.B. Yeats, ‘Come Let Us Mock At The Great,’ in Seven Poems and a Fragment (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1922); 60, B. Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, tr. S. Sprigge (London: George Allen and Unwin Limited, 1941); 61, W. Starkie, Spanish Raggle-Taggle: Adventures with a Fiddle in North Spain (London: John Murray, 1934); 62, W.H. Auden, New Year Letter (London: Faber and Faber, 1941); 64, R.M. Rilke, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, tr. J. Linton (London: Hogarth Press, 1930); 69, Florence Margaret Smith, aka Stevie Smith, Over the Frontier (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938); 74–5, C.P. Duclos, Considérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle (Amsterdam: [n.p.], 1751).
what genius is to talent.’2 No man can have absolute faith in the purity of his motive – not even the man who knows himself best. But he can have a sense of the absolute integrity of his life & character in his actions & words – & that is to self-confidence what genius is to talent. ‘To make up one’s life as one goes along.’3 This requires not a less firm hold upon principle than a life lived according to rule, but a more firm hold. 13[04] Sentimentality 1. Inappropriate emotions; e.g. too large for the occasion. This is to judge by ‘the occasion.’ But what is ‘the occasion’? Nothing at all. 2. Insincere emotions. Many people when they say that an emotion is inappropriate, they mean that, in their view of the occasion, it must be insincere. But how to tell? Does this mean that ‘sentimentality’ is not a fact of observation at all, but merely ‘somebody else’s sentiment when it differs in feeling or expression from mine.’
[2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘C. Morgan, Sparkenbroke (London: MacMillan and Co. Ltd, 1936), p. 335.’ [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Morgan, Sparkenbroke, p. 364.’
13[04] Mortality and Property Many Christian writers (& others) have found a dissonance between property & the immortal soul of man. How can a man whose soul is immortal take up with the tedium & the distraction involved in the ownership of property? they have asked. I find the dissonance between property and the mortality of man’s soul. I ask, how can a man who has the few years of youth, of manhood & of old age in which to enjoy the world and taste all its sweetness – how can this mortal man take up with the tedium & the distraction involved in the ownership of property? ‘Possession is one with loss.’ Dante. ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ – lust, & property. 13[05] What would life be like if men determined to organize it (or not to organize it) so as to get as much happiness as possible? 13[06] ‘To wrestle with life as an equal’ – but why these pugnacious similes? We & ‘life’ are not two combatants, but a simple whole. Life becomes conscious of itself in us and is self-mastered. 13[07] (i) We must have the will to live. (ii) We must have the will to die.
And we must, somehow, have them both at once & without contradiction. Nonchalant. 13[07–08] Mortality ‘That philosophy is to learn how to die.’4 Montaigne collects together a number of notions, mostly Epicurean, about death, but they do not form a consistent whole; he does not present a logical argument. He triumphs over death empirically, by a number of arguments & attitudes which are not self-consistent. 1. Death must be thought about & conquered emotionally & intellectually.5 2. Death always comes suddenly & unexpectedly (therefore) we must master it in advance: ‘fore-see it.’ 3. First, death must be seen as ‘natural’, not strange; we must make ourselves familiar with it. We must expect it always & everywhere. A constant meditation on death conquers it. Nothing should be allowed to put death out of our minds. 4. Reaction of this upon our way of life.6 No long views: no putting off: no saving for another day. [4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, I. xiv.’ [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, p. 92.’ [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, p. 102.’
5. The contradiction at the heart of mortality— (i) We are all born to be doing. (ii) Doing must not be made an end, or we shall fail, for death comes before accomplishment. ? ‘Let death take me planting my cabbages, but careless of her & of my imperfect garden.’ 6. Montaigne’s necrophilia.7 Death has an emotional & intellectual fascination for him. 7. Death leads to a contempt of life. Epicurean argument – since after death we shall not feel the loss of what death makes us lose – why worry.8 8. Many kinds of death: mortality is in everything.9 Death is the condition of your creation: death is a part of yourselves: fly from death & you fly from yourselves. 9. The ‘profit’ of life must be something that death does not touch & cannot destroy – otherwise there is no profit. (Perhaps – life exists; there is no absolute profit in it; but it is better to live it so as to get some profit from it than to live it in another way: & this is possible if we observe its conditions – death.) 13[09] Mortality The relevant fact is not that some people escape the pains & the perplexities of mortality – until the end. It is that human life is [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, p. 103.’ [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, p. 107.’ [9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, p. 107.’
always subject to them & can never be certain of avoiding them. We have to be very lucky to escape them all; most suffer them frequently. The relevant fact is that life & mortality are inseparable. It is not pain or suffering that is the enigma; it is mortality itself. And that somehow must be understood. 13[09] ‘De toutes les aberrations sexuelles, la plus singulière, c’est la chastité.’10 Is it? It would appear to be, but is it? 13[10] The Past ‘Once poor always poor’ – what rescues us from this? – imagination; the power of mastering the past & creating a new life, a life of a different sort with new principles & fresh conventions. 13[10] ‘Death is a defeat: an interruption of our life’s work.’ This is just what it must not be thought of as. Mortality ‘a disease’ – so some fanciful writers: but its not. Mortality isn’t a disease, poisoning the very roots of our life, it is the condition & essence of that life itself.
[10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Anatole France.’ Actually Remy de Gourmont, Physique de l’amour essai sur l’instinct sexuel (Paris: Société du Mercure de France: 1903), Ch. XVIII, ‘La question des aberrations’, p. 233.
13[11] A future life – Do not deny the possibility, but the relevance. At all events it is grotesque to let it influence our way of living now. We do know something about this life, & we must live it in the light of that knowledge. It is absurd to throw that knowledge away & live it in the darkness of supposition & ignorance. 13[14] The place of ambition in mortality? The mortality of ambition; how a man finds that he has payed away his life for nothing at all. Ambition must have a place similar to that of all relationships. But love? Is this not a break-down of mortality; or denial of mortality? Immortality in life, & its danger & pleasure. Live as an immortal. Omsk. 13[14] Sentimentality The sentimental are those who have neither the intellectual consciousness nor the feeling of mortality. To be sentimental is to have succumbed to standards & values other than those of mortality. 13[15] Mortality ‘We shall never get to Omsk.’ A specific end, an external goal to be achieved – these contradict Mortality. If our life is to comprehend
its own mortality, these must be replaced by something else. A different scale of values & a different scale of desires. 13[15] ‘It takes a nature of great genius (like St Francis of Assisi) to be determined for ever by a single experience. The ordinary human being, when his way is blocked in one direction by some dreadful experience, will move in the other direction.’11 To be determined for ever by a single experience…is that mortality? It is immortality, true & timeless. It is immortal mortality. 13[16] Mortality To most people some conditions of life, some periods & places in history, seem more desirable than others; to many people the hope of progress, the hope that the future will be better than the past or the present, is some sort of an inspiration, & they allow this faith to determine their values – but, every time, every place, every actual condition of life leaves something to be desired. No man since the world began has ever found his condition of life wholly satisfactory, & no man, in spite of progress or anything else, ever will. The actual conditions of life are always more or less unsatisfactory. This is the condition of mortality – what are we to do about it. A belief in progress does not help, clearly; an imaginative projection of ourselves into a more desirable condition, does not help. [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Hofmannsthal, Andreas.’ H. von Hofmannsthal, Andreas or the United, tr. M.D. Hottinger (London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1936).
We must admit this condition, admit it as the actual essence & character of human life, & from it we must derive our values; they must be the values of mortality. 13[19] Anyone who has been touched at all deeply by the instinct for life must love ‘fashion’ & find a peculiar fascination in it. Wantonness & fashion – the spirit awake in the body & not yet experienced enough to know how to live in its wakefulness: the spirit alive to mortality & grasping at the first wild expression of mortality. And those first expressions are inexpressibly touching. 13[24] Mortality Not the first to attempt a consideration of life from the standpoint of death. Cp. Epicurus. Hobbes on death.12 Christian tradition, from New Testament onwards. Now, perhaps, out of fashion; but it has a long & vital enough tradition to make certain that it will never be entirely out of fashion. 13[24] Jealousy, in fact, has nothing to do with sex. It is purely egoistic.
[12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. L. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, its Basis and Genesis, tr. E.M. Sinclair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 16.’
13[26] Not to be content to go through life without inheriting what the past life of the world, & of one’s civilization, has left to us. To avoid the feverish acquisition of a knowledge of things past & dead; but, at the same time, to enter into the present life of the world, a present life which has its meaning only its place in the tradition to which it belongs. E.g for an Englishman to be content with an ignorance of the civilization, the literature, the arts to which he belongs – to allow his life to be taken up with business, the business of living, without entering into that common world of experience, is barely to be alive – is to have wasted one’s life on things without significance. The ‘business’ man. The feeling that what one is forced to do daily ‘interferes’ with one’s ‘living one’s own life.’ 13[27] In each human life there is a crisis, a decision point. Sometimes it is reached early – this is the case with lives lived against a fixed background, or with temperaments in which there is little or no instability. Sometimes it is reached late; sometimes, it almost seems, not at all. Once the decisive point is reached, this development is virtually ended; change, if there is change at all, is within a narrow & narrowing limit. The crisis, too, may attach itself to different elements in different lives – a profession entered upon, marriage, an experience which determines the whole future. To reach this crisis too early (sometimes it comes so early that it loses its character as a crisis, it is unappreciated) is the sign of a low degree of vitality, an unconsciousness of life; to reach it too late is disintegrating; to reach it not at all is unhappiness. There is in some a fear of reaching the crisis – cp. Shelley’s fear of habits. – it seems to them inseparable from death. But it is a
death which the living must have died – it is part of the mortality of life. False crises – crises which work themselves out & fail to accomplish the change & the equilibrium – this is to live in pain without dying, the vulture which gnaws the liver of Prometheus. Romantic Agony. 13[28] Mortality – Time – Eternity – Sub specie momenti; sub specie aeternitatis. 13[28–29] ‘The necessary ignorance of man explains to us much; it shows that we could not be what we might be, if we lived in the sort of universe we should expect. It shows us that a latent Providence, a confused life, an odd material world, an existence broken short in the midst are not real difficulties, but real helps; that they, or something like them, are essential conditions of a moral life to a subordinate being.’13 That is one reaction to mortality – ‘a subordinate being,’ this gives meaning, makes satisfaction possible in spite of mortality. But it is not the only reaction; & it is not one which appeals to or convinces us to-day. ‘An existence broken short in the midst’ must be shown to be, not something for which this is compensation & meaning in the compensation, but an inaccurate analysis of the situation. Only when ‘existence’ is conceived in a certain way, a way which implies a denial of mortality, can it be thought of as ‘broken off in the midst.’ It must be shown to be something other [13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘W. Bagehot, “The Ignorance of Man,” in The Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. F. Morgan, 5 vols. (Hartford: The Travelers Insurance Company, 1891), ii.297–325, at p. 319.’
than this, something with a meaning in its own self & not in what may come after, before one can claim to understand our mortal life. The doctrine of immortality, of a ‘subordinate being,’ of a ‘latent Providence,’ explain mortality only by denying it – we must explain it by admitting it. 13[29] To set men free from fear & greed. 13[30] Mortality ‘When a man realizes his own insignificance, by that act he becomes more than insignificant.’ Santayana. But ‘insignificance’ compared to what? The physical universe (Jeans)? The history of the world – ice age (Balfour). Insignificance as a moral attitude. 13[30] Mortality Everything is irreparable – that is, the idea of ‘repair’ doesn’t apply. Ideas of repair, forgiveness.
13[31] The Mortal’s hunger for Immortality: Eternity Eternity is a condition that cannot vary, a habit, a safety, & changeless certainty. The desire in marriage. But a marriage which does not give this? There is a certain necessity in mortality for immortality; but we must live as if we were mortals, for there is no real immortality, only mortal immortalities. To achieve a mortal immortality, a temporal eternity is the greatest achievement open to mortals – but it may be a death, & what we want is a immortal life. 13[32] Mortality ‘There is no point. Life & love are life & love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, & to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live & let live, love & let love, flowers & fade, & follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.’14 Lawrence’s hatred & suspicion of divertissements: (i) Work; the vice of work. The gospel of work; it is really only idle amusement. Frivolous view of life. (ii) Spirituality; i.e. forgetting the delights & occupations of mortality by pretending that you are an immortal. The true doctrine of the immortality of man never blinked the fact of mortality; its mistake was not pretending that man was, in one sense, mortal, or in asserting that mortality did not matter, but in making it subordinate & a means to an end beyond itself, & other than itself. It refused the immortality of mortal life.
[14] D.H. Lawrence, ‘Do Women Change,’ p. 153.
13[33] Intimations of Immortality Have we, apart from our hunger for it, any intimation of immortality, that is anything in us which, conflicting with our mortality, gives us, not a hope of another life, but another life itself? The binding of mortal love – cp. Blake, it is love itself, in its very nature which is binding – this is to be accepted. But we cannot accept it. There is something in us which cries out against it – our loneliness. And this refusal to accept a condition of mortality is not merely a defect in the realization of our mortality, it is an intimation of mortality – no, not even an ‘intimation,’ for that suggests something to come which is not here, but a suggestion of an immortal character in us – immortal merely in the sense that it conflicts with our own mortality. But what is it? A romantic unreality – a creation of our own mortality? Is it anything more significant than the desire for a future life? Even if we find & assert a personality which protests against the binding of mortal love, do we do more than assert a personality which protests against the mortality of love? 13[34] The Courage of Women It is not a moral phenomenon, but almost physiological. It comes from not being obliged to look very far ahead, not having to consider what life will be like after the risk has been taken & the situation won or lost. It is not optimism, a feeling of the certainty of winning; it is a complete carelessness about the future. This is clear from the fact that when they are obliged to consider the future that miraculous courage vanishes. But it is not physiological, rather sociological – it arises from the arrangements
of our & other civilizations by which responsibility for the future, which makes cowards of us, has been the duty of men rather than women. And women, by this chance, have kept alive an attitude & an irresponsibility which is bright & clear in this dullness of the masculine world. Nerve. 13[35] Mortality The unwanted child – some of us are this, literally; all of us are this, metaphorically. The product of an instinct, a passion, an emotion which is complete in itself & yet finds this added to it. It is a symbol of our mortality. Mortality is a natural fact; we have not yet moralized it – or only a few poets have succeeded in moralizing it; the world has merely tried to escape from it. 13[37] The notion of a task, and finding the meaning of life in the fulfilment of a task – an attempt to circumvent mortality, but a clumsy & ill-conceived attempt, an empty formalism – what task? Duty for duty’s sake. 13[38] Mortality Mortality & Civilization – the connection. The sense of mortality as the great civilizing force. Cp. Chinese civilization; the sense of mortality in Chinese poetry. Freedom from unreal loyalties. Freedom from power complex, & power motive.
Poverty – the limitation of the desire for money & property to what can be used for the purposes of a good life. Cp. capitalism, where unlimited money making is the aim, & no longer the simple satisfaction of material wants. Building bigger & bigger barns. But this conflicts with the spirit of mortality, it is out of relation with a mortal life. The immortal family or community. Chastity; refusal to sell your life for something which is less valuable. Sense of Mortality as the giver of a true scale of values. 13[40] Mortality ‘The individual felt dwarfed by the mass of population; the vast urban cemeteries with their labyrinths of tombstones seemed fit end for a life as crowded, blurred, & impersonal as that of the old villages had been detached & distinct.’15 But: (i) This was the result of a new consciousness: the new fact was a knowledge of the world, a sense of the world, & not a world or a population in fact vaster than before. (ii) Cp. similar sense derived from the new astronomical knowledge. 13[42] A sense of mortality is a sense of the deserts of vast eternity.
[15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘R.C.K. Ensor, England: 1870–1914 (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1936), p. 553.’
13[43] Mortality – negative & positive, as an escape from doubt or unhappiness or as a positive, active attitude, as a doubt or a faith, as a defence against confusion or a source of power & happiness. 13[43] Philosophy – the knowledge of what is certain. Viz. – all we can know for certain is something about the character of knowledge. 13[43] Hume: civility not truth. 13[43] The value & importance of philosophy in the modern world— (i) Freedom of opinion (as against truth. Science). (ii) Belief in reason. (iii) Something for its own sake; freer from the contagion of the world than anything else can be – (cp. Science). ‘Philosophy needs neither protection, attention, nor sympathy from the masses. It maintains its character of complete inutility, & thereby frees itself from subservience to the average man.’16
[16] José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (London and New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1957), p. 86.
Recognizes itself as essentially problematic. Does not live on the profit it brings to others. If it happens to help the world, it is a matter for joy from simple human sympathy. Not serious.17 Philosophy does not rule by making philosophers kings, but by being itself: philosophers need only be philosophers in order to rule. What is wrong with philosophy is that it has left behind its true character in order to rule in another way – philosophers becoming scientists, politicians, pedagogues. 13[44] Mortality The unavoidableness of contingency – time. I am born here, live here, die here; I am born, live, & die at this time. My life is here & now – nowhere and nowhen else. The meaning of modernity; the meaning & necessity. ‘Il faut être absolument moderne.’18 So we cannot escape; and to try to escape is to defeat oneself – escape to another time or another place. We must sink down, deep into our time & place – for these are ourselves. 13[44] ‘All primitive races, without exception, believe that there is an after life for mankind.’19 [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Pascal.’ [18] Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer: see SC[10–11], above. [19] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Eyre, History of Civilization, i.67.’ Probably Edward Eyre (ed.), European Civilization: Its Origin and Development, 7 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1935–9).
This perhaps should lead us to suspect that this belief is a primitive and probably inadequate rationalization of human experience. 13[45] Life is neither for ever, nor for a very short while: its positive character derives from its limit; neither long nor short. The plague in Athens.20 13[45] Fear of death does not appear in societies in which sudden death is common – e.g. a society engaged in military conquest, but in societies where life is comparatively secure & is directed towards creative activities. There life becomes valuable & men are sensitive to its sweetness &, if they fear anything, fear to give it up. 13[46] A hiatus between his total personality & his cultivated powers. E.g. his art not an expression of his whole personality but an interest, known & felt to be less than the whole. 13[46] There is no hope or joy except in human relationships. One by one our comrades slip away & deprive us of their shade.21 Death in its proper place & time. It becomes part of the order of things – e.g. when the old peasant of Provence, at the end of his reign, remits into the hands of his sons his parcel of goats & olive-
[20] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Eyre, ii.53.’ [21] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A. de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, tr. L. Galantière (London: William Heinemann, 1939).’
trees…When one is part of a peasant lineage, one’s death is only half a death.22 Death can be in its right place; a civilization which had got death into its right place. 13[47] The actual precariousness of human life on the earth. How easily it is destroyed – destroyed in bulk, even whole civilizations. Earthquake, volcano, tidal wave. This earth is a scarcely cooled bed of lava, upon which human beings build their civilizations in spite of the rumblings which go on underneath.23 13[48] Schopenhauer:— Thinkers: (i) Who think for themselves: philosophers: for its own sake. (ii) Who think for others: Sophists: for the sake of what can come of it. 13[48] Personal identity A mode of mortality, the ever perishing self ‘Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change & are no longer the same persons.’24 [22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, p. 273.’ [23] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Exupéry, Wind Sand & Stars, pp. 87–8.’ [24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pascal, Pensées, 122.’
It is a short step from this to Blake’s doctrine of ‘states,’ & with it the complete destruction of the moral personality & moral responsibility. Somehow we must hold on to the truth in Pascal’s observation without involving ourselves in a false doctrine of ‘states.’ 13[49–50] The view that the most important thing is personal relationships. But note the way in which these relationships go bad if they are made an end in themselves, if everything else is subordinated to them. Answer – ‘Personal relationships are satisfactory when the people who enjoy them have a satisfactory relationship with society’ – i.e., when they are a source of inspiration for some work in the outside world. Then a personal relationship is an alliance between two people who form a united front to deal with the problems of the outside world. But this is no answer in the end. True, personal relationships exist within society & directly they become a kind of conspiracy against society they are perverted. But, what is this ‘work,’ this ‘outside world’? It is a world in which personal relationships are the most important things in. By insisting upon this importance we are, not disowning society, or cutting ourselves off from it & making a purely personal world of our own, we are asserting the supreme value of a certain sort of society. That is, the importance of personal relationships becomes the law of society & not the exclusive view or feeling of a single person; it becomes the basis of a system of rights & duties, & not a denial of rights & duties in favour of a single personal relationship. People who put personal relationships before their work, it is said, become parasites on each other, form mutual admiration societies, agree to do nothing that may make one jealous of the success in the world of the other. But this is only true when we agree to separate ‘work’ & ‘personal relationships’ – that is, when
we assert the prime importance of personal relationships without making it a principle of the life & structure of a society. And why should I prefer to please the world rather than my lover? Posterity – illusion. 13[51] Mortality The mortality peculiar to this age – for a great part of the 19th century there was a future in which they had confidence. Mortality was not brought home to them because the life they lived they could think of as going on. To-day there is no future to which we can look forward with confidence, & consequently our life is peculiarly & desperately mortal. Or rather, we are aware of the actual mortality of human life because we have been relieved of a false confidence that the future will be continuous and similar to the present. To us the present is mortal because the future, unknown & difficult to control, is something in which the present appears to die, & not in which the present is represented. 13[52] ‘The belief in progress & that in transubstantiation are alike superstitions.’25 But what I want to show is not merely that the belief in progress is a superstition, but that this belief is a misstatement of, misrepresentation of the conditions of human life – that as a doctrine it may or may not be true (in some sense), but is certainly irrelevant. Like the belief in immortality, the belief in progress aims at supplying an answer to one of the questions which being alive [25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Crossman, Government and The Governed, p. 204.’ R.H.S. Crossman, Government and The Governed: A History of Political Ideas and Political Practice (London: Basis Books, 1940).
presents: both these answers are really no answers at all because they are based on a misconception of the question. That is, they answer a question, but not the important question. Consequently, we can leave behind all discussion about their truth & falsehood, & turn to re-examine the question & to answer it. 13[53] ‘When all is done, human life is, at the greatest & best, but like a froward child, that must be played with & humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, & then the care is over.’26 But this is a hoax – it is a false sentiment about life – words without meaning – no-one could have felt like this except in a mood. This is no doctrine. 13[53] All the troubles of the world come from men wanting what they can only get with violence. 13[53] ‘Surely God will soon close down the human show with its misery.’27 The erroneous assumption is that the human show is a means to some end – an end which it fails to advance, or which is not worth the apparent price. Misery is the price paid for something – too great misery is too great a price for anything; & the doubt always [26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Sir William Temple, “Of Poetry,” in Essays on Ancient & Modern Learning, ed. J.E. Spingarn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), p. 79.’ [27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘T. Hardy.’
remains whether the something is worth having, or indeed what exactly it is. But remove from our minds this assumption of a something beyond, & the problem changes its character. This assumption is gratuitous, & nothing that we know of in human life justifies it. The misery is insupportable only when it is considered as a price paid for something else, possibly not worth the misery. Keats’ ‘vale of soul-making’ suggests, but not quite satisfactorily, an entirely different & better approach. 13[54] Human fulfilment is not another state, following upon the conduct of life, as wages follow work. 13[54] Each man is different from every other man, but ordinary men find no difference between men. The tyrant, the megalomaniac, the man conditioned by a desire for power, by ambition, is an ordinary man because, though he may find differences between men, he does not recognize them and denies their value. 13[54] Pascal & Epicurus28 Pascal’s social & political doctrine; its blend of Epicureanism & Stoicism, coming near to the truth of Hegel – Will & Reason.29
[28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pascal, Pensées, i.18: “When we do not know the truth of a thing, it is of advantage that there should exist a common error which determines the mind of man.”’ [29] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pascal, Pensées, 291–338.’
Restlessness / curiosity / power: 17th century mental atmosphere? Cp. Hobbes – restless desire for power after power, which can never be satisfied (therefore) the Leviathan – a common ‘error.’30 Glory & curiosity the scourge of mankind. Montaigne. 13[56] Mortality ‘It is certain that the mortality or immortality of the soul must make an entire difference to morality.’31 This is profoundly true; but what do we mean by soul? What is Pascal’s relation between the self & the soul? He can’t have a continuously perishing self and an immortal soul, unless he is prepared to separate self from soul.32 It makes all the difference to morality whether the self is mortal or permanent. ‘We must live differently in the world, according to these different assumptions: – (i) that we could always remain in it; (ii) that it is certain that we shall not remain long, & uncertain if we shall remain here one hour. This last assumption is our condition.’33 This is the assumption of mortality – a different assumption from the one Pascal elsewhere urges – i.e. that we shall not remain here long, but that the soul is immortal. This is a third assumption, different from the other two. [30] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Pascal, Pensées, 451.’ [31] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pascal, Pensées, 219.’ [32] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pascal, Pensées, 122.’ [33] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pascal , Pensées, 237.’
Note two things about Pascal— (i) The invalid’s closesness to death & contemplation of it, is ever before his mind. (ii) Fear; religious fear.34 This belongs to the Christian tradition – St Paul, Augustine, et seq. 13[57] ‘I wonder how people in a condition so wretched do not fall into despair. I see other persons around me of a like nature. I ask them if they are better informed than I am. They tell me that they are not. And thereupon these wretched & lost beings, having looked around them, and seen some pleasing objects, have given & attached themselves to them.’35 This last is perhaps truer to-day than in 17th century. Indifferentism to human life as a puzzle & a problem has become our normal way of thinking or failing to think. Few now are terrified, few even bewildered; few fall into despair about this. Perhaps this has come about because we have accustomed ourselves to live with questions unanswered; & instead of trying to answer them we go in for politics, science or business. Those who might think have made for themselves a misologic philosophy which excuses them the necessity of beginning to think from the bottom upwards: a philosophy of indifferentism is now the partner of a natural, thoughtless indifferentism & they divide between themselves the majority of mankind.
[34] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Pascal, Pensées, 205, 241, 693.’ [35] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pascal, Pensées, 693.’
13[57] ‘We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen & tongue. It is a great word whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.’36 The real gist of ‘democracy’ is that it is the expression of mortality. 13[58] ‘Democracy requires three conditions for its fulfilment— 1. All production should be for use, & not for profit. 2. Each should give according to his abilities, & each receive according to his needs. 3. The workers in each industry should collectively own & control that industry.’37 Tripe: these conditions may be desirable, they may even have some meaning (which isn’t at all certain), but they could exist without even the beginning of democracy being in sight. They are, in fact, nothing whatever to do with democracy, which, fundamentally, is the social & political expression of the sense of mortality, & nothing else. These conditions don’t express this sense; indeed, to
[36] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (New York: Smith & McDougal, 1871), p. 37.’ [37] Oakeshott’s note: ‘H. Read, To Hell With Culture: Democratic Values Are New Values (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1941), p. 19.’
lay them down in this manner is possible only when we forget or neglect the fact of mortality. 13[63] Somehow to detach Democracy from the doctrine of progress with its false implication of the evanescence of imperfection. Not progress is the heart of democracy, but love & the sense of mortality. Eternal change – no summum bonum, never ask the end; Croce. 13[65] On the conduct of mortals; mortality the principle of conduct in individual life, in the life of societies, states & societies of states. Characters; the believer in immortality; eternal youth.* Progress. Violence; power. The mysologist:* believes that the ‘eternal truth’ cannot be ascertained. 13[65] ‘It is doubtful whether the eternal truth that exists in the democratic ideal can ever be perfectly distilled & formulated as a dogma for all time.’38 (i) Why not? (ii) What do you mean by ‘eternal truth’? Degrees of truth.
[38] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Preface, Thomson, Democratic Ideal in France & England.’ D. Thomson, The Democratic Ideal in France and England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940).
This is a ‘practical truth,’ a truth of conduct, & therefore only a mode. Philosophical truths alone can be ‘eternal.’ Show first what quality of truth belongs to truths of conduct & then draw out the truth of conduct which belongs to the democratic ideal. Democratic ideal – ‘a society which shall give the greatest degree of freedom & happiness to the ordinary citizen.’39 A society which conforms to the conditions of human life & human nature. Cp. Plato’s plan in the Republic & Hobbes in the Leviathan. 13[66] Will and Reason Burke, Address to Bristol Electors 1774. ‘If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But government & legislation are matters of reason & judgment & not of inclination.’ Note Burke’s equation of will & inclination. He belongs to the school of Reason, but has a faulty philosophy of Will. 13[67] Pride & Sensuality – the two extremes between which human life must be conducted if it is to be conducted rationally – that is, in accordance with its nature. Pride – the ‘too-much’ – the immortal man, the mere soul – living ‘for ever.’ Immortality. Sensuality – the ‘too-little’ – the moment – death in life. [39] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Thomson, The Democratic Ideal, p. 5.’
Mortality – stands for the mean, the conduct of human life in accordance with its unique nature. This – not only of the individual life, but the life of a society & the conduct of man in society. Natural Law = Pride; the immortal, absolute law & the making absolute of what is really only finite. Natural Right = Sensuality; the no-law, the rule of the momentary sensation, the finite will. Hegel’s synthesis of these. 13[68] Democracy based upon individualism, & equality.40 Not based upon the ‘goodness’ of the people.41 13[68] ‘Be the mind never so full of facts, the education of the heart is incomplete if no time has been left for Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen.’42 The education of the heart, this not less necessary than the education of the mind. 13[69] The lovely decadence of Athens. [40] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Whitman, Democratic Vistas, pp. 311–13, 317–19, 329–30.’ W. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1) & Democratic Vistas (London, Toronto, and Paris: J.M. Dent and Sons; New York, E.P. Dutton: 1912). [41] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p. 318.’ [42] Oakeshott’s note: ‘C.V. Wedgwood.’ Possibly C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938).
13[69] Everything is penultimate. 13[70] What causes one to fall in love? A sense of personality. Love & hatred are its extreme intensifications. 13[72] ‘Deep down each one of us feels he has an historical mission to fulfil, that he has to leave some mark on the world, so that he will be remembered after death. This wish gives rise to daydreaming & fantasies. Fascism allows & encourages the daydream to become fact…the feeling of being important…these things do away with, at least temporarily, the feeling of inferiority in each individual.’43 This feeling of inferiority, where it exists, arises from our past history etc. To be sublimated: it is false; ‘fear & care’ of which Lucretius spoke etc. How free ourselves? An emotional insight into the conditions of human life. Evil: ambition, desire to excel, mission, etc. ‘Live unknown’: Epicurus to the rescue. What has ‘democracy’ to put in the place of this feeling of satisfaction & fulfilment which Fascism gives to souls in search of freedom from their feelings of inferiority? Democracy, the social order for those who are free from ‘fear & care.’ It gives, instead of a temporary fulfilment, a rational denial of the need of such fulfilment: it dispels the illusion, & can exist only where there is a society of men no longer under the power of illusion. [43] Oakeshott’s note: ‘P. Nathan, Psychology of Fascism.’ P.W. Nathan, The Psychology of Fascism (London: Faber and Faber, 1943).
Christianity:— 13[73] The supreme need of Western civilization to-day is to be made conscious of its virtue by being made conscious of its true character. What is required is a synthesis of insight. When all was shaken, Plato’s Republic did this for Greece. Aquinas did it for the Christian civilization of medieval Europe. But why is it required? Will a synthesis, a system, a corpus, teach, when we have failed to learn from those who given us insight into our civilization already? No. Academic – yet worth trying. Its small value; not pretentious. The part more clearly seen than the whole – no man will reveal the whole as clearly as Montaigne or Nietzsche revealed the part. Lucretius – a body of knowledge which should form the basis of belief. Not knowledge; but insight into character & condition. 13[77] Mortality The young enthusiast – Now we know what we want, let us set about making the world conform – let us make our Plan of Society and put it into operation— But no; even that consolation is denied us – show why ‘plan’ does not belong to mortality. Society – Democracy.
13[78] To know the future is no more desirable in the life of mankind than in the life of the individual – a confusion of all desire & endeavour follows. 13[78] Of all the struggles of mankind, the most appalling have been the wars of religion – those between religions in which the thought of a future life predominates. 13[78] The modern world & its emphasis on security, & plan.44 13[78] Power45 Evil. Why is power in itself evil? Because it involves a false valuation of everything: it denies mortality & the values of mortality. The corruption of him who exercises it.46
[44] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J. Burckhardt, Reflections on History, tr. M.D. Hottinger (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1944), pp. 60–3, 106–9– 17, 120–1, 143, 158–9, 204–19.’ [45] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Burckhardt, Reflections, pp. 85, 86, 113, 118, 120–1, 213, 215.’ [46] Oakeshott’s note: ‘R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan: Or, Man, Society, Civilization, and Barbarism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942).’
13[79] The human good as a state to be attained & achieved & rested in – to stop there, having nothing further to wish for.47 Desire ‘in some fashion to escape’ from death and the condition of mortality.48 Disenchantment with the whole of human life. 13[80] The manner in which we are accustomed to look back to early life – with its privations & struggle – as something nevertheless better than later achievement, gives a hint of the mortality to which all living is subject. The highest pinnacle of fame, the greatest achievements, the most solid gains – these lack the life & excitement which belongs to early struggle. An actors first part, an author’s first achievement, a poet’s first poem – these live in the memory. Later achievements are a decline from these. 13[80] Politics are an inferior form of human activity. 13[80] It was always impossible to draw Isaac Butt into an argument, always he had other things to think about.
[47] Oakeshott’s note: ‘John Comenius, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, tr. Count Lutzow (London: J.M. Dent and Co., 1905), p. 5.’ [48] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Comenius, Labyrinth, p. 31.’
13[81] An inconsequent life – how make it consequent? Rather – life is inconsequent – how endure the inconsequence? ‘Never ask the end.’ 13[84] Not a struggle between ambition and the Absolute (tho’ consider this: George Herbert) but one between ambition and a life in conformity to the principle of mortality, between ambition & selfrealization. Ambition – external: (therefore) only a means, & not a good one. 13[85] ‘These first sweet moments, why could one not live an eternal, undying life in them?’49 That is why men seek in somebody or something new the recreation of what is dead. 13[A] Neither a rebel nor a slave.50
[49] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Turgenev, Fathers & Children.’ I.S. Turgenev, Fathers and Children, tr. C. Garnett (London: William Heinemann, 1905). [50] On a loose sheet, numbered 12[86a].
13[A] 1) The times when the need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterward. 2) The ability to supply the sympathetic gesture as an action without consequences, a gift that implies no obligation, a ‘good work’ not asking for gratitude or even recognition. 13[B] You, Sir, alas, are not old enough to remember a world not dominated by the scientist, nor, alas, am I. Our civilization a civilization of the scientist. – Not, thankfully, all & everything that he would desire; nevertheless a civilization. created by the scientist. Difficult to imagine anything different from this scienceridden civilization – it is all that we know – have known – or are likely to know.51 How can we speak of the scientist as a menace to civilization? Has he not conceived it, brought it to birth, nurtured it? Is a parent a menace to his offspring? Yes; such is the case. How? – not for me to say. But this unnatural parent, dead to pity & devoid of affection, is now in process of strangling what he has created. Stung, perhaps, by some guilty, but unnatural, conscience, science is now engaged upon the removal of its early indiscretion, it is destroying what it has created. That, one would imagine, is menace enough. But I do not propose to confine myself to so superficial a view of the activity of the scientist – indeed, if the scientist were to perish along with the civilization he has created, nobody could regret this loss. No, my view of the menace of the scientist is more profoundly shocking than this. My case is that this science-ridden civilization [51] On a loose sheet, stamped: ‘GONVILLE AND CAIUS COLLEGE / CAMBRIDGE,’ numbered 12[92].
is a menace to civilized life. Worse than a menace; it has already removed from mankind both the hope & the desire for a civilized mode of existence. If the scientist had kept himself & his knowledge to himself, he would have merited only our pity & contempt – not our reproach. Not trouble you with a review of the uselessness of all scientific knowledge – it is well enough known. But the scientist doesn’t keep himself to himself – he is an evangelist, a preacher with a gospel that is anything but good news. He has imposed upon mankind; imposed a civilization. He has persuaded mankind of his benevolence; but little – nothing – in the history of folly to be compared with the infatuation which the modern mind has conceived for science. What has the scientist given us? False hopes – desires – values. 1. False hopes: – The evanescence of imperfection. Lucretius; banish fear, fear of the gods; but it has put a thousand fears in place of the few it has removed. The scientist came before the world with a magnificent programme. 2. False desires – And what it has made us hope for, it has made us desire. And what is our condition – long fed on boundless hopes, O race of men How angrily thou spurnest all simple fare.52 3. False values – Perverted our standard of importance. It has organized the world into larger & larger & less manageable communities. Made us think that the value of life is increased merely by making life longer. It has perverted our moral sense so that we believe in nothing but productivity. It has made us believe that our sole purpose of existence is to contribute to some present evolution or development: It has removed from us our capacity for merely pleasant enjoyment of life. By its crass insensitiveness it has pretended to deprive the natural world of its mystery & has driven our poets to the supernatural, to a world of ghosts & [52] See Notebook 12, n. 7, above.
shadows, in order to satisfy their sense of the mystery of life. It has made what is negligible important; & what is valueless valuable. It has created a civilization which is a menace to civilized life. Two objections.53 1. Not the scientist, but science. Who is responsible for this science ridden civilization but the scientist? It is he who has liberated the evil genie from the jar in which he was safely confined. Who was the first scientist? Ah! I see you know the answer. I need only remind you. A woman. No not Eve: Pandora. What is more, the scientist is a blackmailer: he trades upon the stupidity of mankind. First he whets our desires & flatters our hopes, then he lets loose a civilization more horrible than we could have imagined, & then he says ‘you can’t do without me.’ But he does nothing to rescue us. Trust me; wait & see; if my lips were not sealed. 2. Not science, but the misapplication of scientific knowledge. Science, it will be said, has lessened our misery & relieved our pains. But the misery & pain which it has removed are the creations of this scientific civilization. Medical science is scarcely more than a vain attempt to relieve the miseries which science has created; it is one more example of the attempt of the scientist to remove what he has been indiscrete enough to bring into being. And he’s unsuccessful. I am willing to concede few benefits from science. The misapplication of scientific discoveries is not merely regrettable; it is inevitable. The price we have paid for allowing the scientist to do what he likes with the world is a civilization based upon false hopes, desires & values: a radical perversion of human life. It is too dear. And things that we buy too dear we always turn [53] Oakeshott added four lines at the top of 13[92] in pencil: ‘Ridicule unnecessary / Misapplication of science + / Given the present civilization – science necessary. / More people – .‘
to bad use, because we have no love for them, but only a painful recollection, the recollection of being swindled. ‘The whole universe is about 1000 million times as big as the part of space which is visible in a telescope, which reveals about 2 million nebulae. Let us multiply 1000 million by 2 million & the product by 1000 million. The answer (2×1024) gives some indication of the probable number of stars in the universe; & the same number of grains of sand spread over England would make a layer hundreds of yards in depth. Let us reflect that our earth is one millionth part of such a grain of sand, & our mundane affairs begin to appear in their correct proportions.’ That, Sir, is science & I submit is a wholly false standard of importance; it is nonsense; it is the magna charta of stupidity.
A Conversation (1944)1 CV[00] Characters? ‘The soldier’ – unnamed. The philosopher & poet. Academic profession. The doctrinaire: Rationalist. The poet. [1] LSE 2/4/3. Hard cover, grey marbling, cloth covered spine, 35 cm × 20 cm, ruled. Autograph, Ink and occasional pencil. Recto folios numbered 1–62; the first two folios are unnumbered and include the title page and CV[00]. Title page: ‘A Conversation / Somnia sunt non docentis, sed optantis / Pauso’s horse. Burton III.249 / ‘All men say “I know,” but they are driven into nets, caught in traps, fall / in pitfalls, and not one knows how to avoid this. All men say “I know,” but, should they / choose the mean in action, they could not persist in it for a round month.’ / Tzu Ssu, The Doctrine of the Mean, VII.I / ‘Now that Lucius Gellius is dead,’ Cicero, Laws, I. 53 / ‘It is all one where I begin, for I shall come back there again’ / Parmenides of Elea. Diels 3. / As soon as we have destroyed the enemy, let us banish steel, & destroy iron. / In perishable wood & with immortal souls let us construct a world of freedom.’ Undated, but the inside front cover bears a paper sticker in Dutch, suggesting Oakeshott acquired this notebook when in Holland on military service in 1944. This dating is reinforced by the insertion at CV[30b] of a page from the Times Literary Supplement, 20 May 1944. [Possibly an adaptation of Cicero, Academica priora, Bk II ch. xxxviii: Somnia censet haec esse Democriti non docentis, sed optantis; Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, iii.249; Tzu Ssu, The Conduct of Life, or, the Universal Order of Confucius. A Translation of One of the Four Confucian Books, Hitherto Known as the Doctrine of the Mean, tr. Gu Hongming aka Ku Hung-ming (London: John Murray, 1912); Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker Griechisch und Deutsch, ed. H. Diels, 3 vols. (Berlin: Weidmannische Buchhandlung, 1922 [1903]), i.116; not traced.]
The man of the world (Peter Newall). Elastic, non-doctrinaire, but worldly & commonsensical. + ‘Public man.’ The politician; the ‘public man.’ The scientist. Russell – Haldane – Jeans, Hogben, Needham.2 Doctrinaire Rationalist in politics. Planner. The religious man – lack of interest in everything topical or transitory. No ‘detail’ of participants or their characters or occupation: information to come out in the course of the conversation. As little machinery as possible, & as little scenery. 1) The scene. Any occasion that makes conversation the only thing available. Books not available; thrown together for the time being. Opening with a conversation on conversation. Prison, country house? The pub, the dinner table (the visitor) (Henry Brandon). 2) The characters. How well known should they be to one another? Not too well known; acquaintance of 2 months. But two of them close friends. Not more than three or four. Similarity of education, but not the same. Same civilization. Les soirées de Saint-Pétersburg.3 Begins on a boat in the evening on the Neva. The company lands and begins conversation. Comte, Chevalier, Senateur. [2] Probably Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), philosopher and logician; John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892–1964), geneticist; James Hopwood Jeans (1877–1946), physicist and mathematician; Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975), zoologist and statistician; and Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (1900–95), biologist and sinologist. [3] Joseph de Maistre, Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, ou entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la providence: suivis d’un traité sur les sacrifices, 2 vols. (Paris: Cosson, 1821).
CV[01] Conversation A philosophy of conversation; & conversation as a philosophy of life. The nature of a conversation – knowledge of self – knowledge of truth? The art of conversation: its destruction. No place in the modern world. B.B.C. The topics of conversation: love & death – the two fatalities of human life.4 The man averse from conversation – from talk nothing comes. We know what we know, & neither thought nor talk make things clearer.5 Keep the common path & avoid subtleties. Avoid the suggestion of ‘disputants’ – or let it enter only occasionally, when passion is aroused. This is a conversation within oneself. No central figure. A recorder or commentator? Not victory, not agreement or persuasion. CV[01] Conversation as the microcosm of life and as an interpretation of human life. That is, human life conceived in terms of conversation – not of war, or struggle, or commerce or even of a card game or a racehorse or the acquisition of learning, but of a conversation. The idiom of conversation. [4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Berdyaev, pp. 83–4, 317 sq.’ Possibly Nikolai Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, tr. N. Duddington (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937), referred to at p. 314 n. 15 below. For Oakeshott’s review of Berdyaev, The Meaning of History (London: Centenary Press, 1936), see SW iii.137. [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, iii.144, 404–5.’
A type of life: an ideal of life. Open ‘A Conversation’ with a conversation on conversation: the ideal human relationship, the relationship that expresses best at once the character of man & the character of human life. Springing from this will be ‘mortality’ – death – and love, as the two topics of conversation. Dialectic of conversation: a Penelope’s web – a doing & an undoing: a circle. CV[01] The spirit of conversation opposed to the pièce à thèse. Not to be in the habit of discussing general topics does not mean that one has not the spirit of conversation in one. Scepticism of a sort is its essence. And toleration. CV[01] Conversation like a meal – a breakfast at some wealthy friend’s house where the sideboard is covered with dishes & one can take one’s choice. Not a set meal with a menu where one must go through and either eat each course or refuse & wait for the next. (Cp. the carefully designed & planned meal). Certain conventions observed – one would not start with an ice and go on to a roast. A restaurant meal, where one can choose at will, and where what one chooses is determined partly by one’s tastes, but partly also by one’s companyions’ tastes. CV[01] Conversation dialectic not eristic.6 [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Plato, Meno, 75c–d; cp. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24:57.’
CV[01] The participants in a conversation must, one might say, have everything in common except their opinions. There must be a common civilization, certain common tastes. The notion that a contribution to a conversation can be made by a dogmatic savage is an error: for conversation consists in being able to understand what others say better than they understand it themselves; and being able to speak not only so as to express one’s own opinions, but so as to7 CV[01] We live in an age of dogmatism, which has only to continue in the way it is going, to bring us to a new dark age of enlightenment: what may save us is conversation. Cp. the degeneration of debate in Parliament – debate replaced by the statement of dogma. CV[02] Conversation as the form of social relationship: its criterion. Exclusion of power & force. Exclusion of plan. Toleration. A natural following of the mood of the argument: there is nothing which, from the start, is ‘to be proved.’ CV[02] The value of discussing a question, & the pleasure, with two or three others – with food & wine and the feeling of unlimited time. ‘I would rather make love than talk.’: I cannot see the distinction. A distinction without a difference. The participants must all be persuaded of the pleasure of conversation. [7] The sentence is unfinished in the original.
Symposium? The dialectic of conversation – continually returning to the same points only on a different level. A participant may win a point, may disarm his opponents, but nobody ‘wins’ the conversation as a whole. Defects of conversation – the right reply escapes us at the time, & afterwards, in the night, we would return to the argument – but the others are not there. But this is relevant only when the conversation is thought of as a matter of ‘winning’; if it is not thought of in this way – then, if the right reply comes when too late for that conversation, it is not too late for the conversation that our ideas always have with one another. (Esprit de l’escalier. In a dispute this may be a matter of regret, but not in a conversation.) CV[02] A conversation does not require all possible opinions to be represented: in Plato’s Republic a variety of opinions is represented, but there is plenty of foolishness that makes no appearance; several people appear, but no fool. CV[03] The Criterion Cp. the Stoic doctrine of the ‘Criterion.’ Things are interesting because we care about them & important because we need them. There is no other true criterion. The universe is significant to us only as it belongs to us in feeling: its size, its longevity, its multiplicity – are not in themselves significant, but only as they affect our lives, our ideas & emotions. Man & his world is the centre. The false ‘Copernican Revolution.’8 Contrast: The Stars and Astronomy. [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), p. 96.’
Again: to know that the earth is spinning through space at some incredible speed is to know nothing significant, because it cannot be heard or felt. What answer to – ‘God is the centre.’ The three sided argument: 1. The Poet. 2. The Scientist. Jeans etc. 3. The Religious Man. Cp Pascal. 4. The ‘Philosophe’ – the believer in the practical value of philosophic truth: amateur philosophy. To be answered by 1–3. What is relevant to, significant in, human life? The value is the thing itself: but the thing itself is never devoid of conjunctions. Cp. Friendship – value, a relation. Comradeship – a means to an end: a ‘political’ relation. Palinurus.9 CV[03] Somehow not to allow the universe to impose its false values on mankind. When man (by the Copernican revolution, since continued by modern science, cp. Jeans) was deposed from his place in the centre, the individual degenerated into a means to an end, and all the enormities of modern society were made intellectually possible. If the Copernican revolution had any moral significance, what it took away from the earth & its inhabitants should be given to the sun & the moon – which is absurd. Because you happen to inhabit a fixed star does not make you more important. [9] Palinurus was the helmsman in Virgil’s Aeneid, but see A Conversation, n. 89, below.
CV[03] The one all-pervading principle – is there such? Confucius, Analects.10 ‘Conscientiousness within, and consideration for others.’ But not occult.11 The one principle (Confucius), the main thought (Pascal) = Tao. The way.12 The implication of the Way. Not a law or a principle or an end. Cp. ‘The English Way.’ Maitland. CV[03] The absolute value of man, human personality. How established?13 Its meaning. Egoism. Cp. Hobbes. Personality the root because it is the source of all values.14 The necessity of a criterion.15
[10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Confucius, Analects, Bk IV ch. xv; Bk VII ch. xxiv; Bk XV ch. ii.’ [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Confucius, Analects, Bk VII ch. xxii.’ [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Hughes, pp. 261, 263.’ Possibly E.R. Hughes (ed.), Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times (London: J.M. Dent & Sons; New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1942). [13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘V. Soloviev, The Meaning of Love, tr. J. Marshall (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945), pp. 17–22, 23, 59.’ [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Hughes, Chinese Philosophy, pp. 57, 172.’ [15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Berdyaev, Destiny of Man, p. 44.’
CV[05] The Present The force & relevance of the present. Exemplified by the limitation of memory to comfort, console or even to relate to a present circumstance. The memory of a satisfied love, of the resilience of youth, the rapture of passion – of sight or sound: these have no relevance to present melancholy or frustration. Present evil requires present joy to heal it. In this sense we certainly live in the present.16 CV[05] Spontaneity of conduct. (therefore) Habit rather than ideas, tradition rather than doctrine: habit & tradition are less deadly to spontaneity than ideas & doctrine. Spontaneity: extemporary – full aliveness to the present. The Artist. ‘We are never wise but by present learning.’17 CV[05] Each present has its politics: all true politics are politics of the present – but not too short or too long. CV[06] A Time For Everything To know the four seasons: that is the sum of practical knowledge.18 [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Santayana, pp. 97–8.’ Possibly Santayana, Persons and Places, referred to at p. 324 n. 43, below. [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, i.188, 190.’ [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Hughes, Chinese Philosophy, p. 216.’
The seasons & their emotions.19 CV[06] Every man has a fit of madness once in his life, if it does not run upon love or money, it takes the direction of politics or of religion. CV[06] The characteristics of life – we come upon them ignorant, not knowing what is suitable for our age, victims of necessary inexperience. CV[06] ‘The sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter…the sorrow only abideth.’ Sir Walter Raleigh. 1) All is in vain & only sorrow abideth. 2) The desire to have again or to enjoy permanently what was once so sweet is a false desire: refuse disillusion by the limitation of expectation. The sorrow in which all ends is, also, an experience, if not to be enjoyed, at least to be accepted in its place. CV[06] Neither Dionysius nor Apollo – but both in their places. But these two must be seen as one: they unite in mortality. CV[06] Everything in its own place; but not a place for quite everything. [19] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Hughes, Chinese Philosophy, p. 282.’
Let the glare of passion pass its meridian & we have entered upon a new life – live it without desiring to return. The Seasons: Palinurus. Keats: Odes are odes to mortality. CV[07] The Small Opposed to the Large Principle – the only real goods spring from actual personal relationships. What we cannot enter into a personal relationship with has only a fiction’s value for us. The local & the close – opposed to the global & the distant. Friends as opposed to ‘humanity.’ Ideal (therefore) close personal relationships with a few. The fiction’s value of ‘contacts’, acquaintance, knowledge gained from travel etc. CV[07] Piety – faithfulness to what is close to us & a part of ourselves, not because of its intrinsic worth, but because the fortune of living has placed us on earth together.20 CV[07] The western European tradition of the mean. Cp. Confucius. Aristotle; Burton. CV[07] To cultivate & find satisfaction in little things enables us to keep contact with the world, with nature & with ourselves. It also saves us from hubris. Do this; but avoid niggling. [20] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Santayana, p. 83; Hayek, p. 174.’
Importance & size not related: avoid the grandiose & the niggling. The art of the miniature &c. CV[07] Local as against national. But avoid the parochial.21 National as against world. Modern communities first destroy local culture & then seek to resurrect it by compulsion or encouragement. Cp. Russia. CV[07] The evil infinite. CV[07] Contrast the limited with the unlimited – cp. Horse race & motor race. Cp. Greek civilization – a horse race. This is the immortal quality of Greek civilization.22 CV[09] Politics and Government, Law The false notion of ‘destiny’ in politics. Destiny – man has only one destiny – death. To speak of these childish plans for the immediate future of a mortal society as its ‘destiny’ is absurd. [21] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Vauvenargues, 382.’ A reference at CV[15] to ‘Vauvenargues, Pensées’ suggests Oakeshott may have been using Pensées, maximes et réflexions de Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, ed. A.T. Baker (London: Macmillan and Co., 1937). [22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘K.B. Smellie, Why We Read History (London: Paul Elek, 1947), p. 29.’ For Oakeshott’s review see SW iii.228–9.
CV[09] How does it come about that a policy (party or national) acquires a sort of moral halo? This happens, but there is no substance in it. It is a trick – not conscious, but a trick of circumstance.23 Cp. 1) The case of the North in the American Civil War. 2) The case of Socialism in England for 40 years. 3) The case of Russian policy, 1944–5. And how difficult it is to disperse this false moral sanctity. Socialists think they have a corner in ideas – & this reveals the defect of their mentality. CV[09] Let me be reconciled to my childhood – but this is not difficult: what is difficult is for the middle aged to be reconciled with their youth: for childhood is outside his control, while youth is something for which he can blame himself. CV[09] Society & the artist: the necessity of being an ‘outcast,’ necessity of rejection by society. Art flourishes only when it is slightly discreditable to be an artist, for then only is it free.
[23] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Pickthorn, Prejudice.’ Probably K. Pickthorn, Principles or Prejudices (London: Signpost Press, 1943).
CV[09] Each society has its own life – the doctrinaire misses this and falls down. ‘Democracy’ does not & could not exist: an abstraction. Same with Fascism. CV[09] Continuity of the history of a nation – the inspiration & the guide to politics. The good fortune of those nations that possess & value continuity. A nation reconciled with its past, as an individual reconciled with his past, is sane in a way no other can be sane: – not subject to the impediments of morbid compulsions and neurotic fears. England made peace with its middle ages by misconstruing them. CV[10] A general interest & preoccupation with politics is the surest sign of a general decay in a society. A universal preoccupation with rights, interests, affairs of government, political questions in general is fatal to the public peace & individual happiness. CV[10] The politician’s attitude to men – ‘use’: i.e., he sees ‘qualities,’ not individuals.24 CV[10] Not to break the grand affirmative flow of things. [24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See J.A. Stewart, Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), pp. 132–4.’
CV[10] Revolution. ‘When the springs dry up the fish are all together on dry land. They will moisten each other with their dampness and keep each other wet with their slime. But this is not to be compared with their forgetting each other in a river or a lake.’25 CV[10] Our non-doctrinaire view of politics has enabled us to escape the error of putting too high a value on political action, too high a hope on political achievement, to escape the error imbedded in the belief in the evanescence of imperfection.26 England with its non-doctrinaire system of politics benefited more by the French Revolution than France, or Germany or any country that accepted the revolution as a new beginning. Stimulated instead of intoxicated by the abstractions & perfections it asserted. CV[10] Politics seen as a struggle for power – is it more than this? CV[10] Each day, each period, has its ‘politics’ – its major political problem. This is important, but no more important than politics itself. The politician alive to his day is he who apprehends the politics of his day and applies his art to its solution. The problem to-day: [25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Chuang Chou, in Hughes, Chinese Philosophy, p. 193.’ [26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Halifax, Maxims.’
1) Germany? 2) How to protect the individual against mass despotism.27 3) The protection of society against the ‘gangster.’ 4) How to encourage in an industrial society the social virtues which were achieved in other simpler forms of society. CV[10] Rationale of second chamber— 1) The majority – the mass against the individual. Equality. 2) The individual against the mass. Liberty. The ideal second chamber – an impoverished aristocracy.28 CV[11] The Psychic and the Supernatural The error of supposing that we could lead better lives if we knew the future. Blessedness of ignorance. Divination; fortune telling. A detailed knowledge of our future life would be fatal to living. Is this true of knowledge of a life after death? Bagehot. Even if there is survival, proved, it does not get over the fact that now we have to live without those who have died: – that is the
[27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Maillaud, pp. 78–9.’ Probably Pierre Maillaud, The English Way (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Maillaud, p. 95.’
sharpness of death, not the possibility of extinction, but the fact of loss.29 But does this not put psychic communication on the map again? Is it not a means of not doing without those who have died? A false means? A refusal of mortality, a refusal to experience. CV[11] Personal immortality: the evidence of psychical research might become overwhelming. But survival of bodily death is different from personal immortality. Ability to communicate. Evidence can never be more than to show the postponement of psychical death. CV[12] The common man more dangerous to civilization than the atomic bomb. CV[12] Democracy not relieved of the imperfections & partiality that belongs to political arrangements.30 The fundamental problem still remains the State and the Individual.31
[29] Oakeshott’s note: ‘B.E. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1936), ii.297.’ [30] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Berdyaev, p. 249.’ [31] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Berdyaev, p. 251.’
CV[12] Democracy is politics without the idea of perfection. All government involves error; democracy alone admits this. The least scientific of all government. CV[12] Democracy is politics become conversible. CV[12] Those who mistake a sort of pelagianism for democracy – identifying the two.32 CV[12] The principle in democracy. Que sais-je? Montaigne. Humility & not presumption; enquiry & not scepticism. CV[12] Montaigne’s doctrine of the fallibility of human judgment, wisdom, & experience. No man is ever free from it – & the arrangement of the world should be based upon it as the finest & most certain foundation we have.33 This is not so much an imperfection in human character as the very stuff & structure of human character – it is ‘imperfection’ only because in rare spirits it is, not absent, but curtailed & modified. What is required in the world’s arrangement is not perfection, the total absence of fallibility – because that is impossible – but the [32] Oakeshott’s note: ‘R.B. Perry, Puritanism and Democracy (New York: Vanguard Press, 1944), p. 424 sq.’ [33] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, v.1–2.’
absence of certain types of fallibility in certain men – e.g. injustice & partiality in judges, pusillanimity in soldiers, etc. CV[12] All systems of government fail, & must fail. The important question then is, not What system is the best, abstractly & if it succeeds entirely? But, What system of government is the best when it fails? The failure of absolutism is worse than the failure of democracy. CV[12] Democracy and a contempt for human beings not inconsistent. CV[12] The ‘radical’ insistence on the primacy of the ‘man’: e.g. monarchy valuable only when the king is personally a good & able man. The primacy of personal worth & ability. It seems so reasonable, so undeniable. But it ignores more than it comprehends. The ‘tradition,’ the ‘system’ is, in fact, more than the man. If life were in an immediate present only, then ‘the man’ would comprehend all. But it is neither in an immediate present, nor in an eternity, but in a middle stretch of time, which requires both ‘the man’ and ‘the system.’ CV[13] Sense of space and time; the foolishness of undue haste. Sense of impersonal factors – Tradition, the past, the inability to see far into the future or to control beyond a certain point the consequences of our actions. E.g. the way in which man’s plans turn out differently from what was intended – either better or worse. The incalculability of remote consequences of action.
Chance & fortune. Impersonal factor in law & in competitive commerce – Hayek. The ease with which circumstances deflect the results of human endeavour: e.g. the romantic concept of nationality containing the seeds of the malignant nationalism of fascism. We have no sovereignty in the face of destiny. Sense of the past & the importance of continuity: preservation of identity in change. Respect for the other man’s personality; the sense of the improbability of any rigid doctrine being ‘right.’ The refusal to see the political world in simple black & white. Pursuit of the good that can be seen and grasped, not of the ‘highest good.’ Limitation – self-limitation – of those in power; for power is something transitory and to be exercised only within the limits of a tradition. Apprehension that no man can be certain of not making a mistake, and the determination to put no man in a position where a single mistake will overturn the world. Scepticism of political genius; a sense of relative values that discourages the attempt to achieve great ends quickly when the cost is disproportionate to the ends achieved. Scepticism of the ‘all or nothing’ attitude. So far from this system of politics being merely empirical, it requires far greater subtlety & elasticity of mind than a doctrinaire system. Love of one’s neighbour rather than love of mankind. CV[13] The error of transposing the ideas & traditions of English democracy in the doctrines of continental politics.34 [34] Oakeshott’s note: ‘C. Brogan, Who Are “The People”? Some Thoughts on Our Present Malcontents (London: Hollis & Carter, 1943), pp. 85–7.’
CV[13] When everyone can read and write, there is an end of good taste. CV[13] Democracy? substituted progress for civilization. Progress means failure to appreciate, living always in a world not yet inhabited. It involves a doctrinaire attitude to human life, and takes away the foundation from which the great creations of art arise. But progress is a euphemism for the perpetual readjustments that are going on: it is designed to give an importance to these readjustments by attributing to them a direction; but it is a false importance; their true importance is concealed. Progress leads to planning. Civilization is humbler, tolerant, permits the recognition of the circular movement of human life & institutions; it asserts personality. The individual emerges in civilization & is submerged in progress. That is why progress is inconsistent with democracy: they are in fact mutually exclusive and incompatible. Democracy – mortality – civilization. CV[13] Democracy cannot be ‘introduced’ into a society (therefore) it must grow there. A democracy less than say 200 years old is impossible. Democracy can be developed only by the practice of democracy.35
[35] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Swartzchild, pp. 150 sq.’ Possibly Leopold Schwarzschild (1891–1950), author of End to Illusion. A Study of PostWar Europe, tr. M. Meiklejohn (London: John Lane, 1934); World in Trance (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1943); and Primer of the Coming World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944).
CV[14] Philosophy and Life Pater, ‘Sebastian van Storck’: the confusion of philosophy with life.36 Romanticism is this confusion of philosophy & life: Classicism as the distinction. But yet there remains – either a preference for life or for philosophy (death). The pursuit of perfection, the unconditioned, the absolute. In practice it is an error, for this perfection does not belong to the world of practice, to human life, whose ideals must be as mortal as that life itself. It takes two forms in life: 1) Mysticism, which is both the pursuit & the achievement of perfection. 2) Sebastian van Storck or M. Teste (Valéry).37 CV[14] To love the earth & hate the world – Rationalism, Naturalism: not knowing that all the most valuable things of life are great concrete human achievements, not abstractions or the gifts of nature.
[36] W. Pater, ‘Sebastian van Storck,’ Macmillan’s Magazine, 53 (1886), 348–60, reprinted in W. Pater, Miscellaneous Studies A Series Of Essays (London: Macmillan and Co, 1895). [37] P. Valéry, An Evening with Monsieur Teste, tr. M. Gould (London: Besant & Co., 1936).
CV[15] Values – What is Valuable Charm compensates for the lack of everything else: charm that comes from a sincere and generous spirit. Those who ignore charm & fix their appreciation upon what they consider more solid virtues are, in fact, ignoring mortality. Mortality is the rationale of the primacy of charm. CV[15] To desire is better than to possess – i.e., it is more in accord with the happiness possible to the human condition. Desire may be mortal, but possession is more frail. Indeed, desire is an intimation of immortality; the acceptance & the defeat of mortality. CV[15] The enjoyment of what is best is, in some cases, impossible because the majority seizing the best makes it unenjoyable. In these cases the rule is never to have the best, but only the second best. In this way enjoyment is at least secured, if what is enjoyed is less than what might be enjoyed. Modifications of this principle: 1) Where the best is not wanted by the majority – then one is safe in fixing one’s enjoyment in the best. 2) Where the best can be enjoyed (e.g. books etc.) without interference. If, by chance, the majority desire the best (mostly without appreciating it), then the wise man will surrender the best for the
second best, because what is selected by the majority is rapidly destroyed. CV[15] ‘Quand l’universe considère avec indifférence l’être que nous aimons, qui est la vérité?’38 The question should not be, ‘what is the truth,’ because that isn’t relevant: it should be, what shall we think? Or what shall we do? And the answer must be ‘ignore the universe.’39 CV[15] We must take account of the fact that the love of the good and constant striving for it may make a man spiteful, hard & merciless. Indifference to good & evil in one extreme, a too great insistence on good & evil in the other. The true life of man lies between. Tolerance, mercy, ‘consideration for others’ (Confucius), i.e. love. Freedom from obsession.40 CV[15] To be second is better than to be first:— 1) To be first requires & implies extraneous qualities, worldly qualities, that mislead. It requires not only merit in whatever one is first in, but also ability to be ‘first.’ It carries with it the penalty of success. Perhaps it implies the extraneous will to success. [38] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Jouhandeau.’ Presumably Marcel Jouhandeau (1888–1979), French Catholic novelist and moralist. [39] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Homer, Odyssey, X.70–7.’ [40] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Berdyaev, 231.’
To be full to the brim is not so good as to know when to stop – to have a limit of one’s own; to control. 2) It avoids hubris. CV[15] If there are no realities, appearances rise in value. CV[15] The falseness of the idea of perfection: – It is an intellectual, philosophical ideal improperly carried over into life – Democracy – the removal of the idea of perfection from politics. CV[16] The baseness of the mercantile & the military ideals: & note how they merge into one another. The Germans were apt to contrast their military & heroic civilization with the mercantile: but the contrast can’t be maintained in the end, and the true military ideal is something that has no place in modern civilization: vide ‘War.’ The German military idea degenerated in a struggle in which the acquisition of patents & the management of currencies were more important than the military character. CV[16] ‘The old qualitative civilizations had as their aim perfection, not power, & are our Paradise Lost.’41 No, not perfection, for that would dismiss what is strongest in these civilizations – their perception of mortality, of balance. It [41] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Ferrero.’ Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942), Italian historian and novelist.
is the West that has destroyed them in the search for perfection – power after power. The loss of the power to let well alone. The thoughtless exploitation of invention. CV[16] What of the innumerable joys, struggles, thoughts, sorrows, hopes & desires that are of no account to the world? The emotions of the individual whom one sees in a city crowd? One may either be oppressed when one thinks of the absolute reality to themselves of these emotions; or one may reject their not being of any account to the world and take them as they are valued by those who feel them. An illusion is real to those who suffer it – it is the reality. But psychological states are not valuable simply in themselves; there is another criteria – that which distinguishes between illusion & reality. Nevertheless, in human intercourse, & above all in close relationships, illusion even known as such must be accepted as reality. CV[16] Lost causes Jacobites; the South in the American Civil War; Cavaliers & Roundheads. Often the great moments of history; often, because they are fixed & finished, more permanent than that which succeeded & therefore tends to be lost in further achievements. The value of loss itself. The moments of success tend to lose their individuality in a general development; the moments of loss retain their individuality and power. The same true of decay – it is freed from the dissolving power of success.
Loss.42 CV[16] The cultivation of life in a world of mechanization & mass labour involves a form of escapism. This in itself is a criterion of our civilization; though the true sweetness of life was, perhaps, always something involving an escape from the current & conventional life belonging to any civilization. It is the quality & the direction of the escape that matters. The English tradition encourages an individual escape, & that is an escape of the highest quality. Continental societies, especially Germany, tend to make it a communal, almost mass escape; this is of the lowest quality. E.g. sports clubs etc. Democracy & escape. Democracy implies the encouragement of individual escape: mass escape is not democratic.43 CV[17] The Ideal Human Character The necessity of belonging to a time & a place. Equally, the necessity of not being wholly governed by that time & place. The representative of a civilization. The nature of an ideal. A possible form of being, expressive of the will. Expressive of a consistent moral attitude towards all things in human experience, a coordination of our interests, a criterion, a means of valuing things & persons – a logicalimaginative perception of what is important & what is trivial. Ideal – the voice of love & hate, hope & desire. Ideal a function of reality. Imaginary, only because more complete. [42] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Maillaud, p. 214.’ [43] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Santayana, Persons & Places, p. 215.’
Independent of any possibility of its realization – does not even imply that it would be better if it were realized. An ideal has authority, not by reason of its prophetic content, but because of its insight into the conditions of human life. Not necessarily good that all should conform to the ideal. By its nature, full conformity to the ideal is impossible. It deserves & wins imaginative allegiance because it expresses what the will demands. It does not require to wait for realization for its validity to be proved. An ideal character implies an ideal world; i.e. that part of the world controlled by will must be in accord with the character itself. An ideal has no force. It is explanatory rather than creative. It is a creature of the imagination & it creates only images. Ideal – a principle & example of comprehension. An extrapolation. CV[17] The ideal is the expression of a temperament, a realization of a character. Does it ever get beyond this? Get to reason?44 It is susceptible of no proof; it belongs to ourself, never a true universal. CV[17] To be contented with oneself, reconciled, without being selfsatisfied. Wisdom’s content with that which is present. CV[17] An ideal human character must assent with and express a civilization: it is always the ‘ideal of a civilization.’
[44] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, iv.13.’
CV[17] The form & the content of the ideal character. 1) Integrity 2) Inheritor of his civilization 3) Charm
}
These joined in piety.
CV[17] The ideal not something abstract, a set of principles embodied in a mechanical man. This ideal has been learnt from my society, from England. It matters not that it is not exactly the ideal of my society – everything in it has sprung from seeds that find this social soil not inimical: it could be the ideal of my society.45 CV[17] Perfection: – not belonging to life at all. Not required by love, not required in ourselves. CV[18] The ‘Thruster’! The Irish character: decadence. Par délicatesse j’ai perdu ma vie.46 How shall we follow Montaigne & escape the Left Book Club. The ideal human character as the myth of a civilization. Confucius & Epicurus joined: not the false synthesis of Taoism.
[45] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Berdyaev, pp. 306–10.’ [46] Cp. p. 245, above.
CV[18] The myth of Palinurus: will-to-failure, repugnance-of-success, desire to give up at the last moment. Not a suitable criterion for external activity itself, for it denies the value in external achievement; but considering the inappropriateness of external achievement to human life, it becomes a suitable condition for a good life. Entering into the promised land seems to put everything on a false foundation – not that in itself it is evil, but it is false as the motive of desire. A demonstration to oneself that one’s motive of desire is true to human life. The disengagement with anything that is not an end in itself. Serve flow of life: austere. CV[18] Is ‘live unknown’? anything more than the natural prejudice of a temperament? Has it any universal significance? E.g. the natural prejudice of the Englishman against ostentation in habit, speech or appearance. The English, unemphatic, undemonstrative in work & leisure. Not frivolous. CV[19] The implication of ‘consideration for others’ – avoidance of interference with others or using them for our own ends. Always the good man thinks himself at once not called upon to tell others what they should do and under obligation to do whatever he can for others.47
[47] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A. Wingate, The Golden Phoenix: Essays on Chinese Art and Culture (London: J. Jenkins, 1930), p. 182.’
CV[19] 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. CV[20] War The object of any war is power – increase or preservation of power. This war – the modification introduced by liberation. CV[20] War produces the worst in everyone; no man is as bad at other times as he is in the army – as selfish, as stupidly insistent on his rights, as impervious to reason, as dishonest. CV[20] The similarity of war & the life of pleasure – the sense of the shortness of life, the life from day to day, without more than daily responsibilities – surely the military life is itself a fair example of the life of pleasure? No; because war is not the same as the circumstances of military life – at least not the circumstances that make it akin to the life of pleasure. Wars can be conducted only because they create circumstances agreeable to those who desire a life of pleasure, but they appear because a mere life of pleasure has ceased to attract: a new background at least is required, an illusion of destiny, an illusion of affairs, even an illusion of action that has some object beyond the moment & some motive other than pursued pleasure. Ambition, glory – these have no place in the life of pleasure.
CV[20] War & the military life contrasted: a prolonged war destroys the virtue of the military life. The function of military power; the military life as the agent of military power.48 CV[20] War and its false standard of immediacy & the necessity for speed: standards that mislead in peace. A politics of peace conceived in the categories of war & recommended in the terms of war – ‘labour front’ – ‘D-day in the schools’ – ‘five year plan’ – tactics & strategy – is a false politics: Germany; Russia. CV[20] War 1) its folly 2) its possibility. How much of history is, in fact, taken up with war? On any count it must be one of the major facts of human life: and one so deeply & so frequently experienced, that we might have expected that the human mind would have distilled from it some essence, its idea. CV[20] War & love. Does war give the catharsis of love? Or does war perhaps give the opportunity of that catharsis? A people that desires war & embraces it with relief or enthusiasm is almost certainly a people whose sexual life is unhappy.
[48] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Swartzchild, p. 33.’
CV[21] Imagination not powerful enough to forsee all the conditions created by a plan.49 The evils we design to avoid, when we fail to avoid them, are not experienced as we imagined them. They become conditions that, when accepted, are transformed by acceptance. Imagination to be complete must comprehend not only fact, conditions, but also what these conditions will appear as when they are seen to be unavoidable. Liberalism & planning.50 CV[21] Planning is the interjection of philosophy into life – a confusion des genres, ignoratio elenchi. CV[21] The feeling of the Russian revolution, cp. Wordsworth & the French Revolution. I was 17 and in 1917 felt it all. Illusions. But saw dimly even then the value of what was being destroyed – the civilization of Tolstoy & Turgenev. The intellectual grandeur of the Eastern church. CV[21] The idea of Christian unity – the unity of the churches – doctrinaire; an early example of the ‘planned’ religion.
[49] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, iii.69–70, 73.’ [50] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Croce, Morals & Politics, p. 147 sq.’ Probably B. Croce, Politics and Morals, tr. S.J. Castiglione (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1946).
CV[21] Planning and Millenarism The perfect society; a society from which all vulgar & extraneous elements have been excluded; other ideals – a society in which production is organized throughout on the most economical plan, from which all rules of inefficiency & tradition have been excluded: All such ideals, & one or other of them or a combination of them is certainly implied in a planned society, are false. Compare the notion of a literature only of masterpieces. A society that is unmixed, no discordant element as well as no imperfection. This perhaps is an ideal (though also perhaps a false one) for a man’s own personal narrow society. But if our aim is persons & our politics are the politics of the person, none of these ideals appear even for consideration. What sort of society is implied in the politics of the person? CV[22] Science and the Modern World The inventions of ‘science’ – what do people want with all this electricity rushing up & down the country – telephone & telegraph. Argument: the gifts of science cannot be separated from one another: it is impossible to have modern surgery without the rest of the modern world. This true only if you suppose that these inventions spring from an energy which can’t be directed selectively. Why should not a civilization say ‘yes’ to some and ‘NO’ to others? We feel that it ought to do so when this energy of the scientific mind spends itself on destruction; but we don’t do it & don’t know how to do it. The only way to do it: not
‘authoritatively’, from above, by law or order, but by the presence of the values the civilization embodies. Since these are forgotten, perverted, or not appreciated there remains no selective principle to govern this activity. CV[22] The terrorism of science in the modern world. CV[22] Science – the factory ideal of culture. Division of labour – the result only matters – speed – each must specialize. When science dominates, then culture becomes pseudo-culture because science & journalism divide the field between them. CV[23] ‘Creation’ in art – always conditioned by the ‘material’ = craft. Acceptance combined with rejection. CV[23] Only the supreme artist is perfectly simple, perfectly balanced – arising out of such an excess of energy that discipline alone would save it from disintegration. Weaker imaginations can allow themselves full play. Classic & Romantic. CV[23] The artist – at once an outcast and adored, idolized, commanded devotion.
CV[23] Without actual physical embodiment – words, sounds, stone, pigment – even if actual embodiment is only imagined, the artistic experience does not exist. In no sense is a poem the translation into words of the state of mind of the poet, for he does not know till he has said it either what he wants to say or how he shall say it – two things that are admittedly one. The artist is driven by a passion, an excitement, his expression may be at once representative of that passion or it may become so after much change & correction – but ‘correction’ is not to make it correspond with images in his mind, but to make it a more satisfying expression of his passion. A work of art is the expression of the artistic passion or excitement, & not of any imaginative artistic experience. That experience is generated in & through the expression itself. Creation; rather a recreation & a practical creation – acceptance of the material & the creation of the experience…the subject chooses the material and the material chooses & modifies the images & the artist finds himself compelled by his material to fresh or altered imagination. Creation & acceptance. CV[23] The business of the writer is to produce a masterpiece. Literature as a library of masterpieces – is it possible? The place of the second rate? (i) As contemporary. (ii) As the condition of the masterpiece. CV[23] Perfectionism in art, but not in life.
CV[23] The place of the artist in his society is one of the definitive characteristics of both the art & the society. CV[23] The modified ivory-tower To be an artist is a high calling, demanding patience and a certain self-sacrifice, a sacrifice of certain other ordinarily enjoyed activities & enjoyments. Artist inherently isolated; should not seek admission to the organized body of society. He is an outcast, or alternatively, an aristocrat. An outcast by calling: but more by temperament & necessity. Flaubertian conception of art & the artist. This view, it is true, belonged characteristically to the nineties. But it has a universal aspect – the theory & the practice of the nineties was only one mode of its existence, one avatar. Our question is: Is this universal aspect valid? Not, is this mode valid? CV[23] Art & Life If we assume that art represents what we want in life – that the literature of Europe is Europe’s expression of its longings & desires – then certain conclusions about the civilization of Europe will follow.51
[51] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. D. de Rougemont, Passion and Society, tr. M. Belgion (London: Faber and Faber, 1940).’
But this perhaps is not so; art may represent something else but desires; it may represent an understanding of life. And if this is so, our conclusions about the civilization will be different. CV[23] Let us give up the fruitless, meaningless question of the relation of art & society, & consider the relation of art & society now. The best is corrupted by the mob. CV[24] The discipline of adaption to circumstances. We are so ready to consider everything as a construction & therefore as subject to the exercise of the human will, that we forget that we live in a world in which not everything can be changed, & possess natures whose characters cannot wholly be recreated. We would rather destroy & recreate than adapt. But adaptation belongs much more to the fallible human character & judgment; it is more in accord with our actual powers. We are not ‘gods.’ CV[24] Creation v. Acceptance We undertake to decide everything e.g. death – suicide. Birth – contraception. And yet we do not possess the necessary wisdom to make half these decisions. A planned life.
CV[24] The value of something beyond our control – something we accept. Marriage – arranged.52 CV[24] Language. Each has its own range of possibilities, its own arbitrary euphony & prosody, its own strength & weakness. The poet does not reject these; he does not even feel them as limitations; they are his material, they belong to his experience, & the habit of his ear. So mortality is the material of human life – things that do not last for ever. CV[24] You can’t have a good wine without a long tradition – principle of minimum time. And the best speak to us now of a passion, an experience, a life & a wisdom more serene than can now be enjoyed. Even the worst remind us of something better, in closer touch with the ancient realities, than our present world. Like poetry from a world ignorant of newspapers & advertisements & the other prostitution of the magic of words – & even when it is not poetry of the highest class – even when it is a little sentimental – we are in partnership with it; our age, alas, will be one that the future will skip over as its roots strike down for the earth that nourishes.
[52] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, v.102–86.’
CV[25] Suicide Part of suicide is no more than the readiness to die if what makes life worth living is denied. What sure distinction can we draw between the suicide and the man who is prepared to die because he knows that nothing he can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die for what he prizes most? Suicide as the escape from mortality and as the recognition of mortality. CV[26] Death Delight increased by rareness & by precariousness: a life surrounded by death, a mortal life, has delights that an immortal life could never possess. The fact that one can do some things only once makes them infinitely precious: & if by misjudgment the value is lost, it can never be regained. Indeed, everything in life is ‘once.’ External acts – e.g. marriage etc. – can take place more than once, but that is only because they are generalizations, abstractions; the thing itself is only & always once. Everything is irreparable: the notion of repair inapplicable to human life. CV[26] Epicurus – why should we fear to lose something that being lost we no longer remain to experience the loss? Death not to be feared because it is at once the end of life & the self. But this does
not touch the lesser deaths – only the last death. And these lesser deaths – the mortal material of our life – are the worst. To lose youth, vitality, power, love, a friend – all are deaths & they are felt & suffered as deaths. Hence, not death, but transience, old age is the crucial predicament of life. The lesser deaths are the greater because they are not final. How to overcome death – & these lesser deaths? The sharpness of death? Not overcome by another life. 1) If we are the same person, personal immortality. Because if we are the same, then the last death is like the lesser deaths, we have to feel it. And the sudden transition, without depriving ourselves of ourselves, makes us exiles until we become naturized to the new world: there must be felt loss. 2) If we are not the same person. Because then death really is the end. No doctrine of another world can overcome the sharpness of death: only 1) tiredness, willingness to die, or 2) a mastery of death by acceptance. Not death, but this fear of death, the enemy. One death cannot explain or prepare for another: the lesser deaths are not a school teaching how to die finally. One loss does not prepare for another. And a series of suffered & felt losses has nothing in common with a final loss in which we ourselves also are lost. How to overcome the fear of death? CV[26] How much thought do we normally give to death? The evidence suggests:
1) That children think much about it 2) That adults may think often & deeply of it or may hardly think of it at all – matter of temperament. CV[26] Our reactions to death are the most civilized of our reactions. Sex still remains a reflection of a dim & distant part of human history, taking us back to the childhood of the race – to its infancy. But in death our conscious ideas about death, and our childish reactions to death, are mirrored the struggle & intellectual pains of those ages when the religions of the civilized world were being born and when the Greeks shed the clear, compassionate light of their intellect upon the human predicament. CV[26] To leap from being (even ill-being) to not being is neither so great nor so revolutionary as to leap from one state of being to another in which the first is lost but remembered, felt & may be lamented.53 CV[27] Death belongs to life: part of it. We could not remove death without transforming the whole character of our life. But we can remove the fear of death. 1) Forget it: do not think of it. 2) Consider it closely, expect it, forsee it, live with it continuously in mind. Cp. Pascal. But this prepares us for the death of others rather than our own: & the idea of others is one of the lesser deaths we have to suffer. [53] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Homer, Odyssey, X.237–41.’
Remove the strangeness of death by close acquaintance with it. Conversation. Friendliness with death. But no mastery of death in the abstract will console for an actual death. One death does not explain another; one loss cannot reconcile us to another. ‘He who has learned to die has unlearned to serve…To know how to die doth free us from all subjection & constraint.’54 But this can apply only to the last death – which is the least. The most we can learn is how not to fear death. ‘The deadest deaths are the best.’ Montaigne, Essais – i.e., the last.55 Permitting death to influence our way of living. E.g. not attempting what we do not think we shall live to complete. Death should find us – cultivating our garden, prepared, but not dominated by death. No man dies before his time – not that his death is predetermined, but because the time you leave behind is no more yours than the years before you were born. No man dies too late, no man is cut off in the middle of his life – except in the irrelevant sense that there is an average span of life that (being an average) some do not attain & others exceed. As long as one is not forgotten one is not dead? Birth presents many of the same problems as death. S. Butler, Pascal. The practical importance of a doctrine of death. What makes extinction tolerable or intolerable. (a) Intolerable: selfishness, ambition, glory, desire not to be cheated, purpose, failure, subject to disappointment. [54] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, i.98.’ [55] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, i.101.’
(b) Tolerable: detachment, unambition, failure, present enjoyment, absence of contempt for life. Suicide more appropriate to (a).56 ‘If death ends my career, then I should decide that this earth-life, taken as a whole, is not worth living’:57 i.e. only the evanescence of imperfection satisfies. Doctrines of survival.58 The argument that only the immortality of the soul can substantiate individualism, because it makes the soul outlast everything in the worldly scene – state, society, civilization, etc. But a soul separable from its world is nothing: an empty shell.59 ‘Neither at the sun nor at death can one look steadily.’ La Rochefoucauld. CV[27] Socrates refused to grieve over his own death, saying that it would set his soul free, but he could not keep his friends from weeping.
[56] Oakeshott’s note: ‘McDougal, Body & Mind, “Preface,” p. xiii; Faucett, Zermatt, pp. 4, 51, 94.’ W. McDougal, Body & Mind A History And A Defense Of Animism (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1911); E.D. Fawcett, The Zermatt Dialogues, Constituting the Outlines of a Philosophy of Mysticism (London: Macmillan & Co., 1931). [57] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Oberland, pp. 201–2.’ Possibly D.M. Richardson, Oberland (London: Duckworth, 1927). [58] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Oberland, p. 205.’ [59] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Oberland, p. 378 sq.’
CV[27] The mental acceptance of death is difficult – so difficult that the effort may cloud our whole life – consciously or unconsciously. This is deeply written in the records of mankind. Religion – by its doctrines & by its rites – has helped to ease this difficulty & everything it has done in this direction is good: whether it is by way of a doctrine of life after death, or merely by the consolations it offers when the farewell is felt as final. Brings death into a grand & positive relation with life. Religion – a social organization of human reactions relating them to a culture. Religion & its offer of relief from anxiety – even suttee, martyrdom or sacrifice. A true religion is the integration in each individual of his attitude to death. CV[28] Death defeated by propagation. This is an important element in Eastern culture – e.g. Chinese, but has never been important in Western civilization.60 Hatred of death, and fear of death. Death universal & inevitable, but an evil. This felt sometimes by those in love with life, but also by those who have no strong feeling or reason to attach themselves to life. CV[28] Since it is fear of death that is evil, what is required to combat it, is not reason, but courage. Cp. Lucretius who gave man a reason. Relation of reason and courage, what is it. [60] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Plato, Symposium, 206c–207d. Cp. “Come let us make love deathless” – sexual love and not its result. Shakespeare, Sonnet 12.’
If fear of death is the father of all fear, then courage is no answer to death – or rather courage can answer death only when it has answered all lesser fears. Fear of death – a child hoping that he would be an exception to the general rule: children only gradually come to see death as a natural & universal event, connecting it first with human ill-will or accident. But when they see it as a natural event it is difficult to accept it. CV[28] To take death’s part in life – any great casting away of ambition or worldly goods, any retirement from the normal competition of one’s profession, any overcriticalness that prevents production or inhibits result, certainly any philosophy of failure or non-success – is taking death’s part – is an accommodation to death in life. But a too complete anticipation of death and what death will do to us, will turn life into death. Here again, a mean is the only avoidance of the unreality & madness of the extreme. CV[28] The Christian tradition that death came into the world with sin. Somehow death did not belong to man as he was created. Bodily immortality was one of the special privileges belonging to man that he lost with the vitium originis. CV[29] Life. Mortality – Transience Human character: a middle. Not a god nor a child. Not living for ever, nor for a very short while. Not like day-flies. Thucydides.
Not wholly bound by mortality because able to transcend by comprehension some elements of mortality (defeat it), nor immortal, but it must accept.61 CV[29] We have both to accept & defeat mortality. Shakespeare, the poet of mortality: what he leaves out: cp. Homer, Lucretius, Dante, Goethe, Santayana. CV[29] Life is a barmecide feast: know it as such. ‘Patience & shuffle the cards.’62 The point is, not whether we have rational grounds for believing in survival, continuance or immortality, but that however firmly we are convinced of any of these, we are still subject to the conditions of mortality. Even if we are in some sense immortal, yet we cannot avoid the sufferings of mortals. Mortality still the prime fact. Immortality & survival only touch the last death. CV[29] To ‘admit’ mortality is familiar to us as a mood, an attitude of mind, a mood peculiar perhaps to a certain period in life when the mind has become adult. But the admission of mortality is also more than a mood; it is a philosophy, or at least what Pascal called the ‘hidden thought’ that gives coherence to the parts of a philosophy.
[61] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, vi.314–15.’ [62] M. de. Cervantes, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote De La Mancha [The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha] (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1605), Pt II Bk III ch. xxiii. Cp. pp. 388–9, below.
CV[30] The charm & pleasure of the suggestion of immortality that youth contains. A man whose body remains young past its time; a girl en fleur in the hey-day of her youth – these make us forget mortality for a moment. But they are not intimations of immortality: they are a momentary suspension of the law of mortality that, for a moment, lifts the weight of death from the shoulders of those who yet must surely die. CV[30] Tedium vitae. To avoid: 1) The ‘American’ fear of never having lived – leading to febrile nervous activity, continual, unguided experiment: losing your head about living. 2) Never in fact having lived. CV[30] To avoid regret that hinders life. Not to mourn over wasted years that cannot be recalled. CV[30] Having conceived a discontent on account of the conditions of human life – its sorrows or even just its shortness, we then go for comfort to the philosophers. Three great doctrines:
1) Stoic: – it is inevitable, so do not allow it to worry you. Grave nihil est homini quod fert necessitas.63 2) Epicurean: – dismissal. 3) Christian: – Life a warfare; suffering temporary; the new world is at hand. None of these accept. CV[30] Manichaeism The denial of mortality: perfectionism – and a heresy. The feeling for mortality that has always lain at the root of Christianity (at least from the 4th century A.D.) CV[31] How can we come to feel and know that the troubles & happiness of this transient life justify themselves. There is nothing else, beyond or outside, to which they can be referred for justification. They must be known as their own reward. And we can feel & know this if we give up searching for some ulterior meaning & justification & apply our minds to what is known to us. This life is a ‘stumble’ only when we compare it with a perfection that does not belong to its character, a perfection that is not its perfection. Let us, by all means, distinguish & hold before us clearly the imperfections that belong to this life; but do not let us attribute to it as imperfections what belongs to its character. (Cp. Spinoza. Nothing must be attributed as an imperfection that belongs to the nature of the thing.) [63] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cicero; Burton, ii.148–9 sq., 180.’ Probably Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: see BD3[53], above.
What do we know of human life? That it is neither long nor short, that we do not know what, if anything, comes after it. That every detail of it is subject to mortality. That we are ignorant of any ulterior purpose or meaning. That it is made of joy and sorrow. That it is governed by a chance that, if it is accepted, may be understood as a necessity. CV[32] That the nature of our emotions change & have changed is as certain as that the institutions under which we live have changed and our ideas have changed. If our conception of nature is radically different from that of the Greeks, it is not less certain that the emotions we connect with love and e.g. external nature, are different from what they were 500 years ago. There is, in fact, no absolute stability. The important question is, what may be inferred from this instability? The first inference, when this transience was recognized in the 18th century, was that no one stage or thing is more valuable than another – absolute relativity. That this is a false inference we know – but knowing this, we have ceased to infer. But there is a true inference. CV[33] Chance; Fortune; Necessity In another age I should never have known what it was to be a soldier. In another generation, five years of my life would not have been spent in the army. There is no natural course of life. Life is a predicament in which circumstances command, and in which we become what can be made from circumstances. Nothing inevitable. E.g. This move towards planning.64 [64] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Hayek, p. 16 & Ch. IV.’
Turning points in history:— 1) Reformation. 2) Victory of North over the South in USA. At both these points the life of the Western world took a turn for the worse: the one produced the modern German character; the other the modern American character: both menaces to civilization. To entertain the possibility that Western civilization has taken a wrong turning: what do we mean by wrong? Perhaps a denial of its central character, or a malignant as opposed to a healthy growth.65 Remedy— 1) Not to go back. 2) Not to go on. 3) But to catch up by a short cut; & meanwhile not to lose what is not already lost. CV[33] Progress?66 Why do we need to believe in progress? Progress, in some sense, may be a fact but it isn’t a relevant fact because 1) it does not bring the present release from imperfection [65] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Hayek, p. 8.’ [66] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, v.251–4; Essais, vi.71, 102, 122.’
that we demand, it is a not a surrogate salvation, and 2) it assumes the evanescence of imperfection and therefore puts us on the wrong track. Unless we leave this track we shall never find salvation in mortal life. The appearance of a faith in progress carried with it an exuberant optimism and a febrile impatience – tempting men to tear themselves adrift from their historic past and to set sail after utopias & perfectibilities conceived not in terms of the society & time to which they belonged, but in terms of abstractions, doctrinaire ‘rights of man’, eternal orders, new orders etc. Only those societies which had a firm hold on their past & a deep affection for it escape: perhaps only England: Progress & continuity. So firmly grounded in our non-doctrinaire system of politics, we were not tempted. CV[33] The conception of Trumps – divine or quasi-divine intervention: a degeneracy in the game. A Joker even more degenerate. Did card games originally contain either? CV[33] ‘The science of life consists in seizing every chance that presents itself.’67 1) Every chance? 2) How to avoid the dissipation of personality, & the fear of never having lived at all?
[67] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Joseph Conrad, Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (London: Methuen & Co., 1913).’
CV[33] No inevitable cause of events; also, what has happened is not necessarily the best – and even if we decide that there is no going back, we need not assert that what has happened is good, or that, if it is not good, going on will cure it. There is no cure. The world is henceforth different – worse than it might have been – if this cause or that had not been lost. The fact that it was lost does not mean that what was lost was not good & better perhaps than what prevailed. E.g. population. The fall in the death rate and the extended expectation of life means an older population – unless there is a rapidly increasing population due to a rising birth rate. But even with a rising birth rate – which might keep the age proportion in the population stable – the gross number of old people would have increased & be increasing. Is this good? Yet, if it isn’t we can’t undo it, for most of the things that have made us live longer have also made those who are younger live less painfully. CV[34] What responsibility can we accept for our actions, the consequences of which, or what might appear to be the consequences, are, from the very beginning modified and conditioned by what is out of our control?68 CV[34] The anatomy of hope. What is the place of hope? ‘Patience is the art of hoping.’69 Gambling as the expression of optimism. [68] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Lord Salisbury.’ [69] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Vauvenargues, 251.’
CV[34] Often small mistakes bring great misfortunes; a man may break his leg walking in his room. It is only good luck that prevents a man’s errors bringing him ill consequences. CV[34] Misfortune = lack of external achievement that might be expected to be achieved. Suffering external circumstances that might be expected to be avoided. Its relation to personality: we think of it as merely hindering, but if this is so, then the whole world must be regarded as a potential hindrance to the achievement of personality. CV[34] A man without a sense of chance or fortune is a man liable to the defect of pride. A sense of fortune is part of humility. Hubris implies the lack of it. CV[34] Why are there years without spring or autumn, when the fruits of the season wither in their bloom? Years without summer? Useless questions. Yet this may happen in years when to us personally it is most important that the full sweetness of the seasons should appear. A lost year. CV[34] All particular stations in life are, at bottom, accidental; and inequalities which they indicate will trouble only those in whose mind a theory has completely effaced experience. To see these as the
result of chance, reinforces rather than removes the responsibilities which go with them: but they are not responsibilities to abolish that which gives meaning to responsibility. CV[35] Religion What determined our religious beliefs & their intensity & importance? The influence of circumstance: adolescence, marriage, etc: This true particularly of mystical religion. Social religious beliefs: Piety, sympathy with simple believers.70 CV[35] The ‘herd creeds’ – but why not?71 Two great periods in a religion— 1) The near-beginning; archaic; first customs & ceremonials established. 2) The high summer: the creation of a theology. CV[35] ‘The appalling possibilities of a world uncontrolled by the divine’ – this is the beginning of Fascism, which creates a god so as to eliminate the possibility that there may not be one.
[70] Oakeshott’s note: ‘H. Wodehouse, One Kind of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944).’ [71] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Fawcett, Zermatt, pp. 138–59.’
CV[35] A blind God – but do you trust blind pilots? But what if God isn’t a pilot? CV[35] Belief in God – what does the common man believe? How far can we follow him?72 Religion is devotion – God the organizing centre of devotion. Have I any experience, similar to the apparent experience of the disciples, that forces one to attribute divinity to somebody or something I know? Can we know something & then later come to know it to be divine?73 CV[35] The comforting Greek religion in which, if one god is against you, it is always possible to find another to help you. It is a kind of personification of the Christian God who is at once secure & loving.74 CV[35] For the Greek men & gods inhabited the same world; they walked hand in hand over the earth. Direct contact. For the Hebrew, God was an overseer; a supervisor; the dossier business. A superior to control human affairs. Christianity, the incarnation, introduced into the Hebrew religion an intimacy, but it did not succeed in overcoming the overseer & the dossier. Protestantism reintroduced an added Hebrew element into Medieval Christianity. A bridge [72] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Fawcett, Zermatt, p. 65.’ [73] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Fawcett, Zermatt, p. 193.’ [74] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Homer, Odyssey, V.333–54.’
between man & god – Christianity – incarnation – a cumbersome contrivance to overcome a defect that (whatever its other defects) Greek religion never suffered from. CV[35] Religion as an attempt to explain away & modify the felt insignificance of the life of the individual by creating a God everlastingly occupied in watching every single one of us & engrossed in the welfare of each. We add to our own importance. What is the alternative? Accept insignificance or transform it in some other way. CV[36] Religion in England. Diversity in institutional religion. No advantage in theoretic unity. Unity of the churches a false ideal.75 Churchgoing in England.76 CV[36] Fear is the basis of religious dogma: fear of nature – B. Russell. Primus in orbe deos fecit timor. Petronius?77 But are not the gods, from earliest times, associated with dancing, feasting, laughter, poetry, holiday, joy, gifts? Yes; but how far were these things autosuggestive? Appeasement? Sacrifices. [75] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Maillaud, pp. 205–6.’ [76] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Maillaud, pp. 35–6, 211.’ [77] The phrase occurs in a fragment of poetry by Petronius (c.27–66 CE), Roman satirist, and also in the Thebaid by Publius Papinius Statius (c.45–96 CE), Roman poet.
CV[36] In religion to ask for something other than what the religious consciousness provides is to ask for something that does not exist. True religion is the outflow of an uncorrupt religious consciousness – & is nothing else beyond this. CV[36] Religious observance.78 What matters is the range of human need & aspiration focused in the observance.79 CV[36] We may suppose, like the anthropologist, that mankind is somehow, & perhaps in spite of elements tending in the opposite direction, on the whole better for its religion. There is a certain survival value – value in living & dealing with life, in a religion. Religion = religious feeling, with which is allied action of a sort, formalized action, rather than thought. A developed religion, perhaps, must have dogma: but the primitive religion is almost without it. God – beginning perhaps as an implication of a ritual, who answers only when he is called, becomes something that cannot be denied – becomes ‘the conditionality which the religious man comes more & more to feel in his efforts to adjust himself to this universe by means of rites.’80 [78] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Santayana, Persons & Places, pp. 107–9, 121, 172.’ [79] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Laurence Whistler, The English Festivals (London: William Heinemann, 1947).’ For Oakeshott’s review see SW iii.222–3. [80] Oakeshott’s note: ‘p. 11.’ Probably a reference to Whistler, English Festivals.
CV[36] Religion gives a feeling of expectation, of power which may turn into the false intoxication of the non posse peccare – a sort of hubris. Religious license usually an indication of a religious prohibition in normal times. Cp. carnival, Dionsyiac rites.81 Gives a dynamical mood. The thrill of the obscene to quicken the sense of life. If religion is taken as an intensified expression of the will to live, a positive hopefulness must be a basic element in it. To give nerve to the nervous strain entailed in the great enterprise of living. Those who do without a religion are those who have no sense of nervous apprehension in meeting life (cp. Robinson Crusoe). Relation of hope & fear. CV[37] Education A true education of the spirit for the first time in the history of Western civilization is not to be found without great difficulty. Because we no longer have a true civilization. Gadgets: science: specialization: eclecticism. Music; dancing. What shall we aim at? Cp. The eclectic life as against the unified life. 1) Variety of information; so-called ‘knowledge of the world we live in.’ 2) Travel – seeing how others live.82
[81] Oakeshott’s note: ‘R.R. Marett, Faith, Hope and Charity in Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 78.’ [82] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, vi.54, 79–81.’
3) Understanding other people. 4) Cosmopolitanism. 5) Insularity; parochialism.83 Cp. with this – Custom and plan; nature & art; growth & construction. CV[37] Education as the preparation of the mind for the enjoyment of the fruits of one’s civilization. Civilization a partnership of the living & the dead: education making real this partnership to the individual. CV[37] The best environment for the young child: country, gardens, orchards, meadows, forests, snow in winter, the snow of the countryside, rock, river, sea, peasants, hills, flowers, trees. The town, its pavements, over-stimulate children. Change is too rapid; the impermanence of everything is founded upon no permanent ground. As proof: an intelligent countryman can quickly grasp the life of a town, its complexity; no townsman can ever fill the gap caused by the failure to know the country & grow up in it. The life of cities may be the true life of a civilized man (though that is doubtful), but it is not the best education for civilized children. Who knows only towns does not know the real secret of the life of cities.
[83] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, vi.78–9.’
CV[37] ‘The secret of happiness is curiosity.’84 This is the great lie of the modern world. Curiosity to Aristotle was a defect, to Aquinas a sin & Burton recognizes it as a cause of madness. Curiosity = a mind filled with bric à brac = this is not the enjoyment & appreciation of the fruits of our civilization, of human experience. A prying mind. CV[37] Mathematics; Not desirable beyond the elements of arithmetic, algebra, & geometry. It affords no, or a harmful, training of the intelligence. There are no nuances & la verité reste dans les nuances. Chemistry: its entertainment value. Physiology & biology? Enough should be acquired of these sciences to save a man from being at the mercy of bogus science. Astronomy: – rather the appreciation of the stars as they have become part of human experience. Mythology. CV[37] Education should safeguard the world against the crafty egoists who will always dominate it by making them value craftiness less highly and modifying their natural egoism. CV[37] Give a serenity to life to counterbalance the febrile mercantile activity that surrounds us.
[84] Oakeshott’s note: ‘N. Douglas, South Wind.’
CV[37] Don’t let us bog ourselves talking about education in general – what we should talk about is education now. And the most obvious thing to say is that the whole force & pressure of the contemporary western world is against education. It is a world of violent stimuli – film, radio, newspapers, magazines – & a mind early adapted to these stimuli will be a mind so much less capable of suffering that slow permeation of the personality that is characteristic of great literature. The world once, undesignedly, offered no positive opposition to this: the walk to school, the relatively slow moving days, long days without movement, time for enjoyment, time for recollection, time for doing nothing. Indeed, such a world is a frame of friendliness to the requirements of cultivation. Time for loneliness. Now the frame is unfriendly and we have to tear our opportunities ‘through the iron gates of life’85 – a life that has been created, not the ‘mortality’ which, in its character of a mean (neither short not long) itself gives the appropriate wider frame – appropriate because our education must conform to that frame. CV[37] Education and a rite of initiation; why are those rites so severe? The necessity of remembering, the importance of preservation of tradition where tradition is only oral. How many lost arts have savages had to deplore owing simply to the precariousness of the means of transmission at a stage in society when continuous participation in a ritual is the only way of keeping truth alive. And how many lost arts & values have we to deplore.
[85] Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress,’ ll. 41–4: ‘Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life.’
CV[37] The predicament of paternity Cp. Lord Chesterfield & his son. Desire that the new generation shall redress the balance of the old. Indeed, a failure to treat the child as a person; using him as a means to an end: – to exact successes that we have desired & missed. To insist on perfection.86 CV[37] There are two things about which we can have knowledge – the natural world & the civilized world. Knowledge of the second is the object of education. CV[38] Alas, in a mercantile world we must expect a mercantile education – just as we must take chemical warfare with the benefits of modern medicine – a civilization is a single piece, if we wish to change any part of it, that change will be reflected throughout – no change in any part without change in every part. CV[38] Variety of schools/education – why? No single psychologically correct system of education; the burden is always on the individual teacher. But he must know the civilization he is imparting. Dangers of a rational system of education: power, uniformity.
[86] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Connolly, The Forbidden Playground, p. 33.’ Possibly C. Connolly, The Condemned Playground. Essays: 1927–44 (London: Routledge, 1945).
CV[38] Books & the decline of 1) memory 2) power of extemporary composition. The human mind has never been so loaded with useless & superficial knowledge as it is to-day. Real erudition is called pedantry, and the values of learning have been turned upside down. CV[38] Education in the myths/legends of 1) the civilization 2) the country. This should be the ‘history’ of the young. The young mind should enter the world filled with myth & legend. CV[38] Culture87 The Culture-Philistine; the pseudo-culture. The governing principle is curiosity without judgment – taste never formed; style never achieved. What should we say of such people if their morals were like their culture? Knowledge about culture. The culture of the encyclopedia. Alexandrine culture. The Philistine is better than the culture-philistine. [87] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season; The Future of Our Educational Institutions; Twilight of the Idols; Schopenhauer as Educator.’ F. Nietzsche, Thoughts Out Of Season, tr. A.M. Ludovici and A. Collins, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London: Foulis Press, 1909); F. Nietzsche, On The Future Of Our Educational Institutions. Homer And Classical Philology, tr. J.M. Kennedy (Edinburgh and London: Foulis Press, 1909); F. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols; Or, How To Philosophize With The Hammer. The Antichrist. Notes to Zarathustra, and Eternal Recurrence, tr. A.M. Ludovici (Edinburgh and London: Foulis Press, 1911).
For Nietzsche the production of genius was the aim of culture. Cp. The business of the writer is to produce a masterpiece. Culture implies cultivation; its not to be acquired in a seed shop. CV[38] Education not accommodation to the culture of a civilization, nor the acceptance, but the understanding & appropriation of a living culture. We must possess what we have come to inherit (Goethe). What education has to do is to offer something coherent: what it tends to do now is to fit the learner only to accommodate himself to many cultures without fitting him to the appropriate one. Religion. We can overrate the importance of understanding the child – what is more important is to have something (a coherent culture) to give. It will always remain a mystery how knowledge & understanding of a cultural tradition is acquired; but we tend to pay a lot too much attention to the way we impart that knowledge – always endeavouring to tell the child only what we know he can understand – instead of leaving to him the problem of understanding & telling him what is true & relevant. All learning is trying to understand what we are not yet quite fitted to understand. With the adult it is a problem that solves itself: the great effort of modern education is to circumvent it, if possible, with the child. But it is not possible, and our lack of faith here only reflects our general lack of faith in learning. Montaigne – whatever we do it will be wrong. CV[38] The Economics of Education: how a system of education could have come about by private enterprise in the 19th century, if, by a system of family allowances, a demand could have been made for it. Instead, the state system came into being, with all its evils.
CV[39] Love The phenomenon of love, perhaps, more than anything else, shows the secondary place of justice and morality in human life. We live suspended in an unstable solution; only for immediate purposes of practical life a certain stability is introduced – called justice & morality. The rest is favour & affection. CV[39] The stirrings of love can be felt, like those of ambition, before we have an object. This true particularly of the young. The potentiality felt in advance of any choice of object. In love with love. What does this imply about the nature of love? CV[39] It would appear from Soloviev’s argument that to love without being loved in return is enough. Does being loved add anything to love? If so, what? Love not dependent upon being requited. But requited love has something. 1) Love, the supersession of egoism. 2) Being loved in return – the return of modified egoism. The self not fully achieved except in requited love.
CV[39] Love & Death Tristan a ‘fatal’ love. Passion is linked with death. Preference for what thwarts passion, hinders the happiness of love, parts lovers. Tristan & Iseult never miss an opportunity to be parted; creation of reasons for parting; preference for pains over pleasure. It is a romance about the parting of lovers in the name of passion in order that the love shall be intensified. What they love is love itself or being in love. The partings are dictated by the passion itself. The love of love is the love of death. The longing for what annihilates us. CV[39] ‘Happy love has no history – in European literature.’88 Assumes too readily that art represents what we want in life. Love & perfection: an immortal love – not a ‘poise in imperfection.’ CV[39] European culture has known two myths of love – Tristan & Don Juan – both are myths of excess. CV[39] Is not the contrast between courtly love & marriage only one instance of the necessary contrast between love & morality?
[88] Oakeshott’s note: ‘De Rougemont, Passion and Society, p. 63.’
CV[40] In pretty girls moral qualities are not so awfully relevant. CV[40] Virginity – loss of virginity – its significance: the loss of that original egoism which, in its way, was complete: the loss of one coherent personality in the attempt to find one more coherent. CV[40] Why is love the most violent of our emotions? 1) Is the violence in it really belonging not to love but to what so often it is connected with – sexual hunger? 2) Love is a birth & a death: it is revolutionary, but not in essence violent. CV[40] Love & morality Love never demands perfection: it is false to say we love only the ideal in those whom we love, or love them in spite of their recognized imperfections. Love is to be pleased by something other than perfection. Indeed, two may be more surely bound by their failings than by their virtues. CV[40] Parents who do not observe a strict impartiality towards all their children, are generally inflicted with an impartiality for the least deserving.
CV[40] When hunger is the root of love, love becomes the tension of two egoisms, or merely the expression of one; because properly speaking love begins where egoism ends. CV[41] Power It is as difficult to wield power and not come to make the exercise of power an end as it is to follow a profitable occupation and not make profit one’s aim. CV[41] Power as the crudest denial of death. CV[41] A taste of political power, supreme political power, is like hashish, giving a wild, unnatural energy in its further pursuit, fatal to peace of mind, destructive of personality – & in the end they drop dead, worn out by this drugged activity. It is the most excessive, insatiable thing upon earth. CV[41] Power makes men stupid. It corrupts because it intoxicates. CV[41] Of all our appetites the love of power is the most unsociable, for it requires the silent submission of those with whom we associate.
CV[43] Myth The necessity of myth. Science cannot substitute for it, & in so far as it destroys myth it destroys a human necessity. Epicurus. The necessity of a myth about the beginning of the world & the cause of what belongs to the character of human life. This different from the ‘scientific’ explanation, which cannot take its place. Myth & poetry. The myth of original sin – scientific explanation (e.g. Freud) does not take its place. The expression of a civilization or of an ideal in a human character is a myth – without that myth the civilization is inarticulate. The corn goddess or the tractor? The womb or the bulldozer?89 CV[43] The Tower of Babel: how the gods prevent a premature ascent into heaven. CV[43] Myth is rooted in the collective subconscious. CV[43] Myth and story; myth belongs to the esoteric tradition; it holds a more concentrated meaning than story, and a more universal meaning – it is connected with rite, it is the oral part of the rite. [89] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Palinurus, p. 75.’ Possibly C. Connolly [‘Palinurus’], The Unquiet Grave A Word Cycle By Palinurus (London: Horizon, 1944); see A Conversation, n. 9, above.
But more, it contains also the representation of the gesticulating part of the rite; dance & movement. CV[43] Myth not typically aetiological or explanatory in its aim. Does not answer the question why myth gives faith, is fidejussive; not to satisfy curiosity but to confirm faith. No aesthetic.90 CV[45] The Life of Pleasure Analysis of pleasure; not as a moral end but as a practical way. The true life of pleasure is the life of the instant: the day-flies life. The power of pleasure.91 Ennui of pleasure – Pascal.92 Cp. Montaigne’s ‘Life of voluptuousness’: the middle between pleasure & ambition.93 War & the life of pleasure as opposites: the extremes. War = eternity, Pleasure = the point instant. Rational human life lies between. The extremes must always be passing over into each other – the tedium of war leads to ‘pleasure’; the ennui of pleasure leads to ‘war.’
[90] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See B. Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology (London: Kegan Paul, 1926).’ [91] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Palinurus, pp. 4, 6.’ [92] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Palinurus, p. 16.’ [93] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Palinurus, p. 86.’
CV[45] Christianity assumed a short life, but since the end was the ‘good time,’ it did not need to adopt a philosophy of the moment. The interimsethik avoided the problem of mortality, that is why the fact of mortality – in spite of its pressure – is not in the front of Christian teachings. Christianity sidestepped the main issue by its doctrine of the new world; Western civilization has nevertheless had this problem at the back of its mind ever since the secondcoming failed to take place. Life neither short nor long. CV[45] The direct opposite of the life of politics. CV[45] A life littered with cards & stained with drink. CV[45] Paganism 1) Cyrenaicsm: the active ‘pagan’ life, the life without moderation or limit. Cp. Rochester. Frantic. 2) Chesterfield: mellow, without frenzy or excess.94 CV[45] The life of pleasure seems the good life because it has the form of the good life – i.e. it is a life desired for its own sake. And this is [94] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. R. Murray, The Good Pagan’s Failure. A Defence of Christianity (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1939).’
the secret of its charm and its truth.95 Amusement is desired for its own sake – but it is not itself desirable for its own sake. CV[47] Sin. Guilt and Redemption Statement of the problem of mortality in terms of sin, guilt & redemption. The necessity of feeling that salvation is possible, that there is an escape from guilt. Luther. The confession & its purpose of absolution: in tune with mortality. Salvation – not in the future & in another world, but here & now: Christianity offers, in its theology, a rationale of present salvation.96 CV[48] Epicureanism Epicureanism – the philosophy of waning powers: pleasure the absence of pain, happiness to be found in practising moderation. Passionless. Favouring mild eccentricities & holding within it a fear of life. – How can we answer this – the accusation that our doctrine of the mean, our philosophy of unsuccess and nonambition, our creed of non-competition, our gospel of acceptance, is, after all, nothing but the expression of a temperament, & the expression of spent passion and exhausted vitality? Because the case against this doctrine is the more than plausible case that whether or not it conforms to the grand ‘conditions of [95] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X, ad init.’ [96] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Palinurus, p. 5.’
human life,’ it certainly is out of tune with the crude vitality of human character: the plausible case that it is the philosophy of the half-man. Somehow this crude vitality must be shown to be comprehended, not merely rejected – or if rejected, then rejected because it belongs not to ‘human character’ but to a restricted, non-adult human character which because it is there to be grown out of in fact rejects itself when it comes to know itself. CV[51] The Mean Mortality a doctrine of the Mean. Mortal life neither too long nor short. The mean between 1) The unexamined life (Plato) & 2) The psycho-analysed life. To think clearly & soberly about oneself – that is enough to destroy hypocrisy & self-deception, without destroying joy & confidence. Let your mind alone. Tradition & the new: a middle way. Civilization a partnership between the living & the dead – Burke. CV[51] Avoidance of importunity or excess. But what is the truth in ‘the way of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ (Blake). Is not excess involved in all greatness? The Chinese concealment of feeing and avoidance of excessive expression. Understatement. It is their social sense; it belongs to a truly social life. Is not a certain frigidity – a certain foreignness to enthusiasm – involved in the mean? And if so, can it be the whole truth?
We can more easily understand the pleasures of others than their excesses. CV[51] The value of a limit: e.g. why horse racing is more interesting than motor racing because you can’t go away & make a horse that can do double the speed of any known horse. CV[51] Extremes abnormal – e.g. impulse to kill animals, excessive tenderness to animals. CV[51] Behaviour determined by others – A balance sought. The excesses of the French Revolution killed in some all enthusiasm for liberty. To be the one sober man in the party, not because of a love of sobriety but because everyone else is drunk. To live on understatement because one’s companion lives on superlatives. CV[51] ‘The Mean’ a morality for the civilized only – not the savage and primitive. Not because the civilized lack energy (cp. Epicureanism q.v.) but because he can be more discriminating. Savage conditions require savage virtues – & these are virtues of excess: bravado rather than courage – because everything is in front. Civilized man has something to lose; the savage has something to win. Savage society lives on positive, aggressive virtue: to tackle fire, to go to sea on a log, to ride the wild horse, to fly the Atlantic –
imagination & courage required – nerve rather than patience. The greatest hero of all time was Prometheus – who stole the fire – fire which had till then terrorized the world – to touch was agony, to embrace death.97 A sort of justified megalomania required in savage society. CV[53] Women In face of a man’s desire a girl is excusable if she thinks herself priceless. CV[53] Women are pleased with small things – this is right, because it is in small things that the deepest loyalty, the loyalty of the passing moment, is expressed. CV[53] It is a principle of society established in the earliest history of the world, on the best authority, that woman should rule man, & the Devil rule her. CV[55] Marriage Marriage— 1) The ceremony. 2) The social institution in general. [97] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Marrett, Faith, Hope and Charity, pp. 23–4.’
3) The human relation. The ordinary marital quarrel – a difference about nothing: a thing of nerves. An idle sense of wrong. Words of perfidious compassion. CV[55] Of all the forms offered us by life it is the one demanding a couple to realize it fully, which is the most imperative. Pairing off is the fate of mankind. And if two beings, thrown together, mutually attracted, resist the necessity, fail in understanding & voluntarily stop short of – the embrace, in the noblest meaning of the word, then they are committing a sin against life, the call of which is simple. Perhaps sacred. And the punishment of it is an invasion of complexity, a tormenting, forcibly tortuous involution of feelings, the deepest form of suffering from which indeed something significant may come at last. CV[55] The late 17th century & early 18th century is the high point in European civilization in the history of marriage. Just as the late 12th century & the 20th century are low points. Marriage a basic institution: stability. Formality. Nothing to do with love. Diplomacy of ‘family’ alliances. Rationality. Manners exist on their own, severed from religious beliefs & supported by religious ceremonies. Worth decided a union; worth alone rendered agreeable a prospective partner. Scrupulous weighing of pros and cons. CV[55] The modern honeymoon – wish to escape from habitual social environment: an insistence on the private nature of married life.
Contrast earlier when ‘the semi-publicity of the nuptial bed’ emphasized the social character. CV[57] Personality Our experience never gets into our blood & bones. It always remains outside of us. That is why we look with wonder at the past. It is the cause of our surprise – when mere ignorance & inexperience is not the cause. CV[57] Personality is a partnership of the present & the past & the future – of what we have seen, see and desire to see. Always ideal, never fully realized. CV[57] The collapse of personality – taking place when society collapses. The mechanism. What gives some personalities the power to resist collapse? CV[57] Somehow personality must be freed from the burden of history. For personality is something of value in itself and the only source of values. If it is tied to history then, for example, those who lived during the long warm spell beginning in the 5th century AD had the opportunity of a perfectibility denied to others; & this must not be. Cp. wealth and poverty. It can be freed only by the recognition of mortality – i.e. independence of personality of particular circumstances and its utter dependence on actual circumstances. Not better or worse because of greater or less achievement. Its
achievement, the only one that counts, is itself. What favourable circumstances allow is merely external achievement. This is not the old crux, is virtue independent of external circumstances. CV[57] A mercantile age has interpreted the parable of the talents in a mercantile manner – but it is significant morally, in the world of values. CV[57] Personal unity & identity. Relative. But no personality without some degree of coherence and continuous conscious existence (memory?). Coherence as the fulfilment of personality. CV[59] Spirit. Courage and Fear. Will All fear is bad & should be overcome – by 1) courage 2) rational reflection. Combatting fear by 1) increasing security 2) cultivating courage. Is courage really physiological? Intrepidity/Nerve: the aristocratic quality of nerve is a remedy against fear – at least a practical & temporary remedy. Women. It may even overcome fear of death. Courage can never be ‘democratized’.98 CV[59] Fear is its own father & a most prolific self-propagator. [98] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. B. Russell, What I Believe, p. 81.’
CV[59] Courage not reducible to Reason; an answer to situations to which Reason has no compelling answer. Cp. Plato. CV[59] All fears have one parentage – fear of death.99 CV[59] The relation of courage & rationalism e.g. in Voltaire rationalism was an expression of courage rather than intellect: he is a man of nerve rather than sensibility.100 CV[59] Christian moralists regarded fortitude as the corrective of accidie. Courage one of the ‘natural’/‘cardinal’ virtues, with wisdom, justice & temperance. CV[60] Man & Society See, Ideal Character. Politics. Democracy. Planning. Personality. [99] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Marrett, Faith Hope & Charity in Primitive Religion, p. 41.’ [100] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Connolly, Forbidden Playground, p. 82’: see A Conversation, n. 86, above.
The ideal society & the ideal character correlations. Relation of man & his society: personality. A man’s society is his civilization. CV[60] A community rooted in the land, whatever privileged classes it may have, whatever hierarchy or hereditary positions, is a society – the relations between the aristocracy & the peasant are more successful & more social than those yet achieved between the industrialist & his employee. We are still looking for an emotional substitute for feudalism. CV[60] Conversation as the form of social relationship. CV[60] Personalism. A transformed individualism. Individual = ego. Cp. Aquinas; individuality is rooted in matter. Personality = interiority to oneself. I.e. a redeemed individuality. Redemption is by love – but redemption does not mean extinction. Personality tends towards communion. Society a society of persons. The state must recognize the ‘rights’ not of individuals but of persons, and maintain a condition in which the rights of persons can be exercised & enjoyed. The person, as such, is a whole. The human person is not a pure person; corrupted by individuality, & (therefore) so far, not a whole.
CV[62] The Non-Political End in Politics Plato – Republic. Aristotle – the Contemplative life. Doctrine of ‘rest’: Leisure. Augustine – the supernatural end of man & the doctrine of contemplation. Aquinas. Spinoza. The Freedom of the Intellect. Hobbes. ‘The ideal of volition is rather the experience of perfect harmony between ourselves and our environment which excludes alike action and choice.’101 Yes; and besides those who can create, Oh for a Voltaire who with his rich, aggressive gaiety will destroy the superstition of politics. CV[64] The effort of the historical imagination to go beyond those hypothetically penetrating judgments of persons & events, which show only what they might be, to something that can maintain itself as what they were. The criterion of this: die Prüfstein ist die Zeit. To know the person in the context, & the context in the person. & to know them as they are. The application of dialectic to history.102
[101] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918), p. 259.’ [102] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Santayana, Persons & Places, p. 253.’
CV[A] This nonsense about seeing the world. The ‘world’ is a very dull place and there is not much to be learned from it. I was in the world for a short time & I was glad to get out of it again, back to my village: I didn’t care for the world.103 CV[A] African tribe: Although God is good & wishes good for everybody, unfortunately he has a half-witted brother who keeps on obtruding himself & doesn’t give God a chance. CV[B] Theme: we live now in a similar position to Athens in the 3rd & 2nd centuries B.C.104 What shall be our reaction – Stoic or Epicurean – or have the intervening centuries provided us with some third attitude which will better fit the times? The vulgar crowd: how escape.105 CV[C] 1. Politicians are scoundrels.106 2. No society is new. 3. Omniscience impossible. Cp. remarks made about Peace in 1914. Laski. Foresight limited. Experience limited. [103] Inserted inside front cover, numbered [1a]. [104] Inserted inside front cover, numbered [1b]. [105] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Grant, Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, vol. I, Essay IV.’ [106] Inserted at CV[09].
4. Imperfection is not evanescent. 5. Men are not certainly either good or bad. 6. Men are often self-interested & always credulous. 7. Power corrupts. 8. Speed: & limited time. 9. There are men who desire power. 10. Men erratic. (therefore) government by law is more wise than man, it is product of man – but because it is more disinterested than its administrators. CV[D] ‘Recreation, and not improvement, is the proper object of conversation.’107 That is, conversation, as such, is an end in itself. Speech & the exchange of ideas takes place for all kinds of purposes; but conversation exists when they are an end in themselves. Information not the object, but sometimes part of the irrelevance of conversation.108 Bad talkers – tedious, pertinacious, noisy, quarrelsome, contentious. The meaningless repetition of catchwords & phrases – like a kind of physical contortions. The inability to progress
[107] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J.P. Mahaffy, The Principles of the Art of Conversation (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1887), p. 106.’ [108] Inserted inside front cover, numbered [1d].
in thought – to move on. Tact to know when a topic has been sufficiently discussed – cp. the essay; conversation not exhaustive. Conversation – its connection with Western civilization. Or is it connected with any cultivated civilization? E.g. China; Persia & Arabia. The expression of a social habit, or even instinct. CV[D] Tone of voice – a soft & sweet tone, like personal beauty, disarms prejudice and disposes the mind in favour of the speaker. Voice as the voice of temperament. The secret power of personal beauty – securing sympathy. CV[D] Sympathy – the common agreement not to talk at cross-purposes. Tact, sympathy in conscious operation to remedy a possible breach. The moment the company has grasped his meaning, the good talker passes on to something else, without regard to the form of his sentence. No emphasis on the particular value of any argument; argument taking what effect it can in the company. Equality the ground of conversation – an established or natural equality. CV[D] The enhanced stimulus of conversation with a stranger – two things taking place, exploring a character & discussing a topic, the one subordinate to the other? & if so which is which? But even with a stranger, there must be a common ground.
CV[D] Politics is a suitable subject of conversation – indeed perhaps that is all it is suitable for. CV[D] Neither too many nor too few – tête à tête not conversation. The Mean – between the Muses & the Graces. Length of time on one topic. Number. Modesty & confidence. Sympathy and self. CV[E] In conversation freedom & intelligence are both at a premium – cp. Acton: How to have reason & freedom at once.109 CV[F] The oblique character of the conclusions of conversation – not what the argument ends with; but the effect it has.110 CV[F] The quality of ideas. Function of their context in the contents of a mind – not always a system, but nonetheless, a whole. Conversation as discourse round the quality of ideas.
[109] Inserted inside front cover, numbered [1e]. [110] Inserted inside front cover, numbered [1f].
CV[G] If it is true that the major achievements of mankind have not been the offspring of war or even of force; it is not true that so predominating a part of man’s time & energy has been spent in peaceful pursuits? War always associated with the expansion of a civilization – Hellenic, Roman, Islamic, West-European. War & the triumph of a society, a point of view.111 The hold of war on the imagination – & what gets as far as the common imagination of a civilization is thereby indicated to be pretty deep. Even wars of conquest. Why this holds – of Alexander the Great, of Roland & Charlemagne, of the Trojan wars, of Cortés & Pizarro. Tolstoy’s War & Peace. War belongs to evil – not in the sense that all wars are always evil, but in the sense that one of the taproots of war is the evil that lies in man. War and a supposed fighting instinct. No real comparison. 1) War a conflict between organized communities. 2) War does not necessarily imply ‘fighting.’ Darwinian struggle not a war – does not follow that there must be a struggle between peoples. A competition, not involving fighting, & certainly not the cooperative conflict of peoples. Belief in the inevitability of war a cause of war. War a conflict between organized communities, not a conflict between individuals. It is one type of conflict. Modern war different: merely a quantitative & technical difference? “Total.” Previous totality of war has only been for one side – the totality of total destruction. CV[G] The psychological roots of European war in the belief in the fruitfulness of suffering – allied to the belief in passionate love. War and eroticism. [111] Inserted at CV[20], numbered [20b].
The common language of love & war from the 12th century to to-day. The language of love changes with the language of war;112 and the character of love (making love) & war (making war) change together. ‘All’s fair in love & war.’ CV[G] It is not the fighting that makes war the enemy of liberty, but the organization – the perversion of a society. That is why modern war is so much more dangerous. It is not the devastation cp. Thirty Years War – but the organization. Liberty in Greece – always modified by war. CV[G] The false urgency that war gives to post-war politics. CV[H] Christianity did not take account of mortality: human life to be short. (therefore) while combating ‘eat drink & be merry,’ the true intermediary state of life – neither long nor short – is not appreciated.113 Interimsethik.
[112] Oakeshott’s note: ‘De Rougemont, Passion & Society, p. 248 sq.’ [113] Inserted at CV[29], numbered [29a].
Nelson (c.1947)1 NE[04] ‘What would Nelson have done’ (Cp. what would Wolfe have done?) No man can be a proper model for another man; the natural egoism of human character steps in to prevent it. Model for an occasion. Just as we can never really bring ourselves to wish that we were anyone else on earth than ourselves (though we may often wish we enjoyed some detail of the character or circumstances of another), so no man can ever be the model for another. NE[06] Ambition. Nelson’s not unlimited; not for power after power. Indeed, all this talk of exterior success is really only an expression for interior success. Not for tangible ends – wealth, power, position. But honour, reputation, fame. Cincinnatus. NE[07] Of few men do we know anything like what we know of Nelson. Every detail. Letters. Words. Self-analysis; self-consciousness which comes into writing.
[1] LSE 3/10. Hard cover, green cotton overlay with brown leather spine and corners, 17 cm × 11 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–11. Autograph, ink and pencil. No title page, no date. The folder also includes notes on loose sheets, given alphabetic references here.
NE[07] Action for no ulterior motive – Honour, glory, fame. Not so uncommon as is sometimes supposed; exploration, mountaineering, etc. The poetry of action. Ideas of ‘service,’ the plausible ethics of productivity absent. Productivity – the protection of England with Nelson – a byproduct of something intensely personal. Sponzia. ‘Purposeless’ we say, meaning not without purpose, but without a tangible ulterior purpose. The morality that is preached to us now is the death of this. Cp. Aristotle – all activity is for leisure. Cp. academic world – 1) to produce something, to make a contribution. 2) to win fame & glory. NE[08–09] Naval Tactics Nelson inherited principles which were admirably suited to the prevailing conditions. There are no absolutely superior tactics; success is the only criterion. The tactics which had been developed by Rodney & Howe could be successful only if those who practised them commanded superior vessels & more skilful seamen. They were inherently daring tactics; the risk in each engagement was considerable. What Nelson added – a touch. 1) By temperament suited to a daring tactic. But such a daring tactic depended upon training and skill in manoeuvre, & Nelson knew it. 2) Determination. The chase. Annihilation the aim.
But how short a time was spent in battle. The landing engagement. NE[A] We can understand or can think we understand the past only by virtue of a tradition which joins us to the past. Any past from which we have broken away completely becomes incomprehensible to us. Cp. Greek philosophy. Contrast Chinese philosophy. NE[B] Dilthey on biography.2 The experience of being able to discern character. Lessing. Novalis. Confidence in reliability of insight: no infallible method proposed. Obscures scepticism: never considers the validity of these insights – they might be complete misconceptions. Convincingness of biography – character study. NE[C] The interpretation (investigation) of human character in history. 1. History 2. Biography. 3. Investigation/Interpretation of character.
[2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lucas, p. 49.’ Not traced.
(i) The enterprise: to detect the historical individual & disclose his historical individuality. Elaborate a little. Cp. to history & biography: ‘a mental portrait.’ Travel over the mind. Mind, character. (ii) How this enterprise is carried out usually; inference from action. Historian’s character sketches; their terms. This a common enterprise; every historian attempts it. But not all successfully. The results of this (a) too general; not individual. Fails to be properly historical. Why? (b) hit & miss – unscientific. Depends upon the insight of the particular historian. (iii) How improved? 1) Science of character. 2) Typology of character. (iv) Examination of presuppositions. What do we mean by character? Expression in action. No. (v) Method of investigation of character in history. The purpose, & the criterion of success. NE[D] We are told that a man is an ‘individualist’ – a type of human character; but what we want to know is, what sort of an individualist? And when we look closer, the historian has merely translated an anecdote into an abstraction: no attempt has been made to interpret character.
NE[D] What so often starts from the pages of history is not an individual at all, but a type. And often it is not even an historical type, but a universal type. And even where it is an historical type, it is anachronistic, a 20th century type projected into the 16th century. NE[D] La Bruyère has some sense of historical type, but none of historical individual. NE[D] ‘To travel over a man’s mind’ – a phrase of the Druid. NE[E] Character & temperament. The necessity of distinguishing character & temperament.3 NE[F] Biography & History 1. Belief that History & biography are not the same thing. 2. When we know little history it degenerates into biography – e.g. Prussia & Russia. Text books. 3. The historian feels this to be defective – Why? [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘W.T. Jones, Masters of Political Thought. Vol. 2. Machiavelli to Bentham (London: Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1942), p. 25.’
4. The nature of history. 5. (therefore) biography not history, not because true history is impersonal – e.g. Marx, e.g. Hegel. Ideas. 6. Why then?4 NE[G] Psychology 1) Positivisitic – i.e., in terms of natural sciences. E.g. Chemistry – elements etc. 2) Types. Descriptive ‘real’ psychology (Dilthey). 3) Historical, i.e. the historical person – the person in the world – the person as a whole. Dilthey’s Hermeneutic. Not psychological, but historical. NE[H] Biography. The study of a person. The inner connections of the personality, which may be expected (& must be allowed) to cut across logical distinctions— E.g. idea & emotion; science & religion; total interaction. And abstractions of all sorts – virtue & vice. A personality is, philosophically (? logically) a vast confusion. Biography is the enterprise of exhibiting the nature of this confusion. The whole is in every part. Cp. relation to history. [4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Collingwood, p. 304.’ Possibly R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946).
NE[I] Style is a magic wand that turns everything it touches to gold. NE[J] In a writer (e.g. Goethe) we often have a record of change in character; but because we have no written record in the case of others, does not mean that such change did not take place. Cp. Nelson. Introvert & extrovert. NE[K] Idea that we must find something that cannot be doubted on which to build our historical investigation of character – false – cp. Dilthey’s psychology. It does not invalidate a method if it grow with its use. NE[L] The ideological courage which inspires men to risk death for a great cause – and the nerve of the aristocrat; death in the hunting field. NE[M] Nothing new to be said about Nelson. The vocab of eulogy has been exhausted; – Nelson & Shakespeare. Even a bad book on Nelson… But I think there is something new to be said of him. The psychologists, thank God, have so far let him rest in peace. Interest in human character – how provoked. Temperament & character: how defined. The nature of character – cp. Forecasting actions. Nelson; the model.
The inadequacy of any human character to be a model; nevertheless something to be learned from the study of human character. What? Nelson’s character: unreflective, unphilosophical, simple & direct. Seems to offer little opportunity for analysis. But this is not so. True his was a remarkably unphilosophical character; but not unselfconscious. Indeed, the first thing to be noted is the complication of a highly self-conscious character with an unreflective character. Not the unexamined life; & not the life frittered away in self-examination. A mean between extremes, & an unusual mean. NE[N] Quo Fas et Gloria ducunt. 1) It can be assumed that all English audiences know the facts of Nelson’s career. This in itself remarkable; true of no other Englishman. 2) One supposes that before 1800 boys had heroes, but one wonders who those heroes were before Nelson caught up into himself about 99% of hero worship. 3) His place in public affection in 1804 – before Trafalgar. At his burial. Half god. The Norfolk Hero. Lord Nelson. Never been superseded in this character. 4) My own hero-worship. ‘The Victory.’ St. Paul’s. Nelson’s Father.
5) Our knowledge of Nelson. Its completeness. Letters; every one of them expressing naively his personality. Cp. Letters of women. 6) Nothing new to be said about Nelson. And yet scarcely a year passes without somebody writing a new book on him: 1947 – two.5 7) What I have undertaken to do is to say something about his character: this, in spite of all that has been written is still relatively unexplored. 8) The problem of investigating an historical character, opened up, – but laid aside. The character sketches of historians – their inadequacy. Cp. i) Clarendon,6 ii) Gibbon. 9) The true aim of an investigation of character i) an individual ii) an historical indvidual. 10) (a) Temperament (b) Character
}
the nature of these
11) Physiognomy: ‘the pouting lower lip of the spoilt school boy.’ Cp. The Italian painter’s remark after the battle of the Nile. 12) Courage; Nerve; Self-confidence. [5] Possibly C. Oman, Nelson (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947), and C.J. Britton, New Chronicles of the Life of Lord Nelson (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1947). [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Stroud.’ Possibly William Strode (c.1599– 1645), anti-royalist politician, described in E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, 8 vols. (1826) at ii.26 as ‘one of those ephori who most avowed curbing and suppressing of majesty.’
13) Glory; Honour; Ambition. 14) Charm. NE[O] Nelson the hero – to his own generation he was a saviour, halfdivine, to ours he is still a hero, but of a different sort. What he is to us is still something to swell the heart & catch the breath. No debunking Nelson. Blind devotees – not blind, but still devoted. NE[P] Nerve In a sea fight 150 years ago it was often all or nothing, success or failure – certainly this was so with Nelson’s tactics. The indecisive had no charm for him, & he ruled it out before he began. Risks.7 Religious resignation is an expression of nerve, rather than vice versa. By itself, the idea could never give nerve. Nerve is the habit of resignation.8
[7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Mahan, p. 107.’ Possibly A.T. Mahan, The Life of Nelson The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain (London: Sampson Low, 1897). [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Mahan, p. 306.’
Notebook 14 (February 1955)1 14[01] Montaigne ‘Those innumerable differences, mental & physical, of which men had always been aware, on which they had so largely fed their vanity, were ultimate.’2
[1] LSE 2/1/14. Soft cover, brown canvas overlay, 18 cm × 12 cm, blank. Recto folios numbered 1–68 (continues for three more unnumbered folios). Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘Notes XIV. / Amour, folie aimable; ambition, sottise sérieuse. / Chamfort l. 6. / Je hais la grandeur qui m’a fait fuir ce que j’amais, ou ce que j’aurois aimé. / Montaigne.’ Dated: ‘Feb 1955.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 5, G. Santayana, Little Essays Drawn From The Writings Of George Santayana, ed. L.P. Smith (London and New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons); 23, notes on George Savile, first Marquess of Halifax (1633–95), possibly from The Complete Works Of George Savile First Marquess Of Halifax, ed. W. Raleigh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912); 31–2, Joseph Conrad, An Outcast Of The Islands (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896); 35, Pádraic H. Pearse, ‘The Wayfarer’, in Collected Works of Pádraic H. Pearse (Dublin: Phoenix, 1917), 341; 37, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler; 41, C.J. Lever, Arthur O’Leary: His Wanderings and Ponderings In Many Lands, 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1844). [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pater, Gaston De Latour, p. 91.’ Fo. 1 contains notes on W. Pater, Gaston De Latour An Unfinished Romance, ed. C.L. Shadwell (London: Macmillan and Co., 1896).
The practical truth in the philosophical error of scepticism – diversities that are ultimate, because we do not & cannot know. Opinion master of the realm of the practical, in the end.3 The practical self: practical reason. Balance, equilibrium, in place of certainty. 14[02] The need of the time (expressed, but ill expressed in Fascism) – the creation of a non-economic society striving for the freedom & equality of the individual (cp. the society of the late middle ages, & its survival in rural England & elsewhere – the organic society of the village.)4 14[08] ‘D’obscures nécessités nous gouvernent à toute heure, depuis avant notre naissance jusqu’après notre mort.’5 The ambitious regard this as slavery; but they live in the illusion that they control their destiny. Ambition is the belief that the transformation of the world is a worthy end in itself. 14[08–09] Pascal – ‘Il ne faut pas avoir l’âme fort élevée pour comprendre qu’il n’y a point ici de satisfaction véritable et solide; que tous nos [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pater, Gaston De Latour, pp. 92–3 q.v.’ [4] Fo. 2 contains notes on P. Drucker, The End of Economic Man A Study Of The New Totalitarianism (London: William Heinemann, 1939). [5] Oakeshottt’s note: ‘Brewster, L’ame païenne, p. 20.’ Fos. 8–11 contains notes on H.B. Brewster, L’ame païenne (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1902).
plaisirs ne sont que vanité; que nos maux sont infinis; et qu’enfin la mort qui nous menace à chaque instant, doit nous mettre dans peu d’années…infailliblement dans l’horrible nécessité d’être eternellement ou anéantis ou malhereux. Il n’y a rien de plus réel que cela, ni de plus terrible.’ This is all taken as evil; it is not simply admitted as the condition of human life. It is true that there is something in human nature that revolts against it; but nevertheless it is not in itself evil, but something to be moralized. The diagnosis is correct, but the prognosis is false. What is required is ‘insouciance.’ Death is not a spectre haunting us; it is the prime condition of human life. 14[10] ‘De tous les hommes à programme, le plus surprenant est l’avocat de l’avenir.’6 L’avocats de l’avenir are better than those who are concerned solely with ultimate ends: they stand between the sensualist and the perfectionist; they look further than the one and less far than the other. In human life we must look neither too close nor too far; for human life is neither short nor for ever. 14[11] Society – Living and Planned. Revolution. The necessity of the organic view. Massingham. Men of Earth.7 Pickthorn. Prejudices or principles. [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Brewster, L’ame païenne, p. 147.’ [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘H.J. Massingham, Men of Earth (London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1943), pp. 6–9, 163–6, Ch. V.’
Burke. Halifax. 14[12] Mortality ‘Man has a prejudice against himself: anything which is a product of his mind*8 seems to him to be unreal or comparatively insignificant. We are satisfied only when we fancy ourselves surrounded by objects and laws independent of our nature.’9 This is what makes democracy difficult. Not only, or not so much, the stupidity of the mass, but their superstition. 14[12] To love the earth & hate the world. There is no earth that is not the world – experience. 14[14] Comradeship – ‘When men are in the same boat together, when a common anxiety, occupation or spirit unites them, they feel their human kinship in an intensified form without any greater personal affinity subsisting between them.’10 Circumstance, & not animal contagion, makes comrades. [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘* imagination’ on the verso. [9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 3.’ G. Santayana, The Sense of Beauty Being The Outlines of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896). [10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, ibid., p. 147.’
Friendship – is impossible without animal contagion. It lasts when the circumstances which might create comradeship have disappeared. A friend is not primarily someone whom one trusts, it is someone who, by the power of affinity, charms, someone who engages the imagination. 14[17] Atheists are the creation of accident & circumstance. Their rebellion is against a religion alien to their nature: in another place or time, they would be believers & the interpreters of an orthodoxy. ‘Religions, like languages, are necessarily rivals. What religion a man has is an historical accident, quite as much as what language he speaks. In rare circumstances, where choice is possible, he may, with some difficulty, make an exchange.’11 Moreover, it is an illusion that one may easily change one’s religious nationality, or that the change is ever quite radical. Roman Catholicism is an abstraction, like any other religion – in each society it speaks a different language & has a different imaginative content.12 14[19] ‘Many a man dies too soon and some are born in the wrong age or station. Could these persons drink at the fountain of youth at least once more they might do themselves fuller justice…But how [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Santayana, Reason in Society, p. 121.’ [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, p. 33 sq.; Poetry & Religion; Reason in Religion, p. 99.’ G. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1900); G. Santayana, The Life of Reason Or The Phases Of Human Progress Reason in Religion (London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1905).
should a future life be constituted if it is to satisfy this demand, & how long need it last?’13 It must be my life, and it must be in this world, this world with the necessary connections of circumstance. ‘Were I transformed into a cherub or transported into a timeless ecstasy, it is hard to see in what sense I should continue to exist… it would not prolong my life or retrieve my disasters.’14 But does not the magic of immortality vanish when the immortal life is seen in this way? And is such a reduplication of earthly life & society possible? 14[20] ‘The glory of life exists in accepting the knowledge of natural death [which is peculiar to man] as an opportunity to live in the spirit.’ Nothing is eternal in its duration…the sort of immortality that belongs to us, is the ability to find joy in the flying moment, the ability to accept the limitations of mortality & to reserve ourselves from the foreign & disruptive influence of what does not belong to our nature.15
[13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Santayana, Reason in Religion, p. 243.’ [14] Santayana, Reason in Religion, p. 244. [15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Brewster, L’ame païenne, p. 172: “Mourir avant d’avoir réussi’ – ce ne sont pas les passionnés qui parlent ainsi, ce sont les infatués. Ils n’aiment pas la chasse, ils aiment le gibier.”’
14[21] The end of Faust – the Politics of Planning.16 14[22] Morality – not concerned with the attainment of happiness, but with the prevention of suffering. This is duty; when & if it is achieved duty gives place to freedom, & happiness. 14[22] ‘We cannot venerate anyone in whom appreciation is not divorced from desire.’17 The character of a god. Not as the result of disappointment, but in a man a rational detachment arising from the experience of many and deep affections. 14[24] Mortality A conversation that is sometimes a dialogue, sometimes even a monologue (cp. an essay read to the conversationists). A conversation in which friends are made, and like recognizes like as well as unlike, unlike. A conversation in which no one person is always right – i.e. is always intended to ‘win.’ Sometimes an internal dialogue (cp. Halifax) – indeed, an internal dialogue all the time. [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Santayana, Three Poets, pp. 181–5.’ [17] Santayana, Sense of Beauty, p. 242.
14[24] That sweet softening of the heart which, going along with a less firm purpose & less wilful ambition, is called decadence. No glory here, perhaps; but sweetness and light. Disenchantment; lowered vitality, perhaps; but a gentleness that could not exist in the ‘great’ ages of a civilization. This is the time when a man might free his slave because, for a moment, he saw into the heart of slavery & was not turned from gratifying a whim. Great ages, like great men, are apt to be hard; they are out of touch with mortality – they are bathed in an alluring light of immortality, confidence. 14[25] Some will die for a cause, some for a faith, or for a person – but those who die climbing a mountain or exploring a sea, represent the immortal mortality of human endeavour, they are the overplus, in whom life has become art. 14[25] Three religions:— 1) Of activity – Christianity, Shinto, Islam. 2) Of passivity – Buddhism, Taoism. 3) Of mortality – Confucianism, the religions of Greece, what humanism might & should be. 14[25] There is no substitute for youth.
14[26] Très séparatiste – without this, intimacy is impossible, for it is impossible to be equally intimate with all friends on all subjects. Indeed the character to whom intimacy is a pleasure will always be très séparatiste. ‘Le don terrible de la familiarité.’18 14[27] eph’ oson endechetai athanatizein.19 So far as possible to live as an immortal. Whatever one believes of another world and a personal survival. But how far will this lead us from finding a home in this world – what does one do, how does one behave, if one lives as an immortal, as one who has no part in death? Keeping a sense of the future – a sense that there is still something to come – a practical substitute for a belief in a future life after death. If we never lose this sense of the future until the day of death, we never experience death – & yet, after all, death does catch up. And in any case, with the smaller, recurrent deaths which happen to us every day, keeping a sense of the future – e.g. a new love – takes away the power to experience deeply what we go through. Problem of immortality is the problem of memory. Shall I remember? For unless I remember I do not survive. Lethe is fatal to a life in another world. [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘de Retz.’ Jean François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (1613–79), French churchman and memoirist, but the quotation has not been traced. [19] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk X ch. vii.
The condition of mortality – the irony of life. Achievement defeats itself in the moment of victory. The seeds of death are always there. There is no moment that can be made to stay fixed. 14[28] Government A sure test – all types of society & sorts of government are, in practice, less than perfect. The question to ask is – is not life more tolerable in a democracy which fails than in another sort of community – e.g. a despotism – which succeeds? Or rather, all types fail, the best is not that which gives the greatest or easiest prospect of succeeding (for that is largely illusion), but that which is most tolerable in failure. 14[28] The Extensive Mind The more we know of the world, the more we travel about, the more we make contrasts, so the more we divide & dissipate our minds among a hundred imperfectly realized images. This is the condition of the modern intelligence, and it is also the ideal encouraged by modern civilization – the man at home everywhere who is really never at home anywhere. The sharp, shallow, pseudosympathetic mind. Preferring many contacts to few intimacies; preferring quantity to quality, preferring fact to thought. The quiz mentality. The article rather than the book, the paragraph to the article, the headline to the paragraph. If we go out of ourselves, if we travel & make contacts, it must never be for its own sake, but in order to make deeper our intimacies – we go away to find home, we make acquaintances
to understand friends, we converse in order to enrich our conversation with ourselves. 14[29] Science and Living 1) We are the inhabitants of one of the meaner planets – microscopic parasites on the surface of an atom. Size: we are swallowed up in the vastness of the universe. Cp. Jeans. 2) Time: our world, & this universe is in its infancy. Its entire history is comprised within 10,000 years. And this planet may be habitable for at least 15 million years. The significance of the individual life is contracted to something negligible. Yet these facts have no more moral significance – i.e., they give no more guidance for living – than, for instance, the knowledge that our world is whirling through space at 60 miles a second. The individual, in fact, defies this universe, and lives untouched by this knowledge. All this matters nothing whatever to me if I am happy & in love, and less if I am unhappy and frustrated. These are facts without moral significance. They give no guide whatever to the determination of the importance of individual life, feeling, emotion. Emotion dwarfs the physical universe rather than the other way about. Cp. Pascal. And one death never explains another, one parting never consoles another. Pain, privation, bereavement. 14[29] The chief human malady is fear. Lucretius.
14[30] Politics are necessarily opportunist. The politician works under conditions that make this unavoidable. The necessary toleration of evil. What a politician does or can do for 40 million people must be second best. Using bad arguments in a good cause. The gross oversimplification necessary in politics. 14[30] Never ask the end. Never let the corruption of winter stand in the way of the enjoyment of spring. To everything its time, and exclude only that which is out of its place. 14[30] The litany as a microcosm of human life; a superb appreciation of its grandeurs & miseries. 14[30] The demand that fire should warm but not burn, water should bless, but not drown. Against mortality. 14[30] The worst thing about life is that the worst part comes last. How enchanting to work back from old age to youth. 14[32] The feeling for mortality that runs through Elizabethan poetry – it is the other side of that age of activity, not in contradiction to
the vitality of the age, but providing the scepticism which saved that vitality from an easy optimism. ‘Time’ – no man can escape. Life’s a play.20 14[33] ‘On what grand and luminous figure does contemporary humanity attempt to model itself?’21 Middle Ages – Contemplative Saint. Renaissance – Free Individual. 16th century – Rationalist. 17th century – Christian Stoic. Too great a simplification: We should ask on what ‘figures,’ for each age admits of several, disparate models, several alternative ideal characters. 14[33] Sub specie momenti is, for the artist, sub specie aeternitas: and no aeternitas that is not known as a moment. [20] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Stephen Hawes, ‘Epitaph of Grande Amour,’ Oxford Book Of Sixteenth Century Verse, p. 14; Richard Barnfield, “A Comparison of the Life of Man,” ibid. p. 728; Fulke Greville.’ Oxford Book Of Sixteenth Century Verse, ed. E.K. Chambers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932); Fulke Greville, first Baron Brooke (1554–1628), poet and politician. [21] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Aldous Huxley, Texts & Pretexts, p. 4.’ A. Huxley, Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932).
14[33] Just as man craves for infinity as an escape from the difficulty of living in time, so he supposes the gods to crave mortality as an escape from the tedium of infinity: man seeks the condition of divinity & god that of mortality.22 14[34] The poetry of transience: its differing moods – mournful, sad, resigned, exasperated, plaintive, rejecting, accepting, understanding. 14[34] The indifference & apathy of old age.23 14[34] Folly is infinite. 14[36] Ireland ‘There is no nation under the sun that doth love equal & indifferent justice better than the Irish; or will rest better satisfied with the execution thereof, although it be against themselves; so as they
[22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Christianity?’ immediately beneath this passage in a different ink. [23] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Maine de Biran, Journal intime: de l’année 1792 a l’année 1824, ed. A. de la Valette-Mobrun, 2 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1927–31).’
may have the protection and benefit of the law, when upon just cause, they do desire it.’24 The Irish passion for the truth; their intellectual curiosity & power: their intellectual tradition. But now ‘agin the government.’ The change is the product of several centuries of experience & suffering. An example of a real change in national character. 14[36] The scepticism of Montaigne ‘I always call reason, that appearance or show of discourse, which every man deviseth or forgeth in himself.’25 14[36] ‘It is only when our feelings are imaginary that we analyse them.’26 It is only when our feelings become images of contemplation that they may be the stuff of poetry. [24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Sir John Davies, Attorney-General – James I.’ See Sir John Davies, ‘A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued And Brought Under Obedience to the Crown of England, Until the Beginning of His Majesty’s Happy Reign [1612],’ in Ireland Under Elizabeth and James the First, ed. H. Morley (London, Glasgow, Manchester and New York: George Routledge and Sons, Limited, 1890), p. 342. [25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, iv.13.’ [26] See H.S. Merriman, The Slave of the Lamp (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1897 [1892]), p. 188.
14[38] ‘Cunning is circuitous folly.’27 Like most men who cultivate mere cunning, he underrated all who do not place the greatest reliance upon it. 14[39] Confucianism is a system of ethics, incorporating the primeval cult, assimilating all other religions & nationalizing the earliest devout instinct. Confucianism & Taoism – the first, open, ancient, primitive, rational, traditional. The second, hidden, esoteric, exotic, revolutionary, new, arbitrary. Nihilism, superstition. Jen = consideration for others: sympathy: love. 14[39] Techne chrematistice – the craft of getting on: practised in addition to a man’s proper techne.28 14[40] Perversion always appears when he who pays the piper calls the tune.
[27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Coleridge, The Friend.’ See S.T. Coleridge, The Friend: A Series Of Essays, In Three Volumes, To Aid In The Formation Of Fixed Principles In Politics, Morals, and Religion, With Literary Amusements Interspersed, 3 vols. (London: Rest Fenner, 1818), i.257. [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Plato, Republic.’
14[40] The sons of god were probably priests, and lived in celibacy, until by a protestant reformation they were allowed to take the fair daughters of men. 14[41] To change one’s allegiance is often necessary, but it should be avoided at those moments when to change involves personal profit: that is too much like changing fealty in return for life. 14[42] The composure, but not the depression of solitude. 14[43] A philosophy of failure – the will not to succeed – is a philosophy of personal life – Epicurus’s ‘live alone.’ This philosophy springs from the belief that personal happiness alone is valuable in the end; success = a reassurance of oneself because personal happiness is impossible or elusive. 14[44] Man is an animal delicately balanced. He has one prime necessity – to survive. To advance too quickly is as fatal as to lag behind. 14[44] Ambition, the desire to succeed, to have power, leads to most ills of the human soul. If the desire is realized it leads to arrogance, violence & final satiety – & if it is denied – all the asylums for the insane are filled with human beings who were unable to face being
mediocre, insignificant, ineffective, & who therefore created for themselves ways of escape from reality so as to be shut off from life itself for ever. 14[44] ‘Pour être heureux, il ne faut avoir rien à oublier.’29 Hence, ‘to admire without desiring’, for to desire is to give a hostage to regret. 14[45] One can never tell what the effect of a satisfied desire will be. 14[45] A long acquaintanceship does not necessarily mean friendship – one being the result of circumstance, the other of choice. 14[45] To follow tradition does not mean doing ‘what was done last time,’ ‘last time’ is only a moment in the tradition, with no more weight than any other moment taken by itself. 14[45a] In a young country events move by jerks – the man who is nobody to-day may be somebody tomorrow.30 [29] This quotation appears at the head of Merriman, The Slave of the Lamp, Ch. IV. [30] Oakeshott numbered two consecutive folios [45]; to distinguish them the second is referred to here as [45a].
14[45a] One does not catch rabbits with a dead ferret. 14[45a] Happiness is a dangerous thing to meddle with. There is so little of it in the world, & it lasts so short a time. 14[46] The advantage of a soldier’s life – his duty is so often clearly defined. The ultimate success of policy, the bona fide, even, of the master one serves – these lie below his horizon, and have no power to break into his unity of spirit. The military life as a circumscribed life: the cause to which he is committed is limited & temporary, it may even be known as a lost cause, but it remains his duty to achieve the temporary success which is military victory. 14[51] To know, not oneself, but only one’s appetites (as the French say). 14[51] To treat each day as if it were our life & not a prologue. 14[52] An indecent revelation of a nauseating mind. 14[52] The belief in progress is more cruel than a belief in predestination; it arouses cupidity without satisfying it.
14[52] Mass in San Marco – so distant, so remote that the whole world seemed to have returned into the eleventh century.31 14[55] Ideals in politics = Omsk – we are haunted rather than directed by them, & they turn activity into an eternally frustrated enterprise. 14[55] Air de famille – a character which distinguishes a family. 14[55] Aristotle: Diogenes Laertius ‘Some men live so sparingly as if they were to live always, others so prodigally, as if they were to die tomorrow.’ The important part of mortality is not merely the inevitability of death, but not knowing when. 14[56] ‘Such courage accounted for the extraordinary feats they had performed.’32 Substantialism – an activity translated into an entity & the entity made a cause of the activity. [31] Oakeshott had recently visited Venice. [32] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Caesar, De bello Gallico, Bk II ch. xxvii.’
14[57] The historic & the practical past.33 History – a world in which there are no illegitimate children (therefore different from the practical world.) Cp. science. To consider misfortunes as legitimate children. 14[57] The ‘democratic’ hatred of everything that is not commonplace. 14[61] ‘The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.’34 14[63] As secure as a man who has led the ace of trumps for the last trick. 14[64] The soldier’s conception of honour. Soldiers have the supreme virtue of fidelity, though they are not always clear about what they are being faithful to. A soldier if he is any good cannot be without virtue. In other trades you offer your services in a limited contract. Not in soldiering – there you put your life at the disposal of your fellow creatures. [33] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Valéry: On the world to-day, pp. 12–13.’ P. Valéry, Reflections On The World Today, tr. F. Scarfe (New York: Panteon, 1948). [34] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Shandy.’ See Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman, 9 vols. (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1760–7), vol. I, ch. XXV.
You get the commands you don’t ask for, they find the dullest theatres for you to serve in. 14[64a]35 Love at first sight: but not first love at first sight. The significance of the second performance. 14[64a] Two desires – to travel & that no-one should know me. To travel & to be unknown. To see the world & remain unknown. 14[65] Genius reconciles one to anything. 14[66] Scientists – they do their cumulative best. 14[67] He made no major concession to life.
[35] Oakeshott numbered two consecutive folios [64]; to distinguish them the second is referred to here as [64a].
Notebook 15 (March 1955)1 15[01] The forms of religion engage our thoughts & affections long after disbelief has transformed them. Indeed, disbelief can do no more than transform. The mysteries become one mystery. And to trace legends & images back to events does nothing to deprive them of their interest & power. Athena, St Michael, each no doubt has some connection with event; but each remains a marvel of imagination. ‘There is a constant turn & return from nature to religion, and from religion to nature.’2 [1] LSE 2/1/15. Soft cover, green, 18 cm × 11.5 cm, lined. Recto folios numbered 1–61. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘XV./ Mar.1955. / Sept 1958 / Paciencia y barajar.’ [Cervantes: see CV[29], above]. Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 9, Contes des fées, a collection of French fairy tales, but the English translation attributed by Oakeshott to ‘Anthony Greene, 1929’ has not been traced; 11–12, Ovid, Metamorphoses; 12–13, Cervantes, Don Quixote; 15–16, C.C. Colton, Lacon; Or Many Things In Few Words: Addressed To Those Who Think (New York: E. Kearny, c.1836); 30–1, notes on Antoine Rivarol (1753– 1801), French aphorist: see for example Notes, maximes et pensées de A. Rivarol, 2 vols. (Paris: J. Haumont, 1941); 32, B. Disraeli, Tancred: Or, The New Crusade, 3 vols. (Henry Colburn, 1947); 36–7, Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica; 48–9, Guillaume de Lorris, Le roman de la rose; 54, excerpts on Mark Antony and Cleopatra from Plutarch, Lives; 61, I.S. Turgenev, ‘An Unhappy Girl,’ in The Jew and Other Stories, tr. C. Garnett (London: William Heinemann, 1899). [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘St-Evremond, Reflections on Religion, Misc. Essays. In Dryden 1692, p. 334.’ Charles de Marguetel de Saint Denis, seigneur de Saint-Evremond, Miscellaneous Essays. Translated out of the French.
To have this moment reproduced in oneself is the glory & the difficulty of the religious man. Abstractions back to events. Characters – such as Faust, Don Juan, etc. – undergo the same process of elaboration & detachment from events. 15[01] Nelson was seasick from the first time to the last time he was afloat: what would a vocational director make of that? 15[01–02] There is an inextinguishable hope in mankind that, in the end, their ephemeral affairs will be regulated by reason…An orderly procession from conception to death. Even vast power is looked upon as beneficent when it is regarded as an opportunity for the achievement of this. But it is absurd to expect men to define their objectives in terms of their capacities, & govern themselves accordingly. How should our artless ancestor have known that he desired to become an astronomer, a bootlegger, an architect or an aviator? There were no such animals; it was necessary to invent them. Nor indeed were they invented; they emerged as activities before they became professions, & as professions before they became desires or ambitions. 15[02] Fame is a vulgar affair at best. It is like being caught in the rushhour crowd. With a Character, by a Person of Honour here in England; Continued by Mr. Dryden (London: John Everingham, 1692).
15[02] There are infinite odds against even the most transient pleasure. The exact conjunction of individuation & circumstance. The marvel of the best moments is enhanced by their fortuitous occurrence. 15[02] To be always young, & light-footed, and in love. 15[02] Love, even first love, is a mingling of old aspiration & present desire. 15[03] ‘Paciencia y barajar.’3 Patience & shuffle the cards. 15[03] Poetry is nothing whatever to do with nature. The poet is a poet in virtue of his penetration of nature (of life). The impossible is the true domain of poetry. Poetry as the present. The conquest of time.4 15[03] Attention means as much as love. [3] Cervantes: see n. 1 and p. 336, above. [4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Von Hofmannsthal, Andreas.’
15[03] Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation. Montaigne. 15[04] Hunger is desire without delight and its satisfaction is relief without pleasure. 15[04] The sweet madness of love & the ties of friendship, both may be eternal if, even intermittently, they reach the level of poetry. This quality of poetry may be absent when, on account of a lack of imagination, they remain fixed in the commonplace; or when, being enjoyed, they reflect only immediate desires. But what forbids its appearance absolutely is egotism; where the impulse is only hunger and the satisfaction only the satisfaction of hunger. For there greed meets greed, and desire & satisfaction are alike devoid of pleasure. And always two egotisms are worse than one – they are sterile, incapable of flower or fruit. It is with love as with eating & talking: unless there is more than the impulse of hunger & something other than the desire to convince or persuade, there is neither pleasure nor conversation. 15[05] June: We resembled one another in some respects, And seeing more than each other’s need, We recognized each other across the room & Entered each other’s lives without knowing
15[05] ‘The road is better than the inn.’5 15[05] To be young – is not to be absolved from obligations, but is not have any, or to have fewer. It is to inhabit a world not yet made. It is to live on credit, & to be recognized to have a right to do so. It is not to be committed, not to have recognized the fixed price of things & always to make a bargain with events. Fluid; elastic. Words are poetry, used for the first time. Actions are poetry, done for the first time. It is not to keep accounts; nothing is specified in advance; everything is what it can be made into. No fixed shapes. And all this means that the activity of politics is supremely unsuitable for the young: anything but politics. For politics is essentially regulative & not creative. 15[06] From a biological point of view human history is a story of regress. Self-consciousness, reflection etc. have weakened the power of instinct & diminished the power of survival. Physical organs have been impaired by civilization. Something has been acquired as a substitute for what has been lost, but it does not replace it. New defences have been built up; but while they promote survival, they promote only the survival of what human beings have become – biologically they are less efficient, & there is a net loss. We perceive this when, on rare occasions, we meet a person who has remained biologically unimpaired. Such persons, usually women, display an egoism which conflicts with every civilized achievement. They are masterfully insensitive to everything but their own desires. Without hesitation, they ignore every fine distinction; their conduct is supremely unselfconscious; they [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cervantes.’
feel, but the world in which they live is invisible to them. They recognize only friends & enemies. 15[06] Women get on very well without any serious respect for rules, without any great aversion to lies or to sharp practice etc. To enjoy without responsibilities. Ineptitude for justice, inconsistency. Keeping secrets. But they can do so only because the prosaic rectitude of men holds the world together. The bourgeois holds the world together for the poet. 15[08] The doctrine of ‘more or less.’ The ‘logic of imperfection’: in practical matters one must not strive for perfection. The second best; stopping short of the mountain top. The jealousy of the gods; the jealousy of ‘the people.’ 15[10] ‘Sadness’ is a feeling possible only to the young: or, perhaps, it is a word which should be used to express this feeling which is possible only to the young – the emotion of unhappiness in those who do not yet know the transience of unhappiness. After our eyes have been opened, & we know how comparatively easy it is to recover from even the most intense unhappiness, we can never again be ‘sad.’ ‘Tristesse’ – the sadness of those who imagine that there is no end & no recovery: the sadness of those to whom every sadness is irreparable.
15[17] The only thing tolerable would be to be married to a great man; genius reconciles us to anything, & the trouble is that there are not enough great men to go round. 15[17] I think it would be difficult to find a conservative in politics who had not some passionate interest other than politics: and any man who has a passionate interest other than politics will be disposed to be a conservative in politics. 15[17] Anyone touched with the sense of mortality will be apt to be a conservative in politics. 15[18] To be afraid of conversation. 15[18] An image should surprise us without making us incredulous. 15[19] A politician should never discuss hypothetical cases or he will lose his freedom of choice when an actual situation appears. 15[19] There ought to be something that ought to be done.
15[19] And sometimes, briefly, we become aware what the camel thinks of the camel driver: democratic politics. 15[19] Whose only notion of importance is urgency. 15[20] To be found out is not the same thing as being understood. And to be self-conscious is not the same thing as self-knowledge. 15[20] When we see a motorcyclist dressed up in an over-all & a helmet we say: ‘like a Martian.’ But the truth is that Martians are like motor-cyclists. 15[20] The ‘geisha,’ a hired conversational companion. 15[20] The emotional groundswell of good conversation. 15[20] The sage & the bore – equally averse from conversation. 15[20] There is no greater sin in politics than to be trop prononcé.
15[21] The art of haircutting is to send your client away not looking as if he’d just had his hair cut. 15[21] You need to be well-mounted for leaping the hedge of custom. 15[21] To respect the sleep of friendship. 15[22] Guarding against the worst; competitive examinations – at any rate they keep out the half-witted. 15[22] In politics the excited amateur of passion must die before the artist can be born. 15[22] To have subjects, but not followers, as a good schoolmaster desires pupils & not disciples. 15[22] A fine imperviousness to mere gentility.
15[23] Perhaps the chief thing one may learn at school & at a university is something about one’s own mental character (as well as something about one’s own mental powers). One’s mental character is partly a question of the size & consequently of the sort of ideas it can accommodate & use. Living is exploring & using & enjoying & accommodating oneself to one’s own mental character. This, I believe, is formed at a fairly early stage in life – not of course fixed, but its main lines acquired & laid out. One has to explore it, to know what it can do, rather than develop it. And develop it rather than change it or try to acquire some quite new mental character: Knowing how to follow one’s own thoughts to their end & being to explore one’s own thoughts clearly. And to be humble about them as well as to enjoy them.6 15[23] Be assured that you have & can have nothing but your own thoughts – your own understandings of what others have thought. 15[24] It is possible to forget everything else in the world. The death of your parents, the loss of all your money, the unfaithfulness of your wife…You forget your mistresses, even the most charming. But a desire that has not been satisfied…an overwhelming desire…that always remains in your heart, even if you live to be a hundred. [6] On the verso of 15[23]; the recto folio contains a lengthy quotation from William Johnson Cory (1823–92), master at Eton College 1845– 72, which Oakeshott used as a footnote in ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’: see Rationalism in Politics, ed. T. Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), pp. 491–2 n. 1.
15[24] Ont hi la pel, hi ha alegria. Where there is hair there is pleasure. Catalan proverb. 15[24] Expensive simplicity. 15[25] Everybody’s youth is a dream, a brief, sweet insanity, a confusion of life & art in which all human activities save love are dissolved into infinite possibilities, in which there are no obligations & nothing is forbidden. No concessions to life. In this dream politics alone has no place. For politics is concerned with things, not dreams, with things as they are & not with our own feelings & emotions but respect for other people’s feelings & emotions. The young never feel the balance of a thing in their hands – unless it be a cricket bat – because they recognize no obligation to accept anything save their own emotions. Self & world undistinguished. It is the sign that what Conrad called the ‘shadow line’ has been passed, that the young man has become an adult when he has accepted things enough to have acquired some skill in using them, when things & people are no longer infinite possibilities, when self & world distinguish themselves from one another, when the sweet solipsism of youth itself dissolves, the ‘selfishness.’ When one is young nothing seems more desirable than to take risks.
15[26] Omnes eodem cogimur.7 When we are no longer light-footed, we find a place for ourselves in the band. 15[26] The carefree gaiety of first embraces. 15[26] …to have sympathy for all happy loves, all desperate matings, all profound frustrations, all slavery…for this is love. 15[27] One likes those whom one is hurting to be gay. It is less upsetting. 15[27] Not love, not affection, but a sweet harmony, without obsession, without calculation, without sadness, without constraint: neither comedy nor tragedy. No regrets; not asking for more than there is. Nothing hidden. Admiration & desire balanced with one another. And thus to make love.8 15[27] To be strong enough, free enough, happy enough to have a happy love affair. [7] Horace, Odes, Bk II ch. iii, ‘To Dellius’: ‘we are all driven to the same end.’ [8] A question mark has been placed at the end of the sentence in a different ink.
15[28] The girl in the advertisement urging us to drink more milk is not a ‘real’ girl. She does not hold a glass of milk up in front of one eye while she looks at us with the other – she has only one eye. The artist did not paint a face with two eyes & then put a glass of milk in front of one of them; he painted a one-eyed girl. It is as perverse to ask what she is doing with her other eye as it is to ask what Hamlet is doing when he is off stage. 15[35] ‘Religion is an art of self-encouragement in the face of the uncertainties of life.’9 The occasional & ad hoc gives place to the periodic – ceremony, ritual, etc. The harvest festival etc. Religion is the art of procuring courage. But by ‘thought.’10 15[35] Why there cannot be another religion. 15[37] Poetic experience is sometimes momentary and leaves the impression of a visitation. There are no settled conditions for this visitation. Opium.
[9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Marrett.’ See R.R. Marett, Head, Heart and Hands in Human Evolution (London: Hutchinson, 1935), p. 145. [10] Oakeshott added this sentence in pencil.
15[37] The feeling of recollection, of having seen it before. Déjà vu. 15[37] There is a likeness, an analogy between loving & poetic experience – both entail delight – but it is a mistake to identify them.11 15[38] A disillusion with the world as it is has commonly lead to a search for relief in three different directions – retirement from the world, the amelioration of the world by practical enterprise, and the transformation of the world in art: religion, moral endeavour & poetry. 15[39–40] Art in the Middle Ages was ‘wrapped up in life.’ Its function was to decorate, to convince, to move. ‘The Middle Ages knew only applied art.’12 The love of art for its own sake did not spring from a new craving for beauty – but was its result. It sprang from a superabundance of artistic production. ‘In the treasuries of princes & nobles objects of art were accumulated so as to form collections. No longer serving a practical use, they [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp Aquinas.’ [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages. A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, tr. F. Hopman (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1924),p. 246.’
were admired as articles of beauty & of curiosity; thus taste for art was born which the Renaissance developed consciously.’13 Thus modern art was born. Art of the Middle Ages for decoration, for record, portraits, ecclesiastical art etc:. The practical use of portraits – betrothal. ‘Art’ was learned & we ourselves learn to look at pictures – lead on by what is irrelevant, an interest in the subject etc., to what belongs to the picture as a work of art – or a poem. 15[41] The Christian when he sins, injures God; if he is penitent he may find forgiveness and absolution. But where sin or wrong-doing is recognized only as injury to others, the effects of that wrongdoing can never be expunged: everything is irreparable, and even if there is forgiveness there can never be absolution. 15[42] It is a great misfortune not to be loved when you love, but it is a much greater to be loved passionately when you no longer love. 15[42] Love is proof against anger, injustice, forgetfulness, even dissimulation; what poisons it is having something important to dissimulate about. 15[42] Most of the people we see here are dead.
[13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages, p. 246.’
15[42] Love is two dreams of love which do their best to spare each other. 15[43] The charm of love. The sudden illumination of life; the illusion that the greatest mystery – why we have been born – is solved; the new value that attaches itself to the most insignificant things; the dissolution of things that had become fixed immovable shapes and their resolution into new shapes; surprise, astonishment but without any incredulity; desire & contemplation for a moment united; invulnerability – neither adverse opinion, nor misfortune, nor death itself can touch us; passion & tenderness joined; infinite possibility; a world that is always at its end but perpetually renewed; a present without a past; movement untied from direction; lightness; peace without immobility; alertness; a tension that is always relaxed; the absence of calculation; freedom. 15[45] A good horse is never of a bad colour. 15[45] I want to stand in a thing as big as a mind. 15[47] Things of the past: Dusty Roads The inky fingers of children. Trouser clips. Sweets at 4 oz a 1d
15[50] He liked to imagine that life was a kind of adventure in which nothing happened that was fixed or irreparable. 15[50] His boredom came from a complete scepticism about the destiny of humanity… Scepticism was not merely a mode of thought, but a duty. It seemed to him that just as he had to evacuate his body every day so that it should not become poisoned, so he must preserve his mind from being burdened or obstructed by beliefs. 15[50] The ease, the grace, which love imparts to the movements of a girl, and the manner in which it softens every contour of the face & body & smoothes out every line. Maturity is given the grace of youth again. 15[51] The True Believer Before he became a member of the Party he felt himself to be merely an isolated individual, lonely & lost, tormented, helpless, vindictive, but quite incapable of forming judgments either about himself or about the affairs of the world. He held no standard of values; he felt himself to be a pariah. All he knew for certain was that he was not a man at peace with himself & could not be at peace with other men. He sought an authority to obey; in the party he found release.
15[51a] To be capable of tendresse as well as of love; to know the difference between them.14 15[51a] Carelessness may govern our lives, but it does not provide us with any arguments in its defence. 15[52] There is a time, between childhood and manhood, when one has become aware of oneself and become aware also of the hostility of the world which is claiming us for itself – the world where things have fixed shapes, where everything has its price, where imagination is no longer sovereign. Fact & obligation are about to drive out image & poetry. Some people rush forward, eager to assume their appointed place in this new world; others hesitate, draw back from its threshold, clinging to what is threatened with destruction and loving it with the passionate love which everything both lovely & evanescent generates; others again, go forward, reluctantly believing themselves to have a talisman which will deprive the hostile world of its power to transform them – and are, nevertheless, in the end, engulfed; others, a few, manage to live in the world, but never come to belong to it. Others find in poetry what they have lost in life. This moment is the shadow-line. This, it should be noted, is not the contrast between art & life, or an attempt to approximate life to art.15 [14] Oakeshott numbered two consecutive folios [51]; to distinguish them the second is referred to here as [51a]. [15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Alain-Fournier, Le grand Meaulnes.’ Alain Fournier, Le grand Meaulnes (Paris: Emile-Paul frères, 1913).
Life, an adventure. 15[53] ‘There was so much youthful pride about him that all the madness in the world was right for him.’16 What we know when we really know another person is how he should behave – that is, his character, what belongs to him, what he can manage without self-destruction. 15[55] The soul of a lover lives in somebody else’s body. 15[56] The homogeneity of the left – Clemenceau – no enemies on the left. 15[56] Attachment, friendship may be founded on a common interest in some activity, such as music; and then it is often as profound as the interest is profound; and if it is profound it may generate the dramatic relationship which is the heart of friendship. And it may be profound without being passionate, the link being devoid of violence, frenzy, anguish, envy, emulation. Love, on the other hand, subsists upon a less specific bond: it is delight & enjoyment of another’s vision of the world; and love is requited when this delight is reciprocal. To make love is to celebrate this delight, to speak of it in the language of the body, to know why one is alive and to be glad of being alive. [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Fournier, Le grand Meaulnes.’
15[57] What mischief you’ve done us, you who would have us believe in nothing… 15[57] Decadence, Venice as it is now, is not a defect, it is the fruit of which power & glory were only the flower. 15[57] The copy is not the idea corrupted, it is all there is, & it is nothing apart from its fortunes. 15[57] Life is like a huge expanse of virgin sand which we must get over without leaving a foot-print. 15[57] There are girls who get more pleasure out of being talked about & becoming notorious for having given up a lover or one who might have been supposed to be a lover than they get from enjoying the attentions of the sweetest lover. The pleasures of being loved are best when they are intermittent; the pleasure of having the eye of the world on them is a permanent need. And to have the attention of the world for having given up a lover is greater to them than having it for having taken a lover. 15[58] Some girls take everything as flattery.
15[58] Sometimes with a look or a word one finds one has sounded the A and there is an instrument tuned to it; sometimes one hears the A and finds oneself in tune – either way, there is peace & happiness & the longing to play a tune. 15[59] To be young, to believe that happiness is near and that one has only to set out in order to find it. 15[59] When you are alone you are nothing & you are restless to escape from this nothingness. You like being petted & flattered because this gives you the illusion of being something. You are afraid of being loved because this might make you something & you cling to your nothingness relieved by distractions. 15[59] God is not a being or a person, it is a way of thinking about human life. 15[60] Children are great conversationalists. 15[60] To be either light or serious is to play one’s part badly in love. Happy love is a tension between the two in which each opposes the other and each keeps the other alive. The unhappiness of unhappy love is that one is left only with the serious: grief is heavy.
It is to mourn a lost lightness, & mourning was never very graceful. There can be no lightness when there is no confidence. To the one (R) I had to teach lightness; & she never learned. To the other (P) I had to teach seriousness; & she never learned. She had neither Reason nor Passion, only a miraculous lightness. 15[A]17 Unrequited Love: 1. Love that never was returned and never looked like being returned. Narouz’s love for Clea. (a) Unspoken love. (b) Spoken love which received no reply. (c) Spoken love which received some reply, but not the reply to love – e.g. marriage in the hope that love will be answered, but knowing it is not answered. 2. Love that was returned, but died in one sooner than in the other. In the one in whom it did not die this is unrequited love – in time. The answer was less, because shorter, than that which was desired. – I loved you once – 3. Love that is half-answered, and remains half-answered. Pierot & Pierette. Love that is answered but in such a manner that the answer is not recognized as an answer. Love oblique. 4. Unhappy love – great variety. [17] On a loose sheet inserted at 15[48].
5. Love not returned to one, but given to another. 15[B]18 The full score, immanent, though perverted in its actual manifestation, but intelligible in its eternal character = the idea of the good. The permanent parts = ‘ideas.’ Their actual performance = copies. Orchestra also represents the Republic, the ‘ideal’ state. Conductor = the philosopher king, the instrumentalists = citizens. Each born to his part, can only be educated appropriately – finding in his part his complete self-expression, i.e. as a flautist. Relatively undeveloped compared with the Conductor. The conductor alone knows the full score. The hierarchy of instrumentalists. Orchestral performance – Necessaries – 1) Full score – held in the memory of the conductor. 2) Instrumentalists, each playing parts, as provided in the full score, & obeying the conductor. (a) As played, each part is temporary & imperfect; but the part itself is eternal (& Perfect). (b) The significance of each part lies in the composition as a whole, the unwritten score immanent in the Orchestral performance. Therefore: (c) each performer can copy (on his instrument) accurately his own part if he follows the conductor’s guidance, but only the [18] On a loose printed form in pencil headed ‘ARMY FORM C 2136 (Large) MESSAGE FORM’ inserted at 15[48].
conductor can give that guidance, either to the parts as parts, or to the parts as parts of the whole; & the power to guide comes from his knowledge of the ultimate idea/character of each part, that is the part as an aspect of the whole i.e. – his knowledge of the full score. This knowledge is purely intellectual – it is in his memory – it is not one of the parts & cannot be played on an instrument. Rivalry between the instrumentalists is impossible – flutes cannot play the parts of triangles – but each instrumentalist can fully realize himself along his appropriate & specialized line. Yet there is a hierarchy of unequal development from timpani to strings – the leader of the violins has a greater directive power & larger conception of the whole performance than anyone else under the conductor. But the conductor alone is fully developed. His function is universal – he is, in a sense, in a purely intellectual sense, the whole orchestra.
Notebook 16 (September 1958)1 16[01] Ginginare – a verb meaning everything that passes at a distance between two people who might be in love with one another before they have spoken. ‘Love comes in at the eyes.’ It is what follows a sort of visual (& perhaps mutual) recognition: perhaps it simply is that recognition. Chance and choice. 16[01] When we love somebody we wish, in the first place, simply to share our time with her and all time not shared is time lost. 16[01] The nearest approach to passion in her was the passion that springs from complicity in deception. 16[03] Statements which, if they were true, things would be as they are. [1] LSE 2/1/16. Hard cover, red, 17 cm × 12 cm, ruled. Recto folios numbered 1–64. Autograph, ink with occasional pencil. Inside front cover: ‘M. Oakeshott / 16 New Row / London WC 2.’ Title page: ‘XVI. / To see the world & live unknown. / ignotos / We are children & we have done a / foolish thing: do not follow me. / Sept 1958 / O monde! Je veux ce que tu veux.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 12, Leonhard Frank, Karl and Anna, tr. C. Brooks (London: Peter Davies, 1929); 67–8, Karen Blixen aka Isak Dinesen, Shadows On The Grass (London: M. Joseph, 1960).
16[03] Tired, not with age, but with supporting the burden of a secret existence. 16[04] Some people need a great deal more courage to live than others, not because they have greater or more frequent misfortunes, but merely because they feel being alive more acutely. So when we tell a man to be brave, we do not know just how much bravery he needs, & he may need much more than someone else in his situation would need. 16[05] The endearing, gentle imperfection of all living things. 16[05] Trust is necessary. Everything rests on confidence. To live is always to live on credit. 16[05] Where there is no choice we are for ever at the mercy of chance. 16[07] ‘The world is like a cucumber – to-day it’s in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.’ Arabic proverb.
16[07] A man is a seismograph – Nietzsche or Burckhardt, for example. Better than thinking of them as diagnosticians. 16[07] For most people living is a hobby; the business of life is elsewhere in ambitions & achievements. This, perhaps, is wise; at least it shows appropriate caution, for to make living one’s grande passion gives too many hostages to fortune. However, this is not a matter of choice. 16[08] Nibbling at the edge of stale ideas. 16[08] ‘The lion shall eat straw like the ox.’2 The tame world of universal mediocrity. 16[08] There are many ways of loving. The word may be given the absolute meaning it has for young lovers, or rather the absolute meaning which young lovers have conferred upon it & which speaks not only to them but sometimes to others also. But, apart from this, which belongs to ‘loving & being in love’ at the same time; there are other meanings. The passion of ‘being in love’ without any profound emotion of love; the gentleness of ‘loving’ without ‘being in love.’ Love too is complete without reciprocation: [2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Isaiah 11:9.’
the intransitive ‘I love’ which proclaims merely an experience, a discovery in oneself. And love that seeks to be requited. 16[08] The desire to give her an experience of pleasure which she did not pretend to feel; the feeling that possession is lacking until this is done. ‘The lineaments of gratified desire.’3 16[08] Not everybody loves, though most people have an intimation of it. With some it is a brilliant firework which flares up in the night & is gone; with others it is a promise which is never fulfilled, the power to give & forget is absent; with others it is devouring & inescapable. The first may, sometime or other, know the last; but the second will never know either of the others, only guess. 16[09] Documentation A man has become a collection of documents: identity cards, employment card, health service card, employers certificates, party card, etc. This is the mass man. What provoked it? Increase in population, writing, printing, literacy, techniques acquired by government, photography, hollerith machines.
[3] See William Blake, ‘The Question Answered,’ in The Poetical Works of William Blake, ed. E.J. Ellis, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1906), i.152.
16[09] She lived as if she were blind, aware only (& that imperfectly) of the objects she came into contact with, but knowing nothing of the general aspect of things. 16[10] The love of adventure, stranger than all other loves. 16[10] It requires wisdom to be happy in love, and it requires wisdom to do without love – & it is the same wisdom. 16[11] Someone to whom he could be life and who could be life to him. 16[11] Shone like a star in hell. 16[11] Nothing in the whole world is so cruel as love – centred upon one, all others, no matter what they have been, are nothing; tied to one all other ties are obliterated; self-surrender to one & fierce egoism in the face of all others. 16[11] In love we grow acquainted because we are already attached.
16[11] Loneliness is not living alone; it is loving alone. 16[13] To love is to have a faithful memory. 16[13] The Beeches. In this sweet house Patricia lived & moved; Was loved, and lovely was; but never loved. 16[13] What one loves in a woman is her life: Je veux une femme à son gré: not perfection, but une femme telle qu’elle est, une femme libre. 16[14] No one is more particular about the conventions than a woman who is tired of her love. 16[14] Love is a condition which reveals what one has to give and what one is able to take: apart from love one never knows.
16[14] What is love – to be enchanted by whatever is happening, to forget oneself completely; it is an air of surprise, a joy which is visible in the eyes & can never be counterfeited. An adventure. 16[14] Innocence & generosity. 16[14] It is only when one’s lover is also une amie that everything becomes possible – the greatest happiness & the greatest pain. Love & amitié joined, the most vital of all mixtures. The greatest adventure. 16[15] How strange is the determination to succeed in the circus of life. 16[15] Fear in young girls is an emotion which a man can hardly understand; it springs from a feeling of helplessness. 16[15] One forgives a woman one loves, forgives everything, & that is what makes one’s love stifling.
16[15] It is not time, or satiety or neglect that is to be feared in love, but an impression of security. They wish to be certain but hate anyone they can be certain of. 16[15] Love is not really a human feeling until it is over. 16[15] The lottery of great passions. 16[16] The idiotic heroism of sublime delicacy. 16[16] I felt torn up by the roots & thrown away. 16[17] The secret of success – get into the queue in life. One’s moment always comes if one has patience & if one doesn’t change queues!! 16[17] Certain circumstances generate rapid advance – e.g. war generated rapid advance in aeronautics, in chemistry, in the treatment of wounds & diseases, etc etc. And the argument is that we should make these circumstances permanent & thus enjoy continuous rapid advance. If we can do it in war why not in peace. Warships generate liners; ferroconcrete fortifications generate new styles of
building, etc etc: why surrender these means in peace? But this is merely the technological argument. ‘We were pushed into doing, inventing, contriving it; we succeeded in finding out how to do or contrive it; therefore let us go on doing so.’ Surrender of choice. 16[18] Glory: the poetry of reputation. 16[18] We are constantly trying to recover in happiness the imaginative expense which the invention of our love has cost us. 16[18] Between love & the dream of love there is no common measure: to love is two dreams of love which do their best to spare one another. 16[18] To hate tenderly. 16[19] The legendary & the historical. Their different structure. In legend, all that is casual, secondary, unresolved, truncated, obscure or uncertain is absent. There is a clear outline; men act from few & simple motives; there is a unity of feeling. It is a pattern; there are repetitions, types. Exact time & place are absent, but everything else is exact & nothing is confused. In history, there is confusion, contradiction, individuality, lack of arrangement, uncertainty, events which lead nowhere & complicated motives & circumstances; obscurity, variety – & yet
a kind of intelligibility. To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend. 16[20] In the romances of the 12th century, the means by which the courtly virtues are proved & established & preserved is avanture: the surmounting of perils, encounters with enemies, demons, spirits, magical powers, ‘natural’ vicissitudes, requiring strength, resolution, courage, fortitude, cunning, etc. But avanture differs from ‘adventure’ in not being fortuitous: they are the structure of the world of courtly conduct. They are possible only to a knight. The world of knighthood contains nothing but the requisites of avanture. The world is specially adapted to prove the virtues of knighthood. Don Quixote’s ‘adventures’ are true parodies of knightly avanture: they are chance encounters in the ordinary world with ordinary circumstances & people, but transformed into moments of self-enactment. 16[21] Those who think that the world isn’t good enough for them, to whom it is an adversity to be alive. 16[21] The victims of activity. 16[21] Chance & courage (choice) – Love. Love is our high idea of courage: courage is our high idea of love.
16[21] The horror of all compulsion, of getting or keeping anything by force or subterfuge or importunity. 16[21] The world of art – a world where only the unforeseen can happen and where conduct is understood only by children. 16[23] Utopian ideals have always turned to blood when they have touched the earth – & they must always do so. ‘Truths’ always kill; errors are better, they are sometimes merciful. Of all such truths one must ask – who does it strike & who does it save? Who will it kill or poison? What will grow from it? Does it smell of rotting corpses? What will happen to those who taste it? What will happen to those who swallow it? 16[23] Some people are both inert and unstable at the same time. 16[23] Her lack of self-confidence showed itself in her leaning towards complicated & equivocal situations & relationships. 16[24] Our fears are all mundane. The fear of spirits & demons, which is still the most important thing to savage people, has disappeared from our world. The fear of the gods, which Lucretius designed to rescue his contemporaries from, has gone also. The last fear,
which lasted until a generation ago & still lingers, is the fear of hell. We are, in this sense, unbelievers. To us the day is the day & the night is the night – nothing more. The dead do not speak or threaten. Every man is wise and alone. But, with fear, belief has also disappeared: we understand everything & despise what we do not understand. Beliefs, too, have become mundane, because thoughts are mundane. ‘Freedom from fear.’ Was this not what Lucretius designed to give his contemporaries – ‘fear of the gods.’ 16[25] Poseidon The world of the sea and men on the sea. Simplified: its demands are simple & cannot be evaded. A world that can be understood by those who inhabit it who, at the same time are entirely lost on land, and among men on land. 16[25] How much of our ‘morality,’ what we think it is right & wrong to do, comes from looking into the future – of which heaven & hell are the extremes. If men & women were accustomed to die, not worn out, or with passion spent, but at the height of their energy, say about thirty or thirty-five, would not this transform our ‘morality’? Morality always distinguishes between feelings, but it reflects feelings & distinguishes only between actual feelings. Passions interrogate values. 16[26] Men handicap themselves with all kinds of ‘virtues,’ like honour, decency, moderation, honesty, consistency, sincerity, detachment,
compunction, justice, which women do very well without. And yet they can do without these ‘virtues’ only because men recognize them – that is to say, the world of women is not a viable world and they have the supreme joy in living in a world which is viable but to whose viability they have to contribute nothing. They contribute ‘movement,’ instability, madness, laughter, pleasure & pain. And they will have to engage in masculine occupations for many generations before they will commonly acquire masculine virtues. Fortunately, ‘women’ as they are will outlast my time. 16[26] The warmth of patience. 16[26] To have imagined every detail; for it all to have been different & yet unmistakable. 16[27] The lower middle class may be defined as that class which approves only of its own ways & manners & dispositions; the class which has sympathy only for itself. 16[27] ‘My dear husban, I would like to wash your dirty shirts again.’ Letter to a soldier 1808. 16[27] You have neither a just nor a compassionate mind.
16[28] You have everything but happiness to offer those who love you. If you look for anything it is for what you would be afraid to find. 16[28] Personality – a settled collection of dispositions & attributes – is an illusion, but if we are to love, it is a necessary illusion. What we love is the flavour of a personality. 16[28] Without reason or passion; unable to give or to take; neither to be raised up nor cast down; incapable of life or of death. She had never experienced pleasure, which is impossible to be entirely self-centred. 16[28] There was no break on the surface, only a gradual sinking of the level. 16[29–30] Ad Patriciam. All these experiences: of desire and frustration and fulfilment; of longing & denial & release; of violence & contentment; of affection, tenderness, sadness, elation, misery, closeness & remoteness, loneliness, hope, fear, wonder, expectation, jealousy, forbearance, forgiveness, serenity, remorse, disappointment, anger, bitterness, suspicion, delight; of joy and defeat; of security & insecurity; of resolution & irresolution; of alienation & friendship; of uncertainty, confidence, doubt, faith, patience &
impatience; of freedom & bondage; of life, death & resurrection; of sympathy & estrangement; of kindness & cruelty & rebellion & submission; of compassion & extenuation & obstinacy; of warmth & coldness; of generosity & meanness; of gentleness & hardness; of shame & guilt & absolution; of imprisonment & liberation; of contention & peace; of doing & suffering & waiting; of pursuit, deception & evasion; of coming & going & returning; of giving & taking and surrendering; of intimacy & understanding & misunderstanding; of blindness & recognition, acceptance & rejection; of hurt & healing; of devotion & blasphemy; of losing & finding & being lost; of creation & destruction & recreaction, making & unmaking; the red, the black, the green & the blue; spring & summer & winter; the sun, moon, & stars; the earth, the air & the sea; the dark, the light & the half-light – all these are the components of the adventure of loving & being loved by you, in which only indifference & satiety have found no place. A night without darkness. A magic circle in which every embrace is a rejection & every rejection an embrace; every entrance an exit & every exit an entrance. A circle that holds us part-owners of one another. A reality and an illusion. 16[30] Loving is two people who are in flower giving shade to one another; there is no fruit. 16[31] Loving & being loved is to live in a world in flower. The egoism of being in love is to believe that you can make the world flower for the person you love. But many things can stand in the way. I never succeeded in doing this for Patricia; tho there was often promise of it & some moments of fulfilment. She loved me enough to spare my dream of love; but she had no dream herself & was therefore invulnerable.
If only she could have extorted compliance from me. But she was not positive or great enough to do this; & I am not naturally compliant. In any case it is difficult for a lover to be compliant: I should have done better as a husband for then love might have engendered compliance without the feeling of loss. 16[33] Love is a fearful struggle to give oneself to another. To be happy in love one must either find one’s love answered in the manner one desires it to be answered, or one must love in so unpremeditated a manner (without any preconceived image of how it needs to be answered) that disappointment is impossible. The first is a miracle, the miracle that every lover desires to perform; but deep love which seeks a premeditated answer is difficult because the miracle of being able to answer it seems impossible to perform. The second is to love like a god or a child – something that passionate men have to learn & find difficulty in learning. Perhaps, in love, depth and this kind of unpremeditation go together; or perhaps deep love cannot easily avoid unhappiness, the unhappiness of not being answered? These things cannot be arranged. Every man has his special coin in which he wishes to be paid. 16[34] I would have thought I had succeeded if she had stopped biting her nails. 16[34] Every art of fortification has its own art of siege.
16[35] Loving is like gambling – winning & losing are equally irrelevant; what matters is wagering, the adventure. ‘Gamblers & lovers really play to lose.’ How much truth is there in this? 16[35] Love is a human invention, the invention of a new pain & a new pleasure of which only those who know themselves & others as individuals are capable. 16[35] Images which sometimes will provoke a paroxysm of jealousy at others provoke only jealous thoughts. The images are the same, but the mood is different. Is the indifference only tiredness? 16[35] Our dreams are as much a part of our life as our waking thoughts: there is one life, dreaming & waking. 16[36] The world is a set of conditions which must be accepted if we are to be happy. In order to make them acceptable we invent stories of how they came into being & theories about their character. The most foolish of these inventions is that they are the creation of a god and represent part of a process in which human beings are perfected, a period of education & probation. This makes the creator all too human. The Manichean theory is much more convincing.
16[36] When we are young ‘love’ is self-centred – we drink from thirst or to get drunk. Later we are concerned with the individuality of who is loved; love is an attachment to individuality. In old age we are, perhaps, young again. 16[37] For the poet and those who read what he has made in its proper, poetic, character, ‘poetry’ does not exist. He does not know what he is doing and they only know what he provokes in them. ‘Poetry’ was invented in an enquiring mood, the mood of the critic, the philosopher, the historian. A poem is something different.4 16[37] What we do is largely determined by our inventions – what we find out how to do. But our inventions mirror our secret wishes. 16[37] Two fatalities: to fall in love with a girl who turns out to be a bitch; to be charmed & delighted by a light & wanton, careless unloving character, & then to find one has fallen in love with her. Perhaps the second is the worse because the love one would have would be deeper & less destructible. 16[37] October 1st 1959: the longest day of my life.
[4] The last sentence has been added in a different ink.
16[38] In love, as in some other connections, knowledge does not generate power, but is only the sign of a lost innocence: it is only in defeat that one knows for certain whether it is love or egoism. For love is surrounded & penetrated by so many egoisms – the egoism of desire, of want, of need; the egoism entailed in imposing one’s own dream of love upon another; the egoism of giving as well as of taking; the egoism of wanting to lose oneself; the egoism of devoting oneself entirely to another’s pleasure, and there is even detectable egoism in the willingness to die for another. And love may be mistaken for the passion & the peace which springs up when the needs of two are requited in each other. This is happiness, & we need enquire no further. But while egoism unrequited may dissolve into hatred, love unrequited remains or is forgotten. Hamlet: ‘I did love you once’ – yes, it is possible; the test is in what it turned into. 16[38] ‘The classic in art is what marches by intention with the cosmology of the age.’ I am sure this must be Santayana, bless him. 16[38] People of various degrees of nothing. 16[38] Love is a condition of intense concentration: desires, cares, thoughts, pleasures, pains, hopes, fears – all revolve round one centre. It is a revolution which destroys all that is trifling – or a revolution which gives one the illusion of knowing why one is alive.
16[40] The woman whom love & youth have deserted takes offence at everything. 16[40] It must be difficult not to feel some degree of contempt for somebody with whom you can play a part with impunity. It you need to deceive, it should be a little difficult to deceive. 16[40] In the past when I fished in my head for bright ideas I usually caught something; nowadays the fish don’t come so easily & never look as attractive as they used to look. 16[40] Convives. 16[40] Savoir-mourir. 16[40] ‘Dieu, que le son du cor est triste au fond du bois.’5 16[41] Do not allow the star to be put out. [5] See Alfred de Vigny, ‘Le Cor,’ in Alfred de Vigny collection des plus belles pages, 2nd edition (Paris: Mercure de France, 1914), 58. The quotation recurs at pp. 503 n. 1 and 520, below.
16[41] The feeling of trudging through life incognito and in shoes of lead. 16[41] Nothing stirred in her except a vague & intermittent desire to be stirred. 16[41] People who dance, not because they are happy but because they are musical. 16[41] To care nothing for one’s enemies & all for one’s friends. 16[42] Some people love life, others are in love with life, but the rare few make love with life in every moment. 16[42] I don’t know whether I believe in God, but I believe in the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, St Michael & the devil. 16[42] It was like making love with somebody in the dark who never answers.
16[43] The complexity of the world & of the interrelation of its components is such that our control over it never lifts us above being gamblers in a lottery. One of the conclusions is that we waste time in refining too much on how children are brought up. 16[43] To have confidence independent of success. 16[43] When we conceive of the possibility of being in the same difficult situations as others, youth is over. 16[44] I was not hostile to him, nor was I friendly; I never dreamed of him. 16[44] Every man has his own sphere of knowledge and he knows his way about it better than most philosophers know their way about theirs: The cook, the seaman, the accountant, the journalist, the actor, the carpenter; each knows at once what will work & what won’t, what is absurd & what is possible & what is probable & what is certain. Our aim is to know our way about our sphere of knowledge as well as these know their way about theirs. This is the way F.C. Burkitt knew the first four centuries of the Christian era.
16[45] Enthusiasm provokes large views and opens up long vistas. But there is a kind of negative enthusiasm where we see little but in immense detail. 16[45] A book is a mirror; we see only ourselves. 16[45] Works of art are works of an artist. 16[46] To love & to cherish the pride of your adversary as highly as your own – or it may be not an adversary, but a partner or one whom we encounter. 16[46] We are now brought up on a system of examinations & promotions, we look for merit & value ‘justice’; and this has bitten into us so deeply that we hardly understand a way of life in which luck & favour are pre-eminent – the adjustment to the unforeseen & the unexpected which it entails, a way of life in which to be safe or to be saved seems to be the least necessary of all things. 16[47] ‘By thy mask I shall know thee’: we choose a mask that reveals what is usually concealed; its ugliness says, ‘Do not regard my beauty; there is something else.’
16[47] What is staggering is God’s imagination: no human inventor could possibly have imagined relationships such as love. There is nothing humane about this imagination, it is pure fantasy. 16[47] It is only a very courageous people who will impose responsibility for the evil & misery in the world upon their gods; alternatively, it is only by imposing this responsibility upon gods that evil & misery (which is unavoidable) is made tolerable. 16[48] Si libet licet – if you want to, why not? 16[48] I am a small incident in your life. Do not say those things which a girl says to a man when she wishes to spare his feelings. 16[49] Prudent men cannot be argued out of their prudence, but they may find it suddenly deprived of its weight & solidity when they see a friend engaged upon a risky enterprise. Then it is like being reminded by a flute-player in the street, that there is such a thing as music & there is such a thing as folly: gilt-edged security seems a shade less attractive. 16[49] There are unshed tears between my eyes & what I see.
16[49] An outlook not jaundiced but simplified. 16[50–51] To be a wanderer, that is, one with no destination or only interim destinations, is to make a world utterly different from the world of those who have a home & live in it or those who go somewhere for an ulterior purpose; this is the world of poetry. If the way is unfamiliar, everything is seen from the outside, & unexpectedly: Medina will rise suddenly from the plain, St Marks appear as the alley takes its last turn before the piazza, the white cliffs emerge from the mist – none was sought because none was known about in advance; and each is for its own sake, is what it appears & is nothing more. And the same experience may take place in books & plays & pictures & operas, & dances. A stopping place for the eyes. But the same can happen if the way is familiar; we may anticipate what we are to see, imagine a glint in the sky before it appears (the white cliffs), or a happening on the stage, know what we shall see round the next corner. But it is not a home, or a resting place; it is not how a tired traveller thinks who is on his way to a destination, it is not what a man at home sees & thinks. For these, things are symbols; for the wanderer they ‘mean’ nothing, whether or not he has wandered this way before. They are not ‘land-marks’, they do not indicate where he has got on his way, they have no history, they cannot be ‘used’, they do not tell him the time of day; they tell him nothing in this sense. Perhaps it is impossible to enter this world with a companion: when we want a companion to see the world with we anticipate an emotional experience & seek it, not a contemplative experience. Everything is superficial.
16[52] The most successful politicians are those who do not pretend to be serious: no undertaker is a success in a music hall. 16[52] The real grievances of mankind are incurable; politics consists in manufacturing curable grievances. 16[52] Love is what happens between two people who love one another. 16[52] Stendhal isn’t interested in love – only in ambition & conquest. Julian Sorel actually didn’t love Mathilde de la Mole. Did Fabrice love Clélia? or did he revenge himself on her? Lucien Luewen doesn’t go to bed with Mme de Chasteller. 16[53] Agreement/Silence may be an expression of contempt. Wellington’s ‘Ha’ is the best reply to most remarks. 16[53] The course of obstacles etc. in the field gun competition at the annual Royal Tournament is based upon the obstacles which had to be overcome by the Royal Naval Field Gun Battery on its way to the relief of Ladysmith.
16[53] Politics is an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others. 16[54] ‘The excellence of things is their undoing.’ Han Yü Everything that diverges from the Mean is vulnerable. Everything, in the end, is ‘undone,’ but that which is excellent is more of a thing and its undoing is a great undoing & unmistakeable. 16[54–55] It is a mistaken feeling one has when one gets older that one cannot afford to dream. When one is young one may waste time dreaming because there seems time enough to spare; there is time to make mistakes & recover from them; whole years may be spent in dreaming. Thus, one thinks; but the reasoning is mistaken. It is based upon the false assumption that there is something else, other than making mistakes, to do, & the false assumption that waking & dreaming are not all one. There is in fact nothing discreditable even in dying in a mistake. And yet all the force of one’s upbringing goes against this. The pressure to accomplish something; the horror of a life spent in dead-ends. And this pressure, instead of relaxing, as it should, when one gets older, seems to increase. One has to jerk oneself out of the view that one should not still be waiting & still have time to dream away the days. And it seems all right for the young to dream because we imagine that there is time for something to ‘come true.’
16[55] First cut and then polish. 16[55] Eyes too easily understood. 16[55] Some people confuse love with an insight into virtues & failings. 16[56] Confucius, like all profoundly reflective men, concentrated a civilization in his thoughts. Out of three thousand songs he selected three hundred; out of a vast variety of customs & behaviour he chose a few; out of concrete morality he made one abstract, universal morality; out of various philosophies he made one. For example, Jen, consideration for others, is a universal abstraction from filial piety and respect for elders: these were the primitive virtues of the Chinese, the roots of their moral conduct. What Confucius did was to universalize them. This is also what Aristotle did with the native morality of the Athenians. In short, what Confucius did was to give a sharp outline to what was thitherto vague, and having found his ‘one thought’ he made it the principle of a world of ideas – but in doing so, much was lost. When we move from ‘possibilities’ to this sort of finality, we seem to have gained, but we have also lost.6
[6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. J. Huizinga, Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance (tr. J.S. Holmes and H. van Marle) London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1959), p. 205.’
16[57] What slips through the net of moral finality is the poetry of conduct, and no amount of subsequent qualification will get it back. A too critical anthologist. 16[57] The conversations & actions of lovers have to be construed differently from the similar words & actions of other people. Actions & words in both cases may be commonplace & banal, but with lovers they mean always: ‘No matter what I say or do I cannot express my delight in you, so I am trying it this way now & you must try to understand.’ 16[58] Some people’s judgment is acute in respect of the current value of things; they know what is fashionable & what is unfashionable; they are ‘in touch.’ And some historians have this quality of judgment also about the past. But such people are rarely able to escape from this sort of acuteness; they don’t even consider the intrinsic value of things. And, in the case of the historian, he doesn’t get beyond the ‘feel’ of the time. It is the faculty of journalists, good journalists, & salesmen – the man who knows what currently an artist’s pictures will fetch. 16[59] The tenderness of making love is the hope that in penetrating each other’s bodies that a secret other than the secret of lust will be revealed.
16[59] To have the dignity of time without the disabilities of time. 16[59] ‘Values’ are what people parade who have neither settled habits of behaviour nor religious beliefs to suggest to them what they should do. 16[61] The Masai when they were moved from their old country to the present Masai Reserve took with them the names of their hills, plains & rivers and gave them to the hills, plains & rivers in the new country…they were trying, in exile, to keep their past by a formula. And to keep one’s past is a necessary component of keeping one’s identity. It is self-preservation. If you must inhabit a new country, then the tribe must not be split up. How to avoid the shame of extinction? This is primitive; we feel it less, for our own identity is more concerned with personal memories, than tribal or community: but it is still something we cannot do without. 16[63] Curious as a concierge. 16[63] Dum vivimus vivamus: you’ve gotta live it up boy.
16[63] Civil association concerned with people whom we do not particularly like, with whom we do not agree, whom we may even despise or even hate, but with whom we must have a relationship because we live near them or have come to be concerned with them in common undertakings. 16[64] With attention narrowed down to listening for faux pas. 16[64] Teeming with second-hand dealings with life.
Notebook 17 (April 1961)1 17[01] One who turns away from no-one but the one who loves her. 17[02–03] A man’s ‘system’ is usually of very little interest except to himself: it is his own particular & exclusive ‘modernity.’ We should look for ‘something else’; and often the great systematizers (like Hegel) are great because they have more of the ‘something else’ than others. The ‘something else’ is difficult to define, except that it has a casualness & a contingency about it. At bottom it is the reminiscences of the intellectual folk-tunes of Europe; it is what connects a man to the roots, which are always contingent. Comte would be a good subject to study in this manner, because these reminiscences are so over-laid. But they are there. This absurd worship of ‘humanity’ & the Comtian ‘heroes’ – it is an ancient perception that gods & heroes have little to separate them. Ancient taboos; the practice of sacrifice. And the trauma [1] LSE 2/1/17. Soft cover, black with gold trim, 18 cm × 12 cm, ruled. Recto folios numbered 1–74. Autograph, ink with occasional pencil. Title page: ‘XVII /April 1961. / Mar. 1964 / To cherish the pride / of those with whom you / are associated, as / partner or adversary, as highly as your own.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 19, Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions (London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1906); 52–3, A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, tr. E.F.J. Payne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), §§399–400; 65, Henry James, Washington Square (New York: Harper & Bros, 1881).
which the replacement of matriarchy by patriarchy has left with us. 17[03] The past is past only for history; elsewhere it is present. The event has gone; but it lives on in fable, in gesture, in turns of speech, in habit, and above all in myth. 17[03] Speed may not be the essence of justice, but it has a virtue of its own. 17[04] ‘Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in Heaven.’2 (‘Heaven’ here means – ‘not as a “natural” world but as God’s artefact & dwelling place.’) 17[05] Philosophy à la Hume ‘Do not strive to seek after the true, only cease to cherish opinions.’ A Zen Master.3
[2] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Thomas Traherne.’ Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, ed. B. Dobell (London: B. Dobell, 1908), p. 20. [3] See Jianzhi Sengcan, aka Chien-chih Seng-ts’an, ‘On Believing in Mind,’ in D.T. Suzuki, Manual of Zen Buddhism (Kyoto: Eastern Buddhist Society, 1935).
17[05] ‘It was when the Great Way declined that human kindness & morality arose.’ Lao Tzu. i.e. with the rise of self-consciousness, animal grace is no longer sufficient for the conduct of life & must be supplemented by conscious & deliberate choices between right & wrong. 17[06] ‘Turning to God without turning from Self.’4 i.e. pursuing personal ends with religious passion. Imposing our ‘ideals’ with religious conviction and passion. 17[06] The morality of ideals is ‘idolatry’ – the worship of what we desire; objects recognized as Gods. 17[07] The ‘individualism’ of Chuang Tzu; its conditions. Belief in the supreme importance of cultivating one’s own powers. No pursuing ‘goodness,’ or obeying the law. Freedom from reputation & a desire to exploit life. [4] Oakeshott’s note: ‘William Law.’ The quotation has not been traced, but William Law (1686–1761), Anglican mystical theologian, typically argued that ‘all turning to self is so far turning from God’: see Selected Mystical Writings of William Law Edited With Notes And Twenty-Four Studies In The Mystical Theology Of William Law And Jacob Boehme (London: C.W. Daniel Company Ltd, 1938), p. 97.
17[08] Confucius’ belief in a moral tradition saved him from extreme moral positivism. Filial piety & brotherly obedience. The value of ritual. ‘When the heart is uneasy we support it with ritual.’ 17[09] The Sages of old: all that was worth handing on died with them; the rest they put in their books. 17[09] The Platonic tradition of political philosophy; the government of a state is a reflection of the self-government of a ruler. 17[09] The Sages – they are the inventors of goodness and duty and of the laws which embody morality. Perhaps, in the circumstances, it was a useful invention: it was a remedy for a disease, but it left its own mark. Schools of moral instruction. 17[09] Rulers cannot rule without a Sage counselor (hsien). Mencius. The Stoic notion of government in the 16th century.
17[11] Chuang Tzu Dim your light. The importance of seeming unimportant. No man can be both admired and at peace. Live unknown: Epicurus. 17[12] Nimrod was a tyrant who conquered the whole earth; heaven alone defied him. Many of his subjects, including his son Abraham, still worshipped the God of Heaven & were aghast at his iniquities. He therefore decided to make war upon God & became the King of Heaven as well as of earth. He built a great tower (the Tower of Babel) from the top of which he shot an arrow at God. The arrow fell down again, dripping with blood. But Nimrod suddenly became grey & old. Too feeble to move, he lay till a host of ants devoured him.5 17[12] For one thing to become as good as another is death. 17[13] When knowledge is the recognition of something absent. 17[14] It is said that in China those who live in the North speak a language incomprehensible to those who live in the South, and a Southerner is unable to understand a Northerner; but the inhabitants of every village which lies between the North and the South understand [5] Oakeshott’s note ‘See p. 44’ refers to 17[38–48], below.
the speech of the villages which lie immediately to the north & the south of them. It is the same with nearly all words: the gradual change of meaning mediates the change, but what the 16th century understood is quite different (sometimes) the opposite of what the 19th century understood. 17[14] I had nothing to offer to her vanity. 17[15] There is nothing intrusive in ‘history’; no ‘intruders.’6 17[15] The experiences & the achievements of the 16th century explorers & voyagers seldom entered the poetry of the time, were seldom the theme of imaginative writers. It is only when they were receding, when they were remembered, that they became poetic themes. They were more important to Drayton than to Shakespeare, and more important to Milton & Donne than to Drayton. The themes of imagination – ancient Greece & Rome, Italy, English history & legend, Arcadia. 17[16] Racine & Milton are the only poets who thoroughly followed out the humanist ideal of style & were not destroyed by it.
[6] This remark occurs beneath a quotation from C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 4–5.
17[17] Courage ‘Moral constancy’ and ‘philosophy.’7 To endure the toothache with patience – this is ‘philosophy.’ The ‘superior man’ (Confucius); ‘the Magnanimous Man’ the sapiens/apatheia of the Stoic – the good will of Kant; the elect of the Calvinist, the importance of ‘living alone’ (Epicurus, Chuang Tzu) – to be free (Spinoza); ‘courage’ of Vauvenargues: all manners of being superior to fortune, invulnerable; of being a ‘mortal god’: Milton’s Christ & his Satan. Unconquerable. Not by Platonic wisdom (contemplation, the vita contemplativa, Aristotle); and not by succeeding – by having good fortune; but by something else – the Platonic courage; the Hobbesian ‘pride’. The hardness of it all; that is only Vauvenargues – ‘coeur tendre et stoique’ hits the right note. 17[18] Public and Private – two spheres of activity, each with its own character, separate; Home & the State. Society on the other hand confuses them; ‘Private’ becomes ‘public’ and together they are ‘social.’ Public gardens. 17[18] One of the most remarkable happenings of modern times was the way in which old soldiers, retired after a generation of war, got out their uniforms, saddled their horses and took flight into a dream [7] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Donne, Sermon 75.’ See The Works of John Donne, D.D., Dean of Saint Paul’s, 1621–1631. With a Memoir of His Life, ed. H. Alford, 6 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1839), iii.356: ‘moral constancy…is somewhat above the carnal man, but yet far below the man truly Christian.’
world when Napoleon landed from Elba. A triumph of poetic imagination over reason and bon sens. ‘Il se lève.’ 17[20] The military-man. The relics of chivalry in professionalism. Conrad: Mirror of the Sea. The heroic age. 17[20] People have a great passion for happiness; they seek it & consider that it is their right. This is an invasion of lower-middle class morality. 17[21] On Living Abroad A world of contemplative images; detached & framed by their unfamiliarity. Cp. the Romans & Greek sculpture. To live abroad is to live a more detached life, unless one were to try to seem to be a native. A sense of escape from all that is homely & habitual, from the dust of vain associations. Being born again to youth; the world as fresh as it seemed at twenty. 17[21] The only new world is the past.
17[22] Prejudice is knowing the answer to a question without knowing that it is an answer to a question. Loss of prejudice is loss of answers without realizing that they were answers to questions. 17[23] Pugnacity is an almost unimportant feature of the character of the military man; indeed, he may be almost devoid of it. Though Nelson had his pugnacious streak, Wellington, very little. 17[23] To have a head so full of ideas that there is no room for sense. 17[23] The dreamers are those who let the world form itself around them, enchanted with whatever appears. They have no problems, they live in a world of happenings. Those who imagine the world different from what it is & who try to impose their imaginings upon the world as it is – these we call ‘dreamers.’ But they are not, they are incapable of dreaming. 17[24] Misfortune sometimes makes us wicked; but then ‘misfortune’ happens only to a certain sort of man – I mean happenings which are recognized as ‘misfortunes.’
17[24] Historical explanation – the reference of the circumstantial to circumstances – a whole in which everything is contingent – even the whole. Explanation of what is recognized to be circumstantial (contingent) without recourse to the necessary. ‘History’ is concerned with occasions, not causes. 17[25] What not to say: Of a book called A Grief Observed in which a man recollects a deeply felt grief in tranquility & makes of it a poetic image – ‘it is safe to recommend this rather unusual book to anyone who has recently suffered bereavement.’8 17[26] The fall of aristocracy. Dragged down by the fear of being conspicuous. The worst the lower-middle-class did for themselves was to generate in others a fear of being unlike themselves – inconspicuousness on account of mediocrity. Mediocracy. The rule of the insignificant. 17[26] It may be hoped that God is a Neapolitan rather than a Mancunian or a Bostonian. But it does not follow that Naples is the better place to live: God may not be so desirable as a neighbour. 17[26] Every great man treats the earth as if it were the boards of a stage; but one has to be a great man. [8] C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber & Faber, 1961).
17[27] Every norm is an artificial construction, an approximation to which is never wholly desirable. The importance of ‘norms’ is not their correctness/ comprehensiveness but their integrity. 17[27] ‘Nature’ for practical purposes does not exist. What exists everywhere (except for negligible parts of the world) is the world of ‘objective mind.’ For scientific purposes, ‘nature’ (what the scientist studies) is wholly ‘mind.’ The world is a world of ‘facts’ not things. 17[27] Government imposes uniformity – most profitably a negative uniformity of abstention from certain conduct. Uniformity, as such, is ugly, boring, ‘natural,’ & undesirable. Some is necessary, unavoidable; there should be as little as possible. Uniformities which emerge (i.e. in electrical fittings or in the pitch of nuts & bolts) are better than those which are imposed. Law (as distinct from taboo or direction) is the least restricting & the most desirable manner of imposing uniformity. 17[28] Artifice: (1) Artificial flowers; statue (different material). (2) A cathedral (nothing to correspond in ‘nature’). (3) A cox’s orange pippin (Same material modified).
A field of wheat. 17[28] The aristocrat is ‘detached’ in a strange, often non-poetic, manner, from both ‘nature’ & ‘other people.’ He does not seem to depend. 17[28] ‘Charm’ & ‘faith’ & ‘grace.’ 17[29] The ‘law’:— ‘Slavery, feudalism, individualism, collectivism.’ This ‘idealistic’ conception of legality belongs only to the politics of scepticism – the politics in which what you do is much less important than how you do it. 17[29] To him the world was a bride, each unveiling a surprise and a delight, each a joy – a pain. 17[29] The sweetest success cannot entirely obliterate the taste of that doubt which is inseparable from every human enterprise. 17[30] ‘When you know what things are really like, you can make no poems about them.’
To know what things are really like is an accomplishment from which it is difficult to escape again into the world of possibilities. 17[30] As ‘Imperialists’ the British have never been disposed to condescend to their subjects by an exercise of understanding. This is at once their modesty & their strength; it is in this that they left their subjects ‘free.’ It is because of this that they have been hated more than tyrants are hated. 17[31] Poetic images – characters, situations, scenes, phrases – inhabit a common world together, the world of aesthetic creatures (images). Ulysses, Faust, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Cherubims, Celia, Bovary, Lord Jim; the death of Hamlet, the death of Boris, the death of Insarov; etc. etc: – are comparable with one another, because they inhabit a common world, in a manner in which they are not comparable with any real person, scene, or situation. With some poetic images it may be said that they are related to one another – cousins, brothers, parents. This is the world of art, autonomous and articulated. 17[32] When, because you are a philosopher (i.e. engaged in explaining things), you find that many, perhaps most, of the activities of the human race have ceased to have relevance for you, you have yourself succumbed to irrelevance. There is no reason why you should not lose sympathy with many, perhaps most, of the activities of the human race, but you are guilty of an ignoratio elenchi if you think it is because you have found an explanation for them.
17[33] The difference between moral dispositions which are part of one’s amour-propre and those which are ‘principles’ or ‘ideals’ or are recognized as independent virtues of a certain character. Is morality entirely itself if its precepts are not part of one’s amourpropre? The morality of ‘honour,’ of ‘pride.’ 17[33] Fatalism can be immensely powerful, but it is something learnt, acquired; and consequently it can put to sleep, but it cannot kill, desire, the thought of the future, the pain of frustration. It is a medicine, not a food. 17[34] For exactly 50 years (1814–1864) the British ruled in Corfu. What did they leave behind? Traces of habits (picnics), fashions (sidewhiskers & top-boots), rock cakes, chutney, dignity, bookkeeping, virtue, Church bazaars, hunting, eccentricity. Some legends attached to persons whose names have become corrupted. Some traces of duty & of the military man’s character. A saying or two. A modification of the landscape. Cricket (the chalked stumps against the walls of the alleys of Corfu). Was it things like these that the Romans left in Britain? 17[35] nostalgia, what did it mean? 17[35] There was a species of mischievous sprite which succeeded on the death of Pan as the representation of disorder in the world,
of minor evil. They could be placated with food (a saucer of milk or a cake), but only temporarily. But they were capable of no final destructiveness. There is a story of them in Corfu (where they are called Kallikantzaroi): during the ten days before Good Friday they are all engaged in the underworld upon the task of sawing through the giant plane-tree whose trunk upholds the world. Every year they almost succeed, but the cry ‘Christ is Risen’ saves us all by restoring the tree & driving the malicious spirits up into the world again for another year. 17[35] How nearly we are all continually destroyed. No certain salvation. 17[36] Sea & land are different worlds which generate different sorts of inhabitants. To each belongs a life of a different intensity. They never really touch one another: the life long-shore is a mixture which deceives. It is not, therefore, surprising that anyone who, like Nelson, was at home on the sea, should not know how to behave on land. 17[37] ‘The birth of the founder of our religion.’ Queen’s Xmas broadcast 1961. How strangely positivistic & unchristian an expression to come from an acknowledged ‘believer’: ‘The Birth of God.’
17[37] The titles of so many books give one the feeling of déjà vu. 17[37] The chief interest: man, his conduct & the excuses & explanations he offers for it. 17[38–48] The History of Creation Before the creation of the world, God made angels: free intelligences & free wills. He made them so that he should not be alone. It is the image of a restless, discontented God. He gave the angels freedom because the praise & the companionship of slaves is not worth having. Some of the angels rebelled; they rebelled against their subordinate status. Satan desired to be as great as God himself – to be an independent God. ‘I will be like the Most High.’9 Satan & those whom he suborned from their obedience were cast of out of heaven by Michael & the faithful angels. He fell, ‘like lightning from the heavens.’10 After his fall (according to the Talmudists) he had four wives: Lilith, Naamah (daughter of Lamech), Iggereth & Mahalath, & raised a brood of devils. According to some Lilith is identical with Eve. The character of Satan is like the character of God – he desires & longs to be worshipped: this is the significance of the Temptation of Christ. [9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Isaiah 14:14.’ [10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Luke 10:18.’
As a result of his fall, Satan was lame – like Hephaestus, Typhon, Loki, Wayland Smith, Vulcan. Human Beings God made man for the same reason as he had made the angels. 1a. He created man & woman.11 They were created from dust gathered from the four corners of the world. The woman created at the same time as Adam was Lilith & was Adam’s first wife. She was expelled from Eden & afterwards Eve was created. She was expelled because she became proud & vexatious to Adam. 1b. The first human creation was a man-woman – male-female.12 They were joined, back to back at the shoulder, & were hewn apart with a hatchet. 2. God created Adam out of dust, and, after the expulsion of Lilith, Eve was created from a rib of Adam’s.13 This ‘subordinate’ Eve was recognized by God & by Adam as a proper mate for Adam because she was ‘Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.’14 Lilith, after she was expelled from Eden, married Satan. Eden Two special trees: the tree of life & the tree of the knowledge of good & evil (Genesis 2:9). Adam forbidden to eat of the second. The world & everything in it at the disposal of Adam.
[11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Genesis 1:27.’ [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Genesis 1:27, v. 2.’ [13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Genesis 2:18.’ [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Genesis 2:23.’
The Fall 1. Disobedience. 2. Satan tempted Eve (a) with the promise that to eat would give eternal youth & beauty, immunity from disease, old age, and death. Vanity. (b) with the promise that she & Adam would ‘be like Gods.’15 She gave Adam to eat in order that he also should be ageless. 3. The result was ‘self-consciousness’ – they ‘knew that they were naked.’16 The fall of man, then, follows the pattern of the fall of Satan: a desire to be God-like. Pride. Cp. Lao Tzu: man, born innocent & obedient & recognizing his part as that of glorifying god, fell because of an immoderate desire to be ‘wise,’ and from a desire ‘to eat.’ The burden of original sin is ‘self-consciousness.’ Adam & Eve were expelled from Eden, ‘lest they should also eat of the tree of life.’17 There is a contradiction here: the story should run – they ate of the tree of knowledge & desired to be ageless by eating of the tree of life, but they were expelled from Eden before they could do so. After the Fall Adam & Eve wandered disconsolate over the face of the earth. There was darkness everywhere & they were in despair. But God did not abandon them; their penitence touched Him, & he sent the angel Gabriel, who said to them: God has accepted your penitence; pray to Him and after a certain time you will even be [15] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Genesis 3:5.’ [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Genesis 3:7.’ [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Genesis 3:23.’
allowed to return to Paradise. The current conditions of their life were to be:— For Eve to bear children with pain, & for both to have their desires met by the things of the earth but only by work.18 Each time Eve bore children she bore twins, a boy & a girl, and each of these twins were given to one another as man & wife. Of the many children the most notable were: 1. Cain. 2. Abel, & 3. (later) Seth. Cain & Abel Their rivalry: (1) Because each wanted the land of the other – Cain a cultivator & Abel a shepherd. And this dispute was not ended when the earth was divided between them, Cain having the earth & all that was stationary & Abel all that was movable. (2) Because Cain was given Abel’s twin sister for his wife & he wanted his own, better looking, twin sister. Cain’s sister was Calmana & Abel’s Deborah. And Cain killed Abel because Abel had been given Cain’s twin sister. The first-born of Cain & his wife was Enoch. Lamech was his great, great grandson, who by his two wives (Adah & Zillah) got – Jabal & Jubal; and Tubal-Cain & (a girl) Naamah. Later he begat Noah, who begat Shem, Ham, & Japheth. Seth, the last-born of Adam & Eve, begat ‘the race of prophets.’ His first born was Enos. The progeny of Cain & Seth seem to join in Enoch who is alternatively said to be the son of Cain & to have as his descendants Irad, Mehujael, Methusael & Lamech, and the great great grandson of Seth & to have as his forbears Enos (the son of [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Genesis 3:16–21.’
Seth) & Mahaleel, & as his descendants Methuselah & Lamech (the father of Noah).19 (Ham was said also to have earned Noah’s displeasure by making love to his wife when he was in the Ark.) Nimrod & the Tower of Babel20 Noah cursed Ham because Ham had seen his nakedness when he lay drunk and uncovered in his tent.21 (Shem & Japheth, who went to cover their father with a garment ‘went backwards’ & did not see his nakedness.22 Noah blessed them & their descendants.) Shem assumed the leadership on Noah’s death; he was pious & feared a repetition of God’s wrath. But Ham, a more adventurous character, displaced Shem. Ham begat Cush, & Cush in his old age begat Nimrod.23 Nimrod was the spirit child of his father’s old age. Cush gave Nimrod the garment which God made for Adam when he was expelled from Paradise. (Adam had given it to Enoch, the reputed inventor of tailoring, Enoch gave it to Methuselah, Methuselah left it to Noah who took it into the Ark & while it was in the Ark Ham stole it & gave it later to Cush.) Vested in his garment Nimrod became invincible. Nimrod rejected God & trusted to his own might, & he gained a following. But he was uneasy because he feared that somebody, empowered by God, would overthrow him. So he said to his followers: ‘Come let us build a city & let us settle therein, that we may not be scattered over the face of the earth & be destroyed once more by a deluge. And in the midst of our own city, let us build a high tower, so lofty that it will overlap any flood, & so [19] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Genesis 4:18; Genesis 5.’ [20] Oakeshot’s note: ‘See 17[12].’ [21] Oakeshot’s note: ‘Genesis 9:21–2.’ [22] Oakeshot’s note: ‘Genesis 9:23.’ [23] Oakeshot’s note: ‘Genesis 10:8.’
strong that it will resist any fire. Yea, let us do further, let us prop up the heavens on all sides from the top of the tower that it may not again fall & inundate us. Then let us climb up into heaven, & break it up with axes, & drain its water away where it can do no injury. Thus shall we avenge the death of our ancestors. And at the summit of our tower we will place the image of our God with a sword in his hand, & he shall fight for us. Thus shall we obtain a great name, and reign over the universe.’ Even if all were not inspired by so large a presumption, they fell in with the proposal of Nimrod, & saw in the tower a refuge from a future deluge. They built with passion & energy; if a man in the process fell & was killed, nobody took any notice; but if the bricks gave way there was an outcry. Some shot arrows into the sky & they came down tinged with blood & it was said: ‘See, we have killed everyone in heaven.’ (There is a Chinese legend that one of their early kings thought himself so great as to make war on heaven. He shot an arrow into the sky & a drop of blood fell. The king said: ‘See, I have killed God.’) At this time Abraham (son of Shem) was forty-eight & he was filled with grief at the impiety of the followers of Nimrod & prayed: ‘O Lord, confound their tongues for I have seen unrighteousness in the city.’ And God commanded the seventy angels who surround his throne that they should confuse the language of the builders so that no man should understand his neighbour. The angels did as they were commanded, & seventy languages sprang up among the subjects of Nimrod. So they separated from one another & were spread over the face of the earth. The tower itself was, in part, destroyed. Nimrod & his followers were incensed by the preaching of Abraham and they cast him into a furnace (from which he issued unhurt). And Nimrod, in his arrogance said, ‘I will go to heaven and see this God whom Abraham preaches & who protects him.’
His wise men told Nimrod that heaven is very high, so he ordered the erection of a tower. His followers laboured for three years, & every day Nimrod ascended it; but the sky seemed, from the summit, not to be appreciably closer. One morning he found his tower collapsed. But he refused to be defeated & ordered firmer foundations to be laid & a second tower was constructed; but it, also, seemed not to carry him appreciably nearer to heaven. So he decided to get there by another means. He had a large box made & to its four corners he attached gigantic birds, Rocs. They bore him in the box high in the air, but the box was upset by the winds & Nimrod fell out on to a mountain top, without however hurting himself. He returned to the project of the tower, & God confounded his followers by a confusion of languages. A word from God overthrew the tower & Nimrod was buried in the ruins. 17[48] Nimrod persuaded his subjects that when the tower was built he would bring down heaven to earth for them. For this he urged them never to be idle; idleness was punishable by death – idleness in building. The tower was a device for unifying his subjects. When a Tower workman died at his work he was believed to go straight to paradise. Everything was subordinated to the Tower; Nimrod’s subjects became ‘Tower builders.’ Replicas of the Tower were compulsory ornaments in every house. The ‘Tower-motiv’ alone appeared in the life of Babel. Postage stamps. They spoke one language, & said but one thing. Build, not for Nimrod but for the people’s paradise. Students, as the Tower grew higher, formed ‘Heaven parties,’ groups who would enter paradise together. As the Tower grew higher it had to be re-enforced with iron.
As it grew higher, farmers sowed no more crops in expectation of paradise. As it grew higher, Nimrod spent days at the top of it, and the workmen below began to be suspicious that Nimrod was already talking with angels & they were left out of it. He was suspected of playing them false, tricking them. And they downed tools & rushed to the summit to see if Nimrod were sneaking into heaven & leaving them behind – pretending when they reached the top to have come to praise Nimrod. But this invasion of the summit overbalanced the Tower, which crashed to the ground. 17[48] A confusion of tongues & a separation of the nations is connected with a presumptuous building of a tower or an attack upon heaven in the mythology of both the Greeks (Titans) & the Chaldeans & also among the Incas. 17[48] Bridges are built where there have been fords or ferries; it is to these that the roads lead. ‘Water’ streets are usually those which run ‘beside’ water. 17[48] I spoke to you of yourself; he spoke to you of himself; you loved him. 17[49] The difference between the belief that ‘everything is possible’ – i.e., nothing fixed, irreversible, that evil can be turned into good etc; which is attributed (H. Arendt) to nihilists & totalitarian dictators
(Hitler), and the belief, held by a man who feels the mystery of existence, that everything is possible, that there is nothing that may not fall in with the beautiful & harmonious & mysterious scheme of things. Is not this belief only an extension of the belief in government as a sovereign activity? 17[49] Courage is more nearly an hereditary virtue than any other. 17[49] Perhaps the greatest principle in politics is that people love to be frightened. 17[50] ‘The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear.’24 – for the royal depend upon what they are & not what they have done or suffered. This is the reason why it was thought that tragedy is the representation of the life of a prince, & comedy that of an ordinary man.25
[24] See K. Blixen aka I. Dinesen, ‘The Dreamers,’ in Seven Gothic Tales (London: Putnam, 1934). [25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Butcher, Poetics of Aristotle, pp. 232 seq.’ See S.H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry And Fine Art With A Critical Text And Translation Of The Poetics, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1898).
17[50] None of humanity’s most vulgar ideas are left unsatisfied. We have discovered the secret of power: to generate desires & to promise to satisfy them miraculously. 17[51] In the early design of motor cars the radiator was not ‘purely functional’ – i.e. size, shape, position etc were not determined purely in respect of its ‘function’ as a ‘cooler.’ Later they have become purely functional & are now hidden behind a façade. But may they not be said to have had originally two functions? – ‘cooling’ & ‘appearance.’ And may we not reduce everything to a collection of ‘functions.’ Not without depriving ‘function’ of any specific significance. 17[51] ‘Functional analysis’; ‘Rôle’ What is the ‘function’ of the National Gallery? To exhibit, free of charge, a collection of paintings which has been purchased by public money (or bequeathed or given to ‘the nation’) so that all may have the opportunity of seeing them? But how little this tells us of the actual place occupied in London life of the National Gallery. Its expression of national ‘pride.’ It is a place where people go in winter to be warm, where Indians go to try to pick up girls, where Ban the Bombers assemble before a Trafalgar square demonstration – its actual ‘function’ is multifarious & is no ‘function’ at all.
17[54] Compare the words ‘function’ and ‘meaning.’ If for ‘meaning’ we prefer ‘use,’ we should for the same reasons (i.e., context gives use) prefer ‘use’ for ‘function.’ Though ‘use’ has a ‘functional’ usage – e.g. ‘What is the use of?’ But ‘How is X used?’ is not functional. 17[54] ‘The function of poetry.’ Newspapers to wrap up fish and chips. Cp. What happened in the newspaper strike in the USA. Those most hard hit – those who used newspapers to keep warm & those who used them for training dogs for the house. 17[54–55] Function 1. To fulfil some specific need; or related to some specific end. The ends & needs may be variously understood; differences of scale. E.g. The ‘function’ of man is to glorify God (Calvin). The life-process. A social order. 2. To relate to a whole or system or organization. E.g. ‘The function of the liver’ or lungs etc. ‘The function of the entrepreneur’ ‘The function of the Trade Unions’ But here it becomes significant only when the system is specifically defined eg. Trade Unions in England.
The ‘function’ of ‘language’ – communication? This is the defect. Poetry. To apply the concept of ‘function’ indiscriminately brings things together which are unlike. Human actions, personalities, historical events: these have no ‘functions.’ To ‘function’ is not the same thing as to ‘act’ or ‘to happen.’ A man ‘acts,’ it is only a ‘functionaire’ who ‘functions.’ If we attribute a ‘function’ to events & happenings we speak in a historicist manner. ‘Functional analysis,’ then, tells us something abstract about human beings, events etc. The concrete is missed. That surrender of personality which comes with the the performance of function. House of Commons, a ‘function.’ 3. ‘Design’ may or may not belong to a functional analysis. The world of ‘fabrication.’ 4. ‘Office’; ‘purpose’; means & end. ‘Functional.’ ‘A function of.’ 5. The difficulty of determining the ‘end,’ ‘need,’ ‘whole.’ E.g. Cathedrals – ‘religious function,’ but what? Sociological or religious. Ad majorem gloriam dei. But this passes out of the sphere of ‘function.’ 17[56] Everything is to be considered in respect of its nearness to or its distance from Love. Thus blackmail is worse than murder, gluttony than drunkenness. 17[56] Australian ‘grace’: For what we have received, thank God & the British Navy.
17[58] Function What is the ‘function’ of a passport? This is like asking what is the ‘meaning’ of a word, whereas the question, if it is to reveal anything important, should be ‘what are the uses of a passport’? How is it used? What may it do? Its current character, like the current character of all such things, is a palimpsest in which it is not merely the latest writing that is significant. 1. Licence to leave the country, an act as a rule prohibited because it deprived the king of a man’s military services. 2. Licence to an alien to travel in the country (now, visa). 3. Demand that the holder shall be respected when travelling abroad. 4. Voucher of respectability, demanded by the state he is visiting – precaution against crime & political conspiracy. 5. A source of revenue, like all licenses. To think of a man as ‘performing a function’ is to think of an abstraction – an abstraction easily generated in urban life. There men are known only for what they do in an ‘economic system’ – a baker, a miner, a lorry-driver, a chemist. They are not members of a local society which knows them as ‘men’ – no ‘baker’ has a wife, as he does e.g. in a French village, who may be supremely important in the making of bread. In these circumstances, we think of people as being ‘simple,’ ‘functional’ – which in fact they are not.
Just as philosophers have long ago ceased to ask what is ‘the meaning’ of a word, so it is time sociologists ceased to ask what is the function of an institution. 17[59] An ‘intellectual’ is a person governed by a false conception of the relation between theoretical & practical reason, between explanation & action, explaining & doing. His forte is explanation, & on the strength of this he claims to be the custodian of morality. Further, if he is a ‘scientist,’ he believes he has the technical knowledge necessary for government; what he really believes is that by virtue of his technical knowledge he is necessary to his society (which is a technological society) & may therefore dictate. 17[60] We are children of the machine. This means we have forgotten, lost almost all sense of process – at least of process which is not declared upon the surface. A loaf of bread is something one buys; one does not think (one has no knowledge of) the earth, the seed, the corn field, the weather, the plough, the harvest, the threshing machine, the mill – almost the bakery is concealed from us. Light we get from turning down a switch – the process above all the mental process behind the switch is concealed. Therefore we believe that all benefits can come from small efforts – the turning down of a switch – full employment, high wages, free medical service. And we believe in the man who says he can give us everything because we do not think his claims to be beyond reason & because we want what he offers more than we want anything else.
17[61] Religion, even if it does not begin in naïve ancestor-worship, always returns to ancestor-worship. All religion is ‘family’ religion. Perhaps it may be said that Christianity did not establish itself as a significant religion until it became a form of ancestor-worship. God a father. 17[61] tharseo the Greeks connected with breathing – breathing out something the Gods had breathed into one. It was a sort of energy.26 It depended upon a man’s spirit thymos, his ‘breath-soul.’ Similarly the Gods put ‘boldness’ or ‘high-spirit’ tharseo with a man’s thymos.27 cholos – ‘anger.’28 17[62] My physiology.29 Every people has its ‘physiology’ except ourselves who have become both ignorant & rationalistic.
[26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Homer, Iliad, X.482.’ [27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Homer, Odyssey, IX.380.’ [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘R.B. Onians, The Origins Of European Thought About The Body, The Mind, The Soul, The World, Time, and Fate New Interpretations of Greek, Roman and kindred evidence also of some basic Jewish and Christian beliefs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), pp. 52, 56.’ [29] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Onions, Origins.’
17[63] Africa The liquidation of colonial government is an incident overshadowed by a revolution with which it is not very closely connected – a revolution in which Africans have learned to want. What they want they are utterly unable to provide for themselves: they lack skill, habits of industry, organization and capital. That is to say, this revolution in which tribal societies, based upon subsistence farming & magic, are turned into the replica of a modern society based upon materialism & technology, is inspired from the outside. Besides farming of a primitive sort & magic the only asset the African himself has is a certain commercial experience – which he has also acquired from the outside, from Asia & the middle East. 17[64] Democritus. The aidos (respect or revererence) which a man feels for himself is the root of morality.30 Similar to the aidos that a man feels for the law. ‘Secret shame.’ Cp. Gyges & his ring.31
[30] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Diels, Fragment 264.’ See Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ii. 114. ‘Feel shame before others no more than before yourself: do wrong no more if no-one is to know about it than if all men are: feel shame above all before yourself and set this up as a law in your soul so that you may do nothing unsuitable,’ tr. J. Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (London, Penguin, 1987), p. 278. [31] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Plato, Republic, 359d; Jaeger, Paideia, i.328, etc.’ W.W. Jaeger, Padeia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, tr. H. Highet, 3 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939–45).
17[64] Morality – ‘honour’ – amour propre. Honour is the life & soul of a military man. 17[64] Law must have authority. In a system of laws, the authority of each must be the same. In no system of law could every law have moral authority, therefore no law has moral authority, i.e. authority based upon approval of what is commanded, i.e. desirability. The authority of law must be independent of an approval of what it commands. The error of Liberalism is that it has no idea of legitimacy. 17[65] The ‘theory’ is neither the disease, nor the prescription. But it is related to both. 17[66] The worst crime— For the French: parricide de la patrie. For the English: treason. 17[66] For centuries, indeed at all times in the history of Western Europe (except in the Greek polis) ‘Education’ has meant a release from the current vulgarities of the world. A good education & ‘upbringing’ was an entry into a world, not timeless, but relieved from merely current ambitions or occupations. It was a defence, a
stronghold, an emancipation. To have enjoyed it was not only to be armoured, but free, invulnerable. Now, education is merely instruction in the current vulgarities. 17[67] ‘Good and ill fortune are to my mind sovereign powers. It is ignorance to deem that human knowledge can play the part of fortune; and vain is the undertaking of him who presumes to embrace cause & consequences.’32 In other words, every designed action has undesigned consequences, and it is these which compose the world of events. 17[67] If ‘analysis’ were a process of taking to pieces it could be productive of some result – here are the components; although this is not obviously relevant to anything but a machine. But normally what is called ‘analysis’ is a process of taking to pieces & discarding what does not belong to the essence: & this is a worthless activity, because there is no essence. 17[68] ‘Democratic’ (modern) politics & religion ‘Grace is a feeling that God is inside you helping. You tell sinners that they have that feeling, & they’ll soon find it – just as if you tell a man he has a pain he’ll soon find one. Having told them they’ve got the feeling (Grace), they’ll find it; and you’ve only got to tell them what it is saying, & they’re yours, in your power & you’re their “representative.”’ [32] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, i.118.’
The assumption here is that you have to do with those who feel themselves to be sinners & therefore need Grace; all they need to have for you to work on is a feeling of inadequacy, not a want, but a lack of something unspecified, an anxiety, a worry. 17[69] I don’t want to understand it, I only want to know how it works. 17[69] The great defect of most politicians is that they never learned how to play a misère hand. They don’t understand that this is one of the ways of winning. 17[70] Ambitions To be a wonderful old lady of ninety-five & to have been the mistress of Robert E. Lee. 17[71] The world that the ‘intellectual’ has imposed upon us. A world where everything is known by its ‘function’; and where ‘function’ is judged to be good – all else is forgotten or dismissed as of no account. All the unintended by-products are neglected – whereas, these are larger & more important than any ‘function.’ A world where desire is to be fulfilled – no place for frustrated desire, no value. Indeed, ‘frustration’ is only frustration of supposed ‘function.’ A world where every reward should be adjusted to merit; where everything is subjected to this crushing uniformity of ‘function.’
17[72] Lord Leicester, when told that the Education Act had been passed: ‘The game’s up.’ 17[72] Love is imagination before it is feeling. 17[72] Rape is the typical crime of modern politics; politicians rape their victims, rulers rape their subjects; technology is the rape of the earth. 17[72] The hold which a man may have on another man is now based upon the guilty feelings of the subordinate. The ruling class is that class of society which does not, for the moment, feel itself guilty. But to rule is to acquire guilt. The only chance of breaking the chain is the dispersal of guilt. Guilt came into Europe about 1650. 17[73] Documenti – identity card, unemployment card, army record card, employer’s certificates, insurance card, etc etc: – these compose the identity of the modern man, together with photographs & numbers etc. – these constitute his legal existence. 17[73] How to be the enemy of superstition without being the friend of ‘truth’ – a problem never solved by J.S. Mill or any ‘liberal.’
17[74] The moral virtue which contains all others is courage. Courage is to rely solely upon onself. 17[74] Civil Association Politics is the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another – not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life. The art of peace; the art of accommodating moralities to one another. Methods – various. (1) A ‘Law’ (2) An arrangement. Cp. the Key to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is kept by a Moslem – because of the disputes between Christian sects.
Notebook 18 (March 1964)1 18[01] I have to talk about doing & being. We are apt to judge human endeavours in terms of ‘result,’ their success & failure. We think of Christabel Pankhurst in terms of the current right of women to vote & sit in Parliament. And when we do so we think of human conduct as contributing, successfully or unsuccessfully, to a stream of happenings & events in the world. But this is only one side of the matter, & often the least interesting. A man’s endeavours & conduct are also his attempts to pass his own life with some sort of satisfaction; sometimes, even, to be judged in respect of how they allow him to get through the day, as pass-times. These endeavours are human beings living. Their ‘products’ are insignificant; to fail is as good as to succeed, sometimes better. It’s [1] LSE 2/1/18. Hardback book, red cover, 22 cm × 14 cm, blank. Spine: IVO LAPENNA: State and Law: Soviet and Yugoslav Theory. The book appears to have been misprinted and the pages left blank; Oakeshott may have seen the humour in this but the volume was genuine, published by Yale University Press, 1964. Recto folios numbered 1–38, 124–46. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘XVIII / March / 1964 / All things hang like a drop of dew / Upon a blade of grass. / Yeats / Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors / The art of being in the world. / The art of mortality.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 129, S. Bligh, The Direction of Desire: Suggestions for the Application of Psychology to Everyday Life (London and Edinburgh: Henry Frowde, 1910); 135–6, Jean François Paul de Gondi, Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz, Containing all the Great Events During the Minority of Louis XIV, and Administration of Cardinal Mazarin. To Which are Added Some other Pieces Written by the Cardinal de Retz, or Explanatory to these Memoirs, tr. P. Davall, 4 vols. (London: 1723).
not the ‘promised land’ that counts, it’s the way there. A whole generation wandered in the wilderness; that was their life. This is why ‘courage’ is the only moral virtue completely compatible with the circumstances of human life. For example, we are apt to think of the contraction of civilized living which took place in the 8th century A.D. as a period of quiescence, of ‘waiting.’ We interpret it in terms of what it did, of the future. But it wasn’t like that at all. This is simply what civilized life became by reason of the impact of the invaders – Goths, Avars, Norsemen, Muslims. Nobody was waiting to enter a ‘promised land.’ The sagas are epics of defeat.2 18[02] The Romans made the coastal strip of North Africa, from Tripoli to Tangier, a cultivated land of cities & villages & shady groves. It had peace, security, & prosperity. But it can’t last. People sometimes look for some special reason for throwing away peace & security, but often they merely get tired of it. Change is what people long for, not better or worse. In this they are like God. 18[02] ‘Speak now, or forever hold your peace.’ This is a great principle of civilized life. Where there are wrongs which can be righted only at too great a cost; there must be an Act of Oblivion. We must stay reconciled with our past, & if we can do this only by forgetting, then we should forget. It is like the fiction that a married woman’s children are all legitimate.
[2] The last sentence has been added in a different ink.
No government should require its subjects to approve of the manner in which its original came to power.3 Or a government must invent a legend about its advent which corresponds to current moral approval – like the Americans. 18[02] Lord Harewood, editor of Opera, a director of Covent Garden, boss of the Edinburgh Festival: ‘I’d be prepared to see more control if we get proper subsidies from the government.’ The longing for the concept of lordship. 18[02] With two people who love one another the pain & the cruelty they may cause each other grieves but does not humiliate. 18[03] The S-type Jaguar originated as a gap-filler, in both size & price, between the Mark 10 & Mark 2 Jaguar saloon ranges. Both these cars descended from the XK120 which, 15 years ago, reshaped the concept of British sports car design & led both to the Jaguar series of saloon cars & to the present E-type. The historical perspective is important, because in design the Jaguar S owes something to every Jaguar since the XK120. The six-cylinder 3.4 litre engine dates back directly to those days, while the alternative 3.8 litre unit is an enlarged version of the same engine. The four-speed manual gearbox has been in used in almost every Jaguar model from the XK-120 onwards. The independent rear suspension was developed for the E-type, then used on the Mark 10, while the body shape is an amalgam of Mark 2 & Mark 10. [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Leviathan, Review & Conclusion.’
Surprisingly enough, this mixture of Jaguars adds up in the S-type to an extremely pleasant vehicle… The gear-box is dated. Motor Correspondent, The Sunday Times A ‘constitution.’ Anyone who could write about the five futile republics of France in this manner may be said to understand them in the only way they may be understood. 18[04] Fay ce que vouldras. This, in Rabelais, was a maxim, not an axiom. It was one of the ‘admitted goods’ of European civilization which had become neglected. A plea for a little more play between the working parts of a society, not a gospel of anarchy. How agreeable the world would be if there were a little more variety & a little less uniformity in the human species. And how much more agreeable if we did not find this variety frustrating, but recognized it as we recognized variety in birds & flowers. From Rabelais, through Montaigne, to Pascal – the deepest concern was with what had been neglected. Their ‘Rationalism’ was opposed to ‘dogma,’ & therefore it was a sceptical rationalism. Their arguments, of course, were all aimed to ‘universalize’ what they pleaded for, but this is just the nature of argument. 18[04] Irony Some writers about the past spend their efforts in getting up a demonstration against it – & call it ‘history.’ The one thing which there is absolutely no point in demonstrating against is the past.
18[04] It should be ‘the Curragh Incident,’ not ‘the Curragh Mutiny.’ 18[04] The remarkable thing about Mrs Ruth Harrison’s book Animal Machines is that it shows us to be treating animals just about the same as we treat human beings.4 18[05] All great works of art have a touch of lightness, happiness, almost inconsequence, & this saves us from being oppressed & having to turn away from them. This is true also of great intellectual constructions, like those of Plato, or Hegel, or Leibniz. It must not be understood as an imperfection; it is one of their virtues.5 Where ‘finish’ appears, it should be a natural facility, a correctness which is recognizable as a form of carelessness. Everything is an ‘idiom,’ nothing an ‘essence.’ 18[05] In Mexico the country people, as they go to mass, throw a kiss to the sun as they enter the church, a relic of Aztec sun-worship.
[4] R. Harrison, Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry (London: V. Stuart, 1964). [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 43, Molesworth, p. 602.’ Leviathan was published as vol. 3 of The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. W. Molesworth, 11 vols. (vols. 1–6, 8, 9, London, John Bohn, 1839–41; vols. 7, 10–11, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans).
18[05] The daemon of Socrates, according to the Apology, would sometimes hold him back, but it never urged him forward.6 18[05] Making allowances. Most people, if you allow them three faults, show themselves as tolerable human beings. Why three? Because it is a magic number. 18[06] One view: barbaric— Art is reactionary in its essence; like alcohol, it merely tends to make people forget their unhappiness & forget their ideals and purposes. 18[06] ‘Come back to us in dreams, if you will; but not as a ghost.’ Australian native to his dead kinsman.7 18[06] The trouble is that I can’t bring myself to take a scientific interest in Lionel Robbins.8 When this is lost, all is lost.
[6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Plato, Apology, 31.’ [7] See 20[25], below. [8] Lionel Robbins (1898–1984), Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics 1929–61.
18[06] ‘Felix’; the Romans bestowed this epithet with exquisite perception. ‘Fortunate,’ rather than ‘happy.’ 18[07] In a ritual an item or a passage does not need to be intelligible so long as it is duly performed or enacted. There is no ‘plot’ to which any item may be considered to be extraneous or superogatory. 18[07] Modes of human experience. ‘Knowing’ – various sorts. ‘Doing.’ ‘Contemplating.’ ‘Feeling.’ This need not be in the service of any of the others. To feel ‘right with the world’ may be ‘make believe,’ but it is something quite different from an hypothesis about the results of action. Religion, or one aspect of it. Release.9 18[07] For Aristotle clansmen are not so much men of the same blood as men of the same milk – homogalacts.10 Blood-brotherhood & milk-brotherhood are ultimately the same. For Aristotle the ‘friendship’ which distinguished the early polis was ‘watery’ – as compared with the blood & milk of the tribe.
[9] A question mark has been placed next to the passage on ‘feeling.’ [10] See Marrett, Faith, Hope, and Charity, p. 171.
18[07] ‘Ada Spelvexit was one of those naturally stagnant souls who take infinite pleasure in what are called “movements.”’11 18[08] Taboo – the act generates its own ‘punishment’ which is a consequence of the act. ‘Punishment’ has nothing to do with desert, or with intention. It is like catching an infectious disease. Law – the act is judged, & the punishment is assigned – & it does not matter if it is pre-assigned. 18[08] ‘Progress’ is an affection for the new. It may be connected with the mere multiplication of the human race. For this has greatly increased the variability of human ‘pro-feelings,’ that is, ‘the new,’ & thus the ‘pro-feeling’ for ‘the new.’ 18[08] The difference between a communal & an individualistic morality:
[11] The character of Ada Spelvexit appears in H.H. Munro, aka Saki, The Unbearable Bassington (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1912), Ch. VII: ‘Ada Spelvexit was one of those naturally stagnant souls who take infinite pleasure in what are called “movements.” “Most of the really great lessons I have learned have been taught me by the Poor,” was one of her favourite statements. The one great lesson that the Poor in general would have liked to have taught her, that their kitchens and sickrooms were not unreservedly at her disposal as private lecture halls, she had never been able to assimilate.’
(1) ‘Conscience is self-judgment in the name of the tribe.’12 (2) Conscience is one’s own good opinion of what one has done or intends. (Hobbes) aidos. And then (3) Hegel: conscience is the subjective recognition of Recht. 18[08] The story about the ape may be told without embarrassment to each member of the party privately, but not to the whole party at once. A. says: This ‘proves’ that the whole is something other than the sum of its parts. B. says: This is ‘explained’ by the proposition that the whole is something other than the sum of its parts. But: (1) A’s ‘proof ’ is not an explanation. (2) It ‘proves’ nothing. (3) It may be explained by this proposition, but it is susceptible of other & less extravagant propositions. ‘Is an example of.’
[12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Clifford.’ See W.K. Clifford, ‘On the Scientific Basis of Morals,’ in Lectures and Essays, ed. L. Stephen and F. Pollock, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1879), i.116.
18[09] ‘A “reasonable” character is one who has a store of stable & worthy ends, & who does not decide about any action till he has calmly ascertained whether it be ministerial or detrimental to any one of these.’13 Add: (1) That ‘ascertaining’ this is a matter of conjecture, not proof. (2) That having ‘ascertained’ that it is ‘ministerial’ to one of these, it also has to be decided whether the end concerned is that which is, on this occasion, to be preferred to any other – because this ‘store of stable & worthy ends’ is not necessarily, or usually, selfconsistent, & action which may promote one may be detrimental to others. In any case, this is how one might behave, but not how we usually behave. In most cases the answer to the sum has been ascertained long ago & is followed by custom, even habit, but not without choice. Is it possible to prove the worthiness of any end? What does ‘prove’ mean? And if we had ‘proof ’ what would this entail? ‘Ends’ could not be separately proved to be worthy, they may be conjectured to be worthy of pursuit on this occasion. 18[10] ‘In the ordinary, the indifferent affairs of life we content ourselves with much less than demonstration. We content ourselves, & have to be content with the balance of probabilities: & then we act reasonably, because in the ordinary affairs of life no passion [13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), ii.532.’
distorts our judgment…The balance of probabilities, in short, is the truth.’14 Not ‘probabilities’ (which concern frequencies in a finite series), but ‘likelihoods.’ Add: this is true not only of the ordinary & the indifferent, but in the fundamental. Cp. Pascal’s wager. Also, ‘passion’ enters at an earlier stage & is not to be merely excluded. What determines the end in relation to which this calculation is undertaken? Passion, prejudice, custom, etc. etc.? To the convinced Jacobite, his duty to rally to the standard raised by one of the Pretenders would be self-evident. 18[10] A ‘criterion’ is something that ‘settles’ the question. 18[11] Pragmatism – ‘our beliefs are really rules for action…to develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce’ etc.15 This neglects the distinction between practical & explanatory beliefs, and it neglects the fact that most practical beliefs are ‘fitted’ to produce a great variety of conduct. E.g. ‘Fatalism’; ‘predestination’ etc. It explains nothing to call it an ‘atrocity,’ but it displays & recommends a certain attitude towards it. [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘C.F. Keary, The Pursuit of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), pp. 9–10.’ [15] W. James, Pragmatism A New Name For Some Old Ways Of Thinking Popular Lectures On Philosophy (London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1916), p. 46.
18[11] Not enough has been said about the love of adventure. It is different from every other love. God, clearly, has a great love of adventure. 18[11] In pragmatism theory & practice are made to coincide. It is the counterpart of the current assimilation of political & social activity. The only writer I know who understood the virtues of pragmatism & distinguished them from its vices, is Bradley. 18[12] Amour-cameraderie (Camille Bos).16 This was the notion of marriage which, for a short time in England, in the Edwardian era, was the ideal of a certain sort of ‘progressives’ – the sort which Rebecca West so admirably depicts in Treason.17 It went with early suburban life, electric light, ‘progressive’ education, hobbies, etc. It was admirable in its sincerity, but its correspondence with life was exiguous. Chintz. Life, in fact, is much more like Ibsen, & this was the escape from Ibsen. The remarkable fact that the relations of those who were thought of as exemplifying it – J.S. Mill, Shaw, the Webbs, etc. etc. bore next to no correspondence with it. Most of the ‘Fellowships’ & ‘Communities’ of the time which were designed to exemplify it in fact broke on it. It was unknown to Stendhal.
[16] Camille Bos (1868–1907), author of Psychologie de la croyance (Paris: F. Alcan, 1901), and Pessimisme, féminisme, moralisme (Paris: F. Alcan, 1907). [17] R. West, The Meaning of Treason (New York: Viking Press, 1947).
18[12] Tolstoy thought that no ‘sincere & serious man’ could possibly disagree with the proposition that sexual intercourse was giving way to a ‘weakness’ & should never be thought of as a pleasure. Epicurus, of course, agreed with the proposition.18 18[13] Teleocratic politicians are wiley. Knowing the opposition there is among civilized people to living in a zoo (security maximum, & all found) they have invented the political counterparts of the Mappin Terraces and Whipsnade. This creates the illusion that they are not teleocrats at all, & that their ‘subjects’ are ‘free.’ 18[13] The ‘renegade priest’ became an ‘art type’; it then began to be copied in real life. It had the cachet of an art-type. 18[13] The remarkable thing about the age we live in is that beliefs & opinions are favourably influenced by considerations based upon statistics: the more who believe the truer it seems to be. Gresham’s law has it that the dilute drives out the more concentrated, but it doesn’t assert that the dilute is more valuable. We live among people who tend to vote for the side they believe to be winning. The pollsters determine who is going up & who is going down, & the vote follows the pollster. The nemesis. But it was long ago that Christians took it as a sign of the ‘truth’ of their faith that millions were converted to it. They should have [18] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Tolstoy, The Relations of the Sexes, p. 27.’ L. Tolstoy, The Relations of the Sexes, ed. V. Tchertkoff (London: C.W. Daniel, 1901).
seen this as a sign of usefulness, not ‘truth.’ And that, after all, is a recommendation for a religion. Cp. Marxism – a farrago of nonsense said to be important because a third of the world’s population believes it to be sense. But what a third? And do they believe it? 18[14] ‘Mr Alexander Balmain Bruce Valentine, chairman of London transport, woke his two daughters to-day & told them he had received a knighthood in to-day’s Birthday Honours List… ‘He had been attending the international railway Congress in Dublin, & hurried back to his nine-roomed neo-georgian house…’ How vulgar can you get? Why not remind us once again of the salary he gets, that he buys his suits at Burton & his cheese at the Co-op & that he’s a scholarship-boy? 18[15] How much of what in medieval times was believed about the world was a combination of the attribution of auctoritas to classical writers and the mere contingency of what they knew of classical writers – what had happened to have survived & be available. 18[15] Evidence is what is elicited in cross-examination; other questions, other answers. 18[15] The barrister’s role – enough is enough, do not ask too many questions.
Claughton Scott cross-examining a farmer claiming damages for cattle having flattened his corn. After a number of questions designed to cast doubt on the cause of the damage: ‘This was in September wasn’t it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘It was rather a wet September wasn’t it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Rain is apt to beat down corn at that time of year, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes, but it couldn’t have shat on it.’ 18[15] I was wrong about ‘fictitious persons in fictitious love’; its familiarity is not accounted for by experience. ‘Falling in love’ & ‘passionate love’ (taking the whole population of the world) are exceedingly rare experiences. 18[15] A cure for a disease which does not exist. 18[15] The gleam & glitter that only candle-light gives to eyes; even the dullest become stars. 18[16] When excommunication, expulsion, or indeed any other penalty, is understood to be the decision of the ‘whole community’ a severity is introduced which is absent when penalties are understood to be the decisions of rulers or governments. Those who suffer these penalties have no refuge; every man’s hand is assumed to be against him.
A Russian banished to Siberia by the Tzar found in Siberia a welcome; those among whom he lived, even the Governors of Provinces, did not think of themselves as having participated in the ban. That is why, in idea at least, a King’s Court is less severe than a People’s Court. Where ‘the People’ is the prosecutor, those convicted have no refuge. There are no interstices in such a society where a man might hide. Calvinist & Papal excommunication: the Pastor is the perpetual executor of the congregational decision; but the parish priest who does his duty in refusing ‘communion’ remains a friend. There is no total excommunication. 18[17] ‘Insult,’ ‘injustice,’ ‘injury.’ Three attitudes to a happening (to ourselves or to another); three interpretations. We reveal ourselves in our interpretation – or, perhaps, in our first interpretation, because reflection may always generate an interpretation in which all three are recognized. ‘Injury,’ I suppose, is the least sophisticated of the three; ‘insult’ is aristocratic; ‘injustice’ is somewhere between. 18[17] La belle laide. One of those nuances – so many of them – which we owe to the genius of the French. All absolutes are abstractions. 18[17] One may renounce the world, disregard it. But if you want to fight it, do not suppose that you can be successful without cheating. The Stoic of the 16th century was presented with the choice – retirement from the world, or reform. But he thought that he could reform the world (when he did think it) by his own virtue.
18[18] In criminal investigations, what is called ‘motive’ is, properly speaking, ‘intention’; & ‘intention’ is the result which it is desired to achieve. ‘Motives’ ‘explain’; intentions indicate who done it. 18[18] A lorry broke down on a lonely road in Abyssinia. The driver could not get it going again, & set off to walk to the nearest town to help. The rocks were full of baboons who had climbed down to watch the driver’s efforts. When he got back with a mechanic & a breakdown truck, he found that the baboons had mastered the use of the spanner & were busy unscrewing the lorry, nut by nut. Politicians; clever & willing to learn. 18[18] A life too thickly orchestrated, in which the melody is lost in elaboration. A life like Brahms or Wagner, not like Mozart. 18[19] A mind that deals in symbols, catchwords & large abstractions, unconfused by concrete reality. 18[19] His only use for thought was to contrive what he had intended & to justify what he had done.
18[19] The human race reduced to a race of ants hurrying obediently from school to work, from work to pension, so painless a living that they will not know when they are dead. 18[19] ‘Higher education’: its range & scope must be increased ‘to meet the ever increasing need for trained minds.’ Would you believe it? 18[19] aidos – the only thing a man can betray is himself. Sometimes it is said: ‘his own conscience’ – but this is merely an unfortunate way of theorizing it. 18[20] ‘A “Ministry of Care” should be created: children now the concern of the Health Service, the Education Service, the Home Office should be brought within one orbit.’ Mr Menday, Warden of a Boys Training School. Yes; there should be somebody ‘in charge’ of everything & everybody. I wonder where ‘parents’ come in? 18[20] ‘Many so-called criminal offences are nothing more than the expression of a desire to be orientated.’ This may be an explanation, but it tells us nothing about what to do with the delinquent.
18[20] One of the remarkable things about courage is that it can be communicated so easily. One can almost procure courage from a courageous man. 18[20] The world being what it is, we must know what to give up to it in order to keep it quiet – the sea-captain who threw his coat into the stormy sea & said, ‘Take that.’ 18[21] ‘Non est tanti.’ Ovid.19 An emotion foreign to the young & the very old alike: the one cannot feel it, & for the other it is indiscriminate. The confidence of experience. 18[21] The greed for the spectacular. 18[21] People who have no selves other than those created by ‘experts’ who tell them what they are. 18[21] The diagnosis of schizophrenia: always in the concepts of one or other the ‘schools.’ And schizophrenia is so multiple a disease that each can make a plausible diagnosis. Diagnosis & ‘explanation.’ [19] Possibly an allusion to Ovid, Fasti, Bk VI, l. 701: ‘ars mihi non tanti est.’
One of the interests of schizophrenia is that those who suffer from it make worlds of their own in a more obvious way than normal people. The oddity of the worlds is not, in fact, much greater than the oddity of the worlds created by other maniacs – bureaucrats, for example; though perhaps it is more individual & personal. Kafka. ‘Facts’ & ‘fantasies.’ The schizophrenic’s world remains a little less organized & a little more fragmentary, & a little more shapeless. 18[22] I have never liked to see a man ashamed; which is odd, because I am as near as damit ‘shameless’ myself.20 18[22] Care for the hearer’s pride! 18[23] The Cromwellian parliament in which it was proposed to burn all the records in the Tower so that all memory of kings past should be effaced, & that the whole system of life should commence anew. 18[23] ‘Goodness’ is not an object of desire or aversion, it is not the ‘aim’ of endeavour, it is simply the general name for the whole class of things we approve. And so ‘truth’; ‘justice’; ‘liberty.’
[20] 18[22] contains an anecdote about a lie told to Louis XIV by Boileau from S. Johnson, ‘Congreve’: see Lives of the Poets, p. 188.
18[24] Politics is not determined by abstract ideas but by memories. Every nation seeks a great wrong in its past by which to govern its movements; England, perhaps alone, never found a convincing wrong large enough to move it, although serious attempts were made to write the Norman Conquest up into such a wrong. England, on the whole, has come to terms with its memories of wrongs. Not so Scotland or Ireland. 20th century England has discovered the ‘guilt’ which has so long eluded it – the ‘empire.’ 18[24] ‘Freedom’ for a man in prison is escape or release. 18[24] ‘All land belongs to the king.’ ‘Lordship.’ ‘Nationalization.’ ‘Crown hold.’ 18[24] The French have acquired a strangely ambiguous character. Their tendency to mix irony with intensely felt emotions; their political stupidity.
18[25] Once ‘the king’ was a tertium quid, the authority which stood between the noble & the common mass & the custodian of a common law. The redresser of wrongs. Jurisdictio: ‘the crown.’ But when rex in parliamento became ‘the crown,’ its position as a tertium quid was compromised. And the compromise has been subsequently increased. ‘Government’ is now ‘one.’ Gubernaculum has swallowed up jurisdictio. The rule of law = jurisdictio. 18[25] ‘Socialism’ had within it, from its emergence, a tension between a disposition to redistribute wealth & a disposition to create it more abundantly. The second is the ‘Baconian’ inheritance, a technological civilization, & was always joined with the notion that ‘government’ should manage the production of wealth – not because this would ensure its appropriate (equal?) distribution, but because ‘efficiency’ called for a single manager. 18[26] Some people talk as if they thought desirable a world without nostalgia, ennui, indolence, a world of normal people, a world without frustrations, a world of ‘virtue’ without ‘vice.’ But this is both impossible & undesirable. We should acknowledge our debt to the ‘vicious’; they suffer, we have the benefit. Only an army is better without vice because (unlike ‘life’) it has a ‘function’ to perform – victory.
18[27] When ‘politics’ was regarded as the duty of those born to a certain station in society, together with a few who entered the political world by choice but who never gave it its tone, because most became recognizably honorary members of the ‘political’ class – in these circumstances, ‘politics’ was never over-valued. Few of those who engaged in it had political ‘ambitions,’ like the Duke of Devonshire who (although a ‘political’ Duke) felt that the proudest moment in his life was when his pig won first prize at Skipton Fair, their ‘ambitions’ lay elsewhere, if they were ambitious men. Politics as an ‘hereditary duty’ carries with it a certain notion of what politics is about, & it is only absurd when it is allied with another notion of politics. Nobody would seriously mind being ‘ruled’ by those who knew it to be their hereditary duty to rule – but nobody would tolerate being ‘managed’ by such people. And for the most part ‘politics’ in these circumstances was the activity of keeping the ambition of rulers in bounds. 18[28] ‘I’ve become a production manager, not a scientist.’ But there are those who tell us that this is just a ‘science’ of another sort. 18[28] Political discourse. ‘Mary ate her steak. “Cheese?” William suggested when she had finished. He was in no way hopeful that Mary would agree to cheese, but he was exercising a simple cunning. Strawberries & cream were what he had arranged, but offer them directly & they might be refused. Whereas, if something else been declined…“Cheese?” he suggested again. Mary shook her head. “Then strawberries,” William said, “& cream.” He intended the impression that the idea had come to him suddenly. “Thank you,” Mary said quickly, “I should love some.”’
18[29] ‘There is no best MS. of Propertius.’ There are a number of different MSS, each of which has its virtues – virtues of ‘purity,’ ‘integrity’ – not age. None is ‘correct’; each can be made to criticize the others. Their value is their differences. If two agree, one is redundant, & we would rather have something in its place. A MS which lacks ‘integrity’ – i.e., which blends others, does not help. A MS which represents a certain tradition pure, is supremely valuable.21 What is the ‘criterion’: ‘intrinsic probability.’ You must know your author; but your author remains only imperfectly known until you have made his text. 18[29] Politics is concerned with deliberating what shall be done, or what shall be recommended to be done. This, beyond considerations of mere survival (which may be taken to be agreed, or probably agreed), is not a question of determining the best means of achieving an agreed end. As Adam Smith observed, civilized people do not wish merely to live, but to ‘live well,’ live in a certain manner. There are, then, on every occasion many competing goods, no one of which is demonstrably, & in all circumstances, better than any possible alternative, as the end to be pursued. [21] The verso bears a quotation ascribed by Oakeshott to ‘Housman, “Preface” to Manilius’: ‘An editor of no judgment, perpetually confronted with a couple of MSS to choose from, cannot but feel in every fibre of his being that he is a donkey between two bundles of hay. What shall he do now? Leave criticism to critics, you may say, and betake himself to any honest trade for which he is less unfit. But he prefers a more flattering solution: he confusedly imagines that if one bundle of hay is removed he will cease to be a donkey.’ See A.E. Housman, ‘Preface’ to M. Manilii Astronomica. Editio Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), p. xxxi.
How are we to deliberate? How are we to argue in support of what we reasoned? The situation is analogous to the situation of a textual critic constructing the ‘best’ text out of a variety of MSS. The ‘rationalist’ believes that one of their MSS is ‘more correct’ than others, & he may decide this upon some general principle, not concerning the contents of the MS, but concerning its provenance, its age, etc. But this is absurdity, preposterous! As Housman says, ‘the legitimate glory of a MS is not its correctness, but its integrity, & a MS which adulterates its text forfeits integrity in direct proportion as it achieves correctness.’ ‘Give us,’ he says, ‘our ingredients pure: we will mix the salad: we will not take it ready made from any other cook if we can help it.’22 The point is that we have got to make a decision; & the materials upon which this decision is to be made are none of them valuable in virtue of their ‘correctness,’ but only in virtue of their integrity, their purity.23 18[30] Prud’homie The moral characteristic of ‘integrity,’ ‘probity.’ It is a word frequently employed by the Troubadours of the 12th century & de Joinville (Memoirs) attributes it to his master, St Louis.24 [22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A.E. Housman, “The Manuscripts of Propertius,” Classical Review, 9 (1895), 19–29, at 22.’ [23] Oakeshott’s note: ‘A.E. Housman, Selected Prose, ed. J. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 88, 94.’ [24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Roman de la Rose.’ Jean de Joinville, The Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville, tr. E. Wedgwood (London: John Murray, 1906).
It was made the focal point of the moral & the intellectual life by Charron.25 ‘True Prud’homie…is free, candid, manly, generous, cheerful, pleasant, self-possessed, constant, it walks with a firm tread, is bold and confident, pursuing its own path…not changing its gait & pace for wind or weather or any other circumstance.’26 It is this, in Charron’s opinion, which makes it possible for God’s grace to operate in a man, not the Augustinian ‘will.’ Cp. phronesis. Sagesse.27 aidos. Savoir – Sophia. It seems to be the intellectual counterpart to ‘courage.’ Michelet called it an ‘ideal faible et negative, qui ne pas faire encore le héros et le citoyen.’28 Cp. Montaigne: L’honnête homme. Rabelais: & at a more formal level Fénelon. Rousseau has something of it. Pompanozzi.29
[25] Pierre Charron (1541–1603), French theologian. [26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘P. Charron, De la sagesse, trois livres, ed. A. Duval, 3 vols. (Paris: Chassériau: 1824), ii.78.’ [27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See Littré, ad vol.’ Possibly E. Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 5 vols. (Paris and London: Hachette, 1863–77). [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Michelet, Histoire de la France, viii.422.’ See J. Michelet, Histoire de France, 2nd edn, 17 vols. (Paris: Chamerot, 1857), viii.349. [29] Probably Pietro Pompanozzi (1462–1525), Italian philosopher.
Ochino.30 Pascal. And, a long, long way off, Sartre. ‘Honour’ – de Vigny. Self-sufficient. Disinterested. Vauvenargues – ‘courage.’ A rediscovery of the Democritian aidos.31 Amour propre.32 Cp. the current adoration of ‘freedom’ & ‘toleration.’ 18[31] Insouciance. Cp. the Nonchaloir of Charles d’Orléans – detached resignation. The ability to console oneself for having failed is a most important part of the art of being in the world. 18[31] Ataraxia. The ‘sceptic’s’ ‘faith.’ The consciousness of a human certitude which is less than complete certitude; an acquiescence in unavoidable ignorance. Its emotional ally, Metriopatheia: equanimity. The Pyrrhonism of Charron: ‘C’est à peu près et en quelque sense l’ateraxie des Pyrrhoniens, qu’ils appellent le souverain bien.’33 [30] Probably Bernadino Ochino (1487–1564), Italian Franciscan and later a Protestant convert. [31] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Diels, Fragments, 264.’ See 17[64], above. [32] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Jaeger, Paideia, i.328; Plato, Republic, 359a.’ [33] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Sagesse, 321.’ See Charron, De la sagesse, ii.28 n.
18[31] What else can move the mass in one direction? Only a single purpose. 18[32] Pascal & Hobbes What Pascal is concerned with is the fallibility of practical argument & practical judgment. He was aware of geometrical argument & the possibility of demonstration. But he understood that its demonstrative possibility sprang from its abstraction. What is the certainty of practical judgment? For the existence of God, immortality & the virtuous life are all matters of practice. The wager. Hobbes’s argument is also in the form of a wager – but his problem is that of a peaceful & civilized life on earth, whereas Pascal’s problem is that of the ultimate destiny of human beings. Hobbes asks, What is the bet that a man must make to live a peaceful life, & what is the degree of reasonableness in making this bet? Pascal asks, What are the odds in favour of a virtuous life being the best? 18[32] ‘Probability’ = relative frequency of occurrence where occurrences are finite in number & mutually exclusive. (therefore) Pascal & Hobbes are not concerned, strictly, with probability, in the actuarial sense? Or are they, & is this the defect in their thinking?
18[32] How I wish I had now all those oddities which made up my childhood. That bound volume of the Canadian boy’s magazine, for example. 18[33] Note the change that takes place in the idea of Enlightenment. The illuminati of the Italian Renaissance; the éclairé of Jansenism; the Aufklärung & the Enlightenment of the 18th century. The half of 16th century ‘science’ was magic. ‘Enlightenment’ is the child of ‘magic.’ Faust. Cp. Libertins. Libertins spirituels. 18[33] Revolutions design to demolish cathedrals, but like earthquakes, they are apt also to fracture the main drain. 18[33] People whose lives are spent fruitlessly are always fascinating. Not the fruit but the flower.34 18[33] The odd appearance of ‘sanctity’ which belongs to Russia – alike to its autocrats & its revolutionaries. Much too profound to be mistaken for sanctimoniousness. When will the Sovietologists pay attention to Russia. Conrad understood it better than anyone [34] Oakeshott’s note: ‘See E.E. Coxhead, Daughters of Erin: Five Women of the Irish Renaissance (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965).’
else. A sort of detestation of life on earth, a corroding simplicity. And, deepest of all, the belief that the Saviour of the world will be a Russian. Guilt for being alive. Gnosticism. ‘Wherever two Russians come together, the shadow of autocracy is with them.’35 Russia’s gift to the world. 18[34] ‘Loyal’ is an innovation on ‘legal.’ 18[34] To understand a people’s politics is like understanding its language. Grammar, yes; & perhaps some very general principles; but the language is only intelligible in the light of its past, & often of its very remote past. For both language & politics are concrete, ‘historic’; the so-called anomalies which logic detects are not ‘anomalies’ but what in fact is the case. Every politics & every language may be said to have ‘latent’ capabilities, eligibilities, & to understand it is to understand these. Intimations. A language is its vicissitudes. 18[34] A dictionary is a language at rest. Sentences, speech, is a language in motion.
[35] Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (London: Methuen & Co., 1911), p. 105.
18[34] Languages are composite only in vocabulary, not in grammar & syntax. E.g., English construction is Anglo-Saxon; its vocabulary is Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, etc. etc. It is its grammar that has ‘latent’ possibilities. ‘Languages, though mixed in their dictionaries, can never be mixed in their grammar.’ Max Müller.36 18[35] But for the Norman Conquest (or for some other extensive connection between Anglo-Saxon & the Romance languages) English would be very like German. The Conquest not only introduced a new language, the language of the conquerors, but it imposed modifications upon Anglo-Saxon which became a ‘utility’ language losing its inflections etc. A vast simplifying process. There is a period during which a language generates new ‘roots,’ but this is over long before people begin by a reflective act to take notice of what is happening to their language. After this pure productive energy has subsided, the history of the language is a history of change conditioned by a settled character. Many later enrichments of a vocabulary are really recoveries of what had fallen out of use. The language of Spenser & of Shakespeare is easier for us to-day than it was for the early 18th century.
[36] Max Müller (1823–1900), German philologist and Orientalist.
A language may be said, after a time, to have become ‘set on a course’; there is much that may happen to it, but its ‘course’ does not change.37 There is something which ‘presides’ over all subsequent changes. 18[36] ‘English’ was constructed out of 3 Anglo-Saxon dialects, one of which was predominant – the language of the ‘Middle’ of England, the place where the Northern & the Southern met. 18[36] One piece of evidence about changes in pronunciation comes from observing the words which poets rhyme. Pope rhymes: great & complete, obey & tea. Dryden rhymes: unbought & draught. Shakespeare: should & cooled. How do we tell which of the words has changed? There is no principle, yet we are in never in doubt that it is ‘tea’ and not ‘obey’ which has changed; draught & not unbought. Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, I.ii. Rome & room. ‘Rome’ has changed. 18[36] There is a craving to have a meaning in a word, & where a word has become inert, a meaning is given it by finding it a lineage, a past-relationship, by spelling it differently.38 [37] Oakeshott’s note: ‘R.C. Trench, English, Past and Present. Five Lectures (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855), pp. 143, 156, 191, 194–5.’ [38] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Trench, English Past & Present, p. 355.’
18[37] ‘A skilled psychiatrist, using his scientific knowledge & experience gained in his counseling room, is in a fairly good position to understand his fellow human beings. But it is possible, especially if he allows himself to be influenced by theories, that he will understand them less perfectly than a good schoolmaster, a novelist or a detective.’39 Why? Because the understanding of the psychiatrist is in terms of generalities, which illuminates, no doubt, human conduct in general – but not what this man did. 18[37] ‘It’s possible, but it’s only an hypothesis.’40 Poirot speaks the language properly; others use the vulgarism ‘theory’ when they mean ‘hypothesis.’ But why should an hypothesis not be a ‘theory’? It could be a theory if it had some ‘generality’ about it, but it would not be a theory if it were merely an hypothesis about what happened in a particular situation. ‘Biological evolution’ is a long way towards being a ‘theory,’ though it began as an hypothesis. But the proposition: ‘It was X and not Y who murdered Z,’ may be an hypothesis, but gets no distance at all to being a ‘theory.’ 18[37] A fit of ambulatory madness. [39] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Dr Richard Fox, in the Lancet.’ [40] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Agatha Christie.’
18[38] This appalling drive to impose uniformity everywhere. Why cannot it be recognized that Spain is unique, utterly unlike any other European country? This destructive, nationalistic, philosophe notion that there is a perfect condition of things, & the later identification of it with something called ‘democracy.’ 18[38] The current lunacy – decision theory – putting the ‘facts’ into a computer & accepting the result: it is only the latest idiom of the destructive pursuit of certainty. 18[38] Living abroad; its quality as a second life, chosen & therefore we are apt to expect more from it. But it is an imaginary life, or the opportunity for an imaginary life. It is like living in the theatre; nothing is quite real. It is partly because what we see & what we hear have never been seen or heard in childhood, & therefore it is a second childhood. Newness in adult life – a prize not to be missed. 18[124] The strength that lies in an energetic ‘No.’ The supreme word, ‘No’; the essence of morality; the defiance of human unhappiness. ‘Yes’ is a crawling, corrupt symbol of dependence, of surrender. ‘No’ is upright, fine, dry, superb. ‘Yes’ is soft, dishonoured, pliable, the symbol of defeat. All great religions are ‘No’ religions: Buddhism, Christianity.
18[124] The greatest mistake that has been made in the interpretation of moral theory since the 17th century is the identification of ‘self interest’ with ‘selfishness.’ Nonsense about ‘psychological hedonism’ – there can be no such thing. None of these writers attributed ‘selfishness’41 to human beings; they all attributed ‘selfinterest.’ This emphasis was on the self, in answer to the question: Who is to be satisfied in moral conduct? When ‘God’ was rejected, when ‘humanity’ was rejected, when ‘the social conscience’ was rejected, the answer was ‘the self.’ This is what Kant was saying as much as Hobbes. It is the morality of ‘honour,’ aidos. One’s own good opinion of oneself. Self-respect. They were not talking about motives, what could be appealed to in order to get a response – that was quite a different discussion.42 They were concerned with moral theory as such. And this is the direction in which the ‘intuitionist’ moral theory moved – or one of them. J.S. Mill writes on the assumption that the current dominant moral theory is ‘intuitionist.’ Even James Mill, who was not a subtle thinker, distinguished between ‘self-interest’ & ‘egoism.’ 18[125] What the revolutionary agitator sees, intensely, is something wrong which must be abolished. It is intensely, but dimly seen. What he does not see is the deadliness of doing, the passionate levity of action & the illusion of what will appear when the wrong has been banished. He cannot be justified in terms of what he does; he can be justified only as his particular flowering. But he [41] Oakeshott wrote ‘egoism’ above ‘selfishness’ and ‘self-respect’ in the margin. [42] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Guesses at Truth, p. 118 ff.’ A.W. Hare and J.C. Hare, Guesses At Truth, By Two Brothers (London: John Taylor, 1827).
can never think of it in these terms; he must have fruit, & demand to be judged by it. 18[125] There is, perhaps, a characteristically youthful courage; good nerves. 18[125] What is astonishing is that Lao Tzu & Confucius should have belonged to the same civilization; the one wholly inward & the other wholly outward. 18[125] If the universe is explicable in terms of mathematics it does not follow that God is a mathematician. 18[126] ‘Achievement’ is the ‘diabolical’ element in human life; and the symbol of our vulgarization of human life is our near exclusive concern with achievements. Not scientific thinking, but the gifts of ‘science’: the motor-car, the telephone, radar, getting to the moon, breaking the sound-barrier, flying the Atlantic, generating electricity, anti-biotics, penicillin, telstar, the bomb. Baconian. Whereas the only human value lies in the adventure & the excitement of discovery. Not standing on the top of Everest, but getting there. Not the ‘conquests’ but the ‘battles’ not the ‘victory’ but the ‘play.’ It is our non-recognition of this, our rejection of it, which makes our civilization a non-religious civilization. At least, non-Christian; Christianity is the religion of ‘non-achievement.’ The ‘welfare-state.’
This has to be combined with an understanding of ‘art’ as nonachievement. 18[127] Aristotle was wrong (& for a Greek characteristically wrong) when he said that the ti esti of ‘politics,’ what it is and what makes it possible, is the power of speech. Polis-life is certainly impossible without ‘speech,’ but this is not its sufficient condition. Polis-life is not deciding what to do by deliberating about what to do, it is doing this within a tradition of beliefs about what is better & worse, what Hegel called “an ethical world.” What makes a man a zoon politikon is not merely logos, but phronesis; & phronesis is having pro- & con-feelings, having ‘standards’ in terms of which boulesis, deliberation, is carried on. Logos is without content; phronesis entails ‘experience.’ What makes a man phronimos is not merely being able to deliberate & to speak, but having something to say. What distinguishes ‘men’ from ‘animals’ is not speech but a geistige Welt. And this entails a past relationship. Men, & not animals, live in a world which is past, present, & future; men have a civilization to inherit, & they become men in so far as they possess what they have inherited, not merely in so far as they can communicate with one another in words. 18[128] ‘Social enquiry’ (so-called) where it is not the unacknowledged servant of despotism, is like boys taking down the numbers of railway engines as they pass. A good day’s work may cover many pages. 18[128] ‘Institutions libres’ means ‘private schools.’
18[128] The Athenian who voted for the ostracism of Aristides because he was tired of hearing him called ‘the Just.’ 18[128] The ‘complacency’ of the perpetually self-critical is the worst. 18[130] May 1453. Byzantium; during the siege. Ships from Venice, financed by the Papacy, were expected & were known to have set sail. A brigantine of the Venetian fleet at Byzantium was sent out to make contact with the relieving fleet; it sailed across the Marmora & out into the Aegean (3 May). On the 23rd May it returned, having failed to make contact with the Venetian fleet, which, in fact, had been delayed. When it had seemed that no contact would be made, the captain of the Brigantine asked his crew what they wished to do. One made said that it was foolish to return to a city that was probably already in Turkish hands. But the others silenced him. It was their duty, they said, to go back & tell the Emperor, whether it was to life or to death. When they reached Byzantium & reported to the Emperor, he wept & thanked them for returning. 18[130] ‘Until you understand an author’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.’43 [43] S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. G. Watson (London: J.M. Dent & Sons
18[131] Administration under the Sung dynasty was not a utilitarian, but an aesthetic activity; it had no relationship with practical progressive results, but was the exercise of refinement in mental sensitiveness. This was true also of calligraphy. 18[132] Human Relationships 1) Equal or unequal. 2) Directed to some external purpose, not so directed.44 3) Dramatic or utilitarian. 4) Moral or instrumental. Friend. Comrade. Partner. Ally. Companion. Accomplice. Convive. 18[133] Fidelity: Mutabilitie
Ltd, 1991), p. 134. [44] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk I.’
It seems that the only fidelity one should expect is that things & people should remain faithful to themselves. But this must be distinguished from remaining faithful to the first impression they gave us of themselves – & this distinction is terribly difficult to make. For oneself, all that matters is that everything should remain faithful to the first impression it gave – or at least to the impression (perhaps a little later than the first) which it came to give, what one took for its identity. This ‘identity’ is imagined; it is something that we give to things & people. And for oneself all that matters is that the world should be faithful to our imaginings. But this is impossible. This is the root of ‘nostalgia.’ Persons & places are always unfaithful; and our own fidelity is the illusion that we, alone, are faithful. In short, faithfulness is the triumph of imagination over experience. In order to live, we have to forgive the unfaithfulness of things & persons: living is forgiving unfaithfulness, & perhaps forgiving unfaithfulness is itself the only possible fidelity. Absolute faithfulness belongs only to those persons & places we never meet again: Petrarch’s Laura & Dante’s Beatrice. Fidelity is a dream; it requires not the absence of imperfection, but the absence of change. What we seek is not something that keeps up with the flow of our imaginings, but something which remains always we had imagined it, & wanting this is the evidence of our not having acquired ‘the art of being in the world.’ 18[134] Fourier, & I do not know how many others, belong not to the history of political thought, but to the history of dreams. Their thoughts are endless & often banal variations on a single theme: Schlaraffenland.
18[134] A fifth-rate dictatorship of political neurotics. 18[134] University Students ½ of them do not know why they have come to a university. Of the other half, about a half know very well why they have come – it is to manage other students & to help to make them at home in a university. (These are worse than the truly lost: they are saved by the vicarious suffering of the lost.) This leaves ¼ (about) who know that they have come in order to be shown-round their human inheritance – to be students. 18[136] ‘Intellectual freedom’ – the big, meaningless words. 18[136] It is beyond the power of governments to deprive us of the great things – thoughts & imaginings. Nor can they either give or assure us of them. By their nature, these cannot be the subject of rights or duties. What we look to government to assure us of are the little things: to go where we like & when; having paid my taxes, to spend my money on what I wish. It is when we look to government for the great things, that we deprive it of the power to give us the little things. Hölderlin: In trying to make a State heaven we make it hell.
18[137] How have we learned what has become characteristic of every generation for the last few centuries – to laugh at the beliefs, the habits, the customs, the dress of our fathers? And, what is more puzzling, how have we learned it so well that we can teach it so convincingly to Orientals? 18[137] The ambivalence of modern politics ‘Most of us are gathered at Congress in the faith of Democratic Socialism. We desire a fully planned economy, greater & better social services, industrial democracy, a classless society, an educational system which eliminates the barriers of class – and all this within the framework of a free society.’ Mr Gunter, Trade Unions Congress 1965. 18[137] The impossibility of denunciation from the lips of a man of honour. De Thou. 18[137] ‘Mon Dieu, qu’est-ce que ce monde.’ Cinq-Mars, dernières paroles.45 18[138] To be a poet is to be lost in wonder. [45] Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis de Cinq-Mars (1620–42), was executed for plotting against Cardinal Richelieu.
18[138] Of some things we love we are allowed no presentiment of love because they are there before we have imagined them: the moon, the sun. Of others we are allowed, & may have, a presentiment of love. I doubt whether such a presentiment is ever disappointed – not, at least, when it is overwhelmingly strong; the imagined, in these circumstances, defeats the fact. Although one sometimes fears that this will not be so and one is reluctant to encounter the fact. The truth is, I suppose, that love attaches itself only to creatures of the imagination, to a dream; and a presentiment of love is a distinction without a difference. But it is something which occurs: I had a presentiment of love with regard to the sea, Dublin, the forests of Schwabenland, Rome (but not Florence), Spain, Yucatan, New England, Cambridge, the Chateau de Montaigne, the Loire, the sister I never had, the circus. The condition of such a presentiment is the opportunity to imagine often & in detail, before the fact. That is why one can rarely if ever have it of books, writers, poems, pieces of music, though I suppose one might dwell in imagination on the Magic Flute after being familiar with Figaro. 18[139] In Galicia it is believed that ghosts are the spirits of those who, in life, loved too well the places that they haunt. 18[139] ‘The cowboy costume remains mysteriously sexy.’ Yes, but how much better it was when it was felt but not recognized to be so.
18[139] ‘Hamur.’ A Viennese word, meaning ‘Nerve’ & something more; what? 18[140] One sort of ‘despotism’ is doulocracy. 18[140] Dogs & cats, per se, have no ‘history.’ They have a ‘history’ only when they are understood as human inventions (which they are), & then they belong to human history. There is no history but human history. 18[140] There are some events, some of one’s own actions, about which one feels that if one understood them the whole universe would at once become intelligible. 18[140] The ‘best’ undergraduates, even the cleverest & the most serious, seem only to be concerned with learning what it will be useful for them to know. 18[141] One is often told about the meeting of the East & the West. Sometimes it is located at Suez; sometimes it is said to be impossible. But there are two places where there has been a genuine meeting, where East & West have coalesced to generate an alloy;
Spain & Vienna. One should recognize the uniqueness of these places; they are neither European nor Oriental. 18[141] I, who hate practically every change in the world since I was old enough to notice, consort with progressives & am unable myself to leave alone the things I am concerned with. What do you make of this paradox? Mostly I suppose it is undoing the work of progressives.46 18[141] The knowledge which enables a connoisseur tasting an unseasoned wine to guess what it will be like when it has matured. 18[142] The world belongs, has always belonged & always will belong to the powerful (potentia), the activists, the controllers, the doers; the real men can hope for nothing more than a place to hide. Potentate, not a political word. Used of a man who so clearly disposes of notable potentia that it seems almost irrelevant to ask about his potestas. What is the worst is when the powerful enter an appearance as the protectors & benefactors of the real men, and set about making their hiding places comfortable, even building special hiding places for them according to the benefactors’ standards & specifications. 18[142] The love of inanimate things whose virtue is their familiarity. They do not, cannot, last; their fragility itself makes them loved. [46] The last sentence is in a different ink.
All this is destroyed, overwhelmed by a striving for redemption at every moment, the introduction of eternity into mortality. Let redemption come; do not seek it, forget it, it is not our business, it is God’s business. 18[142] It is surprising that humour, laughter, which is the lightest thing in the world, can also be the thickest armour; gallows humour. 18[143] The world is not a disfigured copy of an ‘ideal’ world – it is what it is. It has within itself the distinctions of better & worse, beauty & ugliness, slime and clear running water, & they are not the distinctions of a closer or a less close approximation to an ‘ideal.’ What is, & what ought to be, both belong wholly to this world. 18[143] In ancient times men and animals were not distinguished as they are now (though there are still relics of their ancient relationship). Men recognized animals as almost their equals. Wild animals competed with men for the resources of the world, and between them there existed a strange sort of relationship – friendly & hostile, sympathy & antipathy, admiration, fear & worship. This was all caught up in the cult of Diana or Artemis: the human amity & enormity to wild creatures. Diana was the protectoress of all new-born creatures; & it was as if men recognized themselves to be in a common predicament with the wild. All this disappeared when animals were domesticated & became slaves. It was only domesticated animal which were ‘sacrificed’ as surrogates for human beings.
18[144] The chief point of consideration is ‘the experience’ as it becomes known in memory – that is, when it is recollected & comes to compose an element in the identity of the experient: when it joins a geistige welt. Recollection. 18[144] The moral life is never simple. The moral world is made up of the pro- and con- feelings of the young, the getting old & the old, & each makes its contribution to the complex manifold, which can be expressed only in a paradox e.g. Vauvenargues: un coeur tendre et stoique. The contribution of the young is an acute sense of the brevity & the wonder of life – a spring, melancholy with an anticipation of winter, but no experience of it. Warmth, generosity, golden, lyric, unworldly. A generation, a moral world, without this contribution is sadly depleted – & this is our own present condition. The older are made to do the ‘youngness’ of the young (& they can’t do it very well), for the young are born old. The metamorphosis of the generations nowhere more clearly seen than in a modern university. 18[144] The strange passion of the current young for uniformity: to be lost in a uniformity. 18[144] The ‘generation gap’ – ours is the gap between the old who are young, & the young who are already senile.
18[144] Amenity – amaenitas, amoenus – the lovable, the comely, the pleasant. (Amen: so let it be.) 18[145] ‘Principles’ are not criteria, they are formulae of protest against what is currently neglected; and as ‘protests’ they are apt to be exaggerated even where they do not appear as criteria. They indicate what should be preferred now, in the circumstances. They should always be servants; when they become masters they become corrupt. To the uninitiated they become masters. They are not axioms, but maxims. As servants they are always ‘in use’ & apart from ‘use’ they are nothing. They are not targets to be aimed at, or destinations to be sought; they are breezes to open one’s sails to. As ‘fruit’ they are tasteless, or even poisonous. They are flowers. Every ‘principle’ has its opposite, no less valuable. The Stoic denial of patriotism & friendship is given a false absoluteness. Blasphemy is not possible without ‘faith.’ If the ‘libertarian’ had his way he would destroy ‘liberty’: the young do not know how they have become impoverished by the absence of parental frustration, it’s what gave them their youngness. The only moral life we have ever known, if we would only admit it, is one in which ‘principles’ are continuously bouncing off one another. 18[146] Theory & Practice theoria; an ‘understanding,’ represented by Plato as an ‘intuition.’
The translation of philosophical ideas into sentiments & then into practical conduct: this is represented, sometimes, as finding the ‘moral’ or sentimental ‘equivalent’ of the philosophical idea. (This is quite a different notion from that of a moral entailment or implication of a philosophical idea.) But there is no ‘equivalence’; it is merely what it appears would correspond, if there could be any correspondence. Cp. The use of the Stoic doctrine of the imperceptibility of pain to justify or excuse the infliction of pain, or the belief that the infliction of pain doesn’t matter. The moral or the sentimental belief cannot look to the philosophical idea for support, justification, or confirmation. Ignoratio elenchi. A whole series of pretended ‘equivalents’ which are not equivalents. E.g.: 1. Aristippus of Cyrene: the philosophical theory. 2. Horace: the poetic image. 3. The devotee of ‘pleasure’: the practical sentiment or conduct. Philosophy cannot be the theoretical equivalent of practice; it does not provide a ‘moral world’ (i.e., a complete conspectus) for individual beliefs & acts, it provides a theoretical explanation. What determines conduct is ‘sympathies,’ pro- & con-feelings, not ‘theories.’ All morality is specific, & this cannot be justified by writing it up in more general & less specific terms. The philosopher’s attitude to ‘practice’ is, really, ironical – his ‘practical’ attitude. He can recognize the moral world only with a kind of irony. The cave. Philosophers must be understood by what they say, not by what they do. The judges of the Areopagus who tried their causes in the darkness of the night because they were concerned only with what
was said, were guilty of an ignoratio elenchi. They behaved like philosophers; but as judges they were concerned with persuasion & thus not merely what is said. 18[A] Universitas47 Middle ages – John of Salisbury speaks of a realm (provincia) as a universitas and of course his writings are famous for his so-called ‘organic’ analogies, e.g. Policraticus. And speaks almost as if a king were a ‘lord’ – an organizer of an estate. A realm a universitas = a realm as a multitude of people joined in the pursuit of purposes which they could not achieve separately – necessity. But the divergence & irrationality (sin) of men made a ruler necessary to achieve a universitas. A ruled universitas. Union of ‘members’ – members are members in respect of their common not individual characters cp. ‘subjects.’48 Even the Church for which it was sometimes claimed that it was a mystical body, was thought of as a multitude united in a single faith. ‘United,’ rather than a ‘one.’49 The reluctance to accord ‘real personality’ to a corporation.
[47] Loose sheet inserted at the rear, numbered ‘146d.’ [48] Oakeshott’s note: ‘E. Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 347 n. 18.’ Lewis quotes Aquinas, Summa contra gentes, Bk 3 Ch. XXX: ‘In human affairs there is a common good, which is the good of a city or people…There is also a human good which does not consist in the community but pertains to each individual as a self.’ [49] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas, pp. 228–9.’
Notebook 19 (January 1966)1 19[01–04] Morality and Identity A man’s identity is what he understands himself to be. Morality is not obedience to rules, but a man’s loyalty to his identity. All morality is ‘loyalty,’ ‘honour,’ ‘pride.’ A moralist’s originality and distinction lies in the identity he offers to mankind. Relation of this to ‘conscience.’ Identities: ‘A servant of God’ [1] LSE 2/1/19. Soft cover, black, 17 cm × 12 cm, ruled. Recto folios numbered 1–76. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘XIX. / Jan 1966 / Much of modern European “political thought,” / so-called, belongs, not to the history of / political reflection, but to the history of dreams. / It is a set of, often banal variations, on / the theme: Schlaraffenland. / Et ego in Arcadia fui. Death. / Mon Dieu, qu’est-ce que ce monde / Cinq-Mars, dernières paroles / Nous n’irons plus aux bois, les lauriers sont coupés.’ [Compare p. 473; the popular title of a pair of paintings by Nicolas Poussin, (1594–1665); compare p. 474; Théodore Faullain de Banville, ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois,’ in Les stalactites (Paris: Michel Levy frères, 1846), pp. 9–10.] Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fos. 21–3, Flora Thompson, Lark Rise (London: Oxford University Press, 1939); Over to Candleford (London: Oxford University Press, 1941); Candleford Green (London: Oxford University Press, 1943); 33, Henry James, The Pupil (London: Martin Secker, 1916); 34–5, notes on anecdotes of Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington (1769–1852), from an unidentified source; 49, H. Bosco, The Farm Théotime, tr. M. Savill (London: Francis Aldor, 1946); 61, Kai Iskandar Kā’ūs Ibn, A Mirror for Princes. The Qābus nāma, tr. R. Levy (London: Cressel Press, 1951).
‘I belong to Christ’ ‘The member of a family’ ‘A man responsible for his own actions’ ‘A station’ ‘The servant of an ideal’ ‘A man bound to a law – of god, nature, etc.’ The ‘liberal’ identity: what? ‘A human being.’ But this is very abstract. ‘Humanitas’ was something more! A past. Name. Race. Family. Society. Colour. A man’s identity is not to be confused with his ‘better self,’ though the morality of the ‘better self ’ was an attempt to formulate an identity. It is more like his ‘more important self,’ a more ‘entire’ self. An identity may be achieved by exclusion, denial, unsympathy: the ‘identity’ of puritan morality. An ‘identity’ is not an individual achievement, it is the achievement of a civilization. Education = learning to participate in an identity, learning the structure & convolutions of an identity – & this is quite different from learning to play a part in a current social order. Identity = the sympathies which determine conduct. Part of our ‘identity’ is care for the identity of others, care for their pride. Few, in these days, have a simple identity: mostly it is complex, made up of tensions, conflicting or partly conflicting sympathies. To be ‘immoral’ is, in the first place, to commit offenses against our own affections, our own identity. The current confusion between what is called ‘image’ & ‘identity.’ To be concerned with one’s ‘image’ is to be concerned
with a surrogate ‘identity.’ This is usually the case with those who have no proper sense of their own identity. ‘Image’ is the ‘poor’ man’s identity. ‘Image’ is the figure one acts before ‘others,’ & mere contemporaries. It sanctions appeals to what is called ‘world opinion’ which = the opinion of those who have never achieved an ‘identity.’ A ‘majority’ opinion. Where a ‘majority’ is relevant and where it is not. ‘Image’ is the short cut to being ‘something,’ the artificial respiration given to ‘nonentities’ in order to make them appear to be alive. This is a very radical doctrine. It convicts ‘utilitarianism’ of nonmoral rationality. The utilitarian reference to the consequences of action is ‘rational,’ consequences are significant, but they have no moral significance. The consequences of actions may be used as a sign of the morality of actions but they do not specify it. My station & its duties is a representation of an ‘identity.’ What constitutes a ‘superior’ & an ‘inferior’ identity? A human identity must be consonant with the conditions of human life, but the ‘conditions of human life’ are themselves a statement of an identity. Pascal: our ‘identity’ is that of a creature who does not know, & cannot know, for certain that he is merely a mortal. 19[04] Self-interest ‘Self-interest’ is not a psychological, but a moral doctrine. It does not require ‘egoism’ or a psychological theory of ‘egoism,’ ‘selfishness.’ This is clear in Hobbes, whose moral doctrine does not depend upon a belief in psychological egoism. ‘Self-interest’ is an identification of morality with ‘honour.’ When ‘honour’ went out of our moral vocabulary (in the late 17th century), ‘selfinterest’ took its place in the formula.
It has been misinterpreted in the same manner as the formula laissez-faire has been misinterpreted. 19[05] Loyal-legal The morality of faithfulness to an ‘identity,’ & the morality of obedience to a law. One’s identity can be understood as that of man who comes under a law. But a ‘law’ cannot be merely obeyed. 19[06] The effort to endow oneself, one’s relations with another person, or any of one’s activities, with significance, importance, e.g. the devouring passion to search for beginnings, previous encounters, earlier remote connections & relationship, to which lovers are prone. Indeed, this is one of the things which distinguishes a profound love relationship from a superficial adventure. The reconstruction of occasions when earlier meetings might have taken place, but did not. The effort to establish the relationship as not purely fortuitous, as something in which chance is modified not only by choice but by the course of events or even the necessary character of the universe. To detect a moving towards, a close passing by, common friends. To make the actual meeting and its consequences seem not fortuitous. To establish a relationship or a pre-relationship, even in terms of experiences which each had enjoyed but at different times: people, places, sights, sounds, etc. The present is so fragile; it needs a past to make it substantial or even credible. 19[07] The understanding of an experience which comes when one has to recount it for the first time.
19[07] The things one puts out of one’s mind – like sights seen in battle. 19[07] ‘A seminal mind.’ A gift of seeds, however mysterious and wonderful, is less mysterious & wonderful than a gift of thoughts. A packet of seeds is a garden of petunias; a packet of thoughts, Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes – who knows the flower? Perhaps one should settle for a packet of seeds. 19[08] A coat of arms: A sword lying upon a heart. And the motto: El me manda: My heart rules my life. 19[08] Courage. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts. 19[08] Strangely enough, I have always preferred practice to theory. But that does not mean that I prefer the executions of justice to the announcement of justice. Perhaps this means that I am, by temperament, a judge – which is a middle, between a philosopher & an executioner: not enough intellect to be a philosopher, not enough stomach to be an executioner. An interested spectator.
19[09] Our concern with a philosopher, says Augustine, is not with his eloquence (his rhetoric), but with his evidence – not, that is, with what he can persuade us of, but with what he can prove. 19[09] Mens regalis: a royal mind, a mind which is master of itself. 19[10] The occasions of death have been fully explored, they repeat themselves ad lib, and they are insignificant. What matters is the circumstances of death; these change slowly & never return to what they were. One may die in a relatively old-fashioned way, or in a relatively modern way, but the difference is slight. There is always a certain range of deaths available at any time. This is sad, because one envies an impossibly old-fashioned death. Who could now say, with the same meaning, what Alcuin said: ‘The time draws near when I must leave the hospice of the body, & go out into things unknown’?2 And yet the intellectual circumstances of death change so slowly that we can still recognize this as a death. Every man is disposed to be a bit conservative when he comes to die; we are naturally a little less self-confident in death than in life. But, even so, innovation has not been absent. 19[10] How brilliant some titles of books are:
[2] Alcuin of York (c.735–804), English theologian and member of the court of Charlemagne (742–814), King of the Franks from 768, was Abbot of Tours from 796.
Cur deus homo?3 Sic et non.4 De rerum natura.5 Voyages.6 There are more, but it is a nearly lost art. 19[11–12] Raymond Sebond, Book of Creatures, or Natural Theology (1484).7 The originality of this work lies in its attempt to deduce the ‘truths of Christianity’ from the ‘facts’ of the natural world, or the ‘evidence’ of the natural world. It is an ‘ontological’ argument, concerned with the necessary existence & nature of God and the obligations etc. of human beings to God to be deduced from this existence & nature; but God is deduced from ‘man’ (or from ‘creation’ or the ‘natural’ world). Now, Montaigne clearly perceived the original design of the work, & his main criticism of it is directed to showing that human [3] St Anselm, ‘Cur deus homo?’, in Basic Writings, tr. S.N. Deane, 2nd edn (Illinois: Open Court Publishing, 1962), pp. 191–302. [4] Pierre Abélard aka Peter Abailard, Sic et non: A Critical Edition, ed. B.B. Boyer and R. McKeon (London and Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977 [c.1121]). [5] Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, tr. J.S. Watson (London: H.G. Bohn, 1851). [6] Not identified. [7] Raymundus de Sabunde aka Raymond Sebond, Theologia naturalis: sive liber creaturarum (Deventer: Richard Parfraet, c.1480–85), translated by M. de Montaigne as La théologie naturelle de Raymond Sebon, docteur excellent entre les modernes, en laquelle par l’ordre de nature est demonstrée la vérité de la foy Chrestienne et Catholique (Paris: Guillaume Chaudiere, 1569).
beings by the power of their ‘natural reason’ cannot acquire certain knowledge about God’s existence & character. It is a ‘fideist’ argument. But Montaigne was on the verge of something else which he never quite achieved; that is, an enquiry into the nature of ‘religious beliefs’ designed to show that they are not concerned with demonstrable ‘truth’ at all, but with ‘pragmatic’ intelligibility. Sebond’s argument is, almost, more geometrico. Montaigne sees that this will not do; and he almost sees that this will not do, not because deductive argument is always impossible, & that certain knowledge is always out of reach, but because it is impossible in all practical affairs. But not quite. What he can’t quite get over is, as he sees it, the impossibility of practical truth if absolute ‘truth’ is denied: if we do not know le vraiy we cannot know what resembles it, le vraysemblable, that the ‘probable’ depends upon the ‘absolute.’ The probable depends on the certain, but the likely does not.’ But he had in his hands the means for getting over this: his conception of ‘human judgment,’ i.e. ‘understanding’ the world without knowing its ‘necessity.’ 19[13] Le Prudhomme. Integrity: identity: honour. ‘I have kept myself intact.’ Montaigne, Apology.8 To have affection, though not esteem, for himself. ‘Morality’ nothing to do with accomplishment – accomplishment is not within our power, we cannot control it. [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, “Apology For Sebond,” F. p. 428.’ M. de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond (Indianapolis, Hackett, 2003), was included in the Essais, but the edition Oakeshott was using has not been traced although the ‘F’ may stand for ‘Florio’, i.e. John Florio (1553–1625), Montaigne’s translator.
It has to do with ‘will,’ & ‘all rules of duty are necessarily founded upon our will.’9 Impervious to the contempt of others; ‘Without shame.’ ‘The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.’10 De la Boëtie – Montaigne called him the ‘witness’ of his life who, when he had gone, Montaigne might live less carelessly.11 An alter ego. 19[14] Individuality The non-individual is one who does not know how to belong to himself. The insistence on diversity, difference, variety. Montaigne.12 The individual manqué: business for business sake.13 Men who, being nothing, try to do something in order to convince themselves that they exist: they ‘push in indiscriminately wherever there is business and involvement & are without life when they are without tumultuous agitation.’14 When they are not ‘public.’ Lord Mellifont.15 [9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, “That Intention is the Judge of our Actions”; “Of Experience,” ad fin.’ [10] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, F., 178–9.’ [11] Etienne de la Boétie (1530–63), French nobleman and judge, close friend of Montaigne. [12] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, F., 597–8.’ [13] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, F., 767.’ [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, F., 767.’ [15] The character of Lord Mellifont, who only exists in public, appears in Henry James’s ‘The Private Life.’ See Henry James, The Private Life.
19[15] Character. Montaigne on Repentance.16 Every man has his own ‘ruling pattern,’ une forme sienne, une forme maîtresse, which opposes itself even to ‘education’ and against sudden ‘passions.’ The impossibility of condemning or departing from my ‘whole nature.’ Whatever I do, ‘my actions are in order & conformity with what I am & with my condition.’ We are full of ‘inanity and nonsense’ which we cannot get rid of without getting rid of ourselves.17 ‘A pattern established within us by which to test our actions.’ The nature of a ‘character,’ as a kind of practical identity, is not its ‘coherence,’ but the manner in which contraries are balanced with one another. It does not follow a principle of ‘non-contradiction’ but of contraries assimilated to one another: it is a ‘resultant,’ not a ‘result’; a ‘resolution’ of forces. The ‘character’ of modern politics. 19[16] An ironical study of the idea of irony – example of the abortive mixture of universes of discourse, in this case, rhetoric & philosophy.
The Wheel of Time. Lord Beaupré. The Visits. Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (London: Osgood and McIlvaine, 1893). [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, Essais, ii.2.’ [17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Montaigne, “On Vanity,” Essais, iii.9 ad fin. Cp. F., 749, 758.’
19[16] An adventure in verbiage. 19[16] ‘Riding shot-gun.’ The government. 19[17] It is the reason given, & not the judgment, which reveals the thought. (1) The London magistrate who gave as a reason for being severe to a man convicted of theft & damage to a telephone box – that the telephone might have been needed to call an ambulance in an emergency. (2) The ex-Archbishop of Canterbury objecting to having received an invitation to join the new Playboy Club – this club is objectionable because it promoted ‘luxury spending’ unsuitable in ‘the present economic condition of our country’ which calls for ‘more productive forms of national service.’ Both these ‘reasons’ are eccentric, but their particular form of eccentricity reveals the current moral persuasion. Both reveal how far jurisdictio has been superseded by a vague salus populi. 19[18] A great deal of ‘explanation,’ literary criticism etc. is like merely comparing & relating different features of the scenery of a landscape.
But ‘explanation’ does not properly begin until the visible scenery is related to what is not seen – e.g. the geological structure, or the impress upon it of human artifice. A century ago the Landes had no pine trees; 2000 years ago North Africa was not desert. 19[18] The stubborn stupidity of the pseudo-intellectual. 19[19] Two occasions lately when arguments of another sort have been substituted for ‘political’ arguments. 1. The opponents of the compulsory fluoridation of water have been slapped down on the ground that it has been ‘proved’ that the fluoridation of water is beneficial to children’s teeth. What does not seem to be understood is that this is the point at which ‘political’ argument begins, not ends. Supposing the ‘proof ’ to have been provided, or supposing that we have information which amounts to something less than proof – then, we begin to place the proposal alongside our other admitted goods & consider whether or not the disturbance of them is too great to allow the proposal. 2. The advocates of compulsory finger-printing think they have made their case if they have demonstrated that it will help the police in combating crime. It is only when we have some plausible information of this kind that we can begin to argue it. Cp. Cards of Identity.
19[20] ‘If we are not prepared drastically to reorganize we shall not have the modern instruments with which to carry out the policies we want.’ Crossman.18 ‘How can we press a programme of modernization in industry if we refuse to modernize the procedures of the House of Commons?’ The difference between political institutions and factories ignored. A procedure which prevents something being done which someone might want to do is in place in politics & out of place in business. 19[25] The writer never lies. The art of reading is the art of detecting the truth in what he writes. This is a hard saying. For the truth in what he writes is his selfrevelation; and to seek that is to reject him either as an artist or as a ‘scientific’ writer. 19[25] The ‘abstract’ & the ‘concrete’ universal: The ‘abstract’ is a genus with different species; the ‘concrete’ is an individual with different potentialities. The genus must exist in one or other of its species; but the individual does not exist in this or that of its potentialities, but in all of them taken together. Per genus et differentiam. [18] Probably Richard Howard Stafford Crossman (1907–74), Labour MP 1947–74 and editor of the New Statesman, 1970–2.
19[26] The belief that most men are evil is a kind of moral fallacy; the conception of ‘good’ it involves is a petitio principii. Our notion of ‘good’ must recognize the incommensurability of goodness & happiness, between a ‘good’ life & a life which achieves its purposes. To be successful is not the same thing as being ‘good.’ The life of the man & the woman in ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’ was frustrated in all its hopes & designs, but it could not have been nobler or better than it was.19 Fortuna. 19[27–29] Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. There is a truth in this saying, but it emerges only when a great deal of confusion has been sorted out. 1. It suggests a recognition of guilt, or at least wrong (otherwise there would be nothing to forgive), & it suggests that a full understanding of the situation will generate a readiness to overlook the wrong. In short, it seems to be the recommendation of a way of getting rid of guilt or wrong, not by generosity of heart, but by intellectual perception. This, in the first place, is misleading because ‘forgiveness’ does not have the effect of banishing wrong (except God’s forgiveness). 2. It purports to be a recommendation of what ought to be done – a maxim of conduct. And if this is so, it is clearly immoral: the suggestion that, by an intellectual process of understanding, we should deprive ourselves of the possibility of judging conduct to be wrong. [19] See Joseph Conrad, ‘Freya of the Seven Isles,’ in ‘Twixt Land and Sea (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912), pp. 179–287.
This is the muddle. The truth is somewhat different. It suggests that there is an intellectual situation (that of understanding) in which right & wrong, guilt & innocence, do not & cannot appear upon the scene – a point of view in relation to which ‘judgment’ & ‘justification’ are irrelevant. But it does not suggest that to take this point of view is a duty. From what point of view do ‘guilt’ & ‘innocence,’ right & wrong, not appear upon the scene? 1. If human behavior is regarded as an ineluctable process of cause & effect. This is crude, because the categories of cause & effect are crude. 2. If, from contemplating human conduct (which as such is always judgeable) we go on to consider it in terms of necessity – that is, if we think no longer of the tune made by the notes and transfer our attention to the principles of sound. Here the possibility of moral differentiation between one action & another is negated. In short, this is not a maxim of good conduct, it is a statement of fact – the fact that the point of view of moral differentiation is not the only point of view. It points out one of the points at which practice becoming theory has nothing more to do with practice. Irony & a theory of irony. This shall go along side rhetoric & the theory of rhetoric. Comedy & the theory of comedy, etc: as examples of the real break. ‘Guilt’ & ‘innocence,’ & the obligation of interpreting human conduct in these terms – that is, the terms of approval & disapproval – disappears only when the intellectual world we have transferred ourselves into is one which has no place for approving or disapproving.
19[30] ‘Honour’ is the reference of conduct to the pro- and con-feelings which constitute a moral personality. Like everything else, it is social in content but individual in form. Its counterpoint is ‘shame’; ‘shameful’ conduct is conduct which conflicts in some way with the approvals which constitute a moral personality. This allows for the moral personality to be self-understood in varying degrees of concreteness. Mandy Rice-Davis was, perhaps, not mistaken when she asserts that she never lost her ‘honour’ because what she meant by her ‘honour’ was her sexual independence – her aversion to ‘prostituting’ herself.20 And by ‘prostitution’ she meant offering oneself as an object of sexual gratification. It is fair to say that she asserts, also, that she has never needed to do this overtly; but that is another matter. 19[32] An order which produces confusion in our minds we call chaos. For example, history is a chaos if we try to understand it in terms of our moral sentiments. If we seek an overall purpose we induce chaos. 19[32] Self-consciousness is not self-knowledge. 19[32] Her elegance was intermittent.
[20] Mandy Rice-Davies (b.1944), British model involved in the Profumo scandal of 1963.
19[37] The world really is a stage, & all the men and women merely players. Only the producers of plays imagine that this World Theatre has any connection with reality. 19[38] Politics Augustus considered discontinuing the distribution of free grain because he believed the practice to be injurious to Italian agriculture. He did not, however, do so, & said: ‘I did not carry out my purpose because I was sure that one day the practice would be restored by someone ambitious of popular favour.’21 19[38] Henry Ford wanted his car to give men of small means easy access to ‘God’s great open spaces.’ The net result, however, has been to turn ‘God’s great open spaces’ into trivial carscapes, suburban wastes & junkyards. 19[39] For some people ‘politics’ is an invitation to inventiveness, and their desire not to be out-bid by others. Their proposals have only to be unusual, drastic, & unexpected. It is not always a bid for ‘power’; it is an exhibition of what they think of as ‘intelligence.’
[21] Oaksehott’s note: ‘Suetonius.’ See C. Suetonius Tranquillus, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars To Which Are Added His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, and Poets, tr. A. Thomson and T. Forester (London: George Bell & Sons, 1896), p. 105.
19[39] To write a book which a soldier or an explorer might, centuries later, carry in his knapsack. 19[41] What distinguishes war from a criminal adventure? Duty & honour. The adversary is a comrade. Abnegation, loyalty. The mask of almost deliberate thoughtlessness on a soldier’s face; the knowledge that he is always betrayed except by his comrades & his army. War, properly speaking, has disappeared from the world; it went with aristocracy, dedicated to bear arms & to military honour.22 What people don’t easily understand is that soldiers do not have enemies – only politicians have enemies. At least this was so until war was abolished in the twentieth century. The military condition entails its own sins, but they are spiritual sins, like drunkenness; not like gluttony. A relative asceticism. Soldiers, priests. The ruins & the graves. Magnanimity, disinterestedness, good manners. Ascetic. The soldier does not fight for his political masters. He obeys them, but he fights to defend his imaginary world – or sometimes, with more difficulty, to praise & honour his imaginary world. 19[42] The military intellect: to reduce a complex situation to its simple elements & deal with it directly. Never to be distracted by going beyond the limits. Death always near. [22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Péguy.’ Possibly Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist, killed in the First World War.
19[42] ‘The war against crime’ – the expression marks the corruption which has destroyed war. One does not fight criminals; one fights moral equals. 19[42] War is a world apart. The military condition is an autonomous condition. 19[42] The quite extraordinary activities of people in an industrial civilization. 19[43] In the late ‘30s Stephen Spender in a book called Forward from Liberalism argued that the Communists & Communism were the natural heirs of Liberalism.23 19[43] It sometimes seems that governments are playing roulette with their subjects’ money. 19[44] ‘As raw material for scientific history the gospels have the gravest deficiencies. They are incomplete and, in places, inconsistent.’
[23] Stephen Spender, Forward From Liberalism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937).
This is a misconception. What makes ‘material’ valuable for ‘history’ is not its alleged truth, but its integrity. 19[45] We say that ‘Nature’ has no concern for the individual except as the member of a species, the race. Perhaps, what we should say is that, from one point of view, we live in a world in which all individuality is episodic, evanescent, is unrecognized except as an episode in reproduction. We call the world seen from this point of view the ‘natural world.’ We belong to it in respect of thinking of ourselves in terms of ‘human nature.’ When it is said that a man may have a ‘history’ as well as a ‘nature’ we [are] not only asserting a different point of view in respect of human beings, but in respect of everything else. It is the point of view in which everything has an ‘individuality’; the world of proper names. The organization of this world is ‘morality.’ If we think of it in this way we avoid the fatal ambiguity of the ‘conquest of nature’: Descartes’ ‘conquest’ or that of Confucius. 19[46] The story of ‘Nam-Bok the unveracious’ is the story of the philosopher & the Cave, on a lower level.24 19[46] The drug addict – particularly the young & particularly those who are under 20 – ‘exposes at its most painful point not only his own personal disorder but the sickness of our society…We are confronting those whom a violent society has wounded, we are confronting our own sickness.’ [24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J. London, “Nam-Bok the Unveracious,” in Children of the Frost (New York: The McMillan Co., 1902), pp. 53–80.’
But ‘drugs’ are not like an influenza epidemic in which a lowered vitality makes way for an infection, and if you catch the disease it has its natural course to run. Nor is there this sort of connection between ‘violence’ & ‘drug addiction.’ The reason why we are not all drug addicts is not the same sort of reason why, in an influenza epidemic, some escape infection. 19[47] Courage. T. Traherne, Christian Ethicks.25 19[48] Of J.M.W. Turner. ‘The contrast between the man and his work is awe-inspiring. He concealed within a down-at-heels little physical frame a poetic & visionary temperament unequalled in British art.’ ‘All his life he remained taciturn & gauche & he could never look anyone in the face while talking (his drawings of faces are uncertain).’ Nigel Gosling What sort of observations are these? Why should there be a connection between figure & imagination? Could he not look at a face when not talking to it? 19[48] The ‘incommensurability’ ‘beginnings’ & ‘ends.’ [25] Thomas Traherne, Christian Ethicks: or, Divine Morality: Opening the Way to Blessedness, by the Rules of Vertue and Reason (London: Jonathan Edwin, 1675).
‘Nothing great has great beginnings.’26 19[49] Principles are tents in which to pass the night. Build a house of them & you will find that you have built your tomb. After A.J. Balfour. 19[49–50] The materials of ‘history’ are the components of the world in which we at present live understood as evidence for a ‘past’ condition of things. The selection, the classification & the identification of what in our present world we should attend to in this respect is often fortuitous, often dictated by a current turn of events, normally at the mercy of our habits & traditional modes of thought & speech – arbitrary & accidental. But we know that no enquiry (if we identify ‘history’ as an enquiry) can get off the ground & make progress until specific notions are substituted for ordinary language. And if we are to make a beginning with this enquiry, our first move must be to divest ourselves of this ‘natural’ present & to think of what is before us (& therefore of what it is evidence of) in a manner, at any rate, less at the mercy of chance & current happenings.
[26] Oakeshott’s note: ‘De Maistre, Principe generatif, XXIII.’ See J. de Maistre, ‘Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques, et des autres institutions humaines’, in Oeuvres du comte Maistre, ancien ministre plenipotentiaire de s. m. le roi de Sardaigne prés s. m. l’empereur de Russie (Montrouge: Jacques-Paul Migne, 1841), p. 123: ‘Rien de grand n’a de grands commencemens.’
19[50] Love betrays itself in a suggestion of connivance, an unmistakable complicity. 19[50] The animal quality of childhood. 19[51–52] Tristan & Sir Gallahad were both bastards, & King Arthur escaped being one only by a subterfuge; in his case, the important thing was the royal blood of his father. Merlin In Malory, Arthur’s knights are constantly recorded as giving him ‘advice’ – ‘and every man said his advice.’27 Merlin, also, is said to give ‘advice’ – e.g., on an approach to King Ban & King Bors – but his ‘advice’ was clearly of a different quality from that of the others.28 (1) Merlin knew in advance that if his ‘advice’ was followed, success would ensue, i.e. he had ‘certain’ fore-knowledge of the results of actions. Not merely astute. (2) Merlin knew that the two yet unborn sons of Sir Pellinor would be distinguished knights.29 [27] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk I, ch. xxi.’ Sir Thomas Malory, Le morte d’Arthur (London: William Caxton, 1485). [28] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk I, ch. x.’ [29] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk I, ch. xxiv.’
(3) He tells King Mark of Cornwall (& puts it in writing) that there would be a battle between two armed knights, at a certain place, & neither would be killed. This is called ‘prophesy.’30 (4) Merlin knew that Guenever would not turn out well & that Launcelot would love her & she him.31 Nevertheless, Arthur married her at Camelot. (5) Merlin’s foreknowledge was said to be ‘by the devil’s craft.’ He was ‘a devil’s son.’32 (6) None of this deprived him of human weakness so far as his own affairs were concerned. ‘He fell into a dotage on a damosel that King Pellinore brought to court’ – Nemue. When reminded by Arthur that he had the gift of prophecy & knew he was going to the bad, he answered that he couldn’t help it. 19[52] One of Rabelais’ most passionate rejections was the art of astrology, especially when used in making political decisions – the sortes virgilianae33 & all the current modes of presaging the future. He was content with human uncertainty. Merlin, Nostradamus, Ruggieri.
[30] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk II, ch. viii.’ [31] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk III, ch. i.’ [32] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk III, ch. xiv; Bk IV, ch. i.’ [33] A form of divination practised in medieval and early modern Europe, based on randomly opening Virgil’s Aeneid and interpreting prophetically whichever passage struck the reader.
19[53] Sir Tristram & La Beale Isoud easily win our admiration, but Isoud la Blanche Mains is an ill-used character, & her wedding night is a pathetic story.34 19[53] The subtle difference between the relationships of Lancelot & Guenever, & Tristam & Isoud; the uncertainty of the one and the trustfulness of the other.35 19[54] Sir Dinadan is an odd & attractive character. He is said to be ‘the merriest knight that ever ye spake withal & the maddest talker.’36 He is ‘disillusioned’ but remains very human. In some ways he is a ‘loner,’ but with a great sense of loyalty. He says, ‘the joy of love is too short, & the sorrows thereof, & what cometh thereof, dureth over long.’ And he could refuse to ‘fight for a lady’ with such grace that Isoud was bound to ‘laugh.’ He has more self-possession than the other knights – un coeur tendre et stoique?
[34] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk VIII ch xxxvi’ probably refers to the following passage: ‘And so upon a time Sir Tristram agreed to wed Isoud la Blanche Mains. And at the last they were wedded, and solemnly held their marriage. And so when they were abed both Sir Tristram remembered him of his old lady La Beale Isoud. And then he took such a thought suddenly that he was all dismayed, and other cheer made he none but with clipping and kissing; as for other fleshly lusts Sir Tristram never thought nor had ado with her.’ [35] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Cp. Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk XI, ch. i, where Guenever becomes less shrewish.’ [36] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk X, ch. lvi.’
19[54] The Sangreal has an element of the cornucopia in it. When it appeared ‘the hall was filled with good odours, & every knight had such meats & drinks as he best loved in this world.’37 19[55] Bk XIV, ch. ii To join the Fellowship of the Round Table meant that a man lost his father, his mother, his kin, his wife & his children. It was an exclusive ‘fellowship’ which a man joined by choice & election. Not a ‘religious’ fellowship; altogether different from an ‘earthly’ society. The Round Table was temporarily broken up by the quest of the Sangrael – a similarly exclusive engagement. This angered Arthur, & he was relieved when the Knights returned from the quest.38 Bks XX–XXI How ‘the flower of chivalry of all the world was destroyed & slain.’ This is unlike tragedy because the collapse is neither inherent in the situation nor is it represented as an unavoidable fate imposed from the outside. It is a nemesis set in motion by blameworthy conduct. But it is exceedingly complicated, a convergence of many different characters & responses, any of which might have been different. Who is to blame? And what vice generated it? The envy & ‘public spirit’ of Agravaine & Mordred, the ‘simplicity’ of Arthur, the indiscretion of Lancelot & Guenever, [37] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk XIII, ch. vii.’ [38] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk XIII, chs iv, vii; Bk XVIII.’
the misfortune of the accidental death of Gareth, the implacability of Gawaine?39 And, finally, the ‘misadventure of an adder.’40 19[56] There is a fish which ‘haunteth the flood of Euphrates.’ It is called Ertanax, ‘and his bones be of such a manner of kind that who that handleth them shall have so much will that he shall never be weary, & he shall not think on joy nor sorrow that he hath had, but only that thing that he beholdeth before him.’41 All too like ‘La Bonheure.’ 19[55] ‘How true love is likened to summer.’42 A strange chapter, in praise of constancy. The theme of ‘mutability,’ likened to ‘modernity.’ 19[55–56] Arthur’s first response to Mordred’s assertion that Lancelot & Guinever had been taken in flagrante & that Lancelot had fought his way out, was one of admiration: ‘Jesu mercy, he is a marvelous Knight of prowess.’43 And as Arthur says later, a Queen can be got easily, but not a fellowship of Knights.44
[39] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk XXI, ch. ix.’ [40] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk XXI, ch. iv.’ [41] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk XVII, ch. iii.’ [42] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk XVIII, ch. xxv.’ [43] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk XX, ch. vii.’ [44] Oakesholtt’s note: ‘Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Bk XX, ch. ix.’
Lancelot’s subsequent conduct is impeccable. He submits to authority in everything except the condemnation of Guenever to be burnt. 19[58–59] ‘All policy is but circumstantial dissembling; pretending one thing, intending another.’45 This is a common reputation. It may be agreed that it is exaggerated; indeed, Feltham admits that ‘there is an honest policy.’ But what is the truth which is here exaggerated? ‘Policy’ is the pursuit of ends by means other than the observance of rules. There are rules, but in ‘policy’ they tell us less than is usually the case. In ‘policy,’ then, it is the end that is to be achieved which is important; & the pursuit of ‘policy’ beings when the argument about the desirability of the end has come to an affirmative end. In this argument the desirability of this end may have been balanced against the desirability of some other end; but we may take it that a conclusion has been reached that this end is, now, desirable, the cost of pursuing it (in terms of what has to be foregone) having been weighed & found not too great to be tolerated. The chosen ‘end’ in ‘policy’ is, then, the important thing; & it is a chosen end which cannot be pursued merely by observing rules of conduct. The end in ‘policy’ is a condition of human circumstance – that is, it concerns human conduct & not (for example) the ‘earth’ as such. It entails mobilizing the support of human beings & the imposition upon human beings of some pattern of conduct. It entails overcoming opposition. [45] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Owen Feltham, Resolves, p. 42.’ The edition Oakeshott was using has not been traced, but see Owen Feltham, Resolves Divine, Morall, Politicall (London: J.H. Parker, 1840 [c.1620]), 114.
‘Dissembling’ is, or may be, the most economical manner of overcoming opposition. Consequently, the policy may be pursued by dissimulation, while (for example) the administration of justice cannot be pursued in this manner. In short, as Machiavelli says, where there are no rules what governs conduct is the end pursued. One cannot give a rule as a reason for pursuing an end or performing an action. Alternatively, in the pursuit of ‘policy,’ words are used persuasively, because they cannot be used dialectically. 19[60] ‘As policy is taken in general, we hold it but a kind of crafty wisdom, which boweth everything to self-profit. And therefore a politician is one of the worst sorts of man, to make a friend of.’46 The ‘self-profit’ is unnecessary and not even characteristic. What is necessary & characteristic is the pursuit of an end in respect of which human beings are merely valued for their usefulness to one another. 19[60] In Rabelais, when the Franciscan monastery is invaded by marauders, the monks ring the bell & go to pray. Picrochole’s army lays waste the vineyard. It was Friar John (a not very admirable, but a realistic character) who recalled the monks from their folly. Cp. Machiavelli’s remark about meeting an enemy with prayer.47
[46] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Feltham, Resolves, p. 83.’ See Feltham, Resolves, p. 216. [47] See François Rabelais, The Lives, Heroic Deeds & Sayings of GARGANTUA & his Son PANTAGRUEL, tr. Sir T. Urquhart and P. Le Motteux, 3 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1921 [c.1532–65]), i.84–5.
19[62a]48 The use of the word ‘syndrome’ in connection with human conduct is all part of the ‘abolition of man’ which has been afoot for the last four centuries; it assimilates thought to reflex movement, action to ‘behaviour.’ The fantasy of some in the eighteenth century was to turn all physical movement into mental process – to make life ‘rational’ by turning the circulation of the blood into conduct; the outcome was to turn conduct into behaviour. Love becomes copulation. Relation becomes correlation. The Stevens-Johnson syndrome. The Stoics knew better than this. 19[63] In ancient China the profession of actor was despised; the actor was a social out-cast. This was also so for a long time in Europe. And it may be said that when actors became socially acceptable the life went out of drama. 19[64] Both Napoleon & Frederick the Great recognized ‘chance’ as sovereign in human affairs. But ‘chance’ for them was not fortuna. It is the relative unlikelihood that the responses made by others to your actions will be the responses you hoped they might make. 19[64] Politics the art of the possible – but is this not true of all practical conduct whatever? And the possible is not given; it is made. [48] Oakeshott numbered two consecutive folios [62]; to distinguish them the second is referred to here as 19[62a].
19[64] The common error that the steps in which we retrace where we have been before leave no footprints. 19[65] The old-fashioned reproof to children: ‘You forget yourself.’ A relic of the morality of honour: a utilitarian could never forget (or remember) himself. 19[65] The libido dominandi, the ‘will to power.’ One of the problems has always been how to extricate ‘government’ from this. For if to rule is merely to exercise the libido dominandi then rules are, eo ipso, wedded to evil. St Augustine solved this problem in his own way. But it is worth noticing that the person whom we are apt to call a ‘born leader’ is almost without any ‘will to power’; & there have been some ‘aristocracies’ (a few) brought up to the duty of ‘ruling’ who, as nearly as may be, ruled without any ‘will to power.’ The private-enterprise, democratic politician is, almost inevitably, a slave to the libido dominandi. 19[66] Most people are always wondering what other people will think, and they rule their conduct by what they guess its consequences will be. But there are some who don’t bother at all about what others think of them, & whose conduct is determined not by its likely consequences but by what they think is appropriate for them to do. They often do the first thing that comes into their heads to do; but if they are asked for a reason for not doing something they are not disposed to say more than that it is not the sort of thing
they do. These are the tramps & the aristocrats: consequences are nothing to them. They are fearless, truthful & often extraordinarily foolish. And, if the truth were told, while they give to life all the savour it has, they live on the first kind of person who holds the world together. 19[67] Some people seem never to be quite sure that they are alive unless life deals them a blow or unless they become involved in some unusual (preferably disagreeable) happening. 19[67] The revolutionary impulse may spring from many different sources: ‘revolutionaries’ are less alike than we often suppose. In a weak mind it may be no more than a desire to have one’s frustrations removed by magic, or even to see the world in chaos to match one’s own inner chaos or to match a destructive misfortune. These, however, are more likely to welcome a revolution than to make one. 19[67] ‘I set fire to the building because I wanted to be famous.’ No distinction between ‘fame’ and ‘infamy.’ 19[68] Men without a dominant passion who set themselves moral problems all the more fascinating because they are insoluble.
19[68] Rationalism The project of turning the ‘public schools’ into special boarding schools for children from broken homes, in need of psychiatric attention, deprived children, etc. What the ‘rationalist’ does not understand is that this is the complete destruction of ‘public schools’; he thinks of it as a useful adaptation. The public schools are a product of a certain sort of culture. Their distinctive virtues spring from a certain sort of education related to the children who come to them from a certain sort of home. These are counterparts of one another: the school would not exist with, at any rate, a dominant child of this sort. It is like supposing that if you have ‘popular’ newspapers, you still have ‘newspapers’; you don’t, you have something else. Cp. the project of admitting women to Caius. 19[69] Sicily under the Norman rule of Roger Guiscard Elsewhere in the Mediterranean the Normans were mainly destroyers. They were men of war who happened upon a Byzantine & a Saracen culture which was weak, perhaps decadent, & they destroyed it. But in Sicily they made the first modern European state – a multiracial, polyglot state in which Greek, Saracen & Norman, Christian, Jew & Moslem each followed their own cultural traditions under a central Norman rule. ‘Rule’ was keeping the peace in a manifold, not imposing a single solidarity.
19[70–71] Individuality The ‘modern’ pro-feeling for individuality which flowered in the theory of the morally autonomous personality, was a confluence of many tributaries of thought & feeling & was composed of a great variety of idioms of thought & feeling. It expressed itself sometimes in the idioms of the ancient world – Stoicism, Epicureanism – & sometimes in contemporary vernacular ideas. Its vocabulary is confused. It invaded every corner of European life: the business of getting a living, religion, law, art, etc. But fundamentally it was a moral sentiment. Its earlier expressions were apt to be extreme; it first emerged as a protest – a choice, a rejection – and, until the word became corrupted, it all revolved round the notion of ‘freedom.’ Its least spectacular emergence was, probably, in Italy in the late fourteenth century, for here it was preceded with many intimations. But elsewhere this pro-feeling acquired ‘prophets’: the greatest of whom were Rabelais, Luther, and Montaigne. It generated many different idioms of human character; part of the greatness of Rabelais is that he recognized this variety. If Pantagruel is the central character, the same pro-feeling appears, at different levels, in Friar John & Panurge. The Abbey of Thélème was perhaps, the first of the utopias of individuality. Its reflection is, in some respects, strongest in the writers on education. ‘Puritanism’ & the ‘Enlightenment’ were both on the other side: the new superstitions. The only moral utopia; the only utopia which wasn’t a corporation. Appropriately, Rabelais remained an Aristotelian. Kant, Fichte, Hegel – ‘freedom’ = being in control of one’s own world & destiny – choosing.
19[71] One of the most remarkable differences between the 20th & the 15th century is that it was the obscenities of Rabelais which protected him from immediate prosecution & censorship. 19[72] The vulgar is the opposite of the corrupt, the perverse & the uncharitable. 19[73] (1) Minds are forms of matter. Popper: organic matter. Thought & reasoning are elaborations of sense experience. ‘Penser, c’est sentir’: Destutt de Tracy.49 Thought is not a response to circumstances, it is determined by circumstances. ‘Behaviour.’ Religion is the product of desire – ‘God’ is a wish-fulfilment (cp. Hobbes) – not ‘thought.’ (2) In virtue of being able to ‘think’ men are ‘free’ – i.e. they can formulate their own response to circumstances. Choice. ‘Will’ is ‘thinking’ – choosing a response. Sentir, c’est penser – un peu. ‘Conduct.’ Yes, men create their gods, but by taking ‘thought.’
[49] See Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, Eléments d’idéologie: projets d’éléments d’idéologie à l’usage des écoles centrales, 4 vols. (Paris: Levi, 1804–15), vol. 1 ch. 1, ‘Qu’est-ce que penser?’
19[74] The past as a succession of ‘phases’ was the product of geology (geognosis). And the periodization of the human past which was the work of archaeologists was in terms of the tools which human beings had used – Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age: man presented as a ‘tool-using’ animal. 19[74] Not to worry about death is a maxim for soldiers for whom death is one of the fulfilments. For others it is important, but it means something different. Glory. 19[75–76] In a sacred liturgy the words & gestures are only symbols of the beatitude. Religion is ‘eternal life’ – a note of timelessness, of the unconditioned, of the absolute which may be heard in the hubbub of the transitory & the conditional: human beings recognized as immortal souls. This appears almost unqualified in the life of a ‘saint’; in others, it is a mood which may come & go. The ‘saint’ is a human being capable of being determined almost entirely by his character as an immortal soul. He is not concerned with a ‘future’ because he is not concerned with time; it is not ‘the life to come,’ or the ‘next’ world – these are analogies, approximations. This is something very sophisticated; it is not more than intimated in the ‘religious’ customs, rituals, festivals etc. of the world. But these are ‘religions’ in virtue of their intimation of ‘eternity,’ just as heroic self-sacrifice is an intimation of eternity. The virgin Mary, Jesus, the saints are there to collect the offerings, the prayers, the kisses & to safeguard the inaccessible solitude of God. God is not a ruler or a commander; he is remote,
untouched, caring nothing for suffering, for the desires & the longings of men, for their life or death. He cares only about good & evil. 19[A] Education – to impart the power of distinguishing within our everyday life the elements of distinction, and of living with them. An ‘idealizing’ power.50 19[A] To translate, not into practice, but into sentiment, the abstract ideas of a metaphysics; translate them into precepts about how to feel & so to act. The sentimental equivalent of the ethical theory. Cp. the Aristotelian mean. Happiness; pleasure. To transform theory into practice. E.g. idealism & a non-valuing of materialities. 19[B] Bourgeois. A disposition; a kind of person; a social class.51 The ‘Mean’ & the virtues of the absence of extremes – these particular virtues. A pro-feeling for a ‘balance,’ an equilibrium. Not distinguished by any particular amount of wealth; but, on the whole, this is a disposition absent from the very poor & perhaps from the very rich. But it is not, essentially, anything to do with wealth. The extremes to be avoided are religious, cultural, emotional etc., not essentially economic. [50] On a loose sheet inserted at 19[26]. [51] On a loose sheet inserted at 19[66].
A middle road. Temperate. The extremes are what they are in any civilization: piety, profligacy, asceticism, lust. Pro-feeling for maintaining his own identity. Security. Law, rules. His defects – prone to anxiety – the world (of extremes) is hostile & is always pressing upon him. But always avoids the extremes, self-hatred, guilt, mad joy. The puritan is not of this disposition. The reason why he should rule in a society, & not the extremist. The value of the bourgeois to the extremist: he keeps the world going, a world in which to be extremist is not absolute disaster. The bourgeois & the bohemian – they exist in virtue of one another. ‘Tame’; not ‘wild’; common-sense. They easily attract contempt – the contempt of the young, the eager, the strong, the unconditioned. The ‘self ’ he has to ‘please,’ the ‘conscience’ he has to follow, is not very grand, but it is not offensive or barbaric. Irony, humour, both spring from the contact of mean & extremes. The bourgeois does the scepticism of the world for it; its extremists the moral magnificence – faith.
Notebook 20 (April 1967)1 20[01] The title of a book seen in a bookshop: Ten Fund-raising Sermons. 20[01] The Red Guards broke into the Peking Foreign Office, stole confidential documents and copied them into their note-books, shouting ‘What’s so terrific about secrets anyway?’ Kafka’s ‘King’s messengers.’2 [1] LSE 2/1/20. Soft cover, light brown canvas over card, 23 cm × 13 cm, ruled. Recto folios numbered 1–139. Autograph, ink. Title page: ‘XX. / April 1967 / Que vivre est difficile, o mon coeur fatigué / Amiel / Dieu, que le son du cor est triste au fond du bois. Vigny / In the 14th century the hunting horn had but one / note / No, not Jack Buchanan; Fred Astaire.’ Other works from which Oakeshott made excerpts in this notebook but which are not mentioned in the text include: Fo. 5, G.R. Gleig, The Subaltern (Edinburgh: William Blackwood; London: T. Cadell, 1825); 9, Lady Gwendolen Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury, 4 vols. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1921–32); 34–5, L. Tolstoy, ‘The Wood-Felling A Junker’s Tale,’ in Sevastopol and Other Military Tales, tr. L. Maude and A. Maude (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1903), 154–205, 36, L. Tolstoy, The Cossacks; 58, H. Fielding, Don Quixote in England. A Comedy (London: George Faulkner, 1734); 67, Thomas Love Peacock, Crochet Castle (London, Paris, New York, and Melbourne: Cassell & Company Limited, 1887); 88, Freya Stark, Traveller’s Prelude: An Autobiography, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1950–3); 94, Vauvenargues, Pensées; 95, E.S. Kuznetsov, Prison Diaries, tr. H. Spier (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1975). [2] Possibly an allusion to Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. M. Brod, tr. E. Kaier and E. Wilkins (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1991 [1954]), Notebook 3, 2 December 1917: ‘They were given the choice of becoming kings or the kings’ messengers. As is the way with children,
20[02] 1. When one is alone one loses one’s head and ends by loving too much. 2. Great separations defeat fidelity. The first is the condition of the religious man; the second is that of one who feels he ‘has to live.’ What happens, happens. Who is to say what should happen in such an encounter between mortality and immortality? 20[02] ‘Men’ and ‘women’ are not different sorts of beings; ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are tendencies or dispositions common to both ‘men’ and ‘women.’ 20[02] eph’ oson endechetai athanatizein. So far as is possible, live as an immortal. Not ‘as if there were another life.’ Not a wager, not a prognostication, and certainly not a prediction. 20[02] Identity: As children we used to write elaborate names and addresses into our school books: X–, Y–, the room, the house, the street, the town, the country – & then, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, the World, the Universe. Oddly enough, none of they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless.’
them human relationships. Not, mother, father, grandfather etc: up to Adam & then to God. Space, not time. 20[03] A peasant saying his Ave Maria and Requiem aeternam aloud to himself at the door of his hut, turning towards the moon hanging low over the trees of his hut. Leopardi. 20[03] Generals who are said to have chained Fortuna to the wheels of their chariots. Virtus. 20[03] Religion is the way-side Calvary, decorated with a twist of wheat and a sprig of flowers. This is the religion of the civilized; in earlier times it was appropriately more violent. 20[03] The doctrine of the Trinity is a wonderful baroque or even rococo construction. The most impressive image of it is in the Graben in Wien.3 But consider Burkitt on the Athanasian creed.4 Theory & practice.
[3] i.e. the sculpture known as the Trinity column or the plague column in Vienna. [4] F.C. Burkitt, Some Thoughts on the Athanasian Creed (London: S.P.C.K., 1916).
20[03] ‘Dumb animals’: not incapable of uttering a sound (as some are, or nearly so) but incapable of speech. The mute swan. 20[03] The Sexual Offences Bill (No. 2) 1967. Mr Abse (Labour), its initiator, said that ‘the Bill was socially useful & would help a group that had for long been alienated to become integrated in the community.’ 20[03] The Pleades was shining brightly in the west & it was very cold. 20[04] Medicine is concerned with alleviation or cure; diagnosis is ‘understanding’ in relation to cure or alleviation. The so-called ‘principle’ of modern medicine – ‘the physical causation of all phenomena material and mental’ – is neither a principle, nor an hypothesis: it is merely a method of diagnosis and treatment. It is therefore an intellectual muddle to speak of certain kinds of ‘mental deficiency’ as ‘traceable to the lack of a specific enzyme,’ or to speak of the ‘biochemical basis’ of schizophrenia. To ascertain that to correct a chemical deficiency will remove, or suppress, the symptoms is to ascertain this, and nothing more than this. It says nothing whatever about the cause of the condition. And if something which could be represented as the ‘cause’ were discovered, it would not follow that we had at our disposal superior methods of cure. Medical practice is not at all concerned with the ‘nature’ of disease: it is concerned solely with the relief of symptoms. To
the patient it is only ‘symptoms’ which matter. Indeed, there is nothing of which a ‘symptom’ can be said to be a sign or an ‘effect.’ Drugs in so-called psychiatric treatment: it is said ‘the drugs are not curing the disease but only suppressing the symptoms.’ But what is wrong with this? It is no argument against a treatment that it only relieves the symptoms. If a man of 40 is relieved of this distress (the symptoms) for the rest of his life, what more can he ask? There are, of course, symptoms of symptoms. There is, in short, no such thing as ‘mental disease.’ There is, on the one side, ‘physical disease,’ for which cure may perhaps be found (i.e., means of suppressing the symptoms); and on the other side, there are mental conditions which are not susceptible of therapeutic treatment because they are understood to be conditions, not of ‘the mind’ (there is no such thing), but of thought. These are failures in self-understanding for which ‘education,’ not ‘therapy,’ is appropriate. Do people who prescribe group therapy & what-not imagine that they are doing something for their patients’ immortal soul? 20[05] The old relationship (it is gone now) between a soldier & the commander of the army was a strange personal loyalty, trust often mixed with admiration. As a boy I worked on a farm and my companion in the fields was a man named Ted Blaber who had fought in the Boer War, twenty years before. But this was not how he thought of it; what he said was that he had been in ‘General Buller’s army.’ And I don’t believe he had ever seen General Buller. He was proud of having ‘been with General Buller.’ 20[06] The insatiable curiosity, the passion to know all about the world, to explore it in haste, which belongs to some children; sometimes it is a sign that they are not destined to live long.
20[06] The difference between the kind of ‘organic’ fidelity of which some animals are capable, & human friendship. 20[06] Sometimes love is the gift of an impetus towards fantasy. 20[07] To lose somebody one loves is to be deprived of the opportunity to express a tenderness. 20[07] Any activity has a certain semblance of integrity when it is engaged in, not for profit, nor for any practical purpose, but for the glory of doing it, as play. 20[08] The New Atlantis ‘Professor Sir Gordon Sutherland, Master of Emmanuel College, addressing the meeting of Pugwash in Sweden, Sept 1967, on the “brain drain.” He suggested fuller immigration statistics & intensified training by “importing” countries (especially the USA) to produce a surplus of scientists & technologists for export. He also wanted the highly developed countries to introduce legislation which would ensure that the less developed countries could not lose more than 5 to 10 percent of their annual output of scientists and engineers. In the case of the underdeveloped countries, he wanted legislation by the hosts to compel the return home of those sent by their governments to study abroad.’
Sunday Times, 10 September. The reduction of human beings to the status of battery-hens proceeds apace. And we actually have the gall to criticize the ‘inhumanity’ of the Bourbon autocracies. This is a million times more inhumane that a life-time in prison in 18th century Naples. 20[09] Lytton Strachey confessed that he would willingly surrender all his literary talent & success for the gift of physical beauty. 20[09] I have wasted a lot of time living. 20[10] Every man needs a country besides his own, a chosen as well as a native land. It is the opportunity of knowing better all that one may have learned at home by hearing it in another idiom. The difficulty is that it must be chosen when one is comparatively young, & thus, like all adventures in love, it is very much a union of chance and choice. But it is not a choice to be dissipated, &, in most cases, there are clearly eligible partners and & less eligible. It is different from choosing a wife; for one thing one cannot be refused. I made the mistake of never making a choice, one choice; & consequently, I have never managed a deep, dramatic relationship of this sort. I have frittered away my affections; France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Ireland. If I had known then what I know now, I should have chosen Spain.
20[11] ‘Physical’ courage, nerve, respect for tradition & contempt for convention, a proud sense of personal honour, an indifference to death: an aristocrat. 20[11] These young Americans: they are third generation Lt. Pinkertons having their identity crises & convinced that they are interesting.5 20[11] ‘No man’s dignity can be asserted without being impaired’:6 & this goes, also, for the ‘dignity of man’ – ‘human dignity,’ so-called. 20[11] At the Russian embassy. About the cat. Journalist: Do people have many pets in Russia? Official: Yes, like you, we are great lovers of domestic animals. Journalist: Are cats the most popular pets? Official: In Russia, all pets have an equal opportunity to be popular. February 1968.
[5] The character of Lieutenant Pinkerton appears in the opera Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924). [6] Henry Taylor, The Statesman (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1836), Ch. XV, ‘On Quarrelling,’ at p. 107.
20[12] ‘A mind is a fortuitous arrangement of vermicular appetites.’ ‘A painting is a certain interaction of electrons & nuclei.’ These are the great false truths. 20[13] An odd contrast, more or less contemporaries, Tolstoy & Amiel. (I recollect that I came across them both at the same time, when I was about 17 ½, & both have remained with me.) Tolstoy (except in regard to whom he would marry; when he dithered) never had any difficulty in deciding. His only difficulty was his aptitude for making half a dozen ‘irrevocable’ & contradictory decisions in as many days. Amiel could never decide anything. But he managed to live in indecision, to make it a way of life. (Keats has something about this.) They were both fascinated with themselves. But whereas Tolstoy’s self-consciousness never, or rarely, reached the level of self-knowledge, Amiel was self-knowledgeable as well as selfconscious. On the other hand, Tolstoy, by a wonderful intuition, knew an enormous amount about other people; & Amiel – some people (women) believed that they had never been so profoundly understood, but I doubt if he ever understood anyone but himself. Tolstoy upsets the classification of extrovert & introvert; & he denies also ‘man’ & ‘woman.’
20[14] Our historic situation It is reason enough to profess to being a Christian & to support the Church because if we lost all our culture we would cease to exist. 20[14] A ‘compromise’ is not a ‘position’; it can only be defended pragmatically. 20[15] ‘The sailor’s consciousness of complete independence from all land affairs.’ Conrad, The Shadow Line.7 The feeling of isolation, relieved by a tradition of conduct with peculiarly severe & absolute rules e.g. for the conduct of the Master of the ship. Nelson. Poseidon. 20[15] Those who look for only one thing when they look for ‘meaning.’ Meaning is what it means to somebody. 20[15] The writer never lies; even if he does not mean what he says, he says what he means. [7] Joseph Conrad, The Shadow Line: A Confession (New York: DoubleDay, Page, & Company, 1917), p. 27.
20[16] The unhappiness, the frustration & the immorality of the age is its morbid hankering after virtue. 20[16] An exaggerated notion of the importance of every human soul but one’s own – the proud belief that only you can do without being in some manner important – dispense with it & still be a man. 20[17] Theory and Practice The counterpart of philosophy in actual feeling. The Stoic analysis of human nature – action & passion. Cp. Bernard Longueville in Henry James, Confidence.8 20[19] For understanding politics there is more to be got from reflecting upon Hazlitt’s four essays on Chatham, Burke, Fox & Pitt than from all the enquiries into voting behaviour & rôle perceptions.9 20[20] The superiority & the inferiority of Christianity: it must be made (remade) by every believer. This was not so of the only other [8] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Henry James, Confidence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1879), Ch. XV.’ [9] See W. Hazlitt, ‘Character of Lord Chatham’; ‘Character of Mr. Burke’; ‘Character of Mr. Fox’; and ‘Character of Mr. Pitt,’ in Political Essays, With Sketches of Public Characters (London: William Hone, 1819), pp. 356–93.
religion of the western world – the nature religion of the Romans – which is, say, ½ of Christianity: we live, & for two millennia have lived, in a Roman world. The twentieth century is distinguished by the large number of people who do not think it worthwhile to remake Christianity for themselves. But I doubt if its eligibility to be remade has come to an end. Needless to say, I do not think of the Bishop of Woolwich10 etc as ‘remakers’; they are merely soft in the head. 20[20] We have substituted universal pauperization for poverty. 20[20] Edison to his son when his workshop caught on fire: ‘Go and fetch your mother, she’ll never see anything like this again.’ 20[20] What the plague effected in Athens, inflation is effecting in European states. Of course, it need not do so, but the response made & likely to be continued to be made is moral collapse. Honest men become rare; honour & self-respect diminish. Universal pauperization is quite a different thing than poverty. 20[20] My father’s atheism was based chiefly on the insufficiencies of persons, as if the fact that so many clocks are out of order had made him lose faith in Time. [10] Presumably John Robinson (1919–83), Bishop of Woolwich 1959– 69, author of numerous popular Christian works including Honest to God (London: SCM, 1963).
20[20] When we lose a friend in war, he never seems quite gone. 20[23] Both men & women may love a man because of his misfortunes, but no man or woman can ever love a woman on this account. 20[23] Karl Marx is a remarkable writer. No other can turn possible truths into superstitions so rapidly & so conclusively. Every truth that came to him he turned into a falsehood. He is, possibly, the most corrupt writer who ever lived. It is not, therefore, surprising that he has become the apostle of the illiterate masses of the world – by ‘illiterate’ I mean those who can accept nothing but what has been endowed with the quality of superstition. 20[24] In my dream I had in front of me a book of the seventeenth century, & at the bottom of a page I read: Faith is a fruit; lyric flowers grow on other trees. And I knew this to be both true and false. And I turned the page & found there a sentence in which all the conflicting truths about religion were reconciled. But when I woke I could not recall it. 20[24] I was born under a wandering star.
20[24] The human world is composed of gestures. The language of gestures may change, but it may also become impoverished. Nothing in our world has replaced the peasant crossing himself in the hay-field when he hears the angelus bell, & this is far older than Christianity. 20[25] Cecil King was voted out of the Chairmanship of the Daily Mirror Publishing Company by his fellow Directors. When asked whether he had been surprised, he answered that his only surprise was that the vote was unanimous. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘there were some on the board to whom he had not done favours.’ Tacitus, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Hobbes. 20[25] If I were asked what constituted the decadence of our current life, I would say it was having lost the opportunity of noticing. To whom, now, has the expression ‘the bloom of the fruit’ any direct meaning? And the destruction of distinctions. When all men are brothers & all men friends, there is an end of brotherhood & friendship. 20[25] A writer, a thinker, may ‘haunt’ us, or ‘haunt’ a whole subsequent generation of thinkers. But to these we should say, as the Australian native said to his dead kinsman, ‘Come back to us in our dreams, if you will; but not as a ghost.’11
[11] See 18[06], above.
20[27] They want to arrive without having travelled, to have learned without learning. Teaching is initiating into the difficulties & pleasures of travel, therefore they abhor a teacher. What they look for is a drug from which they may awake having arrived, a magic incantation which will open the door, a formula which contains all truth. And what they look for is supplied: the gnostic word which breaks the spell which has hitherto held prisoner the human race. It is supplied by ‘progressive education’ whose message is that it is better to arrive than to travel. It is supplied by Karl Marx & Sigmund Freud. It is received by those who do not know the difference between Mao & Confucius. 20[28] Query: How to deprive death of its sting without depriving life of its sweetness. 20[28] Repentance is not an attempt to cancel what has been; that is impossible. It is a new experience to be added. It does not mean that we should have avoided what we did. There are actions which are both proper to be done & proper to repent of doing. 20[28] Arletty.12
[12] Léonie Bathiat (1898–1992), aka ‘Arletty,’ French actress, singer, and model.
20[29] Le don terrible de la familiarité:13 the power of awakening new thoughts, feelings, emotions in another so that she becomes almost a stranger to herself, & then recognizes herself. Unmaking & remaking. 20[29] What Plato lacked was the amicitia rerum mortalium.14 20[29] The worst comes last. 20[30] ‘It is not enough to end the misery of poverty, we must also end what has been described as the “misery of unimportance.” In the work place, in the schools & universities & in government at every level we have got to reflect our belief in the individual value of every man & woman: their right to be heard, to express their personalities, to control their own environment, to be taken into account as individuals.’ Mr B. Castle at Cambridge, October 1969. Oh, what rubbish. 20[30] How to reconcile adventure & fidelity. [13] See 14[26], above. [14] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Augustine, Confessions, Bk IV ch. vi.’
20[31] ‘Many so-called criminal offenses are nothing more than the expression of a desire to be orientated.’ ‘Nothing’ more? 20[31] Defending Counsel: ‘In this permissive society no great harm was done except that he broke the law.’ 20[31] Every objection to an enormity is called a ‘backlash.’ Every firm stand is called an ‘over-reaction.’ Only Halifax knew how to release us.15 20[32] The custom in French country churches to distribute to the congregation at high Mass pieces of brioche, pain bénit; a symbolic communion. Christian doctrine is a vast collection of heresies; Christian worship a vast collection of local inventions. It will die only when it ceases to be inventive. 20[33] Leave much to time & little to argument.
[15] The last sentence is in a different ink.
20[33] Life imitates art. ‘Nature’ is the invention of poets & painters; ‘human nature’ is the invention of poets. The office of inventor has now been usurped by ‘scientists,’ & they have invented a human being who is a ‘gene-structure.’ 20[33] The art of a nation is the model available for the life of a nation to imitate. But then most of what is called ‘art’ is not the work of artists. 20[37] The work criticizes itself unnoticed, for the most part, by the author. But there are authors who notice, but who do not know how to bring their noticings to bear. The masterpiece is a criticism of everything else. 20[37] ‘Fact finding.’ Facts are not ‘found,’ they are ‘made.’ Every ‘fact’ in a court of law has nine lives. 20[37] The ends of a court of law are ‘relative,’ limited – the best that can be made, the best that can be got, here & now. 20[37] The fatal ‘materialism’ in morals which relies upon ‘facts’ more than feelings, sentiments, loves.
20[39] The ‘justification’ of ‘comprehensive education’ – ‘the fact that society has a right to the fully developed talents of all its children’! 20[39] Every man is an attempt on the part of God to make a human being – that is, one whose life is a self-enactment. Some never become human, they remain frogs & and ants. But, somehow, they must all be treated as if they were human. 20[40] Goethe, & I have no doubt others, believed that civilized human beings might be restrained in their relentless exploitation of the world, & perhaps even saved from the ultimate disaster of a barbarism worse than savagery, by a ‘principle’ in human nature called ‘feminine,’ not because it was exclusive to women but because it was apt to be preponderant in their characters. But with every year that passes this preponderance diminishes; the vocation to ‘save’ no longer calls or is even understood. The urge of every emancipated woman is to become a man. Unisex is not our predicament; it is the triumph of the ‘male.’ 20[41] For those who talk most about it, the revolt against ‘alienation’ is a longing to be given an indestructible identity. It is not a flight from loneliness but a yearning to be lost in a ‘solidarity.’ It is a revolt against multiplicity, against humanitas.
20[41] Agnes Sorèl dominates the history of Charles VII’s reign; Joan of Arc was but an episode in it, a camp legend destined to raise the sinking courage of soldiers.16 20[42] The Rolls of Honour & dishonour; the man of integrity and his counterfeiters; to be continued. Goethe. Burckhardt. Nietzsche. Kierkegaard. Schopenhauer. Karl Kraus. Valéry. Swift.
Marx. St Simon. 20[43]
But how could the ‘popular press’ be anything other than a vast corruption of language? 20[43] ‘A generation bred on syllabuses can hardly understand the inspiration of the medieval schools in their prime.’ – The first rapture of walking or riding hundreds of miles to sit at Abelard’s feet – before this was converted into the formal university ‘course’ [16] Agnès Sorel (1422–50), mistress of Charles VII (1403–61), King of France from 1422.
of the 13th century. And even then it survived. Ramus was sought as Abelard had been sought. 20[44] That fresh exploration of the resources of the Latin language – an exploration in which the language lived again – by the lyricists of the 12th century. Brief – swallowed up by the vernacular. 20[44] We make the mistake of counting as ours only what we experience differently from others or recognize as being divergent. Or we make the mistake of recognizing ourselves as mere reflections of a ‘society’ to which we owe everything. 20[44] A statement which in the mouth of another would be ironical is transformed when it is, in fact, naïve. It has a double meaning. ‘It all helped to pass the time,’ said naively of a life of domestic tragedy. 20[45] ‘Community spirit’ everywhere, sitting about together everywhere, communicating everywhere, but with less and less to communicate. To be out of touch is to be extinguished; and it matters not at all what is said so long as the silence which is equated with extinction is broken. 20[45] The unforced integrity of an educated mind.
20[48] ‘The observation of species so close to our own [apes & monkeys] throws serious doubt as to whether the way we rear our infants in the West is the best possible. Contact between mother & infant is vital for security in monkeys & apes; yet we are content to let our infants lie out in prams for large portions of their early lives.’ Anthony Storr, Sunday Times, 11 October 1970! What rot. We’re not apes but good Christians. 20[49] ‘In Paris one should either have everything or want nothing.’ Yes, but that was the lost sweet Paris of 40 years ago. 20[50] ‘When I was a child,’ writes Julian Green, ‘owing to a misapprehension of a picture in a history book, I got it into my head that France was a real person, a woman with a crown which she doffed at certain times to wear a Phrygian cap, & one of my main sources of worry was that, sooner or later, this person with whom I was in love would grow old & eventually die.’ Perhaps she has died. France: a person whose failings were surpassed by her generosity & courage; a creature of whims & sudden fancies, which led her astray, but with a great power of recovery; a soul of great spiritual wealth; proud, valiant, courageous. Really a family of persons, the Parisian branch of which was flighty, talkative, euphoric, and which was not taken much notice of by the cousins in the Dordogne. France, a land every square foot of which is cultivated, a land without forests or hedges.
Which is my France? The France in whom choice & chance are one at last? The France of the Chanson de Roland, of St Bernard & Abélard, of Rabelais & Villan & Louise Labé & Ronsard, of Montaigne & de la Boétie & Charron & Michel de l’Hôpital, of de Thou & Cinq-Mars, Pascal, Vauvenargues & Chamfort, of Balzac, Racine, Rachel, of the Chartreuse de Parme, Verlaine, Péguy, de Vigny, Manet & Poussin, Cézanne, Braque & Valéry. 20[50] That famous ‘Oak’ in whose shade democracy is said to have been born – it was not the scene of political deliberation; it was a court of law, or it was the tree upon which the grandees fixed their shields in proclamation of their loyalty or it was a totem. The half of the corruption which ‘democracy’ has imposed upon the past in its search for a lineage has not yet been spoken. There are French writers who trace ‘democracy’ to Joan of Arc. 20[52] To be happy for the first time & to be surprised at being happy – it must have happened if only one could recollect. 20[52] The ex-votos that can be seen in a country church in France, giving thanks for miraculous recoveries, safe returns, narrow escapes from death & disaster, little worldly successes & happinesses: a sweet, wonderful, pathetic gratitude. In Winchester Cathedral it is different. Besides the ancient monuments, two centuries of imperial adventure, memorials to boys drowned in shipwrecks, killed in battle in India, Africa, China & on the plains of Europe, a strange mixture of pride & gratitude.
20[53] In 1917, after a great bombardment, an attack having been ordered, a French soldier clambered out of his trench to meet the enemy. Finding himself alone on the parapet he looked back & saw that almost his companions were lying dead or dying in the trench. He uttered a strange & magnificent cry which soon became known all over the country & did more than all the soixante-quinze to save the French nation from destruction: Debout les morts! It took many centuries to breed a man capable of this exclamation. His ancestors were de Thou & Cinq-Mars. 20[54] The most important change in European civilization which marks the twentieth century is the disappearance of ‘war.’ It came slowly, with many set-backs; Wellington noticed it. And it was intimated earlier in the ‘religious wars’ of the 16th century; although it has no counterpart in the wars of the middle-ages, not even in the Crusades. Soon after 1918 Europe entered upon a period of ‘gnostic’ war; ‘democratic’ war, which is not ‘war.’ 20[54] One would have thought that if Scott Fitzgerald & his wife could remain together, any couple could do so; but this discounts the sheer genius for misery of those two. 20[55] There is much less love in the world to-day than there was fifty years ago, & much more ill-temper. We are living the fifties of the seventeenth century over again.
20[55] I arrived & passed the midway of the journey of life without recognizing it, without enough introspection to recognize it. Where Dante stood at the beginning of the Divina Comedia, I never stood. It is a great loss, or is it? I passed that ‘shadow line’ in a dream; the sweet dream of June, si bleu, si calme. 20[56] From that day to this every Spanish soldier carries under his tunic a holy relic & a pack of cards. 20[59] Vera Lynn: ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ Marlene Dietrich: ‘Wo sind alle die Männer?’ The German song is just that much more profound because it is the song of a people deeply, extravagantly in love with death. 20[59] His conduct was founded upon the foolish hope that his opponents would not have the sense to take advantage of his errors. 20[59] I too have tried to be a philosopher, but happiness keeps breaking in. 20[59] Love touched her, but found her without courage.
20[60] ‘Only this morning when I got up I said to myself, where are the good old days when I was unhappy?’17 Ah, those dear vanished days when I was so unhappy. 20[60] It was not ‘social change’ which brought the Labour party into a Parliament hitherto dominated by the Liberal and Tory parties – it was the bargain made in 1903 between the officials of the Liberal party and the ILP to allow the ILP a straight fight with a conservative in thirty-odd constituencies. 20[61] When pop music provides anything half as good as Ronald Burge’s ‘Take a look at Ireland’… The indescribable vulgarity of ‘Sergeant Pepper.’ 20[61] The Immortals: the reveller who, when asked by a railway ticketcollector ‘Do you belong to Glasgow,’ replied ‘No, Glasgow belongs to me!’ 20[61] In everything he had his own way of doing it. Wyat resteth here, that
20[62]
[17] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Delacroix.’ Possibly Eugène Delacroix (1798– 1863), French painter, but the quotation has not been traced.
Quick could never rest Inscription on Wyatt’s memorial in Sherborne Priory.18 20[62] ‘Dieu, que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois.’ Vigny.19 It is the horn of Roland. The world we inhabit to-day emerged in those marvelous ambiguous centuries of the early Christian era, which carried with them reminiscences of ancient Athens & Sparta, & the realities of Rome. This is my world; it is not past, it is present. I & Charlemagne & Roland & Oliver are contemporaries. O rich wild world into which to be born. And it comes to us as it was imagined & put together, for the most part, in the 12th century. This is the century in which we are all born. 20[63] The lyre of Apollo cannot silence the pipes of Pan, but as their sound becomes fainter it becomes more human, more melancholy. If one lived long enough, perhaps they would become one music. 20[63] In love and friendship we take each other à son gré. This is difficult to learn.
[18] Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42), English diplomat and poet. The first two lines of the poem ‘Wyatt Resteth Here,’ composed by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c.1516–47), were used for the inscription on Wyatt’s memorial in the Wykeham chapel of Sherborne Abbey. [19] See 16[40], above.
20[63] In Conrad places are often magic states which explain the actions performed in them. And of how many ‘gardens’ in Henry James is this not also true? 20[63] She was incapable of sadness, only of resentment. 20[64] The ancient, living, miscellaneous world – the world of Gloucestershire which Maitland resurrected – dies slowly. On the morning of 3 September 1939 the out-break of war was announced in Chipping Camden by the town crier in tricorne hat & cape, with his bell & parchment. It was not Marx who portended the new, deadly uniformity; it was Francis Bacon & St Simon, the Faustian progenitors of a world where everything is organized. The world where law has ceased to be lore. 20[64] This is a sort of Zibaldone: a written chaos.20 20[65] You may be bored, but you are quite certain of not being bored by decency.
[20] See Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, ed. M. Caesar and F. D’Intino (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013 [1898]).
20[65] Religion: no doubt it is an affaire des moeurs, & if it were not more it would be something. But, like everything else, it may be something more, much more. 20[66] ‘Tous les comédiens ne sont pas au théâtre.’ Yes, they are: those others have not a jot of the true comedy which reconciles us to life; they are farceurs. 20[67] The National Association for the promotion of Social Science!21 20[68] ‘We all know that young men must go to the devil, but it is intolerable that they should make a theory of it.’22 Even then! Perhaps the only difference is that now there are more of them & their ‘theories’ are more pretentious.
[21] The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science campaigned for social reform in the mid-Victorian era: see Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain. The Social Science Association 1857–1886 (Cambridge, 2002). [22] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Jowett.’ Probably Benjamin Jowett (1817–93), Master of Balliol College, Oxford University, 1870–93, and ViceChancellor of Oxford University, 1882–6, but the quotation has not been traced.
20[68] The peculiarly graceful & not merely detached attention that a man whose affections are anchored may give to attractive women. 20[69] Pascal misunderstood Montaigne (as Montaigne had mistaken Rabelais); and Montaigne would never have understood Pascal. But there is a land, an island, where they meet & understand one another. I have not found it; but this is what I have looked for, without knowing what I looked for. 20[69] One is under an obligation to be happy with the here & now. 20[70] Unforgettable, but not memorable. 20[70] One of the great charms of children to adults is their great faith in the imminence of the unlikely. Of course, this is not how the children themselves think of it; they merely imagine the world to be less set in its ways than it is. 20[70] How much of love is a ‘will to love’? Heavenly love is love without a ‘will to love’; peace.
20[70] O the wide, wide inviolate spaces of the recollected past. 20[70] The eyes of adolescents which show everything. 20[71] A memory. I went to see Llewelyn Powys as he lay dying in his garden hut in Chaldon Herring.23 He could not speak above a whisper, but after a time he pushed a book towards me; it was lying on his bed. It was Leviathan. And he whispered to me: ‘Read to me about the Kingdom of the Fairies.’ And I read until the sun went down. 20[72] I often read the In Memoriam column in the newspaper. It revives one’s confidence in love, devotion & faithfulness & it is a small window through which one can see a happy world. Of course, people rarely know how to express their love & their loss. One has to to wait many weeks, but then comes: ‘Figg, Gerald. Darling, unforgettable Figgy. Diana.’ And if it does not speak with the gravitas of Romans who knew better than any others how to live & how to die, it is reticent, & it reveals a life of ‘joy & woe’ which stays the rot of time. Who was this Figgy & who this Diana. Mortals who made themselves immortal.
[23] Llewelyn Powys (1884–1939), writer, younger brother of Theodore Francis Powys and John Cowper Powys, author of The Meaning of Culture, reviewed by Oakeshott in 1930: see SW iii.58–60. Powys, however, died in Switzerland.
20[73] This evening the ‘Down Your Way’ programme came from Chatteris, that bleak out-post of human life in the Fen Country. One of those interviewed was an engineer who looked after the pumping station. A simple, true man who understood his engines, who had lived all his life between land & water, who no doubt went fishing on a Saturday, who perhaps had to wait a life-time for an emergency, like 1947, but when it came found that he was a soldier. Why was it so moving that when he was asked to choose a piece of music he chose ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s desiring’? Almost anything else would have done – ‘Aufwiedersehen,’ or ‘Wherever you walk,’ or even ‘You are my sunshine.’ Whatever he had said it would be echoing Wyatt – ‘I am here in Kent & Christendom’ – a miracle of civilization which will not last much longer. 20[74] If I were asked to choose the triumphant moments which represent the achievements of our civilization it would not be the great & magnificent exhibition of majestas, nor perhaps great moments in the history of art or music, but the unobtrusive moments of magnificence in which, not one but many show their education: the tumult of applause which, in defiance of all propriety, followed the five-hour closing speech of Edward Clarke’s defence of Mrs Adelaide Bartlett at the Old Bailey in April 1886 & the ovation he received when he was recognized in a London theatre on the eve of that day. Mrs Adelaide was probably guilty of what she was accused – murder. 20[75] ‘I’m a psychology major, so I know something about people!’ Dear deluded girl.
20[75] Why do I find it so moving that it was the 1st Queen’s Regiment (the West Surreys) who in far distant Assam at the battle of Jail Hill turned the tide of the Japanese invasion of Asia on 13 May 1944? There must have been Centuries in the Roman army in the 3rd century which fought battles like this. And Roland’s horn echoes down the ages. But nothing stays the rot of time. 20[76] To love the world without being worldly. 20[76] That facility for starting off again on a new adventure. The voyageur. 20[76] What was between them was like those legends of rings exchanged or coins broken, to be sent as a summons only in some circumstance of finality. 20[77] In the devastation in which we live the greatest of all the destructions is the self-destruction of women. 20[77] Until the middle of the nineteenth century British juries blinked the evidence because of the harshness of the law; we are now entering upon a period in which it is difficult (at least in London) to empanel a jury which, if not composed as to one half of criminals,
is certainly profoundly in favour of crime, in courts served by barristers concerned with ‘social forces’ & ‘psychological urges’ & magistrates who add their quota to the rubbish uttered. 20[78] The immuring of a delinquent nun was announced in these words: Sister, let thy sorrow cease Sinful brother, part in peace. Imagine it.24 20[78] ‘We must uproot & destroy everything, however sacred it may seem to some, which is a hindrance to the proper development of society towards its proper goal.’ Canon Collins 21 July 1963. Dear, mad, bemused Canon. 20[79] Of a book about Amsterdam – ‘This chronicles the growth of Amsterdam from an insignificant fishing village to a major tourist centre.’ Oh what a fall is here.
[24] Oakeshott’s note: ‘But see, Maitland, Canon Law in the Church of England p. 175.’
20[80] The emblem of the human predicament is not exclusion from that Eden-world where every want is satisfied, but the fatality of Babel; not the lack of knowledge but of mutual self-understanding. 20[81] Life is not a honeymoon, but never to have had a honeymoon is to have missed the sweetness of life. The unfortunate are those for whom one is not enough. 20[81] A scorpion came to the bank of the Dog River & could not cross because the river was in flood. He saw a fish, nibbling placidly among the weeds. ‘Please, fish,’ said the scorpion, ‘take me on your back & carry me across the river.’ The fish was unhappy about this. ‘If I carry you on my back,’ said he, ‘you will sting me & I shall die.’ But the scorpion had an answer for him. ‘If I sting you & you die in the middle of the river, I will be lost too because I cannot swim.’ So the fish was reassured. He took the scorpion on his back & began to swim across the flooded river. Half-way over, the scorpion stung him. With his dying breath, the fish asked plaintively, ‘Why did you do it? Now we shall both die.’ To which the scorpion replied, ‘I wish I knew, little friend – but this is Lebanon.’ 20[82] To hear the soft utterances of spring. 20[82] When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?
20[83] A swallow speeds through the air to catch a gnat & to satisfy its hunger; not to verify a principle. 20[84] Augustinian Christianity is severe & remorseful; it had wit & charm & irony, but it lacked gaiety. It was il Francesco, the ‘little Frenchman,’ who translated it into the language of the Troubadors. 20[84] Friendship, like everything else human, has to be learned; in children it has no roots. 20[84] To try, perhaps to try again; but not to grumble. 20[84] …Since the earth rose out of the sea. 20[85] In 1968 a 25-year old Punjabi ‘farmer’ entered England illegally, having paid about £1000 to do so. Subsequently, he alleges, he paid about £700 ‘blackmail’ to conceal the illegality of his entry. He stayed 3 years in Birmingham with a ‘friend’; what he was doing during this period is not divulged. In 1971 he came to London and worked for a time as a builder’s labourer. In 1974 he was employed as a ‘machine operator’ earning £50 per week net.
In 1973 he bought a 3 bedroomed house in Southall for £11,000, paying a deposit of £3000 & taking out a mortgage for £8000. In 1974, by fiat of the Home Secretary (April), he became a legal citizen and disclosed to a journalist the ‘misery’ of his life as an illegal immigrant. 20[86] I was eating my chicken pie. ‘What are you thinking about,’ she asked. Well, to tell the truth, I was thinking about the village carpenter who took Hölderlin in when he went mad & looked after him all the long years of his later life. The village must have been high in the hills of his beloved Schwabenland. I saw Hölderlin sitting on a bench in front of the cottage in the sun. It was a summer evening & the carpenter, smoking his pipe, came & sat beside him. They did not speak. Nor did I. 20[86] Oh to have composed a tune, a polka, a waltz, a song. 20[87] ‘To play with the gypsies in the wood.’ The pipes of Pan, the magic flute, the enticement of the wild; these can be heard only be those who have been brought up in nurseries or inhabit gardens. Never to have heard them is like never having seen the moon for the first time; but oh do not let them steal your children’s hearts away. 20[87] Das goldene Wiener Herz was destroyed by immigrants.
20[89] Man, please thy Maker, and be merry, And give not for this world a cherry25 Please put this on my grave. 20[89] The passing of time, terrible & yet blessed; to understand this is to understand the human condition. 20[90] June, I do not know what it may mean to be with you in heaven where, I suppose, we are what we are in terms of our love of God, & so I do not think much about this. But I often think of meeting you in Purgatory. You will be surrounded by your friends, by those you have loved & those who have loved you; and I shall be standing shyly apart. But were I to send a message to you who should say: ‘There is one here who has made a fire upon the sea shore & cooked a fish & would have you eat with him,’ would you answer: ‘Say to him that I will come’? And were it merely for ‘old time’s sake’ you came, I would be almost content – for this is Purgatory, not Heaven. ‘Come close to me sweet comrade of the past.’ Purgatory, that most human of all inventions, far surpassing ‘heaven.’ 20[91] Priscilla told me that when she was a child she really believed in the Greenwood as a place where one might go and be exempt from the troubles & the confusion of the world. The forest of Arden. [25] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Dunbar.’ William Dunbar (c.1460–c.1520), Scottish poet.
20[91] It is not the wheat which came out of what was then, in 1820, the North West, but the songs. These people were often the victims of crooks, they were credulous, they were deceived; but they did not deceive themselves & they were not Baconians. They retrieved the Wabash from nonentity. How much religion did it take to settle Indiana? 20[92] Un vivant is a much more significant person than the rather vulgar bon viveur. 20[92] It was a smile debased by no accessory expression of benevolence, or irony, pity, cruelty, or invitation; it expressed nothing but itself, a divine delight in existence. 20[92] A drummer boy. The American drummer boy of Castine, Maine. The Little Locksmith.26 ‘The Minstrel boy’: that is what I was born to be – in those totally pointless Scottish wars; a life devoid of all irrelevancies; a life of self-fulfilment.
[26] K.B. Hathaway, The Little Locksmith (New York: Coward-McCann, 1943).
20[93] Lampedusa records that the refugees in Palermo from the earthquake in Messina in 1908 were reported to be ‘behaving most indecently’ when they were billeted in the Palermo theatres, & his father remarking ‘they felt the urge to replace the dead.’27 I remember as a boy finding an account of the earthquake in a book in the school library & reading that, after the shock had passed & the town lay in ruins, those who had escaped, even strangers, made love together on the hill side, & I remember thinking: how poetic a way to celebrate an escape from death. 20[93] The sleepless grudge of unsatisfied curiosity. 20[95] ‘This Government, I am proud to say, has sought to fulfil the longstanding obligations of the Labour Movement to the miners, & the whole nation may rejoice that we have done so.’ Michael Foot on the Miner’s Wages Settlement, 14 February 1975.28 And this is what they called ‘politics’!
[27] Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), Italian aristocrat and author. [28] Michael Foot (1913–2010), Labour MP 1945–55, 1960–92, leader of the Labour Party 1980–83.
20[97] ‘I weigh my words well when I assert that the men who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, & therefore a better conception of this wonderful universe & of man’s relation to it than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity & ignorant of those of nature.’ T.H. Huxley, ‘On a Piece of Chalk,’ 1868. Address to working men in Norwich.29 What confusion! Huxley thinks that the ‘history’ here is ‘geology.’ 20[98] The once born & the twice born; this is a different contrast. To be ‘born again,’ to make the leap – this is not necessary; it is only circumstantial. We are never without the Or; we are born into a world of the Or; we do not have to get out of the Either, both are abstractions; feeling & thought, action & the conditions of action. The Either is not ‘natural,’ it is no less learned than the Or & both are learned together. 20[99] It is glorious & it is wretched to be a human being. We look at the world & can never see enough of it. Each must manage his wants & his satisfactions for himself as best he may. We are joined only in love (where choice & chance are one, at last), in a conversation, [29] See T.H. Huxley, ‘On a Piece of Chalk,’ in Discourses Biological and Geological (New York D. Appleton and Company, 1896), pp. 1–36, at p. 4.
& in observing some conditions of law & morals in whatever we choose to do or say. Live, but live nobly. Be ruled by courage. 20[99a]30 A sword from Culloden. That would be something for a man to keep up-stairs or for a girl to bring with her when she married. 20[100] God died, not in battle or in peace with his dogs around him, but by treachery. 20[101] According to the Chaldean account of the creation of the world, of man & of his Fall, the consequences of this fall for man were: That his knowledge was capable of injuring him. That the human race became disputatious, notable for its hostility. That they were forced to submit to tyranny. That his desires were often unsatisfied & when satisfied often disappointing. That his labour was often frustrated in its purposes. That he was troubled in mind and body. 20[101] What constitutes civil freedom is not that our natural desires are unlawful but that our lawful desires are not themselves law-like. [30] Oakeshott numbered two consecutive folios 20[99]; to distinguish them the second is referred to here as 20[99]a.
20[101] There cannot be an obligation to believe something. In other words no belief is authoritative. Belief on ‘evidence’ is not belief on the ‘authority’ of evidence (it has none) but on the grounds of evidence. 20[101] In ‘politics’ a Jacobite or a Confederate. 20[102] Later generations, especially after 1945, have expressed astonishment & incredulity at the ‘gaiety’ of those who went to war & were killed in the so-called ‘first’ war. Julian & Billy Grenfell, for example, are regarded as sentimental, deceived characters, representative of a sort of decadence. But when I recollect my boyhood & what that war was to us at school, with the almost daily news of an elder boy (who had left a few months before) killed, I know that both the astonishment & the incredulity is misplaced. They were like that, & we who were 15 or 16 were also like that. We did not think of the war as, in any crude sense, a ‘religious’ war, a ‘crusade,’ nor were we in love with death; and we floated upon no nonsense about making ‘the world safe for democracy.’ That ‘gaiety’ was not a meaningless display of fireworks; it was the dissipation of centuries of religious belief. 20[103] C.D. Broad seems to have thought the brain was a mechanism for protecting the organism from the confusion of a rush of messages from the universe.
20[103] ‘The basic human right to reproduce’! Mrs Justice Heilbron, September 1975. Said in relation to a case concerning an idiot girl of 15 or so whose mother, disturbed by her daughter’s escapades with both boys & adults, sought permission of the court to have her castrated. 20[104] 1975. It has taken only thirty years to forget all about the white cliffs of Dover. 20[104] Poverty – the poverty of desires. Pauperization – deprivation of desires. 20[104] Our lives are contests, not with what is without us but with what is within us. 20[105] There are some people who one does not know how the world can have got on without them & yet they were a very long time coming. We could not have got on without Abraham & appropriately he came early, & we could easily afford to wait for Hegel; but how did all those centuries do without Offenbach?31
[31] Possibly Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), French cellist and composer.
20[105] A man incapable of being happily resigned to being a nobody is never likely to be a somebody. 20[105] A memory: June polishing up her brass Woolworth’s ‘wedding’ ring on our bedroom carpet before going down to dinner in the Inn at Brendon; and how I loved her & admired her at that moment. It seemed as if all the gaiety & all the courage of all the girls in the world was for a moment there in her, triumphing over all the misgivings girls in such situations have ever felt. 20[106] A world without names – the world upon which an animal opens its eyes. A world in which sight is the least important of the senses. 20[106] There ought to be a law against eye-witnesses. 20[106] To notice, to wonder, to marvel, to be astonished, perhaps to be dismayed – la chasse – & then what? To understand that one never completely understands. 20[106] The belief that a night-cap carries in it the dreams of its first owner.
20[107] ‘Il est difficile de comprendre combien est grande la ressemblance et la différence qu’il y a entre tous les homes.’32 The resemblances are formal & therefore not really ‘likenesses’ but identities; the differences are individual and governed by education. 20[107] So-called ‘middle-class’ morality, middle-class ‘values’ – to be honest, prudent, provident, punctual, punctilious, self-controlled, responsible, respectable, just, worth, temperate, chaste, decent, modest, square. There is nothing wrong with any or all of this except that by itself it is not a ‘morality’; & of course only the very foolish have ever supposed that it was. Its partiality is, first, that it says nothing about motives; & secondly it is (so far as it goes) a morality, not for a middle-class, but for ‘middle life.’ To be recognizable as a concrete morality it must be filled out by the spontaneous devotion & affection of children (even their delight in wickedness) & by the not less anomalous, even libertine, devotions, affections, generosities & laxities of the old. And, of course, what is fatal is when this ‘morality of middle life’ is identified with ‘religion.’ 20[108] ‘Whither thou goest, I will go; & where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people & thy god my god. Where thou diest I will die, & there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me & more also if aught but death part thee & me.’33 [32] Oakeshott’s note: ‘La Rochefoucauld.’ [33] Ruth 1:16.
This was said, not by one who loved to her beloved, but by a widowed daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law: Ruth, the Moabitess, who became the great, great grandmother of David. But the voice is that of a girl speaking to her lover. That motherin-law must have been a remarkable woman, & so also her dead son. 20[108] Nothing comes of nothing; but the best comes of very little, & the worst of too much. 20[108] Asceticism is not denial, it is release from distraction. 20[109] It was as if the larks were going up for the first time, on a cloudless February morning. Never to have heard it is to have missed something; each year to be reminded of it, even to old age, is to keep one’s place among the vivants; but to hear it more than once (or perhaps twice) in a life-time is to hear something else. ‘I saw you first.’ 20[109] Those terrible words: ‘You’re young, you’ll make it.’ It is the ‘it’ that is so terrible; ‘make the grade.’ As if life were not a dream. 20[109] Tobias & the fish. What far-off folk memory is it that reveals to be me the sacredness of the fish upon the Soho fishmonger’s slab,
and Orpheus in the flute player across the street? And in how many centuries will this be obliterated? 20[110] The cheerfulness of ‘Puritanism’ survived in Bunyan; the original cheerfulness of the feeling of being emancipated. 20[110] Some people take everything for granted; to others everything is wonderful and mysterious. What else is there to do with the mystery of human life but to fall in love with it! 20[111] To be loved is to be remade – that is why it may be resented. 20[111] To love may be a summer’s day or a winter’s night; but it is to wish that, whatever it is, it might never end. 20[111] Christianity is a stupendous imaginative engagement, a poem whose first languages were Hebrew & Greek & Latin but which has since been written in all the languages of the world. Each generation must rewrite it for itself. 20[112] That journey on foot of Hölderlin’s from Bordeaux to Tübingen after he had heard of the death of Susette Gontard in 1802: begun in grief & ended in madness.
20[113] Poems may come to be seen as a perpetual conversation between the generations, images of life & death expressed in the languages, common & contested, of a civilization, intelligible for their immediate meaning but more deeply intelligible only by those whose acquaintance with these languages is profound. And the recognition of every great poem as also an extension of these languages. 20[114] The twentieth century is marked more conspicuously than any other preceding century by the success with which governments have persuaded large numbers of individuals that their value as such is nothing as compared with the overriding requirements of the state or ‘society.’ 20[115] ‘It is better to suffer injustice than to perpetrate it.’ This is the heart of a morality. 20[116] There is a story, appended to the account of St Francis preaching to the Saracens, in which the Sultan, the King of Egypt, ‘asked him in secret to entreat God to reveal to him, by some miracle, which is the best religion.’ ‘Rationalism’ did not begin with Descartes. 20[117] ½ the truth, or thereabouts, is that I went to war as a Cherubino.
20[117] How different it would all be if the Garden of Eden had been told as the story of a boy & a girl. It would, of course, be something more than the story of Daphnis & Chloe, but I could rewrite D&C so as to contain all that there is Genesis. 20[117] Legitimate are all children got out of doors. May boys. 20[118] Whispering grass. The trees don’t need to know. 20[118] Cranage (Bert), Canadian, killed on the Somme Sept 16, 1916. Always remembered. Daily Telegraph, 16 September 1977. Death comes when there is no-one left who remembers. 20[119] All proper love songs are sad. Yes, there is room for rollick, but the joy is religious not sensual. My winsome, handsome Johnny.34 The words may rollick but the music is sad. Mutabilité.
[34] Anonymous, ‘I know where I’m going’: ‘Feather beds are soft / And painted rooms are bonnie / But I would give them all / For my handsome winsome Johnny.’
20[120] Law is an equalizer: what is lawful is the same for everybody. But morality is not an equalizer: ‘It was right for him (or for her).’ Anyone who does not understand this is morally blind. It was right for Jane Digby to live as she did;35 but it would not be right for you or me. The first principle of morality is ‘Be yourself ’ – to be more or less than yourself is ‘wrong.’ And I think Aristotle would have understood this, although he never quite said it. There is, of course, something else than this, but this should be said because it is often forgotten. But it is not forgotten by the uncorrupted, the humble: they know who they are & they know, & happily admit, that there are others who are not like them. 20[121] Ponce de Leon discovered Florida while searching for the Fountains of Youth. Juana Maria de Los Dolores de Leon, the 14 year old girl who, with her elder sister, escaped from the ruins of Badajoz & became the wife (then & there) of Lieut. Harry Smith (later Sir Harry Smith) was his lineal descendant. 20[121] ‘La vie tumultueuse est agréable aux grands esprits, mais ceux qui sont mediocre n’y ont aucun plaisir.’36 How various is this vie tumultueuse, and to engage in it does not itself constitute a grand esprit. Sometimes it is almost a penalty.
[35] Jane Elizabeth Digby (1807–81), adventuress, successively Lady Ellenborough, Baroness von Venningen Üllner, Countess Theotoky, and the Honourable Mrs Digby el Mesreb. [36] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Pascal.’
20[121] There is more misery in having what one does not want than in being deprived of what one has set one’s heart upon or even in losing what one has enjoyed. Contrary to the common opinion, it takes all the religion we can muster to live with what we have. 20[122] ‘I think in order to be great in any sphere it is necessary to be oneself.’37 This is very Stendhalian; one could be more modest: It is necessary to be oneself in order to be anyone. 20[122] It is the second girl who is interesting – the one who goes along with the couple who have begun to belong to one another, not as a chaperone, but as a kind of ‘companion,’ ‘mediator.’ She is more self-possessed & when she has imparted her self-possession she will drop out. She stands, of course, not next to the boy but next to the girl. 20[122] Benignitas, simplicitas, hilaritas. 20[123] Liane de Pougy, Mes cahiers bleus.38 [37] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Stendhal (aged 35).’ [38] Liane de Pougy, Mes cahiers bleus (Paris: Plon, 1977).
Here is everything save Augustinian passion. How may we distinguish between the once born who achieve perfection in a life of 15 or 20 years & the twice born in whom the rerum mortalia are transformed without being denied. So little feeling of guilt: that is the miracle. Her confession before being married in church in 1920 at the age of 41 to an impoverished Romanian prince: ‘Father, except for murder & robbery, I have done pretty much everything.’ Perhaps she really did keep ‘unspotted by the world.’ 20[123] ‘The most enduring of all human passions: the love of self.’ But, oddly enough, the one person one cannot love is oneself. And there is no love in masturbation. 20[124] ‘It’s all nylon.’ Said to me by an elderly man as we walked round a super-market grocery. ‘Including even the cheese.’ 20[125] You’re lucky if once in your life-time there appears a Carmen who not only sings but looks the part. 20[125] ‘Lewis Mumford had the idea of a culture that takes its cues from Darwin and the idea of organic growth, not from Newton & mechanical movement expressed in mathematical terms.’ But this is a great muddle: a distinction without a difference. Organic growth, metabolism, genes – this is chemistry & no less quantifiable than physics.
20[126] In a human relationship one may provide light or shade: to do both is a supreme achievement. It is difficult to provide light: it must be unobtrusive if it is not to be destructive. Fortunately, when one is old one can provide only shade. 20[126] One day, when I was about 12 years old, I was sent out of class to fetch something or other (I forget what) from the Master’s Common Room. When I was there I opened a cupboard door: it was the cupboard which belonged to a mathematics master named C.D. Hardingham. Pinned on the inside of the door was a piece of paper on which, carefully inscribed in somewhat Gothic lettering, were the words: Duty, Dignity, Difficulty. In a flash of recognition I knew it said all – all about Hardingham & nearly all about life. 20[127] In one version of the story, Roland was not killed at Ronçevalles but was found alive under a mound of corpses by one who is described as ‘a noble Saracen,’ who cared for him, set him once more upon his feet, put him upon his horse that he might return to Nonnewerth & to Hildegarde his betrothed. Here and elsewhere (in Ariosto, for example) the relations between Christians & Moslems are represented as ‘civil.’39 There is no profound animosity and nothing like the limitless hatred of orthodox & heretic Christians. This, perhaps, was because they were at ‘war’ with one another. There is a ‘dauntless decency’ of the battlefield which owes nothing to Grotius and is unknown in commercial & so-called ‘social’ relationships. [39] Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), Italian poet, author of Orlando Furioso (1516).
20[128] ‘The dangerous edge of things’; the equilibrium of ambiguities. 20[128] Forseeing that he must before long retire from the world, he retired from the business of the world & went to live in Dorset with the memories he had gathered, the books he had collected & the trees he had planted. 20[130] My mother said that I never should Play with the gypsies in the wood I remember how disapproving Eleanor (his mother) was when I told Peter that this is just what he should be doing: listening to the pipes of Pan. 20[130] Petrarch first saw Laura ‘in the Cathedral on Good Friday.’ 20[130] Rufus told me that his mother, in exile from the Ukraine in Australia, told him that when he dropped a piece of bread he should kiss it when he picked it up. 20[130] Politics used to be about loyalties, now it is about the price of bacon.
20[131] We all have to invent life for ourselves. 20[131] To live at the end of one’s tether. 20[131] Tithonus was a beautiful young man who was so delighted in being alive that he asked Aurora, goddess of the morning, to make him immortal. She did, but as it had not occurred to him to ask also for perpetual youth, he simply became an old man who could not die. 20[131] His soul lacked the elasticity of irony. 20[132] A child is a miracle, but oh how few children there are now. 20[132] As carefree as a ne’er-do-well. 20[132] ‘Science’ is the disease of which it purports to be the diagnosis. Karl Kraus would have understood this. It was ‘science’ which destroyed Vienna in the early years of this century.
20[133] What one needs to explain in trying to understand a writer is the tensions in his thought. 20[133] Circumstance: the foreigner who came out of the sea to marry Conrad’s Amy Foster. 20[133] Augustine. Only a tragic religion can protect us from the final solution & the apparatchik’s paradise. But it will appear to be a religion of despair only when it is circumstantially compelled to resist the pressure for a final solution. What constitutes the character of a human life is that there is no final solution. Montaigne; Pascal. 20[134] Once again. Simply as an agent a man is without a law, moral or civil; he is subject only to his own purposes, to the success or otherwise of his actions related solely to his purposes. The only considerations are prudential. Such an agent is, of course, an abstraction. Every human being is also a moral agent – his actions are not unconditional or conditional only upon their consequences. The concrete act is not justifiable in terms of its consequences – & this goes as much for generally beneficial consequences as any others. It is morally justifiable in terms of its subscription to moral considerations – non-instrumental considerations.
20[135] ‘Never does a labyrinthine man seek the truth, only his Ariadne.’40 The first thing we learn is that we inhabit a labyrinth – the labyrinth of the world. To some (Gnostics) this is intolerable; they wish only to escape. Ariadne they recognize as their Saviour. But, having escaped, they desert her, and they become lost & frustrated wanderers in a wilderness. Some (scientists & technologists) engage themselves to understand the structure of the labyrinth. They measure it, exploit its resources, subdue it to their desires, & devote themselves to making it profitable & to keeping it neat. They do not understand that this is only another sort of escape, and they have forgotten all about Ariadne. But there are others who have learned to accept the mysteries of the labyrinth, its twists and turns, its light & shade, its joys & sorrows with patience, with wonder & without misgiving. From time to time they are visited by a shadowy self-reproach; their unkept promise to return to Ariadne. But they have no thought of escape, and the secret of their serenity lies in the obscure belief that the labyrinth in which they dwell is Ariadne herself. 20[136] When skies are blue And hearts are true. Yes; a kind of easy heaven. But inferior to the heaven of Augustine and the earth of the ballads. 20[137] For the Cardinal de Retz an intention frustrated, a failure, a defeat are more interesting & more important than a want satisfied or a successful coup. The ambivalence of a poet in politics. [40] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, p. 259.’
20[138] We were at supper. The garden door was open and I could see the willow, its slender branches gently swaying: Diana’s hair lifted in the wind. ‘You are so silent; what are you thinking?’; ‘I was thinking how fine the willow-tree is this year.’ But I had gone far past that. I was thinking of that moment in the spring of 1537 when Thomas Wyatt and Louis Labé met in Lyons. But all is turned through my gentilness Into a strange fashion of forsaking Tout aussitôt que je commence à prendre Dans le mol lit le repose désiré41 20[A]42 Kierkegaard. The ‘ethical’ does not ‘annihilate’ the ‘aesthetical’ but ‘transfigures’ it. Aesthetical – pleasure (pain) – ‘for the moment.’ Individual not ‘in control’ – determined by the external situation or accident, such as physical beauty. ‘Experimental.’ In the power of ‘what may or may not be.’ What ‘happens,’ both within & without himself. No self-understanding – only knowledge of one’s wants & impulses. [41] Louise Labé, ‘Tout aussitôt que je commence à prendre.’ The first verse runs: ‘Tout aussitôt que je commence à prendre / Dans le mol lit le repos désiré, / Mon triste esprit, hors de moi retiré, / S’en va vers toi incontinent se rendre.’ [42] On a loose sheet inserted at 20[98].
Ethical – ‘personal’ or ‘choosing oneself.’ Self-disclosure & self enactment. (1) A task set; a rule (2) a motive. Not what you do – but how. At once ‘authoritative’ – ‘objective’ – and ‘free,’ personal. A personal subscription. 20[B]43 Aristocracy Virtue Graciousness Magnanimity Independence Compassion Honour
Carelessness
Vice Uninterest of others: ignorance Contempt: indifference Ostentatiousness Irresponsibility
Bourgeois Virtue Modesty Truthfulness Industriousness Thrift Incorruptbility Studiousness Responsibility Honesty
Punctiliousness literalness
Vice Careerism Touchiness: uncertainty Miserliness
[43] On a loose sheet inserted at 20[105].
Notebook 21 (1 January 1981)1 21[01] The driver of a carriage for hire: ‘Where to, sir?’ The answer: ‘Leave it to the horse.’ 21[01] The most fruitless of all actions; to shake the hour-glass. 21[02] A Parisian taxi-driver’s vocabulary of abuse in 1980: ‘Hé, va donc, structuraliste!’ 21[03] A ‘May Boy’: the child begotten under a hedge. Almost certainly a Sagittarian: gentle, perhaps a little sad, & quietly self-possessed. 21[03] The legend that St Paul wept at Virgil’s tomb in Naples. 21[04] Charles Sorley, killed at Loos in 1915: ‘I regard this war as one between sisters, between Martha & Mary, the efficient & intolerant
[1] LSE 2/1/21. Soft cover, red with gold border, 21 cm × 14.5 cm, ruled. Autograph, ink. Recto folios numbered 1–31. Title page: ‘XXI.’ Dated: ‘1 January 1981.’
against the casual and sympathetic. Each side has a virtue for which it is fighting, and each of that virtues’ supplementary vice.’ (1) If one speaks in this, Aristotelian, idiom every virtue has its corresponding vice. But is the vice a degeneracy to which one who has the virtue is, in some manner, prone; is the courageous man liable to be foolhardy; or are such virtues and vices logical opposites? (2) ‘for which it is fighting.’ If this is a statement about consciousness, then it is certainly false; no man ever fought to maintain or even exhibit a ‘virtue.’ To fight is to exercise power and its outcome can only be power. ‘Rightful power’ is only defended. 21[04] ‘Er spricht zu uns’ – Wilamowitz in respect of Aristotle on the Aristotelian Polity (constitution).2 But in what voice does he speak? And to what ears? Every such survival may be made to speak in the voice of ‘history’; some such survivals may also be made to speak in the ‘practical’ mode, delivering advice about what we should do, or purporting to inform us of the probable consequences of doing this or that. Wilamowitz, I suspect, made no such distinction. 21[05] ‘Human Rights’ transfer familiar & useful conditionals into meaningless absolutes. Cp. the definition of Papal Infallibility of the first Vatican Council, 1869–70. Newman perceived the infelicity. A formal definition of Papal infallibility, he said, was provocative, inopportune, and [2] Enno Friedrich Wichard Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1845–1931), German classical philologist.
unnecessary; it turned a ‘theological opinion’ into a ‘dogma’ – a conditional into an absolute. This opened the door to judicial casuistry; what is ex cathedra, and how is one papal pronouncement to be related to another: Intellectual chaos & moral deviousness. 21[05] Thomas Hardy clearly preferred his women dead. 21[06] ‘If a writer has been entrusted with sources of major historical importance out of which to construct a narrative dealing as this does with some very important & highly controversial episodes, he is surely morally obliged to indicate upon what sources he has relied, and his reasons for preferring one version of events to another.’3 This attributes to an historian the character of Housman’s ‘donkey between two bales of hay’ – which shall he choose and why? An historical account cannot be a preference for one non-historical account over another. 21[06] A lie can tell the truth about the speaker. 21[07] There was so much youthful pride about him, such absence of any calculation of the consequences to himself, that all the madness of the world was right for him. Right? [3] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Beloff in a review of K. Harris, Attlee.’ K. Harris, Attlee (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982).
21[07] ‘Instead of a struggle to repress given evils or to achieve given goals, human existence becomes an exploration in which the destination is always being discovered in the course of arriving.’ There may be a break from a ‘scent’ to a ‘view’ but there is no ‘kill.’ 21[07] Flucht nach Vorn. Burning one’s boats? 21[07] ‘But why the sun do shine upon the just & the unjust, that’s what the books do not tell me.’4 21[08] ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’ But oh, the very reason why I clasp them, is because they die.5 And it is the love that bestows immortality on the lover & beloved.
[4] See Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London: Egoist Press, 2012), Ch. XIX, at 119. [5] Oakeshott’s note: ‘William Cory.’
21[08] Uncertainty belongs not only to what is not accomplished but also to what is; every conclusion is a beginning. We little know the things for which we pray. 21[08] History. ‘Break the drowsy spell of narrative: ask yourself questions: set yourself problems.’6 But they are questions which may be answered only in an assemblage of contingencies: ‘narrative.’ 21[09] Christianity It has often been thought the strength of Christianity lies in its component of ‘evidences,’ in its ‘foundation’ in alleged, & ‘provable’ occurrences and endless trouble has been taken to ‘establish’ them (often confused with the identification of Christianity as ‘the religion of Jesus’). Oh, ‘the scriptures’; we could not do without them, but they have been fatally misrepresented. There are (1) ‘Evidences’ (from which historical events may be inferred); (2) Myths; (3) Theology. Each is the transformation of the one before: Myth = ‘evidences’ turned into parables; theology is myth turned into abstract ideas. But all deities reside in the human breast7 & what is extraordinary is the belief that we must start with ‘evidences’ and the illusion that we do: that the creation was an occurrence (with speculation about its date), that Adam [6] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan and Co., 1883), p. 175.’ [7] See W. Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell,’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
& Eve were ‘historical’ characters (& the inference that they had no navels), that ‘Christ’ was ‘born’ & represents a ‘divine event,’ a change in the character of God announced. So-called ‘evidences’ are ‘events’ in the history of human imagination, in human selfunderstanding. 21[11] Having identified Jesus as the ‘son’ of God & thus the relation of God to the human race, there was a vast opportunity for exploring the implications of this, including the Virgin Birth. The Second Nun in the Canterbury Tales even speaks of her as ‘the daughter of thy son.’8 21[11] There is no such thing nowadays (& perhaps there never was) as a virgin word, free from ambiguous multiplicity. 21[13] ‘Most reflective Christians are intellectually aware that without the idea of redemption through Christ’s death on the cross, the Christian religion would not be Christianity as we know it.’ Perhaps it was unavoidable that sin & salvation should have been made the centre of early Christianity – though this is an exaggeration. But that Redemption as a consequence of the Cross is its central doctrine, unchallenged, is not the case. Great efforts (Augustine, Anselm in early times) were made to supersede it in a doctrine in which the Cross was understood as a symbol of the character of God. It was Jesus who was born and died, not Christ. The Augustinian doctrine of the ‘love’ of God could not be tied [8] See G. Chaucer, ‘The Second Nun’s Tale,’ in The Canterbury Tales, l. 38: ‘Thou Maid and Mother, Daughter of Thy Son.’
to a dated event – ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate.’ The new era dawned, not with an ‘act’ of God but with an idea of God. The notion that God had to perform an ‘act’ in order to give us an ‘idea’ is absurd. 21[14] Christianity (1) As the worship of Jesus: an ‘historical’ person. (2) As the worship of a God into whom the person & attributes of Christ had been incorporated. The ‘suffering’ God: ‘the Cross’ not as an event but as the revelation of the character of God. 21[15] ‘A statement of probability always refers to the available evidence and cannot be refuted or confirmed by subsequent events.’9 A statement of probability always refers to an occurrence understood in terms of its kind. 21[15] A ‘religious’ life: not one filled with extraordinary performances, nor necessarily one in which ordinary actions are given extraordinary, symbolic, meanings, but one in which they are performed with the ‘grace’ which belongs to something done for [9] Oakeshott’s note: ‘J.M. Keynes.’ Oakeshott may have been reading R. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: A Biography, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1983–2000), vol. 1, Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920, where this sentence from an unpublished MS by Keynes on probability is quoted at 153.
its own sake or as an expression of love. A life whose coherence & significance lies, not in carefully pursued designs whose successful outcome gives it a touch of ‘immortality,’ but in which every engagement is an aventure, an eternal moment because its character is its ‘style.’ 21[16] Comedy is a world whose reality is the creation of human imagination. 21[17] ‘An invincible belief in the advent of a loving concord springing like a heavenly flower from the soil of men’s earth, soaked in blood, torn by struggles, watered with tears.’10 No; not quite. There are many such flowers, immortal moments of love hidden in mortal blood & tears. But this, too, is not quite right. 21[17] ‘She was wholly lacking in the capacity to behave with what may be called that hypocrisy without which life may scarcely be carried on.’11 [10] Conrad, Under Western Eyes, p. 372. [11] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Mrs Belloc-Lowndes (sister of Hillaire) on Margot Asquith.’ Mrs Belloc-Lowndes (sister of Hillaire) on Margot Asquith. Mary Adelaide Elizabeth Rayner Lowndes, née Belloc (1868– 1947), English novelist, sister of Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), AngloFrench Catholic poet, critic, and historian, was a close friend of Margot Asquith (1864–1945), Anglo-Scottish writer, wife of Henry Herbert Asquith (1852–1928), Prime Minister 1908–16. The quotation has not been traced.
Some eccentricities we abhor, but they are the price we pay for that absence of uniformity which is the virtue of human life. 21[18–20] Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité.12 In classical discourse, sexual activity was understood as a social practice, while in the language of the Church it was understood as a sign of man’s fall, a mark of his sin. In Christian language, sex for the first time became the secret truth of fallen man, the central sign of his fall & therefore the central preoccupation of his moral life. With us, now, there is on the one hand a vestigial Christian moral Puritanism, shorn of a theology of salvation which made it credible; & on the other, a hedonism, pop psychology & commercial marketing of sexual fantasy & sexual apparatus. This is puzzling. This view of the matter cannot, I think, be got out of the Book of Genesis, and it is not how the ancient Hebrews thought. Their ‘doctrine’ of sex was concerned with monogamy: ‘thou shalt not commit adultery.’ But Solomon! But, in some respect, it did come to belong to Christianity, or at least hover over what was considered to be ‘Christian behaviour.’ How did it do so? Copulation was never detached from progeniture, & progeniture for the Christian was the begetting of immortal souls. But since, according to the earliest Christian belief the ‘end of the world’ was an event which would occur within 30 to 40 years, there was no point in engaging in worldly affairs, making a fortune, overthrowing a tyranny, or begetting children. This was the meaning of Faith, Hope & Charity. The situation of the human race (fully appreciated only in Christian belief) was that of ‘waiting’ & being ‘ready’ (the wise Virgin). The time of waiting [12] M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 3 vols. (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1976–84).
was to be relatively short, so it was appropriate that the main human relationship should be that of ‘charity’ – quiet ‘goodwill,’ ‘tolerance’ & ‘expectation’ of an event which the human race could do nothing to bring about. This view of ‘the world’ & of human destiny gradually receded; it is seen to be recessive even in St Paul’s writings. It has no place in Augustinian Christianity where what is substituted for it is the first fully-worked-out doctrine of Christian ‘salvation.’ ‘Salvation’ was God’s business. Christians, although they were always to have identifiable enemies, ceased to be a ‘sect’ & came to compose a civilization which succeeded in accommodating itself to the beliefs & mythologies of the peoples who became ‘converted’ to it: the Virgin Mary & Diana. This was made easier because the Roman religion was a religion without a theology. The earlier belief in the imminent ‘end of the world,’ however, made Christianity vulnerable to corruption by the beliefs which emanated from Mani & his successors, the doctrine of the fundamental evil of the world as it was created, of the war between the forces of ‘good’ & ‘evil’ & the doctrines about human relationships, sex etc. etc. which found place in his doctrine. And although these beliefs were recognized as ‘heretical,’ they have never been successfully excluded from Christianity which has remained vulnerable to this corruption because it never succeeded in divesting itself of a notion of ‘salvation’ as a future condition to be awaited or promoted. 21[20] The ‘coal cellar.’ I once lived, as a child, in a house which had a ‘coal cellar.’ The Red Lodge, Berkhamsted. It was as significant as our ‘governess’ & ‘the garden shed.’
21[20] ‘The chicken was a clear statement of humility.’13 Yes, yes: it was the only way we knew of giving ‘honour’ to those whom we ‘honoured’ & knew were ‘above us’ and delighted in being able to recognize them. 21[21] Aidos. The human ability to distinguish, first, decency from indecency, and then moral good & evil, virtue & vice in human conduct, reflected in the nemesis which follows the choice of evil: Shame. Human conduct understood in terms of its motive; vice as self-betrayal. A man ‘ashamed’ not of what he has done, but of himself. Moral virtues are emotive dispositions, adverbial qualifications of conduct. 21[21] O Rus. 21[21] An idea is a love-child.
[13] See ‘Cambridge Wives,’ in The Incorporated Wife In the Police Oil Companies Armed Services Expatriate Communities Colonial Administrations Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, ed. H. Callan and S. Ardener, 1984, p. 66.
21[22] ‘The terrible aboriginal calamity.’14 But Newman, who is usually right, was here unexpectedly astray. It must be understood not as a weakness in the design of the Creation but as a subtility which distinguishes the Creation from a piece of commonplace engineering. For Augustine (who unfortunately got caught up with the notion of ‘salvation’ & who erred in some of the eccentric parts of his doctrine of ‘salvation’) the ‘Fall,’ ‘Original Sin’ was not a simple ‘calamity,’ the outcome of a flaw in the design, but an unavoidable consequence of the character with which God had endowed mankind: imagination, the capability of choosing & doing: self-creation. And when Augustine was asked why God did not endow mankind with unattainable ‘perfection,’ he replied that God created Man because he was lonely, & that a companion who was himself a God, or a faultless automaton, would be incontestably boring. There was no point in creating the possibility of ‘sin’ if in fact there were to be no sinners. What (among much else) Augustine meant when he understood the relationship of God to mankind was one of love was that God was interested in something other than perfection. ‘Love’ is a delight in difference which must be capable of including the acceptance of errancy. Zeus had to suffer the errancy of man & responded with displeasure & anger. Jehova had to suffer the errancy of his Chosen & responded with punishment (which recognized responsibility) and forgiveness. The Christian (Augustinian) God purposely created the uncontrollable and responded (to at least the more endearing antics of his creation) with ‘love.’ But this is not quite the whole story. [14] J.H. Newman, Apologia pro vita sua: Being A Reply to a Pamphlet Entitled ‘What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?’ (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864), p. 379: ‘And so I argue about the world; – if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.’
21[23] Feminine divinities (imagined and invented by men) are not notably feminine: Artemis the unpossessed, Athena pure intellect, Aphrodite passionate delight. Yet Troy was sacked for a runaway wife, and Aucussin preferred hell with Nicolette to heaven without her. Follow some Helen for her gift of grief. 21[24] ‘The Faith to die in.’ That is what is wrong: life lived for what comes after. ‘What comes after’ understood as what we have earned here & made the ideal of a consequential moral & religious life. What matters is here & now. Death is the most important event in life, but because of what it ends, not what it may begin. A religion dominated by the notion of ‘salvation’ is as corrupt (& unchristian) as a morality dominated by the natural or penal consequences of ill-doing. 21[24] Philosophy: making riddles out of solutions. 21[25] In the figure of Laura, Petrarch expressed not only the duality often attributed to feminine character, but the ambiguity of human life. She is both Eve & the Virgin Mary. Eve not only deprived Adam of his ‘solitude’ (indeed, banished it from the world), what sprang from her naïve gullibility was a world of successive incidents (often designed), evanescent responses to circumstances yielding momentary satisfactions – the Laura of ‘laurels’ to be sought and won in a world which identified immortality with posterity. And the Virgin who represented the restoration of ‘solitude’ composed
not of, at best, satisfactory outcomes, but of ‘avantures’ each an imperishable moment; a world redeemed, not by a vision of better things to come but by being itself understood, not in terms of success & failure, but composed of immortal moments. 21[26] One of Hegel’s principle targets in his mature writings is the view of morality as the privileged preserve of individual conviction. But to deny the sovereignty of the individual ‘conscience’ is not to identify moral with legal obligations, which clearly are not a matter of individual conviction. Nor does it deny that the recognition of the obligatory considerations which compose a morality is incoherent, the occasion of tension & self-division, & may be morally destructive, where it is not a ‘conscientious’ (or better, an ‘affectionate’) recognition. It denies only that the content of moral obligations is to be identified with the manner of their recognition. And somehow there must be room for the recognition that perhaps ‘all the madness of the world was right for him.’ There is, then, a distinction between moral & legal conditions (obligation), but they are alike in their noninstrumentality – the absence of a concern with either individual or communal substantive interests or satisfactions. 21[28] The mistake of supposing that happiness consists in the satisfaction of our desires. 21[28] How can we stop education from killing the sense of wonder? I was lucky: my schooldays were filled with wonder.
21[29] I am acquainted with Mr X. I know Mr X. I understand Mr X. 21[29] The business of a teacher is to exercise a formative influence of good example upon his pupils – the only kind of influence which can be executed without impertinence & accepted without indignity. 21[29] Not ‘knowledge’ & ‘the known,’ but ‘understanding’ & what is ‘understood’; this preserves the notion of modality. It also escapes from ‘the ruinously inapplicable metaphor of firm foundations,’ the architectural imagery etc. which corrupts the notion of ‘knowledge.’ 21[30] So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes – with the exception of their own occupation. Karl Kraus.15 21[30] ‘A new view of life opened before me. The essence of that view lay in the conviction that the destiny of man is to strive for moral
[15] Karl Krauss (1874–1936), Austrian satirist and critic of psychoanalysis.
improvement, and that such improvement is at once easy, possible & lasting.’16 That is the puzzle. A life devoted wholly & exclusively to being good is impossible. No action or utterance is specifiable in exclusively moral terms. Faust. 21[A] De Mandeville’s proposition ‘Private vices, public virtues’ is not a proposition in moral philosophy: it has to do only with substantive consequences of acting. What he is saying is that from the pursuit of private interests (that is self-satisfactions) emerges more general benefits.17 21[B]18 Garden of Eden ‘Knowledge’ & sin. The ‘virtue’ of ignorance. The devil, not God. An ‘all-knowing God’ & a ‘doomed experiment in human nescience’? A Creator who created trees & animals – & then saw that his creation could not respond to him? [16] Oakeshott’s note: ‘Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood & Youth, opening of Part III, Youth.’ See L. Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood & Youth, tr. C.J. Hogarth (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1912), p. 163. [17] On the back of an envelope addressed: ‘Professor Michael Oakeshott / Victoria Cottage / Acton / Langton Matravers / Nr. Swanage / Dorset.’ Stamped: ‘LONDON SW / 9.15 PM / 29 APR / 1986.’ [18] On the back of an envelope. Stamped: ‘20.5.86.’
The condition of response, the self-consciousness of man. All that Adam & Eve lacked before the ‘Fall’ was self-consciousness – not ‘knowledge.’ ‘Self-knowledge.’ Was God repairing a mistake or did he intend it all along?
Michael Oakeshott
Early Political Writings 1925–30
Edited by Luke O’Sullivan
Preface The fifth volume in the Selected Writings series returns to the Oakeshott archive at the British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES). Unlike the third and fourth volumes, which anthologised Oakeshott’s widely scattered previously published essays and reviews, it consists entirely of previously unpublished work. It is also the first volume to concentrate exclusively on the first decade of his early career. Specifically, it makes widely available for the first time a Fellowship dissertation from 1925, as well as the first version of a series of lectures Oakeshott gave between 1928 and 1930. The 1925 ms has been circulating informally for some years, and is strikingly different in style and content to anything he wrote later on. Yet it is an important work, because it was his first attempt at a systematic presentation of his ideas, and was more explicit about his sources than anything else he ever wrote. Moreover, when the 1925 ms is placed together with the lectures which represent the state of Oakeshott’s thought in the later 1920s and early 1930s, they allow us to understand more clearly than ever before the development of his ideas in this crucial and still under-explored first phase of his intellectual career. The lectures in particular, as the introduction will make clear, form an important bridge towards Experience and its Modes. As is now customary, I am very happy to thank Imprint Academic, publishers of the Selected Writings, for their support. This was the first volume of the Selected Writings to be prepared almost entirely at the Political Science Department of the National University of Singapore, and I would like to acknowledge the generous funding which made possible a visit to the British Library and the London School of Economics in June and July of 2010 in order to finish off the research. I would also like to record my gratitude to Professor Terry Nardin for his comments on a draft of the editorial introduction.
The greater part of the work of turning typescript and manuscript into electronic text fell once more upon my wife Olga, but as usual, responsibility for the errors the volume doubtless contains rests entirely with the editor. Singapore, 2010
Editorial Introduction I: The Early Oakeshott and Political Philosophy Michael Oakeshott (1901–90) made his reputation as a political philosopher, but for a long time students of his work assumed that he had little interest in politics before 1945. His major prewar work, Experience and its Modes (1933), an examination of the nature of philosophy and its relation to other forms of thought, made almost no mention of the subject.1 However, it has become increasingly clear that this initial judgment was misleading. A posthumous collection of early essays, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (1993), proved that political philosophy was a lifelong concern.2 Nevertheless, the belief that Oakeshott was relatively uninterested in politics, at least in the 1920s, has persisted.3 This volume dispels this notion for good. It contains two previously unpublished works, a manuscript entitled ‘A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy’ (the 1925 ms), and a course of undergraduate lectures on ‘The Philosophical Approach to Politics’ written between 1928 and 1930 (the 1930 lectures).4 Their titles alone establish that politics was a central concern in the first decade of Oakeshott’s intellectual [1] M. Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1933]), p. 316, identified politics as a form of practical experience but offered no extended discussion. [2] M. Oakeshott, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, ed. T. Fuller (Yale: Yale University Press, 1993). [3] See S. Soininen, From a ‘Necessary Evil’ to the Art of Contingency: Michael Oakeshott’s Conception of Political Activity (Exeter: Imprint Academic 2005), p. 3. [4]
See LSE 1/1/3 and 1/1/7, respectively.
career. Indeed, this introduction will show beyond any doubt that the ideas of Experience and its Modes actually grew out of Oakeshott’s prior philosophical interest in politics. Moreover, the position Oakeshott had reached by 1930 explains why politics was virtually absent from Experience and its Modes. He concluded that political philosophy could never be true philosophy because of the inherently unsatisfactory nature of political activity itself. Thus, there was little point including politics in a work designed to present a model of authentic philosophy. Incidentally, this conclusion also explains the roots of the negative view of politics that he held between the wars, something often remarked upon but never satisfactorily explained. Together, the 1925 ms and the 1930 lectures transform our knowledge of the first decade of Oakeshott’s intellectual development, bringing his mental horizons into sharp focus, allowing us to reconstruct the context of his early thought, and making the similarities and differences with his later work clearer than ever before. For instance, the nature and extent of his early commitment to philosophical Idealism can be more precisely evaluated, and also be shown decisively to be absent from his later work. There are undeniably important continuities, as well as differences, between the early and the mature Oakeshott. He carried on asking many of the same questions throughout his career, but his approach to answering them changed radically, and even if he sometimes reached the same conclusions, his reasons for holding them were different. Hindsight makes clear that he moved towards an increasingly sceptical and minimalistic approach to political philosophy, and that he did so largely by way of self-criticism, gradually jettisoning more and more of his own early Idealist and Rationalist beliefs.
II: A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy The 1925 ms may have been written as part of Oakeshott’s successful Fellowship application to Gonville and Cauis College.5 Notably dissatisfied with contemporary political philosophy, it enlarges on the theme of a previous essay, ‘The Cambridge School of Political Science’ (1924), which complained that the Cambridge syllabus of political science ‘entirely misses “the real thing”’ because it ‘occupies itself almost exclusively with the passing forms of government’. Consequently, political science as studied at Cambridge lacked a definition of politics. Worse still, one ‘never arrives’ at the true subject of political science, the study of the State.6 An important argument developed in the 1925 ms, about which Oakeshott never changed his mind, is that political thought is not all of the same kind. He owed this view at least partly to Bosanquet’s History of Aesthetic, in which works of art were classified into ‘three main heads. First, the works of art themselves … secondly … all writing about art the aim of which is either to improve it, give directions for the creation of works of art, or to describe individual productions; [and] thirdly, aesthetic theory, the aim of which is neither to describe, to improve or to direct, but simply to theorize’.7 Proposing that we can ‘approach other human experiences in the same way,’ Oakeshott concluded that the ‘vast literature [5] It seems likely that the shorter ‘Essay on the Relations of Philosophy, Poetry, and Reality’ was actually written for the MA rather than the Fellowship as stated in the Introduction to What is History? and other essays. Selected Writings Vol. 1 (SW), ed. L. O’Sullivan. [6] M. Oakeshott, ‘The Cambridge School of Political Science’: see SW, i. 56. [7]
p. 131.
of utopias and practical suggestions in government’ required separating from the ‘genuine literature of political philosophy’. Many problems in political philosophy, he believed, stemmed from a failure to observe the differences between ‘a serious theoretical treatment [of political thought and] the wildest scheme for the reform of the Franchise’.8 While canonical works like Plato’s Republic or Rousseau’s Contrat Social admittedly had a dual character as ‘at once works of criticism and of theory’, Oakeshott interpreted their authors as deliberately employing more than one genre without confusing them.9 In contrast, modern writers like Laski and Hobhouse failed to appreciate the distinction. The 1925 ms was concerned with far more than questions of genre, however. Despite its self-proclaimed status as a propadeutic, it adopted an ambitious Idealistic and Rationalistic metaphysics. First, definition was argued to be the necessary culmination of all rational intellectual activity. Next, it proceeded to define politics, philosophy, the State, and the Self, or individual. Finally, it concluded (in the best traditions of Hegelian and British Idealism) that the State and the Self are mutually implicatory concepts united by the notion of a rational, general, will. Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hegel, Bosanquet, and Bradley are all deployed in support of this position, though Bosanquet’s presence perhaps looms largest. But the manuscript really only makes sense when read as a contribution to the debate then occurring in England between the British Idealists, who defended state sovereignty as the necessary outcome of a metaphysics of the rational will, on the one hand, and the socalled ‘pluralists’, on the other, who attacked sovereignty and its associated philosophy as a danger both to individual liberty and to associational freedom at large. The pluralist theory of group personality (which the legal historian F.W. Maitland argued had received a kind of de facto [8]
p. 69.
[9]
p. 133.
recognition in English history under the law of trusts) seemed to offer a means of preserving the independence of non-state groups such as churches and trade unions against governmental interference.10 If groups had personality, they also had rights against the state. The appeal of such reasoning cut across ‘left’ and ‘right’. While leading historians and political theorists including not only Maitland but J.N. Figgis, Ernest Barker, Harold Laski, and G.D.H. Cole, all found pluralist ideas attractive, they were by no means led to the same political conclusions. Figgis, for example, inclined toward syndicalism, Barker espoused a patriotic liberalism of a Whiggish sort, Cole favoured guild socialism, and Laski increasingly leaned towards Marxism. The Idealist-pluralist debate was not, however, an outright clash. British Idealists often saw the state as an association that was only first amongst equals. Oakeshott in particular, though professedly hostile to Laski, was a lifelong admirer of Maitland, and had considerable sympathy for Barker, whose own political philosophy was also a fusion of Idealism and pluralism. Like most Idealists, Oakeshott regarded a varied associational life as a condition of metaphysical unity, and so was actually in tune with a major theme of pluralist thought. Moreover, pluralists and Idealists shared a common enemy; both disliked legal positivism and the command theory of law, which they found exemplified in the writings of John Austin (and Hobbes). Admittedly, they disliked it for different reasons; Oakeshott because it involved too restrictive a conception of the state as simply the legal government of the day, Laski because it treated state sovereignty as indivisible. Nevertheless, there was sometimes less difference between them than Oakeshott would have cared to admit. Certainly, he criticized [10] F.W. Maitland, ‘Trust and Corporation’, in Group Rights Perspectives Since 1900, ed. J. Stapleton (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), pp. 1–37. This edited collection and its editorial introduction is indispensable for the study of English political ideas in the early twentieth century.
Laski’s view in Foundations of Sovereignty that government was the ‘primary organ’ of the state as too narrow, because the state was synonymous with society as a whole whereas ‘government, rules or laws do not comprise the whole [of society]’.11 All the same, he shared Laski’s dislike of excessively interventionist authority. This affinity between apparent opponents is unsurprising given that the socialist tradition which inspired Laski and Cole owed a great deal to Rousseau and Hegel, thinkers who were also major sources for British Idealism. Indeed, British Idealism itself was a continuation of the fusion of utilitarian, liberal, and socialist themes developed by Bentham and J.S. Mill, just with a more elaborate metaphysic bolted on. T.H. Green was probably the most sympathetic of the British Idealists towards socialism, but Bosanquet could still write that ‘Socialism, at its best [challenges] the preconception that poverty must be recognized as a permanent class-function’.12 Nor should we forget that Oakeshott himself had grown up with a Fabian family background which fostered in him an early sympathy for socialism. Furthermore, both Idealism and pluralism shared some antidemocratic sentiments, insofar as ‘democracy’ was synonymous with laissez-faire individualism. In both Europe and the USA, the outbreak of war in 1914 was widely regarded as the final failure of this type of democracy. In Germany, Carl Schmitt hailed the English pluralist critique of sovereignty and declared that parliamentary democracy was in crisis; in England, both Barker and Laski declared that the state was discredited, or at least relegated from its former position of pre-eminence.13 Once [11]
p. 117.
[12] B. Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1910), p. 318. [13] C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1932]), pp. 39–42; E. Barker, ‘The Discredited State’, in Group Rights, ed. Stapleton, pp. 76–93; H. Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968 [1917]), p. 14.
more, the meanings attached to this judgment varied widely. For Schmitt and Laski it provided a justification for radical political experiments in national socialism and communism, respectively; for Barker it was a positive development, insofar as too much emphasis on the state was not, from a pluralist perspective, a healthy thing. Oakeshott actually held a similar position. At least, he conceived of ‘the State’ as something above and beyond the ordinary business of contemporary government and politics, about which he shared Barker’s disillusionment. Discussing sociological theories of law in the 1925 ms, he declared that the views of Duguit (a colleague of Durkheim’s) were representative of a ‘new movement’ which might ‘succeed … in saying to government …“Give place”, and … will allow the true “State” to take its rightful place as sovereign.’14 Oakeshott thus shared the hope, which informed both left and right in the early 1920s, that a radical improvement in European politics was imminent. Ultimately, however, pluralism and Idealism failed to generate practical political alternatives to liberal democracy, and their anti-democratic sentiments ensured that after 1945 they were rejected along with National Socialism, fascism, and communism. Idealism was universally condemned as a form of German statism (always a common pluralist criticism); pluralism seemed odious because of the similarity between its emphasis on the real personality of the group and the völkish delusions of the National Socialists. The violent reaction to nineteenth-century ideas which the political thought of the inter-war years represented became subject in turn to an equally violent reaction, and the post-1945 welfare state became an unquestionable political norm. The inter-war era was forgotten for a generation, until historians of political thought began rediscovering it in the later twentieth century. In keeping with this general trend, Oakeshott’s post-war approach to political theorising changed profoundly after 1945. He concentrated on an essayistic approach that largely eschewed [14]
p. 125.
explicit talk of metaphysical first principles. The writings collected as Rationalism in Politics (1962) that brought him to public attention made no mention of definition and classification, or the basis of the philosophy of the state in a metaphysics of the rational will. Without some notion of this inter-war context, then, his early efforts can seem strange indeed when placed alongside his published works. But in the 1920s, Oakeshott was convinced of the essential correctness of Idealism. The 1925 ms was prefixed with a quotation from Plato’s Phaedrus emphasizing the necessity of correct definition. The declaration that definition was the basis of all ‘systematic thought’ was not merely rationalism; it was Rationalism of exactly the sort that he would later criticize in his own works.15 His language bespoke the vast ambition of Idealist monism; ‘to see the whole of any one thing … is at once to have achieved a theory of the universe’. In the pursuit of definition, Oakeshott argued, we necessarily realise that our object is only ‘a part or a mode (that is, a modification) of something larger and more generic. In seeking significance the mind always advances from the part to the whole, from the merely actual to the real’.16 We may note both the specific influence of Spinoza’s Ethics in the reference to modality, and the general impact of Idealism, which in both its ancient and modern forms relies on a distinction between appearance and reality. F.H. Bradley’s famous work of Idealist metaphysics, Appearance and Reality (1893), reflected this distinction in its title, as, indeed, did Experience and its Modes. There, Oakeshott insisted that the various modes were less actual than the fully real experience that only philosophy could offer. Yet even in his earliest writings he acknowledged a plurality of forms of thinking which laid claim
[15]
p. 46.
[16]
pp. 46–7.
to truth.17 How, then, was philosophy supposed to be superior to the various other possible approaches to truth? The solution suggested in 1925 was that the best definition or classification is ‘that which tells us most about the thing or experience’. This raised at least two major problems. First, unless we assume that the information our preferred classification contains is somehow self-validating, the fact that it yields more information says nothing about its veracity. It may just contain more abundant error. Second, Oakeshott’s distinction between ‘the essential qualities, purposes and conditions of a thing’, and ‘those qualities, purposes and conditions that are merely contingent’ was inextricably dependent on the perspective of the agent. For instance, ‘a classification of pictures by their date or painter’ would be ‘better than one according to their weight’. But by his own admission, ‘a transport office would do well to adhere’ to a classification of paintings by weight. Thus, the status of the painting as such is from this point of view a contingent rather than an essential feature of it. There is no independent position from which the priority of the identity of the painting as a painting can be asserted. Indeed, Oakeshott’s account of definition showed little awareness of contemporary philosophical thought on the subject. He distinguished several possible uses of the word ‘is’ to signify identity, predication, and existence in a way that indicates a passing familiarity with the discussions then going on at Cambridge in the philosophy of logic and mathematics, but there was no engagement with the work of thinkers such as Frege or Russell. All he really wanted to do was uphold Hegel’s insistence that ‘a definition should have only universal features’ and the Aristotelian claim that a ‘judgment of purpose underlies all our
[17] See ‘History is a Fable’ (1923) and ‘An Essay on the Relations of Philosophy, Poetry, and Reality’ (1925), SW, i. 31–44, 67–115.
judgements as to the value in a definition of the true nature’ of a thing.18 Thus, the question ‘what is political philosophy’ was to be answered by seeking a definition that would ‘be true … not only now, but at all times’.19 The thought of different historical periods was to be judged according to the degree to which it had successfully approximated a timeless ideal of politics. But what was the purpose of politics? The answer given in the 1925 ms followed the arguments of Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State particularly closely. After examining Rousseau’s notion of the General Will and Kant’s and Hegel’s uses of it, Bosanquet had argued that the nation-state was ‘the widest organization which has the common experience necessary to found a common life’, and that as such it represented an ‘ethical idea’ in the form of a ‘faith or a purpose’.20 Oakeshott took up these views, insisting that ‘will, and not force or anything else, expresses the real nature of political life’.21 To support the claim that the realisation of statehood in a given society depends on the development of a common will, he contrasted philosophical and historical ways of thinking. The 1925 ms contrasted history unfavourably with the philosophical search for ‘logical order’. Philosophy eschewed the genetic approach allegedly common to the historical, social, and physical sciences in favour of ‘a theory of the whole’. Even in On History (1983), Oakeshott would probably have agreed with his earlier claim that ‘History postulates that at some time and in some place certain events happened, and then endeavours to discover how these events took place.’ What he would not have agreed with was that this was a flaw rather than simply a characteristic of historical understanding. [18]
pp. 54–5.
[19]
p. 81.
[20] Bosanquet, Theory of the State, pp. 320–1. [21]
p. 58.
Oakeshott always regarded philosophy as a distinctive form of thought. But while he later ceased to hold that all other studies simply ‘present [philosophy] with nothing but the raw material of true facts, and so themselves depend, in the fullest sense, upon philosophy’, the 1925 ms persistently conflated the two positions. The idea of philosophical definition as the ‘exploration of [the] elementary considerations which underlie all thought’22—a conception of philosophy that he never renounced—was merged with the idea that other activities were not fully satisfactory until philosophy had validated them. ‘The existence of political life brings with it certain assumptions...and until these are examined we cannot come at its meaning’.23 The claim that ‘Some conceptions of property will be found quite untenable because...they are discovered to deny themselves’ did not mean, however, that such conceptions would be overthrown in practice. Even in his early work Oakeshott had no sympathy for Marx’s thesis that the purpose of philosophy is to change the world; he was quite explicit that ‘the philosopher never desires to change things, but to understand them’.24 The State Oakeshott wanted to construct was a purely logical entity. Such lack of interest in practical questions actually made Oakeshott rather unusual. The majority view at the time was that political philosophy and social science were of interest only as tools of social reform.25 Utilitarians like Sidgwick and Idealists like Bosanquet disagreed profoundly over philosophical questions, but they shared a conviction that improving the lot of the poor was both necessary and desirable. In social science, a [22]
pp. 39–40.
[23]
p. 65.
[24]
p. 68.
[25] R. Soffer, Ethics and Society in England: The Revolution in the Social Sciences 1870–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), offers a comprehensive account of the connection between social science and reform.
thinker like Graham Wallas, who was interested in developing a psychology that could ‘forecast, and therefore … influence, the conduct of large numbers of human beings organized in societies’, would probably not have been terribly perturbed to be told by Oakeshott that his project could never provide ‘a philosophy of political life’.26 Like Socrates, however, Oakeshott did not much care whether or not kallipolis represented a practical possibility. This Platonism extended to method; in an apparently deliberate imitation of the Republic, he remarked that the state could be approached as a whole, or via the individual selves from which the whole was constructed.27 And like the Republic, the 1925 ms dealt first with the state from the point of view of society, defined as ‘an association of minds’. The individual in such an association will find that ‘his society has undertaken to educate him, whether or not he likes it’. The early Oakeshott assumed that this education (reminiscent of a Rousseauian process in which we are to be ‘forced to be free’) would be benign. This view of the State (with a capital ‘S’) as ‘a self-governing community whose purpose embraces a way of life’ and as resting on ‘a solidarity of feeling, opinion, and belief ’ established it as a very broad category, in contrast to ‘government’. In part, Oakeshott was again following Bosanquet. The State was not merely a Hobbesian answer to the need for order. Rather, it ‘exists because we need, in order to be ourselves, some unified whole which is...morally self-sufficing’. But there is also a clear Aristotelian influence in Oakeshott’s declaration, practically a paraphrase of the Politics, that ‘Every important movement in human history comes into being for the sake of life, but exists for the sake of a more abundant life’.28 Finally, this classicism was filtered through Rousseauianism, and also through Hegelian Idealism. The metaphysical unity of [26]
p. 63.
[27] Plato, Republic, 368e. [28]
p. 76.
the individual with the general will is one of the guiding ideas of the Contrat Social, and Oakeshott cited with approval Hegel’s remark that ‘The State...is the individual’s substance’.29 Multiple sources thus produced in Oakeshott the conviction that the state was the highest vehicle of human ethical purpose. On this basis he was prepared to state that ‘in times of crisis … the degree of statehood possessed by an association will be abnormally great’, so that ‘England in August 1914 was more of a state than she was during the great industrial strikes of 1911–12’.30 After experiencing a second war, he still saw in it a force for unity, but not a positive one; war, he came to think, was inimical to civil freedom. The unity it produced was the unity of an ‘enterprise association’ in which individuals were subordinate to the goal of the group; in this case, victory. The discussion of the State concludes with a list of definitions that has no real parallel in Oakeshott’s published writings, which almost went out of their way to avoid making specific reference to other writers. But this list reveals exactly who he had been reading. It is sorted into different classes, the majority of which failed to meet his criterion of philosophical adequacy. The most common confusion was mixing up a ‘scientific’ approach that addressed ‘questions of origin and development’ with a philosophical ‘treatment of the whole and real nature’ of the state.31 Writers either mistook a ‘particular manifestation’ or ‘activity’ such as territory or government for the ‘real and essential quality of statehood’, or took an empirical account of the origin of the state for a philosophical definition. Of the thirteen examples of correct definition, seven were drawn from either Hegel’s Philosophy of Right or Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State. Burke’s remark that the state ‘is a partnership in all science, in all art, in every virtue, in all [29]
p. 111.
[30]
p. 80.
[31]
pp. 86–7.
perfection’ is also an understandable enough inclusion, given Oakeshott’s conviction that the state was a comprehensive unity. The other more obscure writers, like Mary Follett, an American now mainly remembered as an early theorist of business management, and William Inge, Dean of St Pauls’ Cathedral, were selected because they shared the contemporary hostility to existing forms of democracy and endorsed the creation of new forms of associational life (indicating once more the closeness of Oakeshott’s Idealism to the pluralism of the day). This discussion of ‘the State’, as we observed, was followed by ‘the Self ’. For the mature Oakeshott of On Human Conduct (1975), relationships with others were a condition of selfhood, and citizenship was one such possible relationship. There is a real continuity here with his early work, which also argued that it is impossible to be a self out of all relation to others. The 1925 ms was insistent that, just as the state could not be reduced to territory or force, so the self resisted metaphysical reduction to the body, however inevitable such an identification for practical (legal) purposes.32 Nor was the self equivalent to ‘a kind of constant average mass of experiences’, a Humean bundle of sensations.33 Oakeshott was not tempted by any variety of scepticism which called the reality of the self into question; quoting Appearance and Reality, he declared that its existence was self-evident. The problem was the criterion by which to identify it. For ordinary understanding, a thing was ‘that which seems to stand out from its environment with a certain observable degree of self-subsistence and self-containedness’. But the distinction between a thing and its environment often turned out to be far from absolute. Just as we cannot absolutely separate a plant dependent upon soil and air from its environment, the self ‘is largely, if not entirely, social’.34 [32]
p. 97.
[33]
p. 98.
[34]
pp. 99–101.
Such examples illustrated the more general truth that ‘to suppose a “thing” entirely out of relation is to suppose nothing’. In Oakeshott’s Idealist logic, which seems to owe something to the work of R.L. Nettleship as well as to Bosanquet, some important consequences followed from this position. Since knowing a thing fully involved a knowledge of its relationships, and since any given thing, x, must stand in some relation to everything else (all that is not-x), then fully to know the nature of x entailed fully knowing the nature of the universe as a whole. This view reinforced the Idealist conviction of a gap between sensible appearances and ultimate reality. The plant may look as if it is an entirely discrete object, but this appearance is deceptive; it is only a part of a larger whole. The self cannot be treated in exactly the same way as the plant is, for the self is both conscious and immaterial, but both are embedded in a network of relationships. The self was therefore ‘largely, if not entirely, social’, and the division between ‘self ’ and ‘others’ ultimately apparent rather than real.35 Selfhood comes into being through an active and conscious process of co-ordination with an environment that includes other people. In technical terms, it involved ‘making new experiences logically coherent with the present body of experience’. This idea that experience involves the construction of a coherent ‘world’ was central to Experience and its Modes, but we find it already articulated in the 1925 ms. This theory of the self as active cognition was also intended to highlight its allegedly universal form. The ultimate outcome of all intellectual activity, we noted, was supposed to be a definition of some kind, and it was crucial for Oakeshott that in this respect the intellect was similar to the will, for ‘the true object of the will is always universal’. In keeping with Platonic metaphysics which regarded the true and the good as two aspects of the same ideal Form, Oakeshott found little difference between cognition and volition. Both involved ‘the whole self directed towards a universal object’. But if one had to identify one of these acts as more [35]
p. 100.
fundamental than the other, Oakeshott declared one would have to choose volition. Knowledge presupposed will, so that ‘at least some form of willing seems to lie behind every act of knowing’.36 Oakeshott’s early thought thus also contained an element of compromise between Idealist rationalism and pragmatism. In philosophy, he was a thoroughgoing Rationalist; but he was also convinced that the world of thought depended on the world of action. This was, however, a practical rather than a logical dependence; without actors, there could be no scientific or philosophical or artistic activity, but action was not prior in the sense of being more important than intellectual or cultural activity. Indeed, the reverse was the case; like many Idealists, he was thoroughly prejudiced in favour of the contemplative life. Moreover, like Plato, he was convinced that earthly reality should approximate the world of Ideas. If the idea of the individual Self necessarily pointed towards its union with other Selves in the State, this union was still only a pale reflection of the idea of the unity of the universe as a whole. ‘The only true, because the only perfect, self is the universe; for the universe alone achieves that unity of experience which is the essence of statehood’.37 This attribution of selfhood to the universe as a whole, and the claim that the universe is capable of a unity of experience, would strike most contemporary philosophers—if indeed they accepted such statements as meaningful at all—as quasi-religious in nature, and it is worth remarking that in this period Oakeshott was a believing Christian. His Christianity was, admittedly, highly modernistic and anti-dogmatic; but it was nonetheless a significant factor in his thought. It is also virtually absent from the two works published here, though it is clearly visible in other essays that he published in the 1920s. This only underlines the
[36]
p. 105.
[37]
p. 107.
importance of taking a comprehensive view of a philosopher’s writings if one wishes to understand the full range of their ideas.38 Oakeshott’s metaphysical account of the Self entailed that the individual could only achieve an identity ‘through his particular station and the faithful performance of its particular duties’. In saying this, of course, he was following Bradley’s Ethical Studies. Through acquiring an identity in the obligatory performance of various social roles one came into contact with the State and with humanity as a whole. Neither could be encountered directly; ‘The riches of the wider whole can reach us only through the (apparently) more limited loyalty’.39 The conclusion of the discussion of selfhood, then, was the mutual identity of State and Self, from which it allegedly followed that the State could do no wrong as it was in fact only the real will of the individual. In fact, this argument that the ‘real State...is liable to error only when it deserts its “statehood”’ was supposed to restrict the types of activity the state could properly engage in rather than make it omnicompetent. Here again Oakeshott was following Bosanquet; but faced with actual states ruled by dictators claiming de facto infallibility, there would soon be little public sympathy for the metaphysical subtleties differentiating benign from destructive versions of the philosophy that ‘The self is the State; the State is the self ’. For all that Oakeshott protested that Spencer’s opposition of ‘“Man versus the State” is sheer nonsense’,40 he could only dismiss conflicts between state and individual as illusory, and reduce all political conflict to logical error, so long as he retained the metaphysical contrast between appearance and reality. Only thus could any divergence between the will of the individual and the [38] See ‘Religion and the Moral Life’ (1927); ‘The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity’ (1928); and ‘Religion and the World’ (1929), all republished in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life. [39]
p. 112.
[40]
p. 110.
universal will be explained as a result of ‘isolation and ignorance’, in keeping with Rousseauian and Hegelian tradition.41 But in 1925 the problem of reliably ascertaining the universal will, never mind the even more fundamental issue of whether the concept of such a will made sense at all, was never really faced. Oakeshott concluded by reiterating his desire to defend the specifically philosophical treatment of politics. The new social sciences of psychology, sociology, and anthropology threatened the autonomy of political philosophy, but the fundamental ideas of political life like ‘the State’ needed to be analysed as concepts as well as set in their social context. Yet he was not wedded to his own opinions. Given his subsequent intellectual development we should take him at his word when he wrote that ‘I am ready to abandon many of the conclusions here reached, but not the attitude … of doubt’. He always remained true to this early sceptical conviction, which in the end was at odds with his commitment to the dogmas of Rationalism concerning definition and those of Idealism regarding the distinction between Appearance and Reality, that the aim of philosophy was to identify ‘presuppositions’ and turn them into ‘examined preconceptions’. He had also sown the seeds of a lifelong interest in the philosophy of education with his declaration that ‘the problem of government is a single manifestation of a much wider problem—the problem of education’.42 There are thus some important similarities between the 1925 ms and On Human Conduct. The first section of On Human Conduct, ‘On the Theoretical Understanding of Human Conduct’, can be seen as the counterpart of the discussion in the 1925 ms of ‘the Self ’. Though Oakeshott had long ago abandoned the idea of the universe as a self, this section can still be seen as fulfilling [41]
p. 113.
[42] p. 131. On Oakeshott’s philosophy of education see K. Williams, Education and the Voice of Michael Oakeshott (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007).
the demand for what the 1925 ms described as a ‘metaphysical prolegomenon’. In a sense, therefore, he retained the belief that ‘all political philosophy depends upon a view of the universe’, while becoming much more sceptical and minimalistic in his notion of what such a view entailed.43 Similarly, the second section, on ‘the civil condition’, can be read as addressing what the 1925 ms had called ‘the State’. But here the parallel between the structure of the two works ends, because On Human Conduct included a third section absent from the 1925 ms, in which the history of political ideas was made a separate subject of analysis.
[43]
p. 135.
III: The Philosophical Approach to Politics The lectures on ‘The Philosophical Approach to Politics’ were Oakeshott’s first as a university lecturer at Cambridge. They were read twice, first in the Lent term of 1928–9, and again in 1929–30. The LSE archive contains two complete versions, one written out in full (set A), the other in note form (set B). It is possible to date the composition of set A from both circumstantial and internal evidence to early 1928. On the balance of probabilities, it seems most likely that the full scripts of set A were written first and that the version in note form contained in set B is a later revision.44 Since, however, Sets A and B were unquestionably prepared within a year or so of one another, and are very close to one another in content, the chronology is not vital. Both sets consist of eight lectures and have exactly the same main title. But whereas set B has a table of contents page assigning each lecture its own title, set A lacks such a page, and all the lectures it contains are untitled. The titles used here are thus taken from set B, but it was natural to prefer publication of set A as the full version. Both sets begin by presenting current political philosophy as severely confused. In particular, what the 1925 ms had termed ‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’ theories of the state are criticized because they either conflate political philosophy with some other approach to politics or are blind to it altogether. In the second lecture, this confusion is traced to erroneous conceptions of the nature of thought in general and of philosophy in particular. The third lecture deals with specifically political thought, and the [44] Set A was written entirely on the backs of printed covering pages for examination answer books. One of these has been dated by a candidate ‘December 1927’, a few months before the lectures are known to have first been given. It thus seems very unlikely that set B, written entirely on plain paper, would have been composed in note form before this date. Set A also appears to make reference to a letter published in The Times in early 1928.
fourth, fifth, and sixth lectures successively examine and reject the claims of different types of thinking—historical, scientific, and practical—to provide a philosophical view of politics. The final two lectures explore more satisfactory approaches to political philosophy, but conclude that genuinely philosophical thinking about politics has been rare, and may even, according to the strictest criteria, be impossible. This summary makes clear the importance of these lectures for Experience and its Modes. That book began with a discussion of the nature of thought in general, before successively examining and rejecting the claims of different types of thinking— historical, scientific, and practical—to provide a philosophical view of experience. The final section explored more satisfactory approaches to philosophy, but concluded that genuinely philosophical thinking was rare. In other words, Experience and its Modes was largely a reworking of the 1930 lectures with the parts on politics omitted. Although Oakeshott’s first major work said almost nothing about politics, it turns out to have been the outcome of prolonged reflection on exactly that subject. Indeed, politics became the ‘absent presence’ in the text precisely because of his reflections on it. We may deal very briefly with the context of the lectures, as we have already set out the intellectual climate of the inter-war years above. We will spend most of our time exploring the arguments of the lectures themselves, and pointing out any significant differences between the two sets. But we will also explore the relationship between the lectures and the arguments of Experience and its Modes, before concluding with some more general remarks on the similarities and differences between Oakeshott’s early and late political thought. The prospects for radical political improvement that had still seemed plausible in the mid-1920s looked far bleaker by the end of the decade. Hitler had yet to regain mass support in Germany after his surge in the early 1920s, but Mussolini was entrenched in Italy and Stalinist communism seemed bent on subverting
Western Europe from within. Unsurprisingly, there is a notable absence of optimistic statements of the sort we observed in the 1925 ms. Nevertheless, the 1930 lectures restate many of the arguments of the 1925 ms in a slightly different form. The lectures allowed Oakeshott to air his criticisms of the Cambridge approach to political science publicly, and to expound his own conception of political philosophy as something firmly distinct from empirical political science. Both versions of the first lecture began by treating political philosophy as problematic. Someone new to the subject would probably find the very meaning of Bosanquet’s claim that the State was ‘a working conception of life’ unclear.45 Political philosophy nevertheless presumably represented ‘some kind of thinking about politics’ and therefore must belong with other disciplines like history, psychology, and economics that unquestionably also offered ways of thinking about politics. But how did it differ from them? An answer required investigating the nature of philosophy itself. As in 1925, Oakeshott was arguing that we must first grasp the nature of the genus before proceeding to examine the species. But instead of seeking a definition of philosophy, he offered a historical overview of the question, ‘What has “Philosophy” meant in the past?’46 In 1925, Oakeshott had insisted on philosophy as a timeless activity, but the 1930 lectures recognise definite shifts in the meaning of philosophy, and also perhaps place more emphasis on its reflexive nature (though this was certainly already present in 1925). The task of philosophy is said to be ‘to think about thinking, to turn thought back upon itself ’.47 Initially, ‘philosophy’ signified a general curiosity, as it did amongst the pre-Socratics from whom intellectual pursuits remained ‘undifferentiated’. For Plato, however, philosophy was ‘beginning to have a technical meaning’. The Platonic philosopher [45]
LSE 1/1/7, B1 p. 1.
[46]
LSE 1/1/7, B1 p. 4.
[47]
p. 144.
was both a specialist and ‘freed from the narrowness of view which accompanies much specialization’. Moreover, politics was a central object of concern for this type of intellectual, who was a ‘disinterested, judicious, scientific expert’. But thanks to Aristotle, all forms of knowledge continued to be thought of as in some sense ‘philosophy’ throughout the medieval era. From the seventeenth century onward, the period when modern philosophy could be said to have begun, we begin to find ‘a firmer and more logical differentiation of intellectual interests’, nevertheless in the early twentieth century philosophy was still conflated with ‘the “scientific” attitude’ in particular.48 Both the 1930 lectures and Experience and its Modes were deliberate contributions to this effort to identify the limits of the various forms of thought, and in particular to untangle the confusion between science and philosophy. Their ongoing separation was part of an overall ‘tendency of history...to distinguish intellectual pursuits from one another’.49 Their differences had been obscured by their common opposition to the ‘domination’ over thought exercised by theology and the church. At the same time, it was a general truth about the history of ideas that ‘All studies have been slow to recognize their own limits’. The contemporary desire ‘to merge philosophy into natural science and...admit it no separate existence’ was just another illustration of this tendency.50 Oakeshott may have been paying more attention to the history of philosophy than hitherto, but his Rationalist prejudice that philosophical definition was the ultimate goal of all thinking remained alive, as the beginning of the second lecture makes clear. ‘The history of a thing can never tell us what the thing is...Every question is logical before it is historical’. Both versions of this lecture are nevertheless intended to demonstrate the existence of [48]
LSE 1/1/7, B1 pp. 6–7.
[49]
LSE 1/1/7, B1 pp. 7–9.
[50]
p. 148.
distinct types of thinking. Even simple sensations and perceptions counted as thought; a simple judgment such as ‘I perceive a book’ involved imposing ‘our past experiences upon a certain object before us’.51 These arguments are familiar from Experience and its Modes, as is the claim that moral and scientific judgments, just as much as sensations and perceptions, represent distinct types of thinking. If we ask what all these types of thinking have in common, the answer is twofold. All types of thinking seek, first, ‘to break down all isolations in experience’, and second, to ‘build up a unified experience’. ‘Thinking experience aims at relating … To break down the isolation of a particular event or experience is to explain it’. ‘Explanation’ was being used here as a synonym for ‘giving unity or coherence to experience’; it had nothing to do with establishing general laws for causal relations, the sense it had by then acquired in philosophy of science.52 We should note, though, that this usage was thoroughly anti-sceptical in intention. Insofar as we successfully explain our experiences by classifying and relating them to one another we are supposedly producing Truth, with a capital ‘T’. ‘The Truth is a unified, coherent experience’. The metaphor used to illustrate this view is a revealing one. Thinking is said to be ‘like a river’ whose ‘destiny is to reach the sea’. The sea is analogous to the world of completely satisfactory philosophical definition, but on the way there are ‘twists and tributaries’ which constitute ‘divisions in the world of thinking’. Moreover, each river mistakes itself for the sea; ‘a number of little worlds are created, and each claims to be true’. Again, this is the argument of Experience and its Modes, in which scientific, historical, and practical experience are ‘arrests’ in a process that left
[51]
LSE 1/1/7, B2 pp. 1–2.
[52] LSE 1/1/7, B2 p. 3. Compare J.S. Mill, Logic, 8th edn (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882), p. 332.
to itself would logically result in fully satisfactory philosophical experience. Both versions of this lecture also reject the idea (ascribed to Bacon in B2 and to Kant in A2) that different forms of thought are correlates of separate mental faculties such as memory, reason, and imagination. There were, Oakeshott insisted, no such faculties, and it was impossible to deduce their existence from the existence of separate forms of thought. A2 is particularly harsh on this view, describing it as ‘the crudest possible and the most complicated explanation of the facts’. The theory of faculties does not explain the relation between the various forms of thinking it identifies. Even if we regard the faculties as just ‘postulates’, the theory itself is a bad one because ‘it explains nothing, it merely draws a line’. The lectures also reject the idea, attributed to Comte and Hegel, that each form of thought ‘corresponds with a stage in the development of thought’.53 A2 is rather more sympathetic to the idea of a hierarchy of stages of thought than is B2, which rejected it outright; the possibility of ‘arranging the different kinds of thinking in a hierarchy according to their history’ is conceded, and an historical hierarchy is distinguished from a logical one in which types of thinking are arranged according simply to their ‘value for the attainment of truth’. Hegel is associated with both positions, but Oakeshott made clear he was sceptical about Hegel’s claim to have succeeded in constructing such orders of intellectual rank. Moreover, he disavowed any similar enterprise of his own. Even if we admit that thinking is ‘always the activity of the whole mind’, the question of the relation between different kinds of thinking remains. To illustrate the various possibilities, in B2 Oakeshott used a diagram (see below), something he never did in his published works.
[53]
LSE 1/1/7, B2 p. 4.
The first option, attributed to Laski (Wallas’s successor as Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics in 1926), represents the claim that ‘All are equally true; you can choose which you like, and it doesn’t matter which you choose’. Oakeshott was completely dismissive: ‘It explains nothing simply to call it an alternative to something else’.54 Nevertheless, that ‘all are equally true’ was more or less the position he ultimately adopted himself. While he always insisted that the form of understanding to be employed was determined by the nature of the question at issue, he eventually came to see science, history, practice, and philosophy as identical in status, though not in logical structure. The second diagram represents the position of Barker (appointed Cambridge’s first Professor of Political Science in 1927). It suggests that different forms of thought are parts of the same whole and ‘all contribute to the complete truth’. But it is not clear, according to Oakeshott, how they do so in reality, and unless we know this, ‘we know nothing’. Only the third and final diagram was adequate, because it exemplified the ‘Abstract-Concrete principle’. The smaller circles (in which the letters presumably stand for ‘Psychology’, ‘Art’(?), ‘Science’, ‘History’, and ‘Economics’) are ‘abstract’ kinds of thinking. That is, ‘the particular kind of whole, or truth they achieve’, is not a complete whole and is, consequently, ‘not really
[54]
LSE 1/1/7, B2 p. 5.
true’.55 These terms—‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’—are central to the argument of Experience and its Modes, but they were employed first in these lectures. B2 suggests that we normally use the word ‘abstract’ to mean anything ‘non-material’, and ‘concrete’ to signify ‘anything we can touch and see’. The key meaning for Oakeshott, however, was not tangibility or visibility, but completeness. Using a similar example to one he had employed in 1925, he argued that a complete classification of paintings in a gallery with respect to their size and weight would produce an ‘incomplete unity’, because it failed to acknowledge the paintings as paintings. The problem, as we observed, is that the criterion for ‘completeness’ in such instances unavoidably makes reference to the subjective purposes of agents. A2 tries a different tack, emphasizing instead that the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ help to distinguish different members of a genus. ‘Definition, the old logic taught us, is per genus et differentiam’. But one may concede that ‘thinking may have different degrees of abstraction’ without agreeing that ‘the more abstract [thinking] is, the less of the whole truth is in it’. This claim was essential, however, if Oakeshott was to sustain his belief in a kind of ‘concrete thinking’ that ‘gives the only true and complete unity to experiences’. Unfortunately, his conclusion that the common world is less ‘true’ than the world of concrete philosophy because it was more ‘abstract’ did not follow from the arguments he presented. In On Human Conduct, he was explicit that ordinary thought and action are adequate to their own purposes. Oakeshott eventually realised, in other words, that preventing confusion between different forms of argument and thus avoiding ‘a dispute of cross-purposes’ did not require insisting on the contrast between ‘concrete’ philosophy and all other forms of ‘abstract’ thought. The change is signalled by the very different meaning he later attached to the word ‘conditional’. In 1925, he remarked that all ‘abstract’ truth would be ‘conditional, partial, incomplete truth’, whereas in 1975, conditionality was no longer [55]
LSE 1/1/7, B2 p. 6.
equated with partiality or incompleteness. Instead, all thought, including philosophical thought, is said to be conditional, and only the differing nature of their conditions allows us to distinguish the various forms of thought from one another. The third lecture attempted to take the next step in the argument by identifying the nature of philosophical thought about politics in particular. The failure to be self-conscious about the nature of the perspective we are adopting towards political activity entailed a failure to recognize that ‘“politics” is a different “thing” for each of the different ways we may think about it’.56 Oakeshott observed that this seemed counter-intuitive; we ordinarily expect the nature of a thing to dictate our approach to it. But what philosophy does is to put in question the nature of things: ‘how are you to know what [a thing] is until you have thought about it?’ Oakeshott sounded a Kantian note when he declared that ‘it is only in some very ambiguous sense that there is a “thing” there at all before we start thinking. The raw materials of the “thing” may be there, but the real thing certainly isn’t as far as you or I are concerned.’57 That the bare fact of their existence is the only knowledge of things in themselves that we can have apart from our perception of them was exactly the position of Experience and its Modes. The existence of a plurality of forms of abstract thought stems from the fact that things display a variety of aspects to us, each requiring a different form of understanding; the results of any given form of abstract thought are ‘limited to a single aspect of a thing’. Within its own limits, however, each form of abstract thought is sovereign. It was irrelevant to criticise a scientific argument in philosophical terms, or an historical claim from a practical point of view, since the different presuppositions of the various modes rendered them immune to criticism from arguments that did not share them. The thesis that for ‘as long as each kind of [56]
p. 163.
[57]
p. 162.
abstract thinking knows its own limitations and keeps to them, it is not subject to the criticism of any other kind of thinking or of concrete thinking’ would play a central role in Experience and its Modes and thereafter, but it was first articulated in these lectures. Oakeshott’s use of the term ignoratio elenchi, or irrelevance, is further proof that the lectures provided the foundation for Experience and its Modes, where the phrase was used repeatedly. His source for it is obscure, though irrelevance has long been recognized as a so-called ‘informal fallacy’. It has its ultimate origin in classical logic, specifically the Latin translation of Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations.58 Whether he knew of it from Aristotle first-hand is unclear, as the source cited in A3 is actually J.S. Mill’s Logic, and the term is used too by Schopenhauer, whom Oakeshott was also reading at this time. Nor, unfortunately, is it clear whether it was Aristotle whom Oakeshott had in mind when he remarked that an unnamed philosopher ‘Once said that almost all wrong thinking results from the “confusion of the categories”’.59 The conception of political philosophy as the investigation of ‘organized social life and all that goes with it’ is clearly continuous with the ideas of the 1925 ms. There, Oakeshott had argued at length for the identity of self and society. The 1930 lectures pointed towards the same view: ‘a sensibility for society is the sense of a membership of a whole indistinguishable from one’s self ’. Philosophical recognition of this truth, however, necessarily postdated experience of it, a point he emphasized with a quotation from Browning: ‘Justinian’s Pandects only make precise / What simply sparkled in men’s eyes before’. This argument that practice preceded theory in politics was one of the most widely noticed ideas in Rationalism in Politics (1961), but Oakeshott’s use of this passage from Browning (which he might have encountered from Maitland’s citation in Township and Borough) makes it likely that [58] Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, Bk 1 Ch. v. [59]
LSE 1/1/7, B3 p. 2.
it was suggested to him much earlier by his reading in literature and history.60 The lecture also contains an acknowledgement of a problem that would occupy Oakeshott for his entire life, the ambiguous quality of political speech. In politics, ‘not only are the words we use ambiguous’, but an analytical vocabulary is lacking. ‘Just where we require the utmost coolness and detachment, we are forced to use words commonly connected with warm feeling’.61 His proposal was to replace the term ‘political thought’, which supposedly referred to a single object, with ‘political thinking’ in the hope of bringing about a ‘radical reformation’ based on the recognition of a plurality of approaches to politics. His later work placed more emphasis on understanding politics without employing its vocabulary, but the starting point in the problem of ambiguity was unchanged. To make clearer the problems that resulted from taking all political thought to be of the same kind, Oakeshott singled out some specific terms. B3 singled out ‘political theory’, ‘the state’, ‘sovereignty’, and ‘law’; A3, instead of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘law’, examined the words ‘society’ and ‘real’. Despite choosing different examples, however, he was concerned in both cases to show that the terms mentioned had different meanings depending on whether one encountered them in philosophical, legal, scientific, or moral contexts. This was something he believed writers of all political persusasions, including Gierke, Sorel, Laski, and Zimmern, had failed to recognize adequately. The consequences of this failure were far-reaching. ‘All the old conceptions will have to go. Thinkers can no longer be classed as Democratic, or Pluralist, or Communist, or Realist or Idealist’.62 Arguably, in the later twentieth century, Oakeshott’s demand that we ‘rewrite our histories’ of political thought was fulfilled [60]
See p. 163 n. 2, below.
[61]
p. 164.
[62]
LSE 1/1/7, B3 p. 6.
by historians of political thought like Burrow, Black, Collini, Jay, Koselleck, Pocock, Skinner and others. Ironically, however, he himself made little contribution to this rewriting; and of those just mentioned, only Black has engaged with Oakeshott’s account of the history of political thought in any detail.63 Indeed, Oakeshott’s next move was not to offer an alternative history of political thought, but to distinguish three different ‘abstract’ kinds of thinking about politics. The three main ‘modes of experience’ identified in Experience and its Modes—science, history, and practice—now appear, but in the guise of alternatives to ‘the old way of classifying thinking about politics’. Scientific, historical, and practical thinking are ‘the three most important ways of thinking about society’, and each ‘has claimed to be the philosophical approach to politics’. The following three lectures examine them in turn. The fourth lecture begins by arguing that ‘scientific thinking about politics’ could take various forms; it might actually bear the name ‘political science’, or it might be called sociology or anthropology (‘ethnology’). All of these disciplines presupposed a ‘strict correspondence’ between the study of politics and scientific thought, though the science that was to provide the template for political studies varied. Biology had been a popular nineteenthcentury candidate; others included anatomy, pathology, physiology, and psychology. But all of these proposals suffered, so Oakeshott argued, from an inadequate understanding of what gave science its distinctive qualities. It was not simply its subject matter that gave a science its identity; there was also the question of ‘how’ that science approached its object. Oakeshott’s view of science drew heavily on the ideas of the physicist Arthur Eddington.64 Eddington was certainly not his only [63] See A. Black, Guild and State European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2003). [64] See A. Eddington, ‘The Domain of Physical Science’, in Science, Religion, and Reality, ed. J. Needham (London: Macmillan, 1925), pp.
source; he also quoted Collingwood and Whitehead.65 But it was Eddington’s example of an elephant sliding down Madingley Hill on a Tuesday afternoon that he used (without acknowledgment) in A4. The scientific observer discounts such details of the event as his own emotional response, the fact that what he is seeing is an elephant, the place name, and so forth. What remains is ‘Two tons … sliding down an incline plane set at 45° to the horizon and 100 feet in length [in] 15.4 seconds’. Science explores a ‘common world … in terms which do not depend upon personal experiences; and such description creates a purely “objective” world’. As such, it is ‘interested only in that which is physically measurable’.66 This principle of measurement was the source of both the distinctiveness of science and of its abstract nature.67 ‘There is nothing which cannot be measured in some way or other; but, equally, there is nothing the whole nature of which is comprehended by such measurement’.68 For science, ‘every occurrence is interesting only insofar as it is an instance of a general rule’. An average, for example, ‘is true of a class, but not of any individual in it’, and science as a whole was ‘a true description of one aspect of everything’. The issue for our purposes is of course the use to which this philosophy of science was put. By employing it to establish not 187–218. [65] See R.G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), p. 167, and A.N. Whitehead, ‘The Concept of Nature’, in An Anthology, ed. F.S.C. Northrop and M.W. Gross (Cambridge: CUP, 1953), p. 201. [66]
LSE 1/1/7, B4 p. 6.
[67] For discussions of Oakeshott’s philosophy of science see E. Podoksik, ‘The Scientific Positivism of Michael Oakeshott’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 12:2 (2004), 297–318, and B. Kaldis, ‘Oakeshott on Science as a Mode of Experience’, Zygon, 44:1 (2009), 169–96. [68]
LSE 1/1/7, B4 p. 6.
only sociology, but also economics and psychology, as genuinely scientific, Oakeshott could argue that therefore they were nonphilosophical ways of studying politics, though not simply invalid.69 He actually recommended Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method (in which sociology was grouped with psychology and biology as one of the ‘natural sciences’) to those desiring a defence of sociology as a science.70 Oakeshott took issue, however, with the claim that there was a distinct order of ‘social facts’. Durkheim had attempted to distinguish social facts from other types (such as psychological facts) by arguing that social facts are ‘ways of acting or thinking with the peculiar characteristic of exercising a coercive influence on individual consciousness’.71 He believed that Durkheim had simply failed to appreciate that ‘facts’ are shaped by the perspective we adopt as well as the nature of the object under examination. Despite these criticisms, Oakeshott did not make it impossible for sociology to claim scientific status; it did not, for example, have to be able to discover changeless laws of society. Indeed, it was characteristic of all scientific laws that they were liable to change. ‘All sciences are constantly being reformed … sociology is not peculiar in this respect’. Oakeshott was never tempted by the idea of science as a timelessly valid model of all explanation. Nor did he think sociology needed to be able successfully to predict human behaviour to qualify as scientific, a position he actually shared with Durkheim.72 It was an error to suppose that ‘the exactness of a science is dependent upon its subject’, when in fact it depended on its assumptions. All [69]
LSE 1/1/7, B4 p. 4.
[70] É. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, ed. G.E. Catlin, 8th edn (New York: The Free Press, 1966 [1895; English translation 1938]), p. 1. [71]
Durkheim, ‘Preface’ to Sociological Method, p. liii.
[72] Durkheim, Sociological Method, declares ‘All scientific prevision is impossible’ at p. 118.
sociology needed to do to qualify as a genuine science was show itself capable of the ‘ordering of observations by hypotheses or “laws”’. In Experience and its Modes, which did not need to address the problem of whether disciplines like sociology or psychology offered genuine philosophies of politics, Oakeshott was notably less convinced by their scientific claims. He wrote, for example, that ‘a radical confusion between the scientific and the historical mode of thinking still stands in the path of sociology’.73 But already in 1930 he was committed to the position that neither natural nor social science was a substitute for philosophy. Nor could political philosophy be in any sense a ‘science of the sciences’ consisting of a number of the social sciences in combination. While philosophy could no more criticise the methods and conclusions of social science than they might criticise it, they were distinct enterprises. The two versions of the lecture on history begin with some notable vacillation. B5 began with the confident declaration that we ‘need not spend time showing that History is really a kind of thinking’, but A5 was more hesitant, saying that ‘we are not accustomed to regard History as a kind of thinking’. Nevertheless, Oakeshott was confident both that history was a distinctive form of thought, and that, like science, it was defective. He dealt first with the claim that historical and philosophical thought about politics were in fact identical. His target here was speculative philosophy of history, but again the different versions betray some uncertainty. In B5, speculative philosophy of history is presented as confusion between history and science, but in A5 it is the product of a confusion between history and philosophy. B5 criticised contemporary political science as ‘a hybrid kind of thinking made up of a mixture of Science and History’. McIver’s The Modern State, for example, gave an account of early medieval England that was ‘vitiated by his attempts to make historical events instances of a law’ according to which ‘Feudalism follows [73] Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (EM) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1933]), p. 178.
Empire’. Because it tried ‘to be scientific and historical at the same moment’, it ultimately ‘fails in both’. A5, however, claimed that it was philosophy rather than science that was supposed to ‘discover the general laws which govern the whole course of history’. Oakeshott’s uncertainty on this point is understandable if one realises that the speculative approach to history has claimed both a philosophical and a scientific basis; this is one source of the difference between the Hegelian and Marxist philosophies of history, for example. A weaker claim was that history provided the ‘basis on which to build a philosophy of politics’. In a sense, Oakeshott himself eventually embraced this latter position, but in these lectures he wanted to draw a firm distinction between the objects of historical and philosophical knowledge. While all historical objects (persons and events) are unique in that their identity is specific to their own time and place, their reliance on these criteria also meant, Oakeshott argued, that they are less than fully individual. Full individuality implied self-sufficiency, but the contextual dependence of historical individuals meant that they were ‘abstract’, though in a different way to the objects of science. Both science and history make the assumption of ‘a world of events independent of their being known’, but whereas science asks ‘what must have happened according to all the laws of probability’, history asks ‘only what did happen’. The philosophy of history advanced in Experience and its Modes saw Oakeshott labelled a ‘constructionist’ because of his argument that ‘The historian’s business is...to create and to construct’ a narrative of events based on the evidence,74 but already in 1930 he was telling his students that ‘history is creating the past, and is a matter of thinking, of criticism and selection and building up, all the time’. Histories of politics were like all other genres of history in this respect. Their objects, in contrast to the objects of scientific thought, were individuals rather than averages; Napoleon rather than the normal human being. [74]
EM, p. 93.
It was the specific business of history to study ‘the interrelations between things regarded as individual and unique’ with respect to their temporal aspect. When Oakeshott quoted Bryce’s remark that ‘The great object of teaching history is to enable people to realize that there is no such thing as a normal world’, he meant ‘normal’ in the strict sense; the natural sciences dealt ‘solely with what is average, what can be repeated’, but historical events were unrepeatable by virtue of their very nature. In the language of logic, the historian’s judgments are singular judgments, and consequently categorical judgments’. All these arguments recur in Experience and its Modes, which also followed the lectures in arguing that history is abstract partly because it refers its facts to ‘a world which can never be completed—for always part of it is in the future. The historical series is without an end’. Furthermore, history ‘postulates an objective series of facts, independent of the historian’ and thus fails to acknowledge the role that subjectivity plays in it. Finally, history is in a sense parasitic on practice for its subject matter: ‘No question can be historical without being a question of another kind first’. Oakeshott later abandoned all of these criticisms. The attempt to convict historical individuals and events as abstract simply because they were conditional identities made no sense given that they could take no other shape. Similarly, the incompleteness of the historical series was only problematic if our interest in it is the significance for ourselves of an event (so that, for example, the consequences of the French revolution may be said to be still working themselves out) rather than why the event occurred at all; the question of ‘relevance’ is clearly a practical rather than an historical issue. Nor is it the case that reflective historians must deny the place of subjectivity in the construction of events, even if the past cannot be merely what the historian would like it to have been. And finally, history need not wait for practice to supply it with questions about the past, even though many historical questions begin as practical problems.
‘Practical’ thinking was the final type of thinking Oakeshott examined in support of the contrast between abstract and concrete thinking about politics. As in 1925, he acknowledged that all activity was in a sense practical, even thinking, for all thought ‘aims at producing some change in the mind’. 6A cites Aristotle’s remark that ‘Thought is also activity’ in support of this view, and also introduces the idea that an ‘activity of will’ lies behind all thinking, though ‘will’ is described as an abstraction, like ‘practical reason’ and ‘the moral faculty’. Experience and its Modes made will the principal category of practical experience, showing once again its foundations in the ideas of the lectures.75 Practical thinking was ‘directed solely towards producing some practical change...in the external world’. Such thinking need not consist solely in action, though it might. Any political thinking that ‘issues in a “programme for action”’ belonged under this heading, whether it aimed at reform or maintaining the status quo. Practical political thought, in Oakeshott’s view, had ‘so influenced men that it is often denied that there is any other kind of thinking possible’. It had both co-opted scientific and historical forms of thought for political ends and condemned philosophical ideas about politics as either ‘unpractical’ or ‘immoral’. In doing so, it was of course overreaching itself in the same way that science or history overreached themselves in claiming to be ‘concrete’ thinking. In B6, G.D.H. Cole, Hobhouse, Laski, Bertrand Russell, and the Webbs are all identified as committing such errors. Cole’s pluralism, for example, had ‘an avowedly practical aim’, namely, to ‘“discredit” the state, and its sovereign position’. Moreover, Cole’s treatment of the idea of the ‘real will’ in his work on Social Theory as fundamentally anti-democratic missed the point. The theory of the real will described the State as it always is and necessarily must be; it was not a constitution that could be adopted or rejected, but a metaphysical truth. As such, however, it had no practical implications, and to criticize it as if it did was to mistake its nature. [75] Cp. EM, pp. 261, 305.
The focus of practical thinking was on what ought to be— in effect, on the future. In contrast, the ‘consciously concrete world...would be neither phenomenal, nor subject to the ordinary notions of space and time...a world in which “ought” and “shall” would have no meaning, where growth would be an anomaly and change an impossibility’. In general, Oakeshott’s descriptions of ‘concrete’ experience were remarkably reminiscent of the Platonic world of eternal Ideas; in the seventh lecture he contrasted the temporal world of human experience (‘which, in a sense, we all construct’) with a timeless ideal totality (‘both unmakeable and indestructible’). This view persisted in Experience and its Modes, where philosophy was identified with experience sub specie aeternitatis. When stated so starkly, it becomes all the more obvious how complete his later abandonment of it was. Having dismissed science, history, and practice as incapable of providing a satisfactory political philosophy, Oakeshott still had to venture a positive account of political philosophy. The seventh lecture explores what happens when we forswear abstraction, but still fail to follow the requirements of philosophical thinking fully. We end up with a kind of ‘pseudo-philosophical’ thinking, although ‘a great deal nearer to achieving concreteness than either Science, History, or Practice’. Oakeshott acknowledged that his criteria for genuine political philosophy were extremely strict; so strict, in fact, that he was unable to offer ‘even a single example of this pure, concrete thinking about politics’. Indeed, he found himself defending the rather implausible view that Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau had never written true political philosophy. Rousseau and Hegel had perhaps come closest, but even they had constantly relapsed into abstraction. They were vastly more satisfactory than Laski or Hobhouse; nevertheless, they had not stuck to the aim of philosophical thinking—to see a thing ‘as it really is’—as rigorously as they might. This was of course the aim the 1925 ms had also insisted on, of seeing the object of inquiry as ‘part of the ultimate whole of reality—the real whole, or universe’,
and Oakeshott’s claim that genuine political philosophy had never been written should really be taken as a comment on the untenable nature of his own position. The viewpoint which came nearest to avoiding the pseudophilosophic failure to resolve the apparent opposition between State and Society was ‘the social’. Invoking Plato and Bosanquet once more, Oakeshott revived his argument that individuality was always dependent on its environment. The individual man is not physical but ‘Social...man seen in all his connections with the full social world to which he belongs’. Since this social world includes the state, it can be said that the State is a necessary requirement for the real individual. The ‘plurality and contradiction’ visible in the conflict between ‘the State’ and ‘the individual’ would be resolved once the meaning of both terms was rightly understood. As in 1925, then, Oakeshott remained committed to arguing that political conflicts are apparent rather than real. In contrast, his mature philosophy of civil association provided for the adjudication of conflict but did not explain it away as ultimately illusory from a metaphysical perspective. Nor did it claim to complete the individual; while civil association is a component of civilized life, it is ultimately only one particular type of moral relationship expressed in legal form. Civil association is not concerned with its citizens’ being at home in the world. The differences between the two versions of the final lecture are perhaps greater than those between any of the others in the series. A8 returns to a general consideration of philosophy; B8 addresses the problem for political philosophy of the opposition between state and individual, and argues that the State ‘is to the political philosopher what the universe is to philosophy in general, the necessary presupposition of all intelligible existence’. Nevertheless, both deal with the problem of how to get beyond ‘pseudo-philosophic’ thinking about politics. In B8, even the political philosophy of British Idealism is said to be ‘marred by certain avoidable abstractions’. One was exemplified in the idea of the ‘general will’, used by T.H. Green to
provide a contrast with ‘force’ as a basis for society. This central concept of Rousseau’s political philosophy had set the agenda for British Idealist political thought, and in 1930 Oakeshott could still describe himself giving ‘substantially the same answer as [Rousseau]’ to the problem of self-government.76 In 1975, in contrast, Oakeshott could still have accepted that he was addressing Rousseau’s problem, but his solution had come to differ. ‘Civil association’ offered a less ambitious answer to the question of how self-government is possible by abandoning the notion of ‘will’ altogether and removing to the sphere of enterprise association any substantive idea of a general good beyond the simple maintenance of the rule of law. In 1930, though, he saw no way to escape from the concepts of will and the common good as employed by Green and Bosanquet, despite finding them unsatisfactory. Given this self-confessed failure to develop an adequate conception of political philosophy, we should not be surprised at the ultimately pessimistic conclusion to the lectures. Politics stood condemned as ‘something incomplete and abstract’, and it was impossible to go any further in thinking about it than those who had employed the principle of sociality had already done. ‘Political thinking can never be more than pseudo-philosophic’. That is not to say that Oakeshott regarded the lectures as a whole as devoid of positive results. First, they had refuted the ‘deeply rooted fallacy [that] all thinking is of the same kind’ and identified a number of distinct kinds of thought. Second, they had established philosophy as a distinctive form of thinking exclusively devoted to the interrogation of concepts and independent of other kinds of thinking such as science or history. Third, they defined the relationship of the various kinds of thought to one another as one of logical irrelevance. All of these conclusions were indeed positive results on which his later philosophical work would build. The problem was not the belief that philosophy was useless in any practical sense, a position Oakeshott always maintained. [76]
p. 224.
That the philosophical investigation of political concepts could not provide a guide to political action was not incompatible with a positive view of either politics or political philosophy. The problem lay rather in thinking that the world of practical thought and action to which politics belonged was somehow inherently flawed. We have seen that Oakeshott eventually abandoned this conclusion; but the fact that he held this view in the early 1930s would seem to explain why politics subsequently played no part in Experience and its Modes. There was little point in discussing the inherently pseudophilosophical approach to politics if the aim was to give an account of philosophy which made the contrast between it and the various modes of experience as stark as possible. Equally, however, this view of political philosophy was not likely to prove viable in the long run for someone as interested in the subject as Oakeshott; indeed by 1930 he was already clearly less confident about it than he had been in 1925. Before he could move forward, though, he had to liberate himself from the beliefs that concrete or philosophical thinking ‘supersedes all kinds of abstract thinking’ and that the various ‘abstract worlds’ of science, history, and practice were in the final analysis ‘neither true nor real’. In Experience and its Modes he still remained under their influence.
IV: Oakeshott’s Early and Late Ideas on Political Philosophy Compared This section develops some of the comparisons made above between the ideas of the early and the late Oakeshott in more detail. Idealism (like socialism) tended to regard the ideal future state as a logical unfolding of what was already contained in the present; as Oakeshott put it in 1925, ‘the ideal not only must grow out of the real, but in the fullest sense is contained in the real’.77 After 1945, if not earlier, he abandoned the notion that political change represented any kind of logical unfolding. Famously, he came to see politics as simply a matter of keeping afloat, and the current direction of the ship of state as an historically contingent matter, even if one could chart its previous course and make some informed guesses about where its current one might lead. The idea that the development of the State was a necessary process was one that Oakeshott increasingly came to identify with speculative philosophy of history. All-embracing visions of the historical process which revealed the future on the basis of the past came to strike him as examples of practical political theorising rather than either authentically philosophical or historical in nature; they were not necessarily without worth or insight, but were not to be taken at face value. They reflected a practical understanding of the past in which it was understood in relation to present needs. Furthermore, in his later work Oakeshott adopted a position much closer to what the 1925 ms had called the ‘anthropological’ view of the state. On that view, the role of the state was simply to apply restraint: ‘nothing is more useful for the preservation of “fair play” than a referee with a strong authority’.78 The essential feature of civil association according to On Human Conduct was [77]
p. 83.
[78]
p. 59.
the rule of law, which relied on the existence of an authority that could reliably adjudicate indifferently on the inevitable conflicts between its members. For the later Oakeshott, any attempt by the state to determine what he had earlier called the ‘real needs and desires’ of its members signalled the abandonment of the civil model in favour of ‘enterprise association’, a form of government devoted to imposing a single common purpose on its members. There were forms of ‘enterprise association’ that Oakeshott would have rejected even his youth. In the 1920s he no more regarded the pursuit of ‘luxury’ as a proper end of government than he did the pursuit of profit in the 1970s. But the Edwardian moral high-mindedness of his early work is conspicuously absent from the later writings. The idea that ‘true political life...comes into being with the will to rise...as a whole society’ and rests on ‘a common will to seek that which gives permanent and common satisfaction’ was one that he later explicitly rejected, not simply because of the difficulty of determining what in practice gives common satisfaction, but because it was not the business of government to determine its citizens’ satisfactions for them at all.79 It is true that the ‘common satisfaction’ of which Oakeshott wrote in the 1920s did not exist entirely in an institutional setting; social solidarity as he conceived it was a largely informal affair, a matter of friendship, moral sensibility, religion, and culture rather than government, law, and property. Nevertheless, there was an ambiguity in this manner of thinking that he initially failed to recognize, and his early theory of the State lacked the homeostatic resources of civil association. It contained no means of self-criticism that might help to prevent its own perversion or corruption into one form or another of oppressive instrumentalism. In 1925 Oakeshott thought of himself as making ‘an effort to envisage the principle of the possibility of government and its [79]
p. 60.
organ, law’, in particular.80 The Kantian notion of philosophy as a search for the conditions of possible experience continued to inform his later work. On Human Conduct still held that philosophy was characterised by the examination of assumptions made by other forms of thinking. But he gradually gave up the notions that philosophy understood phenomena in relation to the logical whole of the universe and that philosophical judgment could give ‘a final and real meaning to things by the discovery of their final and real content and value’.81 The notion of a final and real meaning ceased to make any sense: On Human Conduct begins with the declaration that ‘understanding is not such that we either enjoy it or lack it altogether’. Oakeshott always believed that association in a state was a ‘moral’ relationship of some kind. The relationship between citizens in On Human Conduct is still described as a particular type of moral relationship, formally defined by means of law. But in 1925 the moral relationship between associates in a state simply as such was not restricted expressly to a legal form. Rather, the State is spoken of simply as ‘a self-governing community whose purpose embraces a way of life’.82 It presents the State, like all societies, as resting on ‘a solidarity of feeling, opinion, and belief ’. Oakeshott’s later work, in contrast, viewed civil association as requiring no agreement beyond a common acknowledgment of the authoritative and obligatory status of its laws. Solidarity of feeling (something he came to regard as characteristic of certain forms of enterprise association, such as religious communities) might be desirable and even necessary for some groups, but making it a requirement for membership of a state could be divisive and at worst destructive. In 1925 he paraphrased with approval Spinoza’s remark in the Ethics that ‘all reasonable men [80]
p. 128
[81]
p. 66.
[82]
p. 71.
agree’;83 but further reflection convinced him that this was not in fact the case. In On Human Conduct Oakeshott argued that a major difference between civil and enterprise association was that in civil association, the associates had made no choice to become members. Since they had never voluntarily asked to join, and could not easily leave, they could not be said to be ‘free’ in respect of having chosen to join the association. The ‘freedom’ of the citizen must consist instead of being obliged to observe rules which did not prescribe or prohibit any particular action, but only laid down conditions for the performance of whatever actions were chosen. In contrast, an enterprise association devoted to the pursuit of a particular purpose did require its members to perform particular actions, be these ritual observances or emergency drills. Freedom in such an association rested on the fact that one had chosen to be a member and could leave again if one so desired; but membership required giving up one’s own discretion and accepting that one’s actions were to be guided by the aims of the group. In the 1925 ms, the difference between societies of which we are members because of ‘a conscious act of joining’ and ‘societies which we join without being previously consulted as to our willingness to take up membership’ is acknowledged, but the implications for freedom of the different terms of membership are not spelt out.84 One useful way of understanding Oakeshott’s subsequent political thought is thus to see it as disambiguating and deflating his early claim that ‘The state is the social whole’. The metaphysics of the rational will was abandoned, and with it the idea of the universe as a perfect self. But amongst the important survivals were an emphasis on the active role of subjectivity and on relationships and contexts, notions which could be extracted from Idealism [83]
p. 113.
[84]
p. 72.
and transferred to a more modest and sceptical approach without entailing a commitment to any larger metaphysical scheme. Another key difference is that Oakeshott was initially convinced that ‘society’ as he conceived it was not a term for a universal association, and did not rely on any general conception of human nature. He followed Bosanquet in rejecting the view that humanity could form a single ethical community.85 Thus, Hobhouse’s claim in Elements of Social Justice that the ultimate ethical community was constituted by humanity as a whole was ‘nonsense’.86 Insofar as the idea of humanity was more than an allusion to a ‘vague racial whole’, it needed to be understood as mediated by the existence of specific historical communities. I can only come to know ‘humanity’ through membership of my own society. Oakeshott never warmed to the idea of any form of international society that could incorporate a genuine world government. He consistently eschewed moral universalism, and always looked askance at natural law. However, his later philosophy of civil association has proved adaptable to the sphere of international relations in a way that his earlier philosophy of the State was not.87 It is may be that the idea of a common good for humanity as a whole is incoherent; the idea makes sense, if at all, within the confines of a particular political community. Civil association, however, does not predicate the existence of a common good for its members. It is therefore possible to conceive of international ‘society’ as made up of civil associations which pursue their relations with one another in terms of the rule of law as distinct from their individual interests. It is notable that Oakeshott’s later theory of civil association avoided the stark distinction between state and society visible in his early work. On the one hand, civil association was entirely [85] Bosanquet, Theory of the State, p. 329. [86]
p. 111.
[87] See T. Nardin, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983).
compatible with its citizens being related to one another in a limitless number of other ways. On the other hand, it was essential to civil association that the relationship between citizens as such was non-instrumental in character. In 1925 he tended to identify state membership with the shared pursuit of common goals, something that he later realised the Aristotelian notion of the relationship between citizens as one of philia or ‘friendship’ did not automatically entail.88 Oakeshott’s earlier and later works thus display different understandings of the relations between members of the state as such. Civil association shares the pervasive quality of the State, in that it is a relationship from which no adult member of that association is exempt. But the pervasiveness does not create any shared sense of purpose beyond a minimal commitment to keeping the association going, and even that may lapse in certain circumstances. The civil relationship is also continuous with relations in the State in that there is no absolute distinction between public and private in either case. ‘There is no such thing as an “individual” action which is not at the same time an action of the State’, Oakeshott wrote in 1925.89 In 1975 he made a similar point about the conditional nature of the distinction between the public and the private by saying that there are no actions which may not in certain circumstances acquire a legal or political significance, though he would not have attributed to them the status of actions by a social whole like the State. The later Oakeshott would also have found unsatisfactory the suggestion that in any community there are two aspects to government, ‘the sphere of action which comes within the special province of command’, and another which is ‘voluntary, or subject only to permissive legislation’. The former is ‘the region
[88]
p. 118.
[89]
p. 119.
of force’, which in philosophical terms constituted the will of the government to bring about the good of the State.90 For many liberal and utilitarian thinkers the notion of a limit imposed by government, for example in the form of a law, has been treated as an external restraint on freedom, justifiable only insofar as it produced beneficial consequences for society as a whole. However, there is an alternative way of thinking about freedom, exemplified in Hobbes, in which there is no freedom (or at least no freedom worth having) without government. At the same time, government, in order to provide freedom, must respect the limitations imposed by the nature of its own activity. ‘By sheer physical coercion [government] could regulate many social activities hitherto left in the hands of other kinds of State action, but in so doing would defeat its own ends.’91 This point that ‘It is beyond the right of government to legislate’ on matters on which legislation cannot be effective (‘because it is beyond its might’) prompted a closer reflection on the nature of law. A law that simply commanded ‘be moral’ would, Oakeshott argued, ‘be one contradicting the very principles of legislation’. But this does not mean that ‘the will of the law is not as universal as the will of morality’. Government shared the larger wish that ‘the moral standard roughly accepted by our society’ be upheld, for example by providing better public housing and thus reducing the sexual immorality Edwardian reformers believed to be consequent upon overcrowded living conditions.92 It is instructive, therefore, to compare Oakeshott’s early suggestion that the legislative command of government in this case would take the form ‘be sufficiently housed’ with the notion of law in a civil association as he later came to understand it. The early Oakeshott rejected the idea of law as ‘a command issuing from some power outside ourselves’. Instead, he favoured the [90]
p. 120.
[91]
p. 122.
[92]
p. 123.
pluralist view of law developed by a ‘general movement’ involving ‘Durkheim and Duguit in France...Roscoe Pound in America, and Mr Laski in England’. This movement viewed law as ‘not so much a command, but a means of organization, the aim of which is not to compel men, but to serve public need’. Law could however be thought of as a command if it entailed the idea of ‘a voice which tells us what we really desire’, thus also reconciling it with the view of law contained in the Idealist metaphysics of the rational will.93 For the later Oakeshott, law was better thought of as analogous to a rule in a game than either as an order or a functional device. A genuine law imposed what he called ‘adverbial conditions’ on action. Consider, for example, the traffic regulation that everyone must drive on the left-hand side of the road. ‘Drive on the left’ might seem like a straightforward injunction, but this was misleading; it stated only that if one were to drive, one must do so in this fashion. It did not require anyone to drive anywhere in particular, or even to own a car. But it is difficult to see how ‘Be sufficiently housed’ can be construed in this way. To render it as an adverbial condition it would have to be taken to mean that one should do whatever one does ‘housedly’. This command would arguably fail to conform to the civil notion of law in at least two ways. First, it imposes a substantive form of life—living in a house—which is inconsistent with civil association insofar as it leaves no room for an itinerant lifestyle. Obliging people to reside in houses goes beyond imposing conditions on self-chosen activities by proscribing a certain condition of life, in contrast to driving while remaining on the left. Second, while the later Oakeshott would not necessarily have disapproved of public housing, the concept of a law as an ‘adverbial condition’ did not encompass the distribution of material benefits. A civil association might engage in welfare provision, but this was a different task to law-making. The use of law as a tool of policy was something he came to associate exclusively with enterprise association. [93]
pp. 125–6.
Nevertheless, Oakeshott’s fundamental understanding of the aim of government arguably remained unchanged; the provision of a framework within which civilised life and thought could flourish. Put this way, one can understand why he initially thought of law as a means to an end.94 What changed was his view of the nature of the end involved; civil association, he came to think, had no end beyond its own maintenance. It was certainly not concerned with the pursuit of moral and cultural improvement, unlike the State of the 1925 ms. Thus, while his ultimate aim was arguably always to defend a theory of government as an inherently self-limiting concept, both the grandiose metaphysical vocabulary and the particular ethical commitments contained in his early work, were, he gradually realised, unsuitable and unnecessary for its achievement.
[94]
pp. 127–8.
V: A Note on the Texts The 1925 ms at LSE 1/1/3 is a fragile typescript with some autograph corrections and emendations; it may well be a final draft rather than the version that was actually submitted as part of Oakeshott’s Fellowship application. It is, however, a complete text, and despite the poor condition of some of its pages, is easily decipherable. The same is true of the two autograph versions of the lectures at LSE 1/1/7. Both versions are complete texts, and since Oakeshott, particularly at this early stage of his life, wrote a very legible hand, there are no gaps or omissions in the versions presented here. In Set A there initially seemed to be a gap in the ms of lecture 4, as the section numbers jump from 6 to 11 in the original, but in fact this is not the case. Following p. 3, half a page of text numbered ‘4’ has been inserted, and the numbering of p. 5 onwards is the result of a repagination. The original page numbers have been crossed out, resulting in a continuous page numbering from 1 to 16. It therefore appears this is actually a complete but revised version of the lecture, and that Oakeshott had renumbered the pages but omitted to renumber the sections following section 6. Whatever Oakeshott’s merits as a thinker, he was not a particularly scrupulous scholar. Although he took more trouble to provide references in the 1925 ms than he ever would again, his citations are frequently vague and omit all sorts of relevant information including page references. While the Selected Writings makes no claim to be a fully critical edition, the material presented here did seem to require more active editorial intervention than in previous volumes. ‘Nettleship says somewhere’ and ‘from a Glasgow pamphlet (1921)’ are two particularly egregious examples of an almost wilful airiness in quotation that the editor failed to rectify, but in general, references have hopefully been brought up to standard more acceptable to a modern reader.
Where the provision of supplementary bibliographical detail simply involved noting details such as the name of the publisher or a page number, it has not been marked; but outright editorial insertions are indicated by the use of square brackets, [thus]. Quotations have been checked for accuracy and traced where possible. Additional material has also been added, silently when Oakeshott clearly intended to include it in the main text but had omitted to transcribe the passage in question, and as indicated in the notes whenever it seemed helpful to have some indication of the contents of the texts referred to. LSE 1/1/3 was more fully annotated than LSE 1/1/7, but marginalia in the lectures have sometimes been presented as footnotes in order to indicate Oakeshott’s sources or preserve some additional comments. Noteworthy deletions or alternatives have also been retained as footnotes. Where the lectures re-use quotations from the earlier ms, as they sometimes do, this has also been noted.
Part 1: A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy Introduction On every subject, my friend, there is but one mode of beginning for those who would deliberate well. They must know what the thing is on which they are deliberating, or else of necessity go altogether astray. Most men however are blind to the fact that they are ignorant of the essential character of each individual thing. Fancying therefore that they possess this knowledge, they come to no mutual understanding at the outset of their enquiry, and in the sequel they exhibit the natural consequence, an inconsistency with themselves and each other. Plato, Phaedrus, 237b–c95 In the following essay, better described as a collection of notes, perhaps, even, with Bacon, as ‘brief notes set down curiously rather than significantly,’96 I shall attempt, as the title imports, to review some only of the preliminary questions which must occupy the mind of any who sets himself to a study of political philosophy. An introduction to the study it is not, except in the sense of being an attempt to see clearly what must be done if we are to have a coherent philosophy of political life. Perhaps it is [95] [Plato, The Phaedrus, Lysis, and Protagoras of Plato. A New and Literal Translation, Mainly from the Text of Bekker, tr. J. Wright (London: John W. Parker, 1848), pp. 18–19.] [96] [F. Bacon, dedication intended for the 1612 Essays but not published, The Essays, ed. J. Pitcher (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 239.]
most fitly represented as merely an effort to put into focus the telescope of the mind preparatory to a survey of the whole field of study. Thus, though the process must be described in terms of the features of the landscape, it does not pretend to an exhaustive examination of them. It is admitted on all sides that so large a subject requires some preliminary study before it is embarked upon as a whole, but the nature of that preface is often mistaken. It is thought that special study of some small department is the best training for one who is ambitious someday to embrace the whole. But this arises from a confusion of mind. In an historical subject, to study it in parts, venturing first upon those which are less subtle until at last the whole is circumvented,97 is an obvious recourse, though one not without grave disadvantages. But in the case of a philosophical study—the exact nature of which we will discuss later on—it has but the slenderest justification. The exigent preliminary study is not a minute inquisition of some special department, but the most exacting exploration of those elementary considerations which underlie all thought on the subject. For whoever begins to think about the nature of things, what had seemed to him separate entities come so to join and connect themselves in his mind that, though they must be examined apart for the sake of clearness, to study them thus is seen to be studying lifeless abstractions. The whole of any one thing cannot be seen apart from those things with which it is indisseverably united, indeed, not until we see the whole of everything. Thus, if we look at the matter fairly, an historical enquiry offers neither the prerequisite training of mind, nor the necessary groundwork of study. And if we can avoid silly vagueness,98 we shall do well to follow the Grammarian, and [97] [Oakeshott is using ‘circumvent’ in its primary sense of ‘encompass’, see OED.] [98] G.W.F. Hegel, ‘Introduction’ to The Philosophy of Right, §3, tr. S.W. Dyde (London: George Bell and Sons, 1896), p. 10: ‘Silliness is a defect of logic.’ [All subsequent references to The Philosophy of Right are to Dyde’s translation.]
Image the whole, then execute the parts— Fancy the fabric Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz Ere mortar dab brick!99 These notes might suitably have been cast in the form of an appreciation and criticism of contemporary political speculation, or of remarks on the history of political philosophy, but I shall endeavour to limit strictly any critical or historical remarks (reserving them perhaps for another occasion), and apply myself here to a more purely theoretical discussion of preliminary considerations. They are inevitably incomplete, and possess an interest largely personal. Before he can come to think lucidly on any subject a man must make clear to himself not only the exact nature of the subject of study, but also the precise mental attitude in which he is to approach it. And this is what I here attempt. But because the questions here argued are altogether preliminary it is not to be inferred that on that account they lack a very real importance. The decisive battles of philosophy are often fought on this preliminary ground, and, as I shall have occasion to remark later on, the most important problems of political philosophy are solved or mis-solved while the mind is still occupied with metaphysics before ever it reaches politics properly so called. Nothing will be found here which is not known well enough; but the mischief is, that it seems to desert our political philosophers just when they stand in greatest need of it: and unless we are quite clear in our minds on all these questions before we start we shall never be free from the dangers of vagueness and misdirection which an inductive and empirical study seems to gather round itself. My attempt is rather to point out the problems which must receive our consideration, than to essay any final solution of them. [99] [R. Browning, ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’, in Poetical Works, ed. S. Hawlin and T.A.J. Burnett, 9 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983– 2004), v. 454–62, at 459.]
Time and again in the history of intellectual development a study has been brought to a standstill—or even worse—by a failure to ask the right questions. The difference between astrology and astronomy is not a difference in subject-matter, but in the questions asked about it. We shall not get the right answers till we ask the right questions; and yet how easily are we contented with wild interrogatives which, eliciting knowledge of a certain sort, are immediately taken as the only possible ones to be addressed to a certain class of subject-matter. The raw material of political philosophy may roughly be delineated as the fundamental social experiences. To study them from the point of view of their meaning, and above all to study their relations with one another, to interrogate them, if possible to discover their coherence, and then, ‘when the principle comes’, to construct a theory, is the task of political philosophy. The first of the preliminary questions with which we have set ourselves to deal concerns terminology. But that does not mean that the points under discussion are ‘merely verbal’: indeed, we should be more scrupulous how we bandy the phrase. There is, of course, a true derogatory meaning to it, yet the fact remains that ‘in morals, politics, and philosophy no useful discussion can be entered upon, unless we begin by explaining and understanding the terms we employ.’100 The apparently simple, yet in fact bewilderingly complex, question is that which we must ask and answer—What are words? Words are in intention no more than a means of expression; one means among many of expressing thought. The real thing behind a word is the experience which it tries to express, and this must not be confused with the experience which originally brought it into being.101 But unfortunately they possess another property, [100] S.T. Coleridge, Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare & Some Other Old Poets & Dramatists (London: J.M. Dent & Co., nd [1914]), p. 397. [101] Perhaps a single concrete instance will enlighten the subject. ‘Anachronism was used in the eighteenth century for an error in
For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.102 Perhaps part of this obscurity is inevitable, but that which is most dangerous arises from the pernicious habit of thinking in terms of mere words and technical phrases; this always and everywhere leads to the most unparalleled confusion. Words express actual, concrete experience. How do they express it? Shortly, they express it in what we call their meaning. To every word there are two parts; on rare occasions and in certain specialized instances these are indistinguishable, commonly they must be examined per se if we are to arrive at their significance. These parts are its etymological form and its actual meaning: the etymological form may often be taken to represent the original or primitive meaning. With regard to the development of words, which makes their study so complex, there are few absolute canons. A word may change its form without changing its meaning (though this is rare), or it may change its meaning without any corresponding change in form (this is extremely common), or both form and meaning may undergo change at the same time. A change of meaning, we should remark, implies an added experience. Behind one etymological form may reside a gradual development of meaning and experience, that is, several different meanings culminating in what we call its present meaning. There is one other occasion in which meaning may change without a change in form, when a word is adopted for some specialized and technical purpose. For example, though many of our ordinary computing time; its modern meaning, first found in Coleridge, is very significant, and conveying as it does the idea of a thing which is appropriate to one age, but out of harmony with another, it expresses a thought, a way of feeling which is very modern, and which would not have needed expression at an earlier period.’ L.P. Smith, The English Language (London: Williams & Norgate, 1912), pp. 228–9. [102] [Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’, V, in Poems, ed. C. Ricks (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 853–98, at 868.]
words come originally from the vocabulary of law, words in common use with some wide and general reference are often adopted as legal terms and their meaning, for the purposes of law, restricted and specialized. Another point to note is that two or more quite distinct etymological forms may express the same meaning.103 The problems of translation often illuminate the real nature of words and their meaning, and a pertinent example of the point under discussion appears in the English equivalent of the Greek . Writers are often taken to task for translating the word as ‘state’; it means, it is said, not ‘state’, but ‘city’. But though the words may be wholly different in form, it is possible that the Greek conception of city may be rendered most accurately by the English word ‘state’. ‘City’, by its English associations, in spite of its formal affinity to , may be a most misleading and inadequate translation.104 [103] A passage from A. Clutton-Brock, Studies in Christianity (London: Constable And Company Limited, 1918), p. 97, affords an excellent footnote to this topic. ‘In matters of religion now we are bewildered by a divorce between the names of things and the things themselves. Often those for whom religious facts are real enough do not call them by their religious names, or by any name at all; while those who use the religious names know nothing of the facts.’ [104] Cf. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, Bk 1 ch. vi, note, tr. G.D.H. Cole (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1923), p. 13. [‘The real meaning of this word has been almost wholly lost in modern times; most people mistake a town for a city, and a townsman for a citizen. They do not know that houses make a town, but citizens a city. The same mistake long ago cost the Carthaginians dear. I have never read of the title of citizens being given to the subjects of any prince, not even the ancient Macedonians or the English of to-day, though they are nearer liberty than anyone else. The French alone everywhere familiarly adopt the name of citizens, because, as can be seen from their dictionaries, they have no idea of its meaning; otherwise they would be guilty in usurping it, of the crime of lèse-majesté: among them, the name expresses a virtue, and not a right. When Bodin spoke of our citizens and townsmen, he fell into a bad blunder in taking the one class for the other. M. D’Alembert has avoided
The question forced upon us is, What is meaning? Experience has accustomed us to a variety of meanings to every word— not only in the past and gradually developing, but also in the present—and none of these meanings are superfluous, for each expresses a definite event in thought—either a more or a less intense experience, or the application of an idea to a variety of circumstances. An instance of the first is found in the word ‘happiness’. Each man has his own meaning, but that some meanings are truer than others few have any doubt, the question is, Which? Of the second, the meanings of the word ‘real’ afford an example. We need but take two. When a lawyer uses the word in the phrase ‘real property’ its meaning has little in common with that which philosophy gives to it.105 It is a conception applied, or partially applied, to more than one set of circumstances, and with each the error, and, in his article on Geneva, has clearly distinguished the four orders of men (or even five, counting mere foreigners) who dwell in our town, of which two only compose the Republic. No other French writer, to my knowledge, has understood the real meaning of the word citizen.’] Some of the many difficulties of the real meaning of are discussed in W.L. Newman, The Politics of Aristotle With an Introduction, Two Prefatory Essays and Notes Critical and Explanatory, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887–1902), i. 36–44. It is clear that to translate it ‘city’, in the present meaning of the word, is not short of absurd. ‘A sundered and scattered citizen-body, like that of Rome, would not be to Aristotle a citizen-body at all.’ (p. 38). ‘Aristotle assumes, in the very first sentence of the Politics, that the State is a .’ (p. 41). All this goes to show that we cannot remind ourselves too frequently of the first rule of Moritz Haupt for interpreting the classics,—‘Man soll nicht übersetzen.’ [‘Do not translate’: see the essay on ‘Moritz Haupt’ in R.L. Nettleship, Lectures and Essays on Subjects Connected with Latin Literature and Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), pp. 1–22, at 19.] [105] Harold Monro’s poem ‘Real Property’ is an interesting commentary on this point. [H. Monro, Collected Poems, ed. A. Monro (London: Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 1970 [1933]), pp. 82–3. The poem begins: ‘Tell me about that harvest field. / Oh! Fifty acres of living bread.
application bearing a different meaning. In some words, those, for instance, expressing states of experience, we may distinguish, as well as a variety of different meanings, a kind of average meaning for which it stands in ordinary life and which a man might be expected to imply in ordinary conversation. And since this is an average meaning it represents an average experience, or rather an average intensity and fullness of experience. Faced with these facts, our task is to enquire whether there be such a thing as a best and truest meaning which should take priority over these many and variant meanings, and if so, how we are to come at it. It would seem that the best meaning is that which embodies the fullest measure of the experience at which all these lesser meanings— even the technical ones—hint; but it is a matter which we must leave to discussion later on. When we start to think about this subject, political philosophy, we find that, in its terminology, the past moulds our thought and guides it until we begin to lose our power of initiation. The appalling force of habit is exhibited to us, and our own mental impotence. And yet to cut ourselves off from the terminology of the past were to impoverish our thought still more effectually. We should endeavour rather to recover the actual meanings which lie behind words, to grasp the conceptions themselves, and so, through names, enter into the experience of the past. If we do this, and are successful, we shall be building our philosophy on an experience far greater than can claim origination from ourselves, but at the same time on an experience which we may call our own in the fullest sense, for we have thought it. To take the old terminology—‘state’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘government’, and the rest— and to use it without any further attempt to come at its meaning, were nonsensical; but each term, having behind it an event in thought, often a series of events, is the crystallized expression of an experience which we can make our own, and add to, by a critical enquiry into meaning. It is the aim of history to cut away / The colour has painted itself in my heart. / The form is patterned in my head.’]
the mere forms of thought until, no matter what change in words is necessary in the explanation, we come to understand exactly what were the experiences of the past. It is the aim of philosophy to test and interrogate these experiences, discover their coherence and logical justification, or to show how they must be changed to make them coherent. The questions which a preliminary study of political philosophy must ask and answer are such as these: What is Political Philosophy? What is Society? What is [M]orality?106 What is the State? What is a Community? What is a Self? What is Sociability? What is Government? What is Law? There are many questions which we may ask about each of these topics, but the first and the last question which philosophy asks is, What is it? But before we can rightly ask this simplest of questions we must make clear to ourselves its exact implication. In short, until we have discussed and come to some conclusion upon the true principles of definition we are powerless to proceed with our interrogation. And this, as is clear enough, is a question of the theory of knowledge or, as some prefer, logic. Nothing emerges with more certainty from the history of human thought, even if it were not easily deducible from the nature of things themselves, than the absolute dependence of speculation on ultimate problems upon a theory of knowledge. To put the point in its most abstract form, the theory of theorizing (i.e., the seeing clearly of how to see clearly) must be the first study of any ambitious of coming at a true theory. Ethics, the so-called philosophy of religion, politics, aesthetic, all departments of speculation, depend upon a theory of knowledge. Ultimately all antagonistic theories will be found to diverge on questions of logic. [106] [Oakeshott has ‘morality’.]
There are some who, with a certain air of superiority which may best be described as the ‘pride of induction’, are at pains to point out that they, unlike others, are not guilty of the crime of putting forward a series of definitions at the commencement of a study.107 Definitions come last, they say. But having enunciated this truth they enter straightway upon a study of the subject itself and from this evolve their ‘definitions’. They have however omitted to ask themselves one important question—What is the necessary preliminary study to definition? Every study has its appropriate propaedeutic, and to mistake this is to stumble on the threshold stone, to make a wrong choice in the very thing which is to determine the course of study to the end. The preface to definition is a study of the principles of right definition, not (as some would have it) a collection of statistics. It is a question of logic, not of historical induction. This, then, we must take as our point of departure. And bear in mind that our one object is simply to delineate more clearly the real subject-matter of political philosophy.
[107] Plato, Phaedrus, 263d: ‘Alas for Lysias, son of Cephalus’ [tr. J. Wright, op. cit., p. 65].
Definition Systematic thought must have a starting place, and if we understand exactly what it implies, it can have none better than a good definition. The repugnance to definition which is exhibited in many quarters arises from a mistaken notion of what it is, as well as from a right instinct with regard to its extreme difficulty. I shall here confine myself to a few positive statements concerning the principles of right definition; but later, in examining some of the definitions of particular elements of political philosophy, I shall supplement this with a short critical analysis of some of the wrong definitions to be found in the literature of the subject, and the reasons for their inadequacy.108 In the first place we must understand (as our study of words should teach us) that definition is primarily a matter of thought and not of language.109 To define a thing is to see it clearly, to see it as distinct from other things and at the same time to see its exact relationship with other things: for a thing is its relations and activities. It is not less than to ‘see it steady and to see it whole’. Words never perfectly correspond to ‘real things’, and, as I have remarked before, the only way in which we can save ourselves from being deluded by them is by constantly referring them to actuality and reminding ourselves of the frequent difference between the nature of things and its complete expressibility in [108] See note D to Ch. 4 [below, pp. 86–96]. [109] This is seldom, I think, born in mind with sufficient clearness. A failure to do so comes from a lack of definiteness in our view of the nature of words. Like money, they are mere symbols; and to think of definition as primarily a matter of words is to commit the same mistake as to calculate the National Income entirely in terms of money, without any true conception of the real thing behind the symbol. See Goblet D’Alviella, ‘Preface’ to The Migration of Symbols (Westminster: Archibald Constable And Co., 1894), p. 1: ‘A symbol might be defined as a representation which does not aim at being a reproduction.’
language. Definition, then, in the sense first of thought and then of language, is a matter both of great practical advantage and of extreme difficulty. It is an advantage for thought to embark upon a definition because this at once centres the mind upon a particular thing, and what is more, upon the essential nature of a particular thing, and prevents it being led away into vague and useless speculation. It is difficult, because to see the whole of any one thing, to understand it and all its relations and implications, is at once to have achieved a theory of the universe. As Spinoza says, nihil nos de natura posse intelligere, quin simul cognitionem primae causae sive Dei ampliorem reddamus.110 And again, omnis nostra cognitio et certitudo, quae revera omne dubium tollit, a sola Dei cognitione dependet.111 To define a thing, then, is to experience it with the greatest possible degree of definiteness, and to understand all that it means and all that its existence implies; in fact, to be fully conscious of it. But whether it be a finite thing, such as a flower, or an experience, such as dancing, the more we think about it and the more we understand it, we come to look upon it as a part or a mode (that is, a modification) of something larger and more generic. In seeking significance the mind always advances from the part to the whole, from the merely actual to the real. Sometimes this process of looking at a thing definitely is forced upon us in practical life, but a more common experience is to use, and perhaps enjoy, a thing or an activity without the smallest desire to discover what it really is. Thus, we can enjoy a flower, we can plant it in a garden or give it to a friend, without asking [110] Spinoza, De intellectus emendatione, § 92, n. [‘On the Improvement of the Understanding’, in The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, tr. R.H.M. Elwes, 2 vols (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891), ii. 34 n. 2: ‘We cannot understand anything of nature without at the same time increasing our knowledge of the first cause, or God.’] [111] Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, Ch. IV [A TheologicoPolitical Treatise, in Works, i. 59: ‘All our knowledge, and the certainty which removes every doubt, depend solely on the knowledge of God.’]
ourselves any of these questions. And as for dancing, few among its devotees find it necessary to interrogate their experience in this manner. Nevertheless it would be admitted generally that until we have perceived the thing definitely we cannot be said to know very much about it. This process of advancing from the part to the whole, from the modification to the thing itself, is none other than the process known as classification. So our original question, How are we to select the best meaning among the variety of meanings presented to us? comes to be, in terms of things rather than words, Is there a best classification, and how are we to select it from the many to which experience introduces us? With the answer to this stands or falls the possibility of definition. A definition, then, is a classification. ‘Definition “per genus et differentiam” assigns to a thing its position in a genus relative to other things which are also modifications of the generic nature; and to do this is to classify the thing.’112 It is true that this is not the most ordinary meaning of definition. In vulgar parlance it often means merely an arbitrary fixing of the meaning of a word for some particular use; but if we again refer ourselves from words to real things—that is, to experiences—we shall see how small is the justification for taking the ordinary meaning to be the true meaning. For ‘ordinary meaning’ implies ‘ordinary experience’, which rarely necessitates theoretical accuracy. Our ordinary experience is largely made up of the use of words and things for practical purposes of our own, and this is a process which inevitably restricts and specializes the meaning and reference of both. We have discovered that to see a thing definitely implies a true classification. But nothing is clearer than that, for various purposes, there are all sorts of classifications, and each in so far as it is efficient, is valuable. Can one sort of classification be said [112] R.L. Nettleship, ‘Classification and Definition of Concepts’, in Philosophical Lectures and Remains, ed. A.C. Bradley and G.R. Benson, 2 vols (London: Macmillan & Co., 1897), i. 212–16, at 215.
to be truer than another and if so, which? An ordinary dictionary classifies words according to their initial letter in the arbitrary order known as alphabetical. This is convenient for purposes of reference, it is efficient and therefore, for its purpose, wholly justifiable. But it would be nonsensical to contend that this means of classification, of itself, tells us anything valuable about the words themselves. It tells us something significant for practical purposes, but it does nothing towards unveiling the secret of the origin or meaning or development of language. But if we open Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, we find a quite other system of classification, in fact one so elaborate that it gives us no guidance at all until we have mastered the synopsis of categories into which he classifies his words. However, having mastered his plan, we cannot deny that the system of classification itself tells us something about the meaning and habits of words. And it would not be difficult to find other etymological dictionaries which achieve this even more effectually. And each carries its justification with its efficiency. How, then, are we to say that any one classification is better than another? We have seen that a certain number of systems of classification are of such a nature that they may not improperly be called ‘classifications for special purposes’. But a nearer view will make it appear not a little difficult to understand how these can be called classifications at all. A classification, like any finite thing, may be used for a variety of purposes, and use for certain purposes cannot be distinguished from abuse. For example, a cricket bat may be used for knocking in the wickets, but its purpose is for hitting the ball; so, a classification may be used for purposes of ease of reference, but such use is indistinguishable from abuse. Special purposes, then, cannot be said to enter into the question; the best classification is that which tells us most about the thing or experience. Thus, it would readily be admitted that a classification of words according to their roots would be better than one according to their initial letters. Or a classification of pictures by their date or painter, better than one according to their weight.
Although, we may again insist, that for its own particular purposes a transport office would do well to adhere to the last rather than to the first. On what grounds have we called one classification better than another? What do we mean when we say that the best classification is that which tells us most about a thing? In what sense can we be said to know more about a picture by an acquaintance with its author or date rather than with its weight? The distinction we have made, and which it is the business of philosophy to recognize as being ordinarily made and at the same time to press to its logical conclusion and test its coherence, is between the essential qualities, purposes, and conditions of a thing, and those qualities, purposes, and conditions that are merely contingent. Contingent qualities and purposes are not those which are found in this particular thing and not in that, but those which, though they were common to every finite thing in existence, might still be considered not essential to their being, that is, not intimately descriptive of their real and characteristic nature. All cricket bats will knock in wickets, all chisels will serve as efficient screwdrivers, but these are merely contingent uses or purposes. In the matter of qualities, contingent means ‘relatively unimportant’—as, for example, the price paid for an entrance ticket when compared with the actual witnessing of a play of Shakespeare. Circumstances may bring half-a-crown and ‘King Lear’ into a relation of some sort, but there can be no kind of value-comparison between them; and the fact that a sum of money is invariably brought into relation with a play of Shakespeare every time we see one does not make the importance any the less minute. When Plutarch said that a state might more easily subsist without a geographical site than without belief in the gods, he was not being clever or sentimental, he was telling us about the essential nature of a state as compared with its merely contingent qualities, and telling us something that is true.113 [113] [Cp. W.R. Inge, Outspoken Essays, 2nd ser. (London: Longmans, Green And Co., 1922), p. 78: ‘When Plutarch says that a city might
It is the radical vice of most modern political philosophy (so far as it exists) that it supposes that the ‘constitutive elements of a State consist of a people, a territory and autonomy’,114 thus fixing the mind upon what may be common to all states, but what does not give us even the vaguest insight into their real and essential nature. Contingency and essentiality, then, are nothing other than judgments of worth and importance. And all this goes to show the difficulty of a true classification, and consequently of a true definition. Definitio ut dicatur perfecta, debet intimam essentiam rei explicare, et cave, ne eius loco propria quaedam usurpemus.115 And a definition may be said to approximate to perfection the more it tells us about the essential nature of a thing, and the more clearly it distinguishes its value and reality. Again, to see a thing definitely is to see it as part of a whole, or as a mode of a more comprehensive existence; to see a thing completely is to set it in relation with the universe.116 sooner subsist without a geographical site than without belief in the gods, his words would not have appeared strange to his countrymen at any time.’] [114] D. Lioy, The Philosophy of Right with Special Reference to the Principles and Development of Law, tr. W. Hastie, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., Ltd, 1891), ii. 211. There are, of course, a thousand examples in more modern writers expressing a similar belief. [115] Spinoza, De intellectus emendatione, § 95 [Works, ii. 35: ‘A definition, if it is to be called perfect, must explain the inmost essence of a thing, and must take care not to substitute for this any of its properties.’] [116] H.H. Joachim, The Nature of Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), pp. 166–7: ‘A theory of knowledge must rule out as irrelevant some—perhaps most, but certainly not all—of the temporal and finite conditions under which the truth is known. The known truth, as the subject of study in a theory of knowledge, is a concrete universal content, a simple meaning differentiated into many constituent meanings, and emerging in and for many different minds.’
Before we leave the subject it may be instructive to look at it from a slightly different angle. Let us ask ourselves, What must we say about a thing in order to define it? It will be admitted that the mere affirmation of existence is not a definition. To say ‘The State is the State’, or ‘a is a’, is to say nothing. Such an assertion may imply much; it may imply, for example, that we do not know what a is, or even that we hold it impossible for anyone to discover what it is; but the fact remains that we have said nothing about it.117 All definitions, then, all answers to the question, What is a? must be in the form of ‘a is b’. But we must go further than this, and ask ourselves what are the necessary characteristics of b? Following what we have said, b must contain a concept which will link a on to a whole more complete than itself. After all, this is the process through which our minds pass (almost instinctively in the more ordinary occurrences of life) when trying to understand anything. [117] It is appropriate that Shakespeare has put an effort to define a thing in the terms ‘a is a’ into the mouth of a pedant who is out of any sort of touch with reality, ‘the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed’. S.T. Coleridge, ‘Shakespeare, with Introductory Matter on Poetry, Drama, and the Stage’, in The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H.N. Coleridge, 4 vols (London: William Pickering, 1836–9), ii. 78. Polonius: Your noble son is mad: Mad I call it; for to define true madness, What is’t, but to be nothing else but mad? [Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II sc. ii] There is another important point which I have no space to discuss. Viz, the circumstances in which it is permissible to define a thing in the terms ‘a is a’ meaning that it is indefinable. Bishop Temple once said that we ‘must learn to refuse to define’, but it is a dangerous dictum. Once again: to define is to see a thing definitely. Some things, perhaps, cannot be seen definitely, they are necessarily surrounded with a certain vagueness; but what we must refuse to do is to transport that vagueness into a discussion of what are the things we can admit to be indefinable. The laws which govern the judgement, ‘this thing is indefinable’, are perfectly definite—otherwise the assertion were profitless.
It is the process, too, which scientists use in their department for the classification of the phenomena in which they deal. There is one piece of information which we must always seek when looking at a thing definitely. It has been variously named, but perhaps the words ‘purpose’ or ‘end’ describe it most accurately. To see a thing in relation to the whole is to recognize its individual part, its peculiar contribution, the exact nature of that particular modification of the whole. And this is in fact the key to the understanding of its nature. There is no need to quarrel about the possibility or impossibility of there being some one, conscious purpose informing the universe—that is not the question before us. Human things are those we best understand, that is, most completely link on to the whole to which they belong. And our attempts to define things more distant from us are correspondingly less adequate. For instance, it is progressively more difficult to define a house, a garden, and a piece of waste uncultivated land which has never been brought into any close relationship with human life and endeavour.118 It is comparatively easy to define the Navy League, or a Trade Union, but in other matters we are apt to place ourselves in the position of the man who defined sheep in terms of mutton, if we go at it too hastily. Plato was surely right when he said that it would be a long and godlike labour to explain what the human mind is. Yet the fact remains, things do imply purposes, whether or not they are easy to come at. A house serves a perfectly definite purpose, and one comparatively easy to define because it is so immediately connected with our life, though a full comprehension of its whole purpose would involve more thought than all of us are prepared to give. To define a house in terms other than those of purpose is clearly to define it inadequately. To answer the question, What is a house? in terms other than those of the end it serves is to have mistaken its propria for its intima essentia. Aristotle, ina passage already alluded to, says, ‘things are defined by their working and power, and we ought not to say that [118] Spinoza recognizes that finite things may be defined in terms which may not be used of infinite things.
they are the same thing when they are no longer the same, but only have the same name.’119 And this means exactly what I have been intending. That the essential nature of a thing is what reveals itself when we look at it definitely and not through a haze of words and phrases; that it is to be discovered only when we see the thing as a modification of a whole more generic than itself; and that it is to be described in terms of the end and purpose it serves. An objection, which has never seemed to me to be more than merely captious, to this argument is common enough to call for remark. It is said that to define a thing in terms of its end and purpose is to define it as it should be and not as it is. It is true that many houses have leaky roofs and faulty systems of drainage, but can it be seriously proposed that we incorporate these possibilities into our definition? A school may be described as a place where boys and girls receive education, and the fact that there are many bad schools where neither boys nor girls receive any education worth the name, does not call in question the accuracy of the description. The proper conclusion to draw is that such and such an institution usurps the name of ‘school’. We must define things in terms of their purpose, for this is the only constant expression of their whole and true nature, and the fact that many things are wrongly named or do not always show their whole nature on the surface to satisfy those who limit themselves to a casual glance must not confuse our minds.120 There is a second element which has been considered essential to a definite view of a thing. Descartes thought that a thing is seen clearly only when it is seen ‘coming into being’. The nature of things, he says, ‘est bien plus aisée à concevoir, lorsqu’on les voit
[119] Aristotle, Politics, Bk 1 ch. ii § 13 [tr. B. Jowett]. [120] Once, in a discussion, a man said to Whewell that he thought a certain statement was true. The Master of Trinity turned upon him and said, ‘Do you call that thinking? See Ch. 4, note B [below, p. 81].
naître peu à peu.’121 And the same idea is expressed by Spinoza when he says that a definite view of a finite thing (res creata) ‘must … comprehend the proximate cause’.122 And it is no easy matter to decide whether this is necessary to definition, and if so, exactly in what sense. But if we leave words and keep a firm hold on things, we shall see that in one sense this necessity of exhibiting the cause of a thing is none other than the necessity of exhibiting its purpose. And so, in that sense at least, it is already included in our first proposition, viz., that a definite view of a thing necessarily comprehends its purpose. In what sense is it necessary to know and understand the proximate cause of a house in order to see it definitely? A house is the expression of a conscious human need; the consciousness of this need is the crystallization of a long experience; to see a house ‘coming into being’ is to rehearse that experience in an individual mind. And this surely is in no way distinguishable from seeing more clearly the purpose of the house. In this sense the proximate cause must be shown in the definition; and this demonstrates how large an undertaking would be a definition of something the existence of which is in no apparent direct response to human need. But there is another sense in which this proposition is taken, and a sense which carries with it all manner of wrong-headedness and delusion. It is sometimes imagined that a true definition is contained in a description of the actual thing coming into being. That, for example, to see a house definitely it is necessary to see it in the process of construction and to understand the minutiae of that process. But it is an error than which few are more gross to suppose that a definition is contained in an historical account of the construction or growth of a thing. A schoolmaster may [121] [R. Descartes, Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la verité dans les sciences, ed. and tr. G. Heffernan (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 66: ‘their nature is much easier to conceive of when one sees them coming to be little by little’.] [122] Spinoza, De intellectus emendatione,§ 96 [Works, ii. 35].
be annoyed with his class because he has tooth-ache, or because he feels himself to be inefficient, but it would be a muddleheaded theorist who imported these historical, efficient causes of a particular occurrence into a definition of annoyance. To do so, in fact, were to reverse the process of definition, and to seek the meaning of the genus in the contingent peculiarities of the individual example. In one sense only, then, may we add cause to the complement of the term b in our proposition ‘a is b’. ‘To understand a thing is not to understand what it is made of, or what it looks like, but to understand its living operation; and if we are to understand this, we must, above all, know its end.’123 Before we leave this very desultory discussion of the principles of definition there is a further point upon which we must touch. We have examined the necessary nature of the terms a and b in our proposition ‘a is b’, but there yet remains the relating term—the word ‘is’. It is hardly too much to say that the misuse of this word (together with its plural) is the cause of most of the misunderstanding and delusion in this matter of definition. To indicate the occasions when its use is legitimate and those when it is not, will necessitate traversing again some of the ground already covered, but it will hardly be wasted effort, so great is the confusion in this matter in the literature (especially the contemporary literature) of political philosophy. Speaking generally we may distinguish three common usages of the word ‘is’, and two common misusages. 1. The ‘is’ of identity. Where the subject and predicate are interchangable. E.g., Milton is the author of ‘Paradise Lost’. 2. The ‘is’ of predication. Where the subject and predicate are not interchangable. E.g., ‘Paradise Lost’ is a book. This may also be described as ‘is’ meaning ‘is a member of ’. ‘Paradise Lost’ is a member of the class of things generically called books. [123] Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, p. 44.
3. The ‘is’ which means ‘exists’. E.g. ‘Paradise Lost’ is on the table. The common misusages of the word are as follows. 1. ‘Is’ used for ‘implies’. E.g., ‘Murder is death to the perpetrator’. 2. ‘Is’ used for ‘has the value of ’. E.g., ‘Two and two are four’. These are wholly erroneous usages of the word and there is not the smallest justification for their appearance in accurate writing. The question before us is, Which of the legitimate usages of the word ‘is’ will be found in a true definition in the form ‘a is b’? We may reject the last, the ‘is’ of existence, as being of an entirely different nature from that required by our purpose; and so we must decide the relationship between the ‘is’ of predication and the ‘is’ of identity. The ‘is’ of predication, as we have seen, joins a particular thing on to a whole of which it is a modification, and so clearly fulfils some of the conditions of a true definition. But it is clear also that in itself it is open to gross abuse. Can we admit that ‘is a book’ is a good definition of ‘Paradise Lost’, and if not, why? It comes to this. The ‘is’ of predication is accurate in a definition only when the term b possesses a content adequate to the term a. ‘Paradise Lost’ is a book, but so is Bradshaw’s Railway Guide. The statement falls short of a definition not through the inadequacy of the meaning of ‘is’, but through the inappropriate content of the term b. The ‘is’ of predication, then, may be used in a definition. What of the ‘is’ of identity? A perfect definition would be found to contain the ‘is’ of identity, for in it the term b would be entirely adequate to the term a. But this use of the word ‘is’ will be found more frequently in statements in the form ‘a is a’ which we have rejected as a form of definition. I will conclude this section with an illustration of the principles of definition so far as we have been able to come at them. Let us
consider the process of mind through which we pass in an attempt to see a box definitely. 1. Only one box is necessary. That is to say, the first step in definition is not to collect specimens of all the boxes in the world. For, given a mind capable of thought, the essential qualities of a box reveal themselves as well in a single instance as in a hundred.124 2. A single box is before us; let us first detail its characteristics. It is round, blue, made of card-board, is two inches in diameter and a quarter of an inch deep, it has a lid, it was made in 1902 and is used for pills. 3. Our next task is to distinguish essential nature from contingent circumstances, the intima essentia from the propria. For, as Hegel says, ‘a definition should contain only universal features’.125 All boxes are not round, but all have shape. All are not blue, but all have colour. All are not of card-board, but all have substance. All are not two inches in diameter, but all have size. All are not made in 1902, but all have date. All are not for pills, but all have purpose. And so on. 4. We may note, however, that in abstracting these qualities we have not discovered the essential qualities of the box. We have found some of the qualities common to all boxes, but that does not make them any more essential or any less contingent. For, again, contingent does not mean ‘found merely in some examples and not others’, but is a judgment of value. 5. We should observe that purpose is as much a particular quality of a particular box as is shape or size. And so in selecting it as the basis of all definition we do not preclude ourselves from erroneous judgments as to the real purpose of this or that thing. 6. But consideration shows that a definition must be in terms of purpose or end because it is through this that we judge of the [124] Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk 10 ch. ix: ‘If a man does wish to become master of an art or science he must go to the universal, and come to know it as well as possible; for, as we have said, it is with this that the sciences are concerned.’ [tr. W.D. Ross.] [125] Hegel, ‘Introduction’ to The Philosophy of Right, §2, n., p. 3.
essentiality of all other qualities. A judgment of purpose underlies all our judgments as to the value in a definition of the true nature of a box, of its other qualities. Purpose is that through which we come to see anything definitely. It is a judgment of this nature which leads us to pronounce ‘is a book’ an inadequate definition of ‘Paradise Lost’, and to decide that date and author are more important than size and weight in the case of a painting. I am well aware that all this is very elementary. The argument is often laboured, and the points insisted upon are trite. But to any acquainted with the present position of political philosophy these defects will not appear so great. Our most pressing need at the present time is to reexamine those presuppositions which writers on politics have so long been content to make and leave unquestioned. It is delusions upon these very points which vitiate so many of our present attempts to think clearly on this subject.
Political Philosophy It would seem that the first thing to do when embarking upon a study is to gain a clear and exact view of the subject-matter, and of the appropriate method in which to treat it. And yet it is a matter of the commonest occurrence for students of this subject to give not a moment’s thought to these preliminary questions. The two words, Political Philosophy, indicate at once a particular subject-matter and a particular method of treatment: and we must examine each separately in order to discover its true meaning. For a particular subject-matter may be treated in many ways— the stars may be studied both by astrologers and by astronomers— and it is of the utmost importance that we have a clear idea of what philosophy proposes as the purpose and method of its study. In the phrase ‘political philosophy’ there can be but one meaning of the word ‘political’ which makes it coherent. Political philosophy is simply the philosophy of political life. Here, then, we may make a beginning and ask ourselves, What is political life? In answering this question we should bear in mind our previous conclusions. We must think in terms of real things and not in terms of their verbal partial equivalents. Nor must we be content with an ordinary meaning, which represents our ordinary experience, but seek for the meaning which most abstracts the thing itself from its merely contingent qualities. Some have made a practice of commencing their discussions of words with a reference to their etymological meaning. Aristotle, for instance, often indulges in rather dubious etymological speculation, and Ruskin also. But we must understand that in a true definition of meaning, etymology holds the place only of a good analogy—which often exhibits truth, but proves nothing. The legal and commercial definition of port wine is that it must come from Oporto, and this, too, is clear from the etymology of the word;—but a connoisseur would not take this as a good definition. He would say, ‘Do you
call that port?’126 He must think and speak of it in terms of age and flavour and bouquet and take notice of its origin only in so far as it enlightens him on these matters of quality. Etymology tells us what the word has meant, gives us a glimpse of the most primitive form of the experience it is supposed to represent, but often leaves us without any hint as to the mature experience and fuller meaning which has passed into it. The word ‘spirit’ affords a good example. That the words ‘God is a spirit’ did not, and could not contain their modern meaning when the author of St. John’s Gospel wrote them is an historical fact. Etymologically ‘spirit’ means no more than ‘wind’, ‘moving air’, but actually, today it has caught up into itself so immense a part of the deepest human experience that it were difficult to come at the end of all its meanings and implications. And, indeed, each of the modern European languages has been able to appropriate to itself only a part of the whole meaning. The English ‘spirit’, the German ‘Geist’, and the French ‘esprit’ each display a different facet of this comprehensive conception. Etymology, then, sometimes exhibits truth, but can never demonstrate it; it is frequently illuminating, yet often misleading. (i) Etymologically the word ‘political’ goes back to the Greek . To fifth century Athens political life meant that kind of life which it was the aim of the to foster and preserve, even, some thought, to make possible. We can recognize the characteristics of that life disclosing themselves in the saying of Aristotle that the came into being in order to make human life possible, but exists in an endeavour to foster the ‘good life’. And the ‘good life’ was simply that abundant life which provides for the real desires, aspirations, and needs of men as such. If we wish to discover what this really was we must find out the whole content of this idea of the ‘good life’. But before embarking upon any such historical study it will be fitting to pause and ask ourselves what the value of such an enquiry is or may be, to a theory of political life as we know it here and now. [126] See note on p. 52, above.
It is a significant fact that much of the most enlightened theoretical treatment of political life in modern times is deeply indebted to the inspiration of Greek speculation. And we must ask ourselves what are the circumstances which would justify the use made by latter-day theorists of conceptions which originated in the cities of ancient Greece. The Greeks were at pains to point out that they sought their conception of political life by contemplating what appeared to be the real needs of men as men, what the natures of men seemed to demand for their fulfilment. If they succeeded in discovering something so far above the influence of the chances and changes of particular time and place, it is clear that their findings would be of the utmost value to the theorist of political life wherever he is placed and whenever he lives. There are many who have come to believe that this is true of some of the political conceptions of Plato and Aristotle, and to my mind such an attitude needs no apology. ‘Even if Greek philosophy is a philosophy of the Greek and for the Greek, yet the Greek was a man, and his city was a State; and the theory of the Greek and his is, in all 58 Michael Oakeshott: Early Political Writings 1925–30 essentials, a theory of man and the State—a theory which is always true … In studying it we are studying the ideal of our modern States; we are studying a thing which is as much of to-day as of yesterday, because it is, in its essentials, for ever.’127 But not even so unstinted a recommendation as this can justify us in the hasty application of historical conceptions, whether they originate in Greece or in our own country, to present circumstances. The degree of applicability of such conceptions is strictly in relation to the degree of comprehensiveness with which they have singled out the essentials of the case and abstracted these from the exigencies of particular time and place. So much for the historical aspect of our definition of the word ‘political’; to venture further without specialized knowledge were to court disaster without any corresponding possibility of gain, for such a [127] E. Barker, Greek Political Theory: Plato and his Predecessors (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1918), p. 15.
study can in no sense justify any conclusions we may reach. The conclusions of philosophy must rest upon nothing but their own inherent logical value. A theory, as such, stands outside particular circumstances. But to return to the strict matter in hand. In pursuance of our discussion of the problem of meaning we shall readily conclude that, like all other words, ‘political’ has many meanings both in the past and in the present. Our business, however, is to discover, according to the principles laid down, some meaning which may properly be held superior to all others. Not to step outside that which is well known, it is clear that ‘political life’ does not mean the same thing to Plato, Aristotle, Dante, or Spinoza as to a modern parliamentarian or the Proportional Representation Society. Indeed, there are innumerable meanings, ranging from such as contain so minute a degree of experience that they may be called ‘untrue’, to those which, in virtue of their comprehensiveness, may, for human purposes, be taken to approximate nearly to the truth. Between the newly enfranchised voter filled with the sensation of unlimited power of combative opinion, and the poet who understands all friendship and human association not partially but as necessary to the universe and who suffers on behalf of his society that agony or joy which others feel over personal misfortune or success, lies an ocean of political experience of various intensity; and the meaning which expresses most fully and most coherently the highest degree of experience is that which we must call the best and truest. It is long since the opinion was first voiced that the essence of political life is most conclusively expressed in terms of will; and without entering into a controversial discussion of opposing conceptions, such as that which finds in ‘force’ the most characteristic feature of political life, and has today many adherents, I shall pass to a consideration of the meaning of the proposition that will, and not force or anything else, expresses the real nature of political life.
There is a theory which regards a scramble for the means of subsistence as the proper and inevitable business of men in primitive societies, and, carrying this conception into more developed conditions, considers the struggle for those products of civilization which stand above mere necessaries, the proper occupation of men in more advanced stages of social life.128 The view is adopted because it is thought to be an inevitable conclusion from the plain facts before us all; in reality it is founded upon a perversion of a crude selection from the experience of men. Political life, according to this theory, is nothing else than the most convenient regulation of this struggle, which continues unabated though it may change, from time to time, the object of its striving. That is to say, the essence of political life is regulation and therefore force.129 The less of it the better will be our social condition, but nothing is more useful for the preservation of ‘fair play’ than a referee with a strong authority. Stated thus baldly, this
[128] Cf. ‘In all general evolutionary progress the keynote is struggle; struggle of various and several kinds, struggle between species and species, between species and genus, between both species and genus and category, struggle between all of them. There is an intensive struggle going on all the time; and the human race is not and never has been an exception to that general evolutionary rule.’ From a Glasgow pamphlet (1921)! [The pamphlet has not been traced but the same passage is quoted without attribution in A.C. Bouquet, The Christian Religion and its Competitors To-day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. 18, reviewed by Oakeshott for the Journal of Theological Studies, 27 (1926), 440: see SW, iii. 40.] [129] See, for example, B. Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1916), pp. 45 [‘The essence of the State is that it is the repository of the collective force of its citizens’], 72 [‘the purpose of the State [is] merely to exact efficiency and to exact an amicable settlement of disputes’], 75 [‘The essential merit of the State is that it prevents the internal use of force by private persons’].
theory seems to lose most even of its plausibility, and I shall not stay for criticism, or to point out how it has arisen.130 Essentially, political life involves the permanent cessation of this struggle, either for life or luxury, which enables us to enter into a moral relation with men. The egoist, that is the man who through some radical imperfection and poverty of self is unable to enter into any moral relation, sees in men nothing but possible servants of his desires or hinderers of his purposes. His relationship is one of use and not of interest; and good and evil can have no meaning for him. But when we enter a society properly so called we become subject to those sweet and profitable laws of conduct which bring with them such conditions of life as will answer to our real needs and desires. So long as the struggle for life or luxury engages our whole attention we can in no sense be said to participate in a political life. This life begins when we become beings capable of a moral relation, that is when we have learnt to curb and spurn The tyrant in us; that ignobler self Which boasts, not loathes, its likeness to the brute And owns no good save ease, no ill save pain, No purpose, save its share in that wild war In which, through countless ages, living things Compete in internecine greed.131 The true political life is that which comes into being with the will to rise through the struggle for life and luxury, and to rise, not singly, but as a whole society. It is a life in which mere struggle is displaced by a common will to seek that which gives permanent and common satisfaction. It does not come into being with the [130] There is a common form of this theory which says that government and law are the primary activities of society which I have discussed fully in Ch. 7, below. [131] [C. Kingsley, ‘Christmas Day’, Poems (London: Macmillan and Co., 1889), pp. 316–18, at 317.]
will to regulate that struggle, or to change the ends for which men compete in this manner; it is not to be identified with the machinery of regulation and government, nor is this its most characteristic expression. Political philosophy is an attempt to theorize this effort to create a form of life which answers to men’s real needs. Different peoples at different times have been varying successful in their attempt to actualize this type of life, but there is implicit as well in every blunder as in every success,132 the realization that in this direction only can men find the kind of life which corresponds to their nature. At the root of all political life lies this will to live the ‘good life’, and if it can be shown that a certain form of life has no trace, implicitly or explicitly, of this will, then we must conclude that it can in no sense be called a ‘political’ life. It is the business of political philosophy to theorize the real content of this will to live the ‘good life’ and to come at some coherent notion of what that life is. To look at the feeble manifestations of this will in history is at once a sad and necessary task, but to imagine, on the one hand, that they are mainly comprised in men’s efforts to govern themselves in societies, or, on the other, that because of ill success the will is not real and powerful, is to imagine a lie. The ‘good life’ cannot easily be described, for a complete picture of it would involve the whole of all that is most real to us in our present life thought out to the [132] This statement, of course, rests upon a presupposition as to the exact relation of truth and error. It is impossible to discuss it here but it is one more piece of evidence that any theory of politics or anything else rests finally upon a logic. A saying of Theodore Golobensky seems to me to state the case as I see it: ‘Cicero maintains that there is no system of philosophy which is not based upon some fundamental absurdity. I maintain, on the other hand, that there is no widely propagated error which is not based on some fundamental truth. See the point of view from which any error has arisen. Then and then only, will you understand it.’ See A.P. Stanley, Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church (London: John Murray, 1861), p. 491.
end, together with its implications. But we may profitably avoid the elementary errors of those who look for its truest and most characteristic expression in government rather than in friendship, in law rather than in moral sensibility, in ownership and rule rather than in religion and culture. Nor should it be supposed that this ‘political life’ is a vague, phantasmal creature of the imagination. If it appears vague, that is by reason of its comprehensiveness. The exact nature of the unity of content (if it may be so called) of two empty boxes is easy to determine, but we should not expect an equal definiteness to arise as easily from a first look at a human society or a human self. Nevertheless, when it comes to thinking things out to the end, it will be found that only comprehensiveness will secure us from vagueness, for that only can be called definite in a true sense which is a real whole. And human societies, looked at only from the point of view of their government, can in no sense be spoken of as wholes. I am aware that what I have said gives no more than a hint of the full meaning of ‘political life’, but for the present it must suffice. Our next task is to discuss the exact meaning of the word philosophy, that is, to discover the method and end of our treatment of that class of fact and experience we call ‘political’. (ii) There are in general two ways in which we may study socalled ‘facts’. The one we may call the historical method, the other the method of philosophy. And we shall best understand the exact aim of the philosophical method if we can see how it differs from the historical. (a) History postulates that at some time and in some place certain events happened, and then endeavours to discover how these events took place, why they took place (that is, their proximate cause), and what was the effect of their having taken place. The first thing to notice is that its sphere of study is strictly limited—limited in extent and limited in depth. That is, history does not enquire into causes other than proximate. It may, indeed, attribute certain events to the general laws of which is called ‘human nature’, but it does not venture away from the immediate
field of recorded human experience in the actual world. History is not required to pronounce upon questions of metaphysics; its events take place within the closed circle of the actual world, and it does not affect its conclusions whether we believe that all events take place in pursuance of the will of God or that there is no supreme being to exert such a will.133 The reason for this is that history does not concern itself with the meaning of events, except their proximate meaning as expressed in terms of subsequent events. It moves in a self-restricted sphere of cause and effect. It is the study of the origin and development of a certain class of facts and experiences which it postulates as in themselves more or less self-evident. It will readily be seen that, with a slight change with regard to the class of facts concerned, this is the procedure which has come to be called the Scientific Method. Natural Science seeks to elucidate the origin and development of certain phenomena. It expresses its conclusions in terms of fact, like history, leaving out of account any question of meaning in the wider sense. To Science, as to history, facts unquestionably exist; both start their research and end it with ‘facts’. And this is to be gathered not only from an observation of the actual procedure of science and history, but may also be deduced from the fact that their method is not logically warranted to produce any other result. ‘Une recherche d’ordre scientifique … n’amènera jamais qu’une découverte du même ordre’.134 Nor can either science or history be regarded as telling us, or attempting to tell us, anything significant for the whole of time, or the whole of space. However wide the discoveries of science may extend, however comprehensive its theories may become, it neither pretends, nor can ever pretend, to furnish us with anything but facts referring to what has happened in a limited space and [133] [Oakeshott’s marginal note: ‘Is not (e.g.) the Incarnation an insoluble contradiction?’] [134] A. France, L’étui de nacre (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1892), p. 135.
time; a scientific law, theory, or principle never describes more than a particular sequence of physical events which, in all actual cases, is accompanied by other percepts or events in relation to which the law has no application.135 In the same way, from history we can infer only what has been at one time and in one place. And if it is said that the greater historians have rarely been content with this view of things, but have made repeated attempts to link events on to some cosmological plan, the reply will be that a Thucydides, a Gibbon, a Ranke, or an Acton has rarely been content to be nothing but an historian. While a Huxley, a Maxwell, or a Poincaré is never content with being nothing but a scientist. In like case is psychology, which, whether or not it may be considered to have satisfied the exacting demands of scientific accuracy, can never be considered anything other than a study in the same category as science or history; that is, a study of origin and development. It is either a science or a pseudo-science. The psychologist is a looker-on from the outside, not interested with the contents of the mind for its own sake, but in its origin, laws of action, and machinery. He makes no judgment of meaning or value, and his conclusions cannot be taken as in any way contributing to as confirming, or as criticizing, judgments of meaning and value. There has grown up of late years a vast literature on a subject which has come to be called the ‘Science of Social Psychology’. Its aim is to study and record the ‘facts’ of social life. ‘The science of social psychology aims at discovering and arranging the knowledge which will enable us to forecast, and therefore to influence, the conduct of large numbers of human beings organised in societies.’136 ‘Our chief avenue to the formulation of an adequate science of social psychology lies in the observation of [135] See E.W. Hobson, The Domain of Natural Science: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Aberdeen in 1921 and 1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), pp. 26–40. [136] G. Wallas, The Great Society: A Psychological Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 21.
social conduct.’137 These are two statements, of a thousand, which go to show the exact scope of the study. It is impossible to go into a deeper examination of its method or results, and for our purpose unnecessary. All our emphasis must go to pointing out that the method used is a scientific or historical method, that facts are studied and questioned only as to their origin development, that upon this it may be possible to build up a science of social relations, but it will be for ever impossible to construct a philosophy of any sort or kind, and that its conclusions are in no sense a true starting point for either the construction or the criticism of a philosophy of political life. As there are many branches of philosophy, but one characteristic aim and method, so there are many sciences whose diversity consists not in a disparity of method but in a difference of subjectmatter. It is fitting to say a word here about another of these sciences, because, like social psychology, its relation to political philosophy is not seldom mistaken. Political Economy is a science. As such, it sets out to ask the question, How? with regard to certain, limited activities of human societies. It asks, how, for the production and distribution of wealth, are societies organized? As a science, also, it professedly deals, not with particular instances, but with averages;138 it never comprehends more than a small part [137] W.H. Rivers, Psychology and Politics and Other Essays (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1923), p. 7. [138] It is instructive to bring together these two passages: (i) J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, Bk 2 ch. xvi §4, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (CW), ed. J.M. Robson, 33 vols, 1963–91 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), ii. 422: ‘It is not pretended that the facts of any concrete case conform with absolute precision to this or any other scientific principle. We must never forget that the truths of political economy are truths only in the rough: they have the certainty, but not the precision, of exact science. It is not, for example, strictly true that a farmer will cultivate no land, and apply no capital, which returns less than the ordinary profit.’
of any given event or process, and leaves out of account all that has no immediate bearing upon its purposes. And, like chemistry, for example, it may act as a guide to economic development, but in essence is an abstract science of discovery. Lastly, like all scientific studies, it makes no attempt to come at what we have called the best meaning of its terminology, being content (and rightly so) with that which serves and suits its own limited and immediate purposes. We have examined the legal use of the word ‘real’, and on a level with this we may conveniently place the economic use of the word ‘wealth’. ‘A country’, says Mill, ‘would hardly be said to be richer, except by a metaphor, however precious a possession it might have in the genius, the virtues, or the accomplishments of its inhabitants.’139 It is no finally true meaning, nor one true or human life when taken as a whole, which political economy gives (ii) Hobson, The Domain of Natural Science, p. 29: ‘A scientific law is … always, in some greater or lesser degree, abstract, in the sense that it represents only a part of what is in any individual case actually perceived … With the purely individual, Science cannot deal; it operates with the typical, and the type is an abstraction.’ Our notions of what science is have changed since Mill wrote; we can no longer put it on a pedestal as more exact than the ‘rough truths of economic science’. [139] J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Bk 1 ch. iii (CW), ii. 49. Mill’s reservation, ‘except by a metaphor’, is interesting. It is at this point that Ruskin departs from ‘orthodox’ political economy, i.e. in unwisely refusing to limit the meaning of ‘wealth’ in this manner. See J. Ruskin, ‘Ad Valorem’, in ‘Unto This Last’: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1862), p. 156: ‘There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.’ Ruskin came nearer to the whole meaning of ‘wealth’, but failed to criticize Mill and Ricardo on their own ground. The same is true of much of the criticism leveled against Malthus. Nettleship says somewhere that it is by no means absurd to take the metaphorical meaning of a word as its true meaning.
to ‘wealth’ or any other of its terms. And this, par excellence, is the signature of science. (b) Turning to philosophy, it may be said that its distinguishing characteristic is to end, and not to commence, with facts. Its whole task is to find the facts. For history and for science facts are self-evident and are the subject-matter of these studies, but for philosophy they are the most puzzling things imaginable, and when they are really discovered its part is played. This has led to much misunderstanding; philosophy has been condemned for not ‘sticking to the facts’. But the accusation misinterprets the whole effort, which is to ask and answer the questions, What can rightly be called a fact? What are the full implications of there being such things in the universe? As experiencing beings, as minds, we may say that life presents us in the first instance with a number of disconnected phenomena (disconnected that is except in matter of time and place). All science, all philosophy, all thought start from these elementary sensations. And about them we may ask a number of different questions. Let us take, for example, the sensations which we call aesthetic. We may be moved to ask, Where do these sensations come from, and how do they come? And in answer, the physiology of sensation has grown up. And there are numberless refinements of these same questions, which lead us from physiology to psychology, and from general psychology to that which explains and illuminates these particular aesthetic sensations. But alongside such questioning as this (though not seldom following after)140 comes another puzzle to be solved: What are these sensations, that is, What do they mean, and, What [140] J. Burnet, Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), p. 11. But it is often forgotten that all that can be proved is a temporal coincidence and not a logical connection. [Burnet wrote at p. 11 that ‘Greek philosophy … is dominated … by … the question … “What is real?” … It is no part of the historian’s task to decide whether it is a question that can be answered, but … the rise and progress of the special sciences depended … on its being asked’.]
are they worth? And to answer this is the proper study of that branch of philosophy called Aesthetic. The same thing is true of all other human experiences. Life presents us with certain moral sentiments, which, like our aesthetic sensations, are ordinarily chaotic enough; but besides the effort to put an historical order into these sentiments by asking where did they come from and how did they develop, there is the effort to put a logical order into them. And this involves, not the acceptance of the sentiments as they appear in our unexamined experience, but a process of sifting and testing until what remains makes up a single coherent system or whole—an ethic. So far as their meaning is concerned, we can in no sense say that facts are facts until they have been rigorously scrutinized. The logic of thought seeks always to ally itself to the logic of fact, which admits that when two apparent ‘facts’ contradict one another, one (at least) is not a fact at all. And, therefore, until we can say of an apparent fact, ‘nothing in the universe contradicts the existence in this manner of this fact’, we cannot claim to have discovered what the fact is. But let us look at the matter from another direction. Philosophy is said, by re-thinking experience, to make a theory of the whole. What is a theory? Briefly, to theorize a thing or an experience is to rehearse it in the mind and in so doing to create it again in such a way that all its intimae essentiae stand out, and the implications of its existence become clear. And this, again, is the only way in which a fact may properly be said to be a fact to our minds.141 To study political philosophy, then, is to take up into our minds the whole complex of apparent fact and experience which meets us as we contemplate life in society and (as is inevitable in any process of thought) abstracting from it that which is most intimately [141] Cf. Spinoza, De intellectus emendatione, §69 [Works, ii. 25–6: ‘As regards that which constitutes the reality of truth, it is certain that a true idea is distinguished from a false one, not so much by its extrinsic object, as by its intrinsic nature.’]
characteristic, learn to see the whole of each fact.142 In this way only can we come to understand what the fact of political life is and means. So far from it being true that philosophy depends upon the ‘facts’ which history, science, psychology etc. collect for it, these studies present us with nothing but the raw material of true facts, and so themselves depend, in the fullest sense, upon philosophy. All statements which can possibly be made on any subject whatever have behind them and assume, consciously or unconsciously, a theory of knowledge. The whole notion of science and scientific research and discovery attributes a certain nature to things, assumes a theory of truth. For all purposes of thought and practical life these assumptions must be made, but philosophy alone sets out to examine them for their own sake. Presuppositions which are but half-understood make but a poor foundation for thought. Facts are not facts until they are seen fully, that is theorized. The existence of political life brings with it certain assumptions—for facts by their existence make assumptions just as much as statements or actions—and until these are examined we cannot come at its meaning. We are now in a position to see more clearly the exact relation between a scientific and a philosophical theory. They are alike in that they both follow experience and try to relate isolated phenomena to some sort of whole. But they differ fundamentally in their scope. Science gives meaning to phenomena by placing them in an historical, and therefore limited, whole; its theories [142] Hegel, ‘Introduction’ to The Philosophy of Right, §4, p. 11: ‘To make something universal is to think.’ Nettleship, ‘Lectures on Logic’, §1: Thought, Sense, and Imagination, in Remains, i. 114: ‘All clear thinking is … abstract.’ Hegel, History of Philosophy, tr. E.S. Haldane and F.H. Simson, 3 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1894), ii. 29: ‘When Plato spoke of tableness and cupness, Diogenes the Cynic answered, “I see a table and a cup, to be sure, but not tableness or cupness”. “Right”, answered Plato, “for you have eyes wherewith to see the table and the cup, but mind, by which one sees tableness and cupness, you have not.”’
are confined to reaching the how and when of ‘facts’. When we say that a certain theory in Physics is true, we mean that (among other things) it is true if we assume space to be ofa certain nature. But if space, in the end, proved to contradict itself, then in no real sense could a physical theory be said to be true. A theory of rent, or prices, is true on certain assumptions,143 and if it were established that these assumptions contradict themselves, the theory must fall to the ground. And it is just these assumptions which philosophy examines. A philosophical theory, on the other hand, seeks to understand the meaning of the phenomena, not in relation to this or that limited temporal or spatial whole, but in relation to the logical whole of the universe, the totality of experience. Its judgments aim at giving a final and real meaning to things by the discovery of their final and real content and value. A value-judgment is final and comprehensive because it is essentially a judgment which relates the particular occurrence to the whole universe, and not merely to a selected part. And if we attribute to science or history the quality of giving meaning and value to things, we must be careful to note that in so doing we are entirely changing the meaning of the words from that which they possess when attributed to a philosophical theory. Let us sum up briefly. Political philosophy is not a science, is not a study based upon or akin to psychology, is not an effort to get to know the origin and course of development of certain phenomena, in short, does not ask the question, How? On the contrary, it is an effort to come at the true meaning and implication of the complex thing we call political life, but of which we know very little until we have re-thought it from the beginning. And instead of seeking the causes and antecedents of so-called ‘facts’, [143] J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Bk 2 ch. xvi §4 (CW), ii. 422: ‘The laws which we are enabled to lay down respecting rents, profits, wages, prices are only true in so far as the persons concerned are free from the influence of any other motives than those arising from the general circumstances of the case, and are guided, as to those, by the ordinary mercantile estimate of profit and loss.’
it seeks to discover the facts themselves in their meaning and value. ‘Science takes experience as it stands, isolates a portion of it, and subjects that portion to analysis. Philosophy, on the other hand, takes experience as a whole and seeks the conditions of its possibility.’144 ‘The origin of the conception of right falls outside of the science of right.’145 The respective province of the psychologist and the philosopher is so often confused that I feel bound to repeat what I have said before. The psychologist is concerned with the form and machinery of the mind, the philosopher with its content as material for the construction of reality. His principles are not psychological laws, but the principles by which reality may be constructed. I know no better statement of the relations of these two studies than that which is to be found in Maguire’s Lectures on Philosophy. The chief point I wish to impress on you is the difference between Philosophy and Psychology. This distinction is so capital, that when it is perceived one may say without exaggeration that there is nothing else to see. It is briefly this: Psychology is the counterpart of Physiology, and deals with the facts of sentience as states of feeling, but always as a branch of the history either of the individual or of the race; while Philosophy treats of the principles which this history presupposes—which it is obliged to pre-suppose, because it cannot explain them, and because without these its own special deliverances can neither be construed nor understood. Psychology is the history of the individual development: Philosophy is the analysis of the principles which underlie Psychology [144] C.F. D’Arcy, A Short Study of Ethics (London: Macmillan and Co., 1895), p. 3. [145] Hegel, ‘Introduction’ to Philosophy of Right, §2, p. 2. Cf. Plato’s remarks on this subject, Phaedrus, 230a. [Oakeshott may have had in mind Socrates’ remark that ‘I devote myself … to the study, not of fables, but of my own self ’, in J. Wright, op. cit., p. 6].
and everything else. Psychology is the history of a process: Philosophy assigns that process its place in the grand Whole.146 Perhaps the whole contrast, and so the real nature of a philosophical study, is best brought out by an illustration. Let us take the example of property. This fact can be treated in two ways. The historian (and the ethnologist is never other than an historian) will travel the world over, will ransack the laws of civilizations past and present, will penetrate into the conventions, customs, and morality of South Sea islanders and the inhabitants of Greenland, and will collect (like Westermarck) a vast mass of information about the institution of property in different human societies. He must, before commencing his search, come at a rough definition of what property is, or he would be seeking something he could not recognize if he saw it. But there is no need to say more than that property includes all customs and laws concerning the possession of things in human society—and everyone knows what the verb ‘to possess’ means. Yet, when even he has finished, when he has accomplished the utmost measure of the task he set himself, when he has won the felicity of the discoverer of the cause—felix qui rerum potuit cognoscere causas—there will still be a certain residuum of problems concerning property left untouched.147 For instance, no historical study can possibly justify or condemn an institution such as property. But now it is the philosopher’s turn. His task will not necessitate this ‘treading of the ancient track’ until the primitive springs of the institution are laid bare. He will ask other questions; and the most important (indeed, including all others) will be, What is property? [146] T. Maguire, Lectures on Philosophy (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885), p. 106. [147] Lucretius, De rerum natura, VI. 54, as well as Virgil, speaks of the ‘ignorantia causarum’ as the source of all unenlightenment, thereby marking himself as a Father of Science, and not of Philosophy. [Virgil, Georgics, II. 490: ‘Happy is he who knows the causes of things’.]
And when he has come at some conception of its meaning, he will seek its justification, the grounds upon which it can be upheld as an institution coherent and self-justifying. Some conceptions of property will be found quite untenable because, when thought out to the end, they are discovered to deny themselves. Other theories (and a theory, we must never forget, is just a view of a socalled ‘fact’ in which it is seen as nearly as a whole as possible, and in which it is exhibited with such fullness that we can say, ‘That is the fact for which we have been seeking’) will prove themselves of so partial an application as to be virtually worthless. Property enters human experience in various forms. There is what is called ‘private property’; there is also ‘common property’. Of these the philosopher asks himself, not, When did they arise? and What caused them to flourish here and die out there? but, Is this conception of privacy in property really coherent or does it, perhaps, in the end, when seen most fully, defeat itself? If he finds that private property is not a coherent notion, as he well may, the result will be, not an inauguration of the reign of ‘Communism’, but simply the recognition that ‘private’ property as it seems to exist does not and cannot conform to its name, that the thing and the name are not concurrent. For the philosopher never desires to change things, but to understand them. Such an attempt to treat this subject in a comprehensively philosophic manner is to be found in Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts, §§41–70. It is not, necessarily, an entirely successful attempt, but its value lies in its consistency and fullness, and for these qualities it stands almost alone. Not until every element of our social life receives a like treatment shall we have a political philosophy worth the name. I have thought it worthwhile to discuss at such length the exact meaning of the word ‘philosophy’ because there is to-day, in the study of political life, no greater misunderstanding than that which occurs with regard to this point. It is almost true to say that most of the controversies of the last twenty years would never have taken place if this distinction between science and philosophy had been kept clearly before our minds. And at the same time,
our understanding of the history of political writings would be considerably increased if we could bring ourselves to realize that by no means all writing about political life is philosophical in this strict sense. While it would be a difficult task to single out a philosophical work of prime importance which has appeared during these years, the literature of social psychology, ethnology, legal theory, social survey, constitutional history, party politics, to say nothing of numberless reconstructions of society and suggestions for better social organization, bids fair completely to inundate our libraries. Excellent as are many of these works, the sooner we realize that they have contributed nothing at all to political philosophy (they may be said to stand in the same relationship to that study as do books descriptive of the religious beliefs of the Hottentots to serious works on metaphysics) the better it will be for both studies. I will conclude with a note on the various terminology used to describe our subject of study. There are many titles in common use—‘Political Thought’, ‘Political Theory’, ‘Politics’, ‘Social Philosophy’, ‘the Theory of the State’—all of which, at one time or another, have been used with equivalent meanings. The situation is not very satisfactory. ‘Political Thought’, for example, may be, and is, used to cover all forms of speculation on political life, from a serious theoretical treatment to the wildest scheme for the reform of the Franchise. ‘Politics’, again, has at least a double meaning, standing for true political philosophy and at the same time for the actual process and machinery of government. But a few points seem to stand out. In choosing a name to denote this philosophical study it would be well to adhere to some form of the Greek , because the word carries with it the association of all the best thought on the subject. This might lead us to select such a word as ‘Politic’ (compare, Aesthetic, Ethic) to denote this purely theoretical treatment of political life, but the German association makes this a little difficult. German writers are accustomed to divide political writings into Politik and Staatslehre, the former implying writings of a practical or reforming nature which direct
their attention to the preservation or the building up of so-called political bodies (Machiavelli’s Prince is placed in this class), while the latter are philosophical works such as that of Hegel. But even so, I think it might serve to bring some order into the chaotic nomenclature of the study did we adopt this name, ‘Politic’. (‘Political Philosophy’ is already almost irreparably tainted by abuse). At least it would have the supreme advantage of placing the study in the company of its peers—Aesthetic, Ethic, Logic, Metaphysic etc.—so that it could no longer be confused with studies of another colour.
The State In pursuance of my plan, I shall not attempt (except incidentally) any criticism of other theories of the State, but simply try to work out a definition according to the principles already laid down. We must try to see the state coming into being and to single out its purpose and, in the light of that, its essential qualities. And I may again emphasize the fact that the ‘coming into being’ which we must visualize is not historical, but logical. There are many points at which a discussion of this subject might take its departure, and until we have looked at it from all sides our conception will remain inadequate. These numerous avenues of approach may be classified under two heads—(1) those which start from apparent society, and (2) those which start from the apparent individual self. Both these conceptions when taken singly will prove entirely illusory and when we take the logical road to find the State we shall discover that there can be no tarrying or end to our journey until, having traversed both these approaches, we find them to have led us to the same City. In this section I shall essay an approach from the side of society, in a later I shall attempt a similar approach from that of the self, and finally gather up some of the loose ends of the discussion in a resumé. Like every other noun, ‘society’ is a word of many special meanings. But we must keep in mind that we are asking ourselves the question, What is it? about a thing whose meaning does not change, not a word which may not hold the same meaning in two consecutive sentences. First let us follow Spinoza’s counsel and fix our minds upon some particular thing until we come to see it with perfect clearness. We will ask, then, What is a society? A society implies an association of minds. In no sense can we say that it is an association of minds until we have defined the word association, that is, until we have discovered the exact relationship of those minds. Nor can we, except by some vague analogy, apply the word to minds which are not finite or to associations of things without
minds of the same nature as ours. For example, it is thought by some that the most coherent conception of God is to think of Him asa society of spirits. This is perfectly justifiable use of the word, but one in which the whole, definite meaning—as applying to human minds—is partially abandoned. At the other extreme, it is The State 71 equally wrong to call packs or groups of animals ‘societies’, for it is making an unjustifiable assumption that these conglomerations of living things are related to one another in the same way as men in societies. ‘Society’ as applied to a nest of ants is no more justifiable than as applied to a group of pine trees or a bank of blue-bells. The first thing we may say about any association of human minds is that it brings with it a moral relationship. It might be questioned whether this is so in a definitely commercial association, or one for purposes of sport, but the truth is that for whatever purposes men join together and whatever the cause and origin of their union may be, there exists a moral relationship between them. And this is so no less of associations which (in a slightly different sense) are called immoral. As Plato long ago pointed out, the fact that a band of pirates can be called an association of minds, no matter for what purposes, implies a recognition by them of some moral basis to their society. Men cannot associate with one another without creating a moral relationship.148 A society then, is an association of minds which exists on a moral basis. Something of the sort appears in Gidding’s account, which I choose because it unfolds a little more fully the historical process which goes to make a society. ‘In the larger and scientifically important sense, a society is a naturally developing group of conscious beings, in which converse passes into definite relationships that, in the course of time, are wrought into a complex and enduring organization.’149 [148] This is the justification for the statement I shall make later on, that every society is an incipient State, i.e., possesses some degree of statehood. [149] F.H. Giddings, The Principles of Sociology: An Analysis of the Phenomena of Association and of Social Organization (London and New
Not only in the more primitive stages of civilization, but in our own day also, we do not always realize the exact implications of entering a society. For associations always mean (whether or not we are conscious of the fact) far more to us than our ostensible reasons for joining them; and are in themselves often far greater, that is, satisfy far deeper and more fundamental needs, than the specialist purposes which they may actually set before themselves. This is so with all societies. And even those which set before themselves some wider aim than commerce, sport or learning— such, for instance, as a self-governing community whose purpose embraces a way of life—do not always impress the whole of their implications upon each member when he first enters them. For what they effect in the lives of their members can never be fully proposed in a prospectus, or entered in a book of rules. We are all ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [our] intention.’150 But the reflective member of a society—especially one of this comprehensive kind, but hardly less so in the case of, for example, a social club—is not long before he realizes that this association with others is effecting one of the most important changes in his life. It is changing, modifying, developing (as the case may be) his opinions. His society has undertaken to educate him, whether or not he likes it. And he may either accept the opinions he finds around him, and unconsciously become a member of his society (but a member in a very limited sense only, because his reception of membership is negative rather than positive); or he may, often through opposition, come to understand these opinions and this way of life, and accept them with a clearer consciousness of their meaning. In any case, to think nothing about the opinion of his society (if he be in any sense a member) is to be unconsciously York: Macmillan & Co., 1896), p. 5. [150] A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, Bk 4 Ch. ii, ed. R.H. Campell, A.S. Skinner, and W.B. Todd, 2 vols (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976), ii. 456.
influenced by it. A society then, (any society but some by their circumstances more than others) is a union of minds, and its solidarity (no matter if it exist ostensibly for other purposes) is a solidarity of feeling, opinion, and belief. This is the meaning of association; and a society cannot exist without it, for lacking it, it would fail to be a society. I have been speaking so far of societies such as those of which there are numerous examples in the world, and of which we are accustomed to be a member of more than one, perhaps of many. That is to say, they are in no sense mutually exclusive. I have spoken of them, also, as societies which we join, and of which we are not members before we have performed an act of joining. Of course, in the true sense of membership, we do not enter such a society immediately on signing the entrance book, but only when we have made ourselves a real part of the association, and when it has effectively entered our lives; nevertheless in the cases discussed there is a conscious act of joining. But there is another type of society which differs somewhat from this. There are societies which we join without being previously consulted as to our willingness to take up membership, from which it is often difficult to withdraw and whose influence over us it is always impossible to eradicate. I mean those societies into which we are born. One of these is, of course, a family. In some cases, as for example that of a child born into the family of a farmer, completely isolated from ordinary human intercourse in the wilds of America or Australia, it is virtually the only society into which a man is born. But such cases are rare, and most men are born into membership of societies other than their family.151 Perhaps he is born into a [151] I am merely viewing the matter as it appears on the surface. Really, of course, it is entirely fallacious to speak of being born into ‘only’ the society of one’s family, unless we have a very clear idea of all that this means. A man born into an isolated family is always a member of a race (possessing racial characteristics), and a nation (with a national temperament). Apart from what he may physically inherit
community of ten or dozen families isolated on an American cattle ranch. A more common lot is to be born a member of a village, or, if it be in a city of some magnitude, to be born into the society of a certain district. For anyone with the least acquaintance with the facts of life knows the extraordinary solidarity of opinion and belief which exists in villages and districts, and the even more extraordinary difference of opinion and belief existing in districts which abut one another. London is a city of many societies; while the villages of England possess in themselves a great degree of moral unity. Or again, a man may be born into an association of taste (e.g., in Letchworth), of occupation (Commercial Travellers and other most improbable associations have a great moral unity), or of religion, as in the case of a Jew. At all events, it is usual to-day, and was usual before anything like what we call civilization began, to be born into a society the membership of which, whether it is decided by circumstances of geography or by family relationship or by religion or by interest, is more or less defined and limited. There is no need to prolong this perfectly commonplace account of human experience. It is clear that this society into which a man is born has far more influence upon his opinions, feelings, and moral ideas than any he may join in later years. But there is one point of the utmost importance which requires emphasis. It is said the ‘Society is the birthplace of the moral consciousness. The first moral judgments expressed not the private emotions of isolated individuals but emotions which were felt by the community at large. Public indignation is the prototype of moral disapproval and from his parents, he comes from his earliest hours under the influence of their moral and religious teaching which itself is founded upon a past experience of incalculable immensity. In the case of an American settler of pronounced Protestant views, it is true to say that his children, though born into an isolated family, are born into a community of experience whose members are (to mention only a few) Bunyan, Luther, St Augustine, St Paul, and the other great figures of Jewish history— the whole wealth of their thought and feeling in so far as it has been assimilated by his society.
public approval the prototype of moral approbation.’152 And again, ‘Society is the school in which men learn to distinguish between right and wrong.’153 All of which is very true. But what is this Society? This conception of Society which is no particular society has continuous advertisement in ethnological writings, and the time when we must ask ourselves whether it is coherent is long overdue. According to our account, which is easily verifiable in the experience of every human being ever born on to this planet, the society which is the school where we learn to distinguish right and wrong is a perfectly definite association of minds the membership of which we could even go so far as to name and number if we were pressed to it. It would consist of everyone we have ever met, some being much more important than others, also such persons as we have met with in books, and the authors of books and the painters of pictures themselves. Wordsworth would add to these the ‘one impulse from the vernal wood’ which May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.154 while Coleridge will trust himself only to an analogy— the mighty majesty Of that huge amphitheatre of rich And elmy fields, seems like society—
[152] E. Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 2 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), ii. 740. [153] ibid., i. 9. [154] [W. Wordsworth, ‘The Tables Turned’, in W. Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. M. Mason, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2007), p. 99.]
Conversing with the mind.155 But it is a difficult question which we are not called upon to decide.156 Where then is our grandiose conception of Society? The truth is that, though the idea expresses the fact that there is a kind of unity in the human race, no such thing exists. Society for us and for the purposes of moral life, association, intellectual intercourse, custom, convention, education, and expression of self, is a definite and limited number of minds, and for these purposes no other society exists. Nor can the name society, as we have defined it, be attributed to the vague racial whole with any coherence. For in no sense is it a unity, in no sense is it an association, or even, as a whole, a potential association. Many individuals who have so far been foreigners to me may in the years to come enter my life, become part of my society, but even so the number into whose direct relationship I can come is limited and can never be racewide. That this is in no sense a moral limitation I shall show later on, it must suffice for the present to note the fact. But there are two senses in which Society seems to be a coherent idea, and these must receive some discussion at this point. (1). Certain writers of the eighteenth century have put forward a conception of humanity as a ‘man who is always learning’. Vico, Herder, and later Mazzini made much of this idea, which perhaps has something in common with the Stoic notion. The great society of Humanity garners every individual effort and achievement into its all-capacious life and while we pass on to the ‘undiscovered country’, it remains, a collective and continuous being. In a certain sense we may picture some all-inclusive group of minds, the human race, of whose aspirations our longings are a [155] [S.T. Coleridge, ‘Fears in Solitude Written in April 1798, During the Alarm of an Invasion’, Poetical Works, 2 vols, ed. E.H. Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), i. 256–63, at 263.] [156] The obvious unity of the world for economic ‘life’ has blinded us to the fact that in matters of the fuller life, of religion, culture, and custom, the nations of the world are as different and ‘separate’ as ever.
part, from whose desires ours take their meaning, to whose effort our toil is tributary, to whose wisdom our small discoveries are drops in an ever-increasing sea of knowledge, in short, to whose history our lives contribute, but all the intercourse we have with it, the contribution we bring to it and the wisdom we gain from it is through and by means of our definite and limited part which is, therefore, rightly called our society. It is with this society only that we can have any characteristically moral relationship. Perhaps the point is best expressed by saying that though this idea of the unity of all human minds has a considerable metaphysical significance, it has little or none to ethics. At all events our small society is that from which we learn our morality, whether or not we like to think of it as but one copy of a volume in wider circulation. (2). The second conception is of more considerable importance. We shall have occasion later on to discuss the idea of the State and its relationship to a state, and we shall find that the idea has a noticeable significance. This is not the place to anticipate that discussion, but if by Society is meant a conception parallel with that of the State, then its coherence can hardly be questioned. But in that case it were better to speak of the Society, and not of this vague entity distinguished alone by its initial capital and usually taken as referring to some actual and moral whole in the finite world.157 [157] We may note as a matter of interest that Society has been used, and strangely enough by Hegel, to denote the non-moral agglomeration of men from which it was supposed the State arose. That this conception is wholly baseless both in history and logic, hardly needs arguing. It is thought probable that it is the last legacy of the historical contract theory of the origin of the State. See D.G. Ritchie, The Principles of State Interference Four Essays on the Political Philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer, J.S. Mill, and T.H. Green (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1891), Appendix, Note A. [Ritchie, Principles, p. 156, cites J.S. Mann, ‘The Distinction between Society and the State’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1:3 (1888), 92–8, at 95: ‘May it be suggested that Hegel’s conception of the antithesis [of state and society] is partly
There is yet an element in our society of which I have taken no explicit account, it is what we call its institutions. The self of a society resides in its literature and art—in its culture—but even more in its institutions.158 For what are these but a people’s way of doing things, its manner of ordering its life—religion, language, education, government, war, marriage, down to the domestic manners of eating and drinking? From our first entrance into a society it is through its institutions more than by means of anything else that we enter into its mind. As we enter life we enter a society which consists, in essence, of a vast number of social, that is moral, influences; these come upon us in our intercourse with the members of that society, and in so far as we become true members of that association we are communing with its mind whenever we contemplate its laws, institutions, art, literature, tastes, and prejudices. This sum of our social experience as it is presented to us is our state.159 There never was a time in human history when this state did not exist. History can show us a continually changing content to this form, but since man were not man without some such society of experience in which to live, we shall search the dimmest corners of the past in vain for the place and moment when this thing began. It cannot be said to have come into being at any particular date, it is and exists because we need, in order to be ourselves, some unified whole which is or may be morally self-sufficing. But the fact that we must speak of this state as coexistent with man must not lead us to suppose that it issues full-grown from the head of Uranus before ever Cronos and his brood were born. Like everything else it has its rudimentary stages; but even then it was performing the same reminiscent of the Social Contract, partly due to the circumstances of Germany in his time.’] [158] The distinction is not theoretically valid, though still useful. Shelley’s was a true notion that literature, art, and institutions are the various expressions of one creative faculty and of a single social will. [159] It is also, as we shall see later on, our state of mind.
task as more mature social organizations, though necessarily performing it less efficiently. The cave, the hut, the house, and the palace have a common raison d’être and logical origin. Every important movement in human history comes into being for the sake of life, but exists for the sake of a more abundant life. Before I proceed to discuss this conception of a state more intimately, and ‘as such’, I must offer a preliminary observation, which is something in the nature of a repetition. The fact that the meaning philosophy gives to a word in no way corresponds to the ordinarily accepted meaning should not prejudice us against it. The word ‘state’ may well have a different meaning for political philosophy from that which it has, for instance, in law. As I pointed out, it causes no confusion that the word ‘real’ has two quite distinct meanings, one in philosophy and the other in law, and but small confusion that political economy uses the word ‘wealth’ with a highly specialized reference, and there is no reason to suppose that any greater confusion would issue from a like discrepancy in the case of the state. At all events, to accept unquestioned the meaning of which international law makes use as the true meaning is an indefensible denial of the possibility of philosophy and has no shred of justification, even though it can plead custom in the most of the tracts and opuscula which masquerade under the title of Politics. So far we have seen our state in the process of coming into being, it now falls to our lot to make an attempt to single out its essential purpose and characteristic qualities. The purpose or end of a state is the ‘good life’; and a state, because its purpose is the ‘good life’, is essentially a cultural unit. Something has already been said on this topic, and although I cannot treat it fully, the statement is not left as a mere isolated assertion, it is concurrent with the whole conception put forward in this essay. A form of argument against which I particularly wish to guard, for I see no possible justification for it, runs as follows. It is said that a state is not a cultural association of minds because it is impossible to produce a single instance among, say, the ‘states’
of modern Europe, which answers to this description. In reply, I would beg to make two observations. (1) That, on the face of it, a band of pirates possesses no moral foundation, and yet, as Plato saw, their association is held together in so far as they are just and not in so far as they are unjust. And (2) that an alternative conclusion has been overlooked. Is it not possible to conclude from the data presented to us that these so-called ‘states’ of modern Europe are not, at least in the full sense of the word, states at all? And this, in fact, is the conclusion to which The State 77 we must be led; and I shall afford another opportunity to discuss more fully the view of things which lies behind this notion. Prima facie there is no reason whatever for us to admit that all groups of persons called ‘states’ are properly so called, but we must be on our guard against a too hasty dismissal of the claims of bodies which have little apparent right to the title, for the real purpose is often found under the most unpromising exterior. And, indeed, were we to follow out to the end (as we ought) the theory put forward, we should find good reason for saying that every association of minds, as such, is a reaching out, be it of never so small an extent, towards a perfect State. But when we have decided that ‘culture’ is the end a state sets before itself—and our reasons for the assertion may be summed by saying that an association of minds whose purpose is experience of any sort must have its final raison d’être in what is widely called culture—we have yet to ask, What is the nature of this association? In the first place it is not merely the sum number of disconnected influences. This ‘whole’ of social influences which we call our state is a definite, though not exclusive, unit. And the reason why we are forced to say that it is not exclusive is that, in actual life, it rarely achieves more than a small degree of unity. Nevertheless, unity and self-sufficiency are the characteristics of a state. (1) Apologists for the unity of a state, when hard pressed, have been known to say that, whether or not we can prove a unity of mind or experience, one characteristic of a state is that it has a unity in action. This, of course, is true, but on the whole valueless;
for such a unity may (in Bacon’s words) ‘be founded upon implicit ignorance’, and so be a false unity.160 As Coleridge once remarked, I do not know that a man really agrees with me if he only agrees with my conclusions, for unless it can be shown that the reasons why he agrees with my conclusions are my reasons, we can in no true sense be said to think alike.161 ‘It may, perhaps, be doubted,’ wrote McTaggart, ‘whether you can get any unity worth preserving by the process immortalized by Mr. Saunders McKaye of first stripping mankind of their clothes, and then proclaiming them brothers “on the gran’ fundamental principle o’want o’breeks”.’162 Such a unity of result is no unity at all; for oneness, like all ultimate qualities, can only be attributed by a value judgment which implies a judgment of degree. Ultimately there is only one true form of unity,—that which because of its comprehensiveness excludes the possibility of disunity. In any other circumstances a contradiction may creep in, and the unity be destroyed. Absolute unity exists only coincident with absolute truth, for this alone implies the impossibility of disunity. In the final sense, the universe alone is a whole. Das Wahre ist das [160] [Bacon, ‘Of Unity in Religion’, in Essays, p. 69: ‘There be also two false peaces or unities: the one, when the peace is grounded but upon an implicit ignorance; for all colors will agree in the dark: the other, when it is pieced up upon a direct admission of contraries in fundamental points.’] [161] [Possibly S.T. Coleridge, ‘Moral and Religious Aphorisms’ no. 26, in Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character, on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion: Illustrated by Select Passages from our Elder Divines, especially from Archbishop Leighton (Burlington: Chauncey Goodrich, 1829), p. 65: ‘The Absence of Disputes, and a General Aversion to Religious Controversies, No Proof of True Unanimity’.] [162] J.C.E. McTaggart, ‘The Necessity of Dogma’, International Journal of Ethics, 5:2 (1895), pp. 147–61, at 160–1. [The character of Saunders McKaye, a Scot, appears in Charles Kingley’s novel Alton Locke, Taylor and Poet (1850).]
Ganze.163 A unity of action may be achieved even at the expense of a real unity of thought, and can in no sense be taken as evidence of, or as contributing to, this deeper unity. When we say that a state is not only a cultural association, but a cultural unit, we mean that it possesses more than a mere unity of action; it must have some degree of unity of purpose. In the history of so-called states this is often hard to discover, and yet the notion of the good life, of will as the basis of political life, assumes and postulates a certain degree of unity of purpose in every actual association. I have not, perhaps, said enough to establish this idea of will as the basis of the state, but it is sufficiently clear that any conception of unity must be coincident with some such idea of will, the two stand or fall together. (2) I have said, also, that a state is self-sufficing, and by that I do not mean the self-sufficiency (so-called) of isolation. Aristotle said that a state exists because of our need of a self-sufficing society in which to live,164 and a writer of to-day, that ‘the social process is one all-inclusive, Self-sufficing process.’165 Athens was a good deal more self-sufficing in the sense of isolated than any town or country of modern Europe, but no one living in that city, with its port harbouring the ships of all the world, could have placed this construction upon the words of Aristotle. A state is self-sufficing in the sense of being a self-sufficing organ of experience. No actual state possesses in itself all wisdom, none may claim self-sufficiency in point of content, but all true states must achieve it in point of capacity for experience. And this means that it must be more than an aggregate of persons. A state must have a tradition and common memory of experience, built [163] G.W.F. Hegel, ‘Preface’ to Phenomenology of Spirit, §20, tr. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 11. [’The True is the Whole’.] [164] Aristotle, Politics, Bk 3 ch. ix [‘the state is the union of families and villages in a perfect and self-sufficing life’; tr. Jowett]. [165] M.P. Follett, The New State Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government (London: Longmans, Green And Co., 1918), p. 59.
up into an individual language, art, culture, and social life, so that it can properly be called not a body of persons joined together by ties which time might loose, but a ‘working conception of life’166 which grows and develops, is modified and made more comprehensive, by new experience. Capacity to experience argues a definite content of experience, and the capacity grows with the content. These qualities are implied in the self-sufficiency which must be attributed to a state. It has become clear in the course of our discussion that ‘statehood’ is not something which may be attributed to an association of minds on historical grounds, nor on the grounds of a particular type of governmental organization. It is in the nature of a value judgment, a judgment as to the moral and cultural comprehensiveness of an association. And this presents us with a view of things which requires further elucidation. Briefly, we are driven to a conception of degrees of statehood. All human associations, we have seen, whatever their ostensible purpose, qua associations of minds, have in them the elementary grounds of statehood. And this, because (the object of will being necessarily cosmic) all human associations depend and issue from a will to live the ‘good life’. And no possible demonstration of repeated failure either fully to visualize the aim or to achieve it in history, can disturb this fact of logic.167 All associations—or, to use Burke’s word, all partnerships—do not come into being with the conscious object of fostering the ‘good life’, and yet, simply [166] B. Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London: Macmillan & Co., 1899), p. 151. [167] We remember the Spartan ambassador who, being asked in whose name he had come, replied: ‘In the name of the State, if I succeed; if I fail, in my own.’ [See Plutarch, ‘Lycurgus’, Lives, tr. J. Langhorne and W. Langhorne (London: Ward, Lock & Co., Limited, nd [1898]), pp. 40–1: ‘Pisistratidas going with some others, ambassador to the king of Persia’s lieutenants, was asked whether they came with a public commission, or on their own account, to which he answered, If successful, for the public; if unsuccessful, for ourselves.’]
because they are partnerships of human minds, they can neither will any lesser purpose without implicitly willing the whole, nor can they exist at all unless they possess the elementary qualities of a moral association. We must, then, attribute to all associations some degree, be it never so slight, of statehood. This may not lead to any radical change in our general attitude towards associations, but it is the object of a theorist to discover the truth about this relationship, and not to give guidance for a practical attitude. Following this, it is clear that the actual degree of statehood we may attribute to this or that association varies with the comprehensiveness of its conscious purposes and the intensity of its social unity. A Friendly Society will possess more of this quality than an association of bandits, and a University than a Friendly Society, but from start to finish it is a matter of degree. What shall we say about those associations which are commonly called states? We should note, first, that as a rule they will be found the most comprehensive associations of which we have any experience, and therefore it is roughly true to speak of them as states par excellence.168 This, however, must not blind us to the fact that, since they are finite entities, associations in the process of experiencing, they necessarily possess only a degree of unity and a degree of statehood. Secondly, it becomes clear that a given association (e.g., a European ‘state’) will not at all times and in all circumstances possess a constant degree of statehood. In times of crisis, when social experience becomes unified above the ordinary intensity, and focused upon a single object, the degree of [168] H. Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1917), p. 15, is prepared to deny this in some instances: ‘I should be prepared to argue … that in the England before the war the ideal of the trade-unions was a wider ideal than that which the State had attained, one is tempted to say, desired to attain.’ This has an intelligible meaning, but unless State is equated to government it is ridiculous enough. In any case, it has no validity whatever as an argument against the theory of the state I have here put forward.
statehood possessed by an association will be abnormally great. England in August 1914 was more of a state than she was during the great industrial strikes of 1911–1912. Other circumstances also may affect the degree of statehood which a given association attains. The discussions of Plato, Aristotle, and Rousseau concerning the proper size of a state are by no means beside the mark.169 For a great state, qua state, is not one which embraces a great population or an extensive territory, but one which achieves a great intensity of social unity. And in this matter we must bear in mind that unity means unity of purpose and will, and not merely unity of action and result. One of the most significant reasons for refusing to attribute an unlimited degree of statehood to those associations which are legally known as states, is that their size is governed by considerations of commerce, mere whim, or by other limited ends, rather than by reference to the good life or the excellence of souls. This for the present must conclude the general discussion of our view of the nature of the state, that is, the truest meaning we can attach to the thing. But there still remain a few points, which it was not possible to consider in the general argument, requiring special treatment. With the most important of these I will deal in four notes to this section.
[169] Plato, Laws, 737 [‘The land must be extensive enough to support a given number of people in modest comfort, and not a foot more is needed.’; tr. T.J. Saunders]; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk 9 ch. x § 3 [‘One cannot have a city with ten people and with 100,000 it would no longer be a city.’; tr. J.A.K. Thomson] and Politics, Bk 7 Ch. iv [‘Clearly then the best limit of the population of a state is the largest number which suffices for the purposes of life, and can be taken in at a single view.’; tr. B. Jowett]; Rousseau, Du contrat social, Bk 2 ch. x [‘The right relation...is that the land should suffice for the maintenance of the inhabitants, and that there should be as many inhabitants as the land can maintain.’; tr. G.D.H. Cole].
Note A: A State and the State. The relation between a state as (it is said) experience presents it to us, and the abstract something of which political philosophers speak as the State, has evoked much heart-searching and controversy in late years. Political philosophy from its earliest beginnings has agreed to concern itself with something which it has called the State, and the conception is too valuable to be lightly abandoned. Many explanations have been offered. It has been said that the State ‘is a brief expression for states qua states’. What does this mean? I have already devoted several pages to the discussion of the nature of a true definition, so my meaning will be clear when I say that the State is what a state is ‘by definition’. An actual state, so-called, in common with everything else, has features and aspects which are merely contingent to its essential qualities, and attention to these, though necessary for some purposes, invariably obscures the qualities which are most characteristic. To revert to our former example, a house may be an orphanage one week and an hotel the next, but we can think of it qua house, that is, apart from these superficial changes of use. This is what political philosophy does to a state. It will leave unsaid much of what goes to make up this or that ‘state’ at this or that particular time, but all that it says will be true, and true not only now, but at all times, true for the dimmest past as for the dimmest future. And this, because it refuses to concern itself with any account of its historical evolution or passing changes of form and allegiance, and refuses also to base its arguments on any of these features. Thus, when it is said that the State is the whole of moral and social experience and influence, it means that in essence my state is the whole of is the whole of my moral and social experience. And it is no valid argument to say (like many) that it is not, because when I use the word State that is what I mean by it. The only legitimate means of controverting the position is to prove that there is no whole to my moral experience. If the same assertion were made
and also the State were identified with its government or anything less than the spiritual whole to which we belong, there would be serious grounds for objection, but I venture to do no such thing. To use the word State is to express a belief that there is a whole of social experience and that this whole is of a particular nature.
Note B: The Ideal, the Real and the Actual. A great deal of confusion has arisen among students of political philosophy in the use of these terms. I have not so far ventured on their use, but I feel that a note on the subject is necessary because I do not see how a complete theory of political life (or anything else) is possible without bringing them in. In political philosophy these terms are used in a double connection; as qualifying the State, and as qualifying the finite will, and it is necessary to say a word on each topic. As with all subjects treated in this essay, the matter before us is one of definition, and we must conform to the principles already laid down. According to the view of the universe here adopted, it is a matter of no great importance where we start our effort to see a thing definitely, for to see with perfect definiteness the grossest error is to see the truth. We will start, then, at the popular notion of an ideal. It would be easier to start with something more coherent, but it may help to illuminate what I have called the philosophic method if we start as far away as this from the whole truth. Roughly stated, the popular view of an ideal is that it is something of unimpeachable goodness which now exists only in the imagination of men, and which it may be hoped will exist in the actual world at some future date. If we were thinking of a time other than our own, we might have to change the word ‘future’ for the word ‘past’. And though it is a matter of mere fashion to seek the Golden Age in the past or the future, it is an indication of the incoherence of the whole conception. An ideal is something essentially different from the present state of things. In the minds of some it is a state when workmen need do no work, when human beings need no longer suffer pain, when roads are no longer rough and steep, in brief, when the sea is no longer wet.170 Again, an ideal state of things is thought of [170] R. Burns, ‘My Love is like a Red, Red Rose’, Poetical Works, ed. J.L. Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 318: ‘And I will love thee still, my dear, / Till a’ the seas gang dry.’
as a perfect state of things. And popularly perfection may imply anything from a large income earned without toil, to a happy home preserved inviolate without anxiety or effort. Whether or not this is an accurate summary of the popular view of an ideal, is of no very great moment, it is a view. And if we approach it rightly, we shall see that even from this incoherent mass the truth may appear; that if we understand the meaning of ‘present’, it is true that the ideal is not of it; and that if we think ‘perfection’ out to the end, it is true that the ideal is the perfect. Under what conditions can the conception of an ideal state of things have any coherent meaning? First, we may say that the notion of an ideal home has a real meaning when, and only when, it is not a ‘castle in the air’. That is to say, an ideal relegated to the future is nothing unless it is all of a piece with the real facts of human life and human nature as they now are. Real facts are neither mere sensations, nor isolated phenomena, but coordinated parts of a unified experience. And the real facts of human nature are not contained in your or my opinion of the practical difficulties (sometimes called the ‘hard facts’) of living, or the qualities we look for in a good churchwarden, but are found only in a true definition of life and human nature which exhibits clearly the intimae essentiae of these complex phenomena. So then, an ideal society must grow out of the real nature of man. Just as a merely prima facie view of the self and society leads us to the conclusion that (at least) the self requires its society, so the most superficial view of an ideal postulates that it should grow out of what is real. There is an implication of this view which is important enough to require a remark. If it is true that an ideal state of society must, in order to be a coherent notion at all, grow out of the real nature of human life, those who in their schemes for an ideal society fall short of satisfying these conditions are properly and accurately called not, too ideal, but not ideal enough.171 A so-called ideal [171] See Hegel, History of Philosophy, ii. 204; E. Zeller, Plato and the Older Academy, tr. S.F. Alleyne and A. Goodwin (London: Longmans, Green, And Co., 1876), p. 269 [Zeller wrote at 269 that Plato’s ‘whole
scheme which does not grow out of reality is definitely and finally not ideal at all. There can be no question about this, and it is only the grossest misuse of words which has led us to speak of these baseless, meaningless schemes which have no part or lot with reality, as ideal. To return to our main subject. Is this all that we can say about an ideal? What is the real meaning and implication of the phrase ‘grow out of ’? It follows that in only a very limited sense (hereafter to be discussed) can it be said that an ideal is confined to the future, or to the points at which our desires are discrepant with the present state of things. An ideal society, properly so-called, can be none other than an actual, present, society taken at its truest and best. The idea that we have given, on one side a set of facts, and on the other a notion of something in the future, must be abandoned, because it is devoid of meaning. It follows also, that the ideal society, growing out of the real nature of men, can never be severed from reality. Try how we will, the two cannot be held apart. And the conclusions we may draw from this will appear when we have discussed the nature of the real. And finally it follows (as a kind of converse to what we have been saying) that ‘nothing can be made into what it is not capable of being.’172 This means that the ideal not only must grow out of the real, but in the fullest sense is contained in the real. Contained in it, not as, historically, the oak tree is contained in the acorn, but as, logically, the game of tennis is contained in the ball called a ‘tennis ball’. We philosophy is from the outset directed far less to the explanation of Becoming, than to the consideration of Being; the concepts hypostatized in the Ideas represent to us primarily that which is permanent in the vicissitude of phenomena, not the causes of that vicissitude.’]; Plato, Republic, 501a [The philosophical legislator ‘will have nothing to do either with individual or State, and will inscribe no laws, until they have either found, or themselves made, a clean surface’; tr. Jowett]. [172] B. Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.; New York: Macmillan & Co., 1892), p. 290, calls this the central principle of idealism.
have progressed, then, from our initial historical assertion about the relationship of the ideal and the real, to this logical assertion. But the real man, we have said all along, is man when he is fullest man; man with all the implications of his nature realized. Man, the complex, ill-coordinated phenomenon we meet with daily (in ourselves and in others) is not real in the true sense. He is not real because he is not fully realized. Things, most of them, as we experience them are full of contradictions. Even if these contradictions are not always visible, there is nearly always a state of disunion which admits the possibility of contradiction. But the real, in the fullest sense, can harbour no such contradictions. How can it be said that a body of experience is true, when, if only from its limitations, it contains actual error or admits the possibility of error? And if it is not true, how can it be real? The real, if it is anything, is a coherent whole, it is a unity so unified as to preclude the possibility of disunity. And this is what we have called the truth. The real thing is the thing as it truly exists. The true thing, the thing as it exists in its wholeness, is the real thing.173 And how does this differ from what we have called the ideal? In no respect whatever. The word Hegel uses for ‘wholeness’ is ‘reasonableness’, and if we are content to understand it (and not to abuse it) his assertion that was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig, is not so wide of the mark.174 Thought out to the end, as we have tried to do, the ideal not only grows out of the real, not only is contained in the real, but is the real. This, however, does not account for the whole of experience. Philosophers have introduced another term to complete the explanation. And they have introduced it, not wantonly, but because it has appeared necessary to describe the facts as they really are. This third term is the Actual. There are few minds so [173] Cf, Aristotle, Politics, Bk 1 ch. ii ( ) [‘For what each thing is when fully developed, we call its nature’; tr. Jowett]; Spinoza, Ethics, Bk II, df. 6 [Works, ii. 83: ‘Reality and Perfection I use as synonymous terms.’] [174] Hegel, ‘Preface’ to Philosophy of Right, p. xxvii. [‘What is rational is real; and what is real is rational.’]
obtuse as not to admit that it is a common experience for the actual to fall short of the wholly true. Even Mr Laski admits this of what he (wrongly) calls the ‘state’. The actual seldom is, and therefore need not be, the ideal; that is, the actual and the real differ in some important respects, and we have to ask, What is the relation existing between the two? Briefly and from one point of view only, it is one of imperfection to perfection, of partiality to wholeness. For a true view of this relationship we should remember that to see an error or imperfection whole is to see the truth. The universe is all of a piece, and there can be no such thing as a final and unexplainable anachronism. Experience presents us with actual states of society, these are partial and therefore partially unreal. But from a study of them we may pass from that which is so imperfect as to possess but a small degree of reality to the real thing which possesses its reality ‘without measure’. The ideal is latent in the actual, and actual in the real. It is true to say that an ideal is not of the present, if we mean by that to point out the discrepancy of the actual and the ideal, but it is an unwarranted historical assertion to say that the ideal is more of the future than of the present. Essentially it has no concern with this or that place or time.175 A great deal of unnecessary fuss has been made in the application of this view of things to volition. It follows from what has been said that a man’s real will is not (except he be omniscient) his actual will. And this can only be disputed, either by ignoring the meaning we have attached to the word ‘real’, or by showing [175] It has been said that ‘no ideal is worth while which does not grow from our actual life.’ (Follett, The New State, p. 52). To which I should reply: (1) That historically it is quite true that all advance towards perfection must be made by means of a series of actual states, of which the later possess a higher degree of reality than those which went before; but that an imperfect actual state, being in a sense a sub-contrary of the perfect whole, must be said to presuppose the latter, not vice versa; (2) that not only is no ideal worthwhile which has no relation to reality, but that it is not an ideal.
that the whole conception of the universe which has led to this position is false and incoherent. The first is merely inaccurate, and the second is a question of metaphysics and not to be argued by reference to law or constitutional history, or explained by anecdotal psychology.176 As for the identification of a man’s real will with the will of his society, that is a matter for discussion; but until we have made some attempt to answer the question, What is a man? the discussion would be unprofitable. It is sometimes asked by our empiricists, ‘Why do you not theorize the actual?’ But this is only the old question, ‘Why do you not stick to facts?’ put in another form. And to attempt this procedure is to answer the question, What would happen were we to theorize the actual? ‘To theorize’ means, to see as a whole. The actual is a small part of the whole, or a single aspect of it, which, when taken by itself is, by reason of its incompleteness, both meaningless and comparatively unreal. To see the actual in its wholeness is to see it filled out with all that it implies, supplemented by that which gives it meaning. A man’s actual will is a complex of contradictions, but if we theorize it we are inevitably led from this to the real will with its universal content. Philosophers always theorize the actual, they have no choice in the matter; but, once again, a theory of the actual can in no sense be achieved short of a consideration of the whole. Start where we will, a view of the whole must lead us to what is real. Mr Laski’s accusation that philosophers have devoted themselves to the ‘analysis of the “pure instance”, rather than an analysis of the actual experiments with which history presents us’, is meaningless nonsense.177 Either the ‘pure instance’ is the ‘real thing’ to which a [176] The first is Mr Hobhouse’s method, the second Mr Laski’s, and the third that of Mr Graham Wallas. [177] H. Laski, ‘Preface’ to The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921), p. vi. Mr Barker has tried to state the case in somewhat similar language, though with his different point of view, in Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day (London: Williams and Norgate, 1915), p. 80.
comprehensive consideration of ‘actual experiments’ leads us, or it is a void and meaningless conception.178
But in my opinion he fails owing to his perpetuation of the meaningless distinction between the real and the ideal. [Barker, Political Thought, wrote at p. 80: ‘we must take some account of the criticisms which [the idealist school] has to face. First and most obvious is … that it does not deal with things as they are. The State of which it conceives, resting on the free consent and co-operation of the moral will of every citizen, may be laid up in heaven, but it is not established on earth. Such criticism, however, rests on an entire misconception of the method of political theory. Political theory, like ethical theory, is concerned with what may be called the “pure” instance—with the conscience of the good man, and the “general will” of the right State. It assumes the best is the truest, and that the truest is the proper subject of study … There will always be some who will use the lower as the criterion of the higher: there will always be others—and they are not necessarily mistaken—who will use the higher as the criterion of the lower.’] [178] It will have been noted that I have mentioned only the least complex and difficult aspects of the relation between the real and the actual. It is, of course, vital to the conception that we should produce a theory which comprehends the necessity for the existence of an actual of this sort. This has hardly been accomplished, for in the end Bradley claimed no more than to have shown that it is not impossible that it should so exist.
Note C: A State and a Nation. Following the previous argument, it will appear that a nation, in so far as it is an association of minds, has in it the elementary grounds of statehood. Some nations achieve a higher degree of this quality than others: each case must be judged on its own merits. As it is, history affords us examples of all possible alternatives. Athens was an association of minds with a very high degree of statehood, but it was not a complete nation, that is to say, there were Greeks who were not Athenians. The Germans are to some extent a single nation, but to suppose that the geographical and governmental area which goes by the name of Germany is in any sense a single state, is to suppose something for which the most elementary facts give no warrant at all. While the Jews, possessing (at least until recently) no single geographical domicile, may be said, as a nation, to possess a degree of statehood higher than that of many national associations which have the additional advantage of a single government and geographical site. In the ordinary sense, then, the important, much-debated, historico-scientific question of nationality does not properly enter into our subject of study, and should not enter our discussion. And the juxtaposition of the state and the nation has no meaning whatever.
Note D: Some Definitions of the State. Most of the attempts to explain the nature of the State which have fallen to my notice possess such logical defects, and are founded upon so superficial a reading of the supposed ‘facts’ of political life, that some service may be rendered to accurate thinking by an examination of their inherent fallacies. In attempting this, I have no wish to put myself in the position of a judge of the individual merits of the various writers in this field. Few of them have touched the subject without enlightening some corner. Rather, we must cry with Brutus, ‘Age thou art sham’d.’179 For nothing is more striking than the manner in which the peculiar interests and studies of our time—those roughly to be called scientific and occupying themselves with questions of origin and development— are reflected in the views of the State and political life which are offered us on every side by modern writers. History has a dismal tale to tell of the crippling effect of the long-current substitution of pseudo-theoretical speculation for scientific research, and it is only in comparatively recent times that men have been willing to make a habit of preferring an accurate historical or scientific account of the origin or development of a custom, an institution, or a process to an account concocted to meet the demands of their irrational presupposition and petty prejudice. But for our own age has been reserved the distinction of elevating into a habit of mind an even more fatal substitution than ever crippled the infant energies of science—that by which a true theoretical treatment of the whole and real nature of a thing is replaced by some anile, though learned, enquiry into its origin and historical development. In our attention to historical details, we have lost our sense of the whole, that is of reality. And all this, and much else, is reflected nowhere more accurately than in the so-called definitions of modern political science. [179] Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I sc. ii.
In the course of reading I have collected some couple of hundred pretending explanations and definitions of the State, the more characteristic of which I now propose to divide into five classes according to the various forms they take, prefacing each division with an account of its particular logical inadequacies. It would be natural to commence with that subtle kind of ‘definition’, in the form ‘a is a’, which may be distinguished as verbal, since it substitutes a paraphrase of a word for a definition of a thing, and is often found to be no more than a translation of this word into other (and often more obscure) words. But I have noticed few ‘definitions’ in exactly this form, the reason for this probably being that the word ‘state’ is not so easily adapted as some to this kind of manipulation. Whatever we say of it we are liable to say something more than is necessarily inherent in the word itself. Perhaps Bosanquet’s merely verbal explanation that ‘“the State” is a brief expression for “states qua states”’ is the nearest approach we have to a statement in this form.180 (1) The first class is comprised of those ‘definitions’ which confuse the real and essential quality of statehood with a particular manifestation. For the true genus, these substitute a particular representative, taking no care to elucidate the characteristic degree and modification which it exhibits. Their fault is that they are too hasty; their judgment is based upon a first look. The most important office of thought of any kind is to distinguish the various importance of the peculiarities of particular things, and to contemplate the essence of a thing, as revealed in a true classification, abstracted from its propria. Such conceptions as of the latent heat of ice are the result of this kind of abstraction; and why our ‘scientific’ friends should accept such a notion as commonplace, and yet jib at the idea of a latent quality of statehood in associations to all appearance definitely contradictory of such a supposition is difficult to understand. All that a ‘definition’ of this [180] B. Bosanquet, Social and International Ideals Being Studies in Patriotism (London: Macmillan, 1917), p. 274.
class is able to effect is to identify a genus with the most common form of its species—hardly a profitable proceeding. ‘The State is the embodiment and personification of the national power.’181 ‘Der Staat ist die politisch organisirte Volksperson eines bestimmten Landes.’182 ‘The State [is] the nation in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage.’183 ‘Where there is no political law there is no State. Political law is thus the criterion of the State, and in learning the nature and limits of political laws we are learning the nature and limits of the State.’184 ‘By a state I mean a body of people amongst whom government exists with power to enforce internal
[181] [Oakeshott’s reference is to J.K. Bluntschli, The Theory of the State, tr. D.G. Ritchie, P.E. Matheson and R. Lodge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), p. 493, but this passage has not been traced]. [182] J.K. Bluntschli, Lehre vom modernen Staat, 3 vols (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1875–6), i. 24. [Quoted in T.E. Holland, The Elements of Jurisprudence, 6th edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), p. 42, also apparently the source of several of Oakeshott’s subsequent definitions.] [183] M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1889), p. 36. [184] R.M. MacIver, Community A Sociological Study Being an Attempt to Set out the Nature and Fundamental Laws of Social Life (London: Macmillan, 1936 [1917]), p. 30.
order, and to direct its military resources in defence or aggression.’185 ‘The Constitution of a State is a collection of rules which determine who are the persons in whom the powers of the State are vested, how their powers are to be exercised, and how the citizens are to be protected against abuse of power.’186 ‘The State springs from the union of a number of tribes under a single head, or of several communities under a capital city. It presupposes a people, a territory and autonomy.’187 ‘The State is the politically organized person of the nation in a particular country.’188 ‘In general terms, then, the state may be defined as a community in which there does exist a common law. It is an association of men, occupying a definite territory, in which a common sense of right issues in general agreement regarding the value of both public and private interests.’189 ‘That moment of the organization of every society, in which it presents itself as independent, dominant, [185] C. Read, Natural and Social Morals (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1909), p. 168. [186] T. Raleigh, Elementary Politics (London: H. Frowde, 1886), p. 3. [187] Lioy, Philosophy of Right, ii. 76. [188] ibid., ii. 77. [189] G.H. Sabine and W.J. Shepard, ‘Introduction’ to H. Krabbe, The Modern Idea of the State, tr. Sabine and Shepard (London and New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1922), p. lxxv.
and capable of asserting its own conditions of life by force, forms always a distinct phase in the process of association; and whenever any particular society assumes this form, it appears as the state.’190 ‘Civitas est coetus perfectus liberorum hominum, juris fruendi et communis utilitatis causa sociatus.’191 A state is a body of free persons united together for the common benefit, to enjoy peaceably what is their own, and to do justice to others.’192 The modern state is ‘a body of intellectuals, which is invested with privileges, and which possesses means of the kind called political for defending itself against the attacks made on it by other groups of intellectuals, eager to possess the profits of public employment.’193
[190] A. Pulszky, The Theory of Law and Civil Society (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887), p. 216. [191] H. Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis [On the Rights of War and Peace, Bk 1 ch. i § 14, tr. W. Whewell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1853), p. 6: ‘The State, is a perfect [that is, independent] collection of free men, associated for the sake of enjoying the advantages of jus, and for common utility.’ The Latin text is quoted in Holland, Elements, p. 42.] [192] US Supreme Court, Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 Dallas, 456. [Quoted in Holland, Elements, p. 42.] [193] G. Sorel, La décomposition du Marxisme (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1910), p. 53. [The translation, possibly by Oakeshott, is of the following passage: ‘l’Etat moderne [est] un corps d’Intellectuels qui est investi de privilèges et qui possède des moyens dits politiques pour se défendre contre les attaques que lui livrent d’autres groups d’Intellectuels avides de posséder les profits des emplois publics.’]
‘The state is not society, it is an historical form of it, as brutal as it is abstract. It was born historically in all countries of the marriage of violence, rapine, pillage, in a word war and conquest.’194 ‘The modern state is clearly visible as a territorial society divided into government and subjects.’195 ‘La réunion de toutes les forces particulières forme qu’on appelle l’état politique.’196 ‘We may … define a State as a mass of individuals (fixed, more or less), spread unequally over a fixed and limited territory, naturally welded into a society of which every member is more or less sensitive to and jealous of all attacks upon the life of the society from both without and within; and this society, moreover, is ruled definitely and permanently, and for all imperial purposes, absolutely or constitutionally, by a central [194] M. Bakunin, ‘Dieu et l’Etat’, Ouevres, 6 vols (Paris: P-V Stock, 1895–1913), i. 287. [The translation, possibly by Oakeshott, is of the following passage: ‘L’Etat n’est point la société, il n’en est qu’une forme historique aussi brutale qu’abstraite. Il est né historiquement dans tous les pays du mariage de la violence, de la rapine, du pillage, en un mot de la guerre et de la conquête.’] [195] H. Laski, Authority in the Modern State (London: Oxford University Press, 1919), p. 22. (The phrase ‘territorial society’, if it means anything, implies that the vis vitae of a society can be expressed in terms of territory; a most amazing proposition. If, on the other hand, it is thrown in so as to help us identify a state when we see one, it is even more amazing in a pretending definition.) [196] Gravina quoted in Montesquieu, L’esprit des lois avec les notes de l’auteur et un choix d’observations, Bk 1 ch. iii (Paris: Didot Frères, 1872), p. 7. [‘The union of all individual strengths forms what is called the political state’, tr. A. Cohler, B.C. Miller, & H.S. Stone.]
government, which, after a certain period of time recognized by all or the majority of its fellow States, has become legitimate.’197 (2) The second class of pretending definitions or explanations of the nature of the State consists of those which identify the whole with a particular activity or function (sometimes with the sum of all the apparent functions) which appear as common to all states. The activity usually chosen for this purpose is what we call government. Though the logical errors inherent in this process are of an exceedingly elementary nature, they have laid so firm a hold on modern writers that it were well to go to the trouble of enumerating them. First, even if it were proved up to the hilt that the State is an association of persons possessing a definite governmental organization, it would be the grossest blunder to suppose that states could be identified by choosing out these human associations which possess governments. The proof of an affirmative in one thing (which in this case is never even offered) can by no conceivable logic be taken as the proof of the negative in another; unless, of course, the statement is in the form ‘a is a’, in which case it would not be a definition. Secondly, this procedure involves the even more egregious logical flaw of cum hoc, ergo propter hoc, or the assumption of a logical connection between things where no more than an historical association (not even causal) can be demonstrated. A building of some kind is common to all the colleges of Cambridge, but it would be absurd to define the vis vitae of a college as existing in the fact of this possession. And though it were proved that such a possession was common to all the colleges in all the universities of the world, this would neither increase nor abate in any degree whatever the falsity of the reasoning which identifies the essence of a thing with that which happens to accompany it in certain or all of its manifestations. It is not more wrong to assume, because boots have been found in the [197] H.S. Seal, On the Nature of State Interference (London: Williams & Norgate, 1893), p. 66.
sea, that fishes wear them, than to assume that government is the essence of the state. Thirdly, a real definition must consist neither in an account of a single property, activity, or function of the thing to be defined, nor in all its properties, activities, and functions added together, but in an account of its complete nature such that the principle of its possibility is demonstrated, and the informing law of its life explained. Medicine has long since achieved the scientific distinction between a cause and a symptom, but, for all their science, our political thinkers have failed to recognize that what accompanies does not explain, and what causes does not define. As a disease is not properly described by one of its symptoms or by the sum of them, but by the essential condition of the whole body or that part most intimately affected, so a state is not to be defined by a list of its constituent properties, but by a revelation of the law of its life. It may be noted that these definitions or explanations, when they make use of the form ‘the state is …’ illustrate the first misuse of the word ‘is’, i.e., ‘is’ used for ‘implies’ or ‘is sometimes (or always) accompanied by’. ‘The modern state is … nothing so much as a great public-service corporation.’198 ‘The state is concerned only with those social relations that express themselves by means of government.’199 ‘Suffice it that in general the State is required as the organ of the community for the execution of all purposes for which common force or the common resources are essential.’200 [198] Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty, p. 109. [199] Laski, Authority in the Modern State, pp. 26–7. [200] [Oakeshott’s reference is to S. Amos, The Science of Politics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1883), p. 53, but this passage has
‘De Staat ist die Form der geregelten und gesicherten Ausübung der socialen Zwangsgewalt’201 ‘The prevailing conception of the State in our own day is that of a vast mechanism for controlling and regulating the action of Society.’202 ‘The State we may define in a rough preliminary way, as the institution, or system of institutions, which, in order to secure certain elementary common purposes and conditions of life, unites under a single authority the inhabitants of a clearly marked territorial area. It is the largest and the most powerfully equipped institution within Society.’203 ‘The essence of the State is that it is the repository of the collective force of its citizens … The State is constituted by the combination of all the inhabitants in a certain area using their united force in accordance with the commands of a government.’204
not been traced.] [201] R. von Jhering, Der Zweck im Recht, 2 vols (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1893–8), i. 307. [‘The State is the form of the regulated and assured exercise of the compulsory force of Society’: quoted in Holland, Elements, p. 42.] [202] S.H. Butcher, Some Aspects of the Greek Genius (London and New York: Macmillan & Co., 1891), p. 46. [203] H.J.W. Hetherington and J.H. Muirhead, Social Purpose A Contribution to a Philosophy of Civic Society (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1918), p. 225. [204] Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction, p. 45.
‘The essential merit of the State is that it prevents the internal use of force by private persons.’205 ‘The State is essentially a mere institution designed for protecting all against external attacks and individuals from attacks within its borders.’206 ‘The State is nothing else than the nation organized for the purpose of government.’207 ‘The revenue … is the state.’208 As currently employed in that department of political science which concerns itself, not with the relations of separate political entities, but with the political composition of society as a whole, ‘the word state expresses the abstract idea of government in general, or the governing authority as opposed to the governed, and is thus used by Herbert Spencer in all his discussions of government and society. Louis XIV’s “l’état, c’est moi”, Rousseau’s theory of the “Contrat Social”, and Bastiat’s “donne à l’ état le strict nécessaire et garde le reste pour toi,” all imply this opposition.’209 ‘The action of the State, or sovereign power, or government in a civilized community shapes itself into [205] ibid., p. 75. [206] A. Schopenhauer, ‘On Jurisprudence and Politics’, in Parerga and Paralipomena, tr. E.F.J. Payne, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), ii. 241. [207] J.E.C. Welldon, The Consecration of the State (London: Macmillan & Co., 1902), p. 14. [208] E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Works, ed. H. Rogers, 2 vols (London: Samuel Holdsworth, 1837), i. 467. [209] Sir Thomas Barclay, ‘State’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn, 29 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–11), xxv. 799.
the threefold functions of legislature, judicature and administration.’210 The State [république] is ‘un droit gouvernement de plusieurs mesnages, et de ce qui leur est comun, avec puissance souveraine.’211 ‘Ma definition de l’Estat, ou de ce que chez les Latins on appelle Respublica est: que c’est une grande société dont le but est la seureté commune.’212 ‘The state can require no performance and impose no restraint, can command its subjects in nothing and forbid them in nothing, except on the basis of a legal prescription.’213 ‘The life of the state is crystallized in the form of definite institutions, that is its ordinances have to be incorporated in laws and rules of universal application.’214 The State is ‘a society living under laws, which define, and maintain against aggression, certain specific rights [210] Anonymous, ‘Government’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, xii. 297. [211] J. Bodin, Les six livres de la république, Bk 1 ch. i, ed. C. Frémont, M-D. Couzinet, and H. Rochais, 6 vols (Paris: Fayard, 1986), i. 27. [212] G.W. Leibniz, ‘Lettres’, quoted in P. Janet, Histoire de la science politique dans ses rapports avec la morale, 3rd edn, 2 vols, (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1887), ii. 247. [213] P. Laband, Das Staatsrecht des deutschen Reichs, 3 vols (Tübingen: Verlag der H. Laupp’schen Buchhandlung, 1876–82), ii. 173, quoted in Krabbe, Modern Idea of the State, p. 1. [214] L.T. Hobhouse, Social Evolution and Political Theory: Columbia University Lectures (New York: Columbia, 1911), p. 186.
belonging to individuals as citizens, or to society as a whole.’215 ‘Civitas nihil aliud est quam hominum multitudo, aliquo societatis vinculo colligata.’216 ‘Res publica … coetus multitudinis, juris consensu, et utilitatis communione sociatus [est].’217 ‘Civitatis haec commodissima videtur definitio, quod sit persona moralis composita, cujus voluntas, ex plurium pactis implicita et unita, pro voluntate omnium habetur, ut … securitate commune uti possit.’218 ‘[T]he Common-wealth is one Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude, by mutuall Covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, [215] R.A. Duff, Spinoza’s Political and Ethical Philosophy (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1903), p. 245. [216] St Augustine, De civitate dei, Bk 15 ch. viii. [The City of God, tr. M Dods, 2 vols (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1871), ii. 63: ‘a civic community … is nothing else than a multitude of men bound together by some associating tie’. The Latin text is quoted in Holland, Elements, p. 41.] [217] Cicero, De re publica, Bk 1§ 39 [Republic, tr. N. Rudd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 19: ‘a republic is … a numerous gathering brought together by legal consent and community of interest’. The Latin text is quoted in Holland, Elements, p. 41.] [218] S. Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium [Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Bk 7 ch. ii §13, tr. B. Kennett (Oxford: L. Lichfield, 1703), p. 151: ‘the most proper Definition of a Civil State seems to be this, “It is a Compound Moral Person, whose Will, united and tied together by those Covenants which before pass’d amongst the Multitude, is deem’d the Will of All; to the end [of] maintaining the common Peace and Security.”’]
to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their Peace and Common Defence.’219 ‘The chief purposive organization of civil society is the state, the organization through which the social mind dominates the whole autogenous society, prescribes forms and obligations to all minor purposive associations, and shapes the social composition. Coordinating all activities and relations, the state maintains those conditions under which all its subjects may live “a perfect and self-sufficing life.”’220 ‘Every state … recognizes obligations to literature, science, and art, and undertakes to discharge them by supporting universities and such institutions as the French Academy.’221 (3) The third class, embracing perhaps the most wholly baseless of all forms of ‘definition’, is composed of a variety of descriptions of the origin of the so-called empirical state, put forward as definitions of the thing itself. In matters of clear thinking, there is no distinction which must be kept more steadily in mind than that between the causes and antecedents which produce a thing, and the grounds or reasons which justify it and comprehend the possibility of its existence. The first is a purely historical enquiry, the second is within the province of philosophy. I have already discussed the relations of those two studies, and more particularly the relation as exemplified in psychology and metaphysics, and [219] T. Hobbes, Leviathan, Bk 2 ch. xvii [Quoted in Holland, Elements, p. 42.] [220] Giddings, Principles of Sociology, p. 174. [Giddings quotes Aristotle, Politics, Bk 3 ch. ix] [221] Giddings, Principles of Sociology, p. 179.
there is no need to repeat the arguments. The reason for the popularity of the confusion which takes an explanation of cause for a true definition is difficult to come at; perhaps it arises from the prevalent vulgar sophism of ‘political’ speakers, when they try to discredit their opponent by referring to his ancestors and the circumstances of his birth, or from the legally necessary, though metaphysically indefensible, appeal to precedent. It is not easy to choose out passages illustrating this type of logical error, because in most cases it infects whole works and forms a kind of mental assumption of the authors, thus wholly governing their point of view. ‘If we knew the origin of the State it might be expected to throw some light upon its relations to the individual, upon the antiquity and hereditary and traditionary character of this adaption to others, or upon the difficulty of reconciling its claims with his. If, for example, we knew that the State was always founded upon conquest, this might be thought to explain the irreconcilability of many men to its claims more easily than if it could be shown to have resulted from an agreement, or to have developed from the Family.’222 ‘We must ceaselessly remember that the monistic theory of the state was born in an age of crisis and that each period of its revivification has synchronized with some momentous event which has signalized a change in the distribution of political power.’223 (It would be difficult to find a statement more egregiously illogical than this. Not only are questions of origin and validity [222] Read, Natural and Social Morals, p. 167. [223] Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty, p. 233.
irredeemably confounded, but the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc argument is urged with engaging simplicity.) (4) The fourth class comprises ‘definitions’ for special purposes which are admitted as such. These are superior to any of those we have yet examined, in that, though they have no more right than their predecessors to be called definitions, they admit their own limitations and are only definitely false when used for purposes for which they were never intended. The admission of the limited scope of these definitions is sometimes contained in the passage itself, but more often in the nature of the work. A form of definition is justifiable in a work on jurisprudence which is inexcusable in a pretending contribution to the problem of the real and whole nature of the state. ‘A State can be defined, in legal language, as a territory or territories over which there is a government claiming unlimited authority.’224 ‘A “State” is a numerous assemblage of human beings, generally occupying a certain territory, amongst whom the will of the majority, or of an ascertainable class of persons, is by the strength of such a majority, or class, made to prevail against any of their number who oppose it.’225 ‘In constitutional law, the state is the power by which rights are created and maintained, by which the acts
[224] A.E. Zimmern, Nationality & Government With Other Wartime Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918), p. 56. [225] Holland, Elements, p. 40.
and forbearances necessary for their maintenance are habitually enforced.’226 (5) In a fifth class I have gathered a number of definitions which, whether or not they achieve the fullness of content and comprehensiveness necessary for a perfect definition, are at least cast in the true form, and reach out towards the law of the state’s life, and an explanation of the principle of its possibility. ‘The State is the name we give to the spiritual whole.’227 ‘The State is not a number of persons, but a working conception of life.’228 ‘The State is … the operative criticism of all institutions.’229 ‘The State is a moral and intellectual domain.’230 ‘The State is not something arbitrarily made, it does not arise by contract between men, nor by the power of one or more individuals. The state grows like an organism, but not according to the laws, nor for the ends, of mere natural life: it has its foundation in the higher moral
[226] W.R. Anson, The Law and Custom of the Constitution, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886–92), i. 2. [227] [Oakeshott cites Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, p. lvii, but this passage has not been traced.] [228] Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 151. [229] ibid., p. 150–1. [230] [Attributed by Oakeshott to Friedrich Julius Stahl but not traced.]
tendencies of man, and is a sphere for the realization of moral ideas, it is not a natural, but a moral organism.’231 The State [society] is ‘a partnership in all science … in all art … in every virtue, and in all perfection.’232 ‘Hegel means by the state, not the machine of government, but all that fulfills, in the actual community, the individual’s mind and will.’233 ‘The state is always the great Yes, not the great No.’234 ‘We need not fear the state if we could understand it as the unifying power.’235
[231] G. Waitz, Gründzuge der Politik (Kiel: Ernst Homann, 1862), p. 5. [Oakeshott’s translation of the following passage, ‘Der Staat ist nichts willkürlich Gemachtes, nicht durch Betrag der Menschen, nicht durch Gewalt eines oder einiger Einzelnen entstanden … Der Staat erwächst organisch, als ein Organismus; aber nicht nach den Gesetzen und für die Zwecke des Naturlebens; sondern er ruht auf den höheren sittlichen Unlagen der Menschen, in ihm walten sittliche Ideen: er ist kein natürlicher, ein ethischer Organismus’ , is identical to that in Bluntschli, Theory of the State, tr. Ritchie, p. 76 n.] [232] Burke, Reflections, i. 417. [233] B. Bosanquet, ‘Patriotism in the Perfect State’, in The International Crisis in its Ethical and Psychological Aspects Lectures Delivered in February and March 1915 by Eleanor M. Sidgwick Gilbert Murray A.C. Bradley L.P. Jacks G.F. Stout B. Bosanquet Under the Scheme for Imperial Studies in the University of London at Bedford College for Women (London: Humphrey Milford for Oxford University Press, 1915), pp. 132–54, at p. 133. [234] Follett, The New State, p. 141. [235] ibid., p. 314.
‘The State is Society under its most organized form.’236 ‘The State is the embodiment of concrete freedom.’237 ‘The State is the realized ethical idea or ethical spirit. It is the will which manifests itself, makes itself clear and visible, substantiates itself.’238 ‘The basal principle of the political state is the substantive unity, which is the ideality of its elements.’239
[236] W.R. Inge, Outspoken Essays, 2nd Ser. (London: Longman’s, Green, & Co, 1922), p. 67. [237] Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §260, p. 248. [238] ibid., §257, p. 240. [239] ibid., §275, p. 283.
The Self As in the case of the State, we must not be surprised to find that the meaning for philosophy of the word ‘self ’ differs from the ordinarily accepted meaning. There is no necessity that makes this so, but we should at least be prepared to find that it is so. For instance, in law and for ordinary purposes of identity my self is considered to be my body. No one can enter my body and act with it. When my body has committed an act, the alternative before the law is, either my self committed the act and I am responsible for it, or I was in such a state of mind as relieves me of this responsibility; but in no case can it be conjectured that someone else did it. For law, and for practical purposes, the self and the body are thought of as commensurate. But this gives no warrant at all for assuming it to be a true theoretical definition. What is useful is not necessarily true; in fact, it is often found that in practice theoretical considerations (i.e. consideration of the thing as a whole and for its own sake) are best left unargued. A great variety of theories has been put forward in definition of self, but I shall make no attempt to discuss them all, or even to refute adequately those which are discussed but not accepted. As heretofore, my aim is constructive and not critical; it is to focus the telescope, and not to examine the features of the landscape for their own sake. It will be found that most theories of self fall into one of two classes. (i) The class which postulates some centre or nucleus behind experience, and calls this self. A kind of thingin-itself. And (ii) the class which, in some form or other, thinks of self as ‘the concrete filling’ of the mind. A self is its experiences and activities. (i) I do not propose to say much in refutation of the theories of the first class. For the most part, they are what have been called
‘theories of the first look’,240 because they conform very much to the first appearance of things, and in one form or other are found to be at the back of the minds of those who would say that they ‘had no theory’. The form of argument which has been most successful against theories of this sort, takes the line that (a) it is impossible to find this ‘centre’, and (b) even if it were discoverable, it would be so small and characterless a minimum entity that to identify it with the self would be not short of ridiculous.241 (ii) In the second class there are four theories which require discussion. But it will be found that three of them, in emphasizing a single aspect of self and its experience, fail to comprehend the whole. (a) It has been seriously contended that a self is its body.242 But though the body must be considered one of our closest experiences, and as the medium through which, in one way or another, all our experiences come, it is impossible to justify the assumption that it is, itself, anything like the sum of our experiences. It is not, historically, one of our first experiences, and, as we shall see later on, a close inspection will reveal an extreme difficulty in isolating any one thing which may be called [240] See Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 80, and B. Bosanquet, ‘Do Finite Individuals Possess a Substantive or an Adjectival Mode of Being’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 18 (1918), 479– 506, at 493. [241] See F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), p. 88. [‘It may be suggested that the self is the matter in which I take personal interest … And interest consists mainly, though not wholly, in pain and pleasure. This general view may serve to lead us to a fresh way of taking self; but it obviously promises very little result for metaphysics.’] [242] W. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Longman’s, Green, & Co., 1912), p. 170 n. [‘The individualized self … is a part of the content of the world experienced. The world experienced (otherwise called the “field of consciousness”) comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest … The word “I”, then, is primarily a noun of position.’]
a body. (b) Secondly, there is the theory which contends that a self is a kind of constant average mass of experiences. This has been met by the fact that it is impossible to discover any average mass of experiences which does not change constantly. To accept this theory is to make the search for self a hunt after an elusive entity which has the same form for no two consecutive moments. It might also be added that this theory condemns a self as an abstraction, for there is nothing more unreal than an average. Averages may have their practical uses; but from the theoretical standpoint they are too full of contradiction to be allowed a separate existence. (c) And thirdly, there is the theory that a self is that in which interest is felt. The truth or falsehood, wholeness or partiality, of this depends entirely upon the meaning we attach to ‘interest’. Nettleship, for instance, uses the word so as to include all conscious experience. We have varying degrees of ‘interest’ in a thing as we experience it more or less fully.243 In this sense, as we shall see, a self may be roughly thought of as that in which interest is taken. But if ‘interest’ is used (as in Bradley) as an equivalent for sensational experience, mere feeling, we shall discover that it is an inadequate notion. But instead of arguing about the various theories put forward, and the meanings of words, let us try to build up a conception for ourselves, thinking all the time of the ‘real things’ which give words their meaning so far as they have any. It has been truly remarked that ‘the fact of one’s own existence, in some sense, is quite beyond doubt’;244 and the most elementary way of looking at a self is to regard it as a thing among other things. When we have made clear to ourselves its properties qua thing, it will be time enough to consider whether these must be enlarged or modified when it is regarded qua self. The question which presents itself is, What is a thing? At first we are inclined to call a ‘thing’ that which seems to stand out from its environment [243] Nettleship, Remains, i. 17. [244] Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 76.
with a certain observable degree of self-subsistence and selfcontainedness, as we say. And this introduces the notion which lies at the base of all theories of the first look, that we may place on one side the ‘thing’ and on the other its environment. If this is a coherent notion, surely we must be able to decide exactly what is the ‘thing’ and what is its environment? But often enough, in our commonest experiences, the difference between them does not stand out with that degree of clearness we should desire. If we said, for example, that a plant was what we could take away and put somewhere else, we should be faced with a double problem. How far is the plant in its present position affecting its ‘environment’, that is, how far does its environment, for being what it is, depend upon the plant? And, how far does that which is removable in the plant depend, for the continuance of an identical existence, upon its environment? For even if it is possible to remove the plant without removing either soil or air, it is still true that the plant depends upon access to some soil and some air. There are alternative ways of answering these questions, and if they are stated clearly there should be little doubt which is the superior. (i) We may say that common experience forces us to the conclusion that everything is determined by its relations with other things, and to suppose a ‘thing’ entirely out of relation is to suppose nothing. A ‘thing’ out of all relation, is not a thing. Words, even sentences, we know, may mean anything when taken out of their context, and ‘may mean anything’ is equivalent to meaning nothing. Locke has, perhaps, put this as well as anyone else. ‘We are then quite out of the way’, he says, ‘when we think, that Things contain within themselves the Qualities, that appear to us in them.’ And again, ‘This is certain, Things, however absolute and entire they seem in themselves, are but Retainers to other parts of Nature, for that which they are most taken notice of by us.’245 The point is almost too obvious to require emphasis, but its application to the idea of ‘environment’ should be noted. Environment [245] J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk 4 ch. vi §11, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 587.
may always, with varying degrees of accuracy according to our scientific knowledge, be divided into ‘things’. If we represent the ‘thing’ by A, then ‘not-A’, the whole of the universe excluding A, is made up of a definite number of other things, B, C, D, E etc., some of which may be called the immediate ‘environment’ of A, but to all of which A stands in some relation. And all that we may say of A, qua thing, is equally true of B, C, D, E etc. Nor does it require great application to see that our knowledge of A is commensurate with our knowledge of ‘not-A’. That is, to know one thing perfectly argues an equal knowledge of the whole universe. We may, then, formulate two propositions, both of which are true. (a) A thing depends on its environment. (b) An environment depends upon its ‘things’. This is one manner of regarding the problem. The ‘thing’, we say, is necessarily related to other things with varying degrees of propinquity. (ii) Now for the alternative. Our first method of approach, as Locke’s phraseology makes clear, assumes that the ‘thing’ is its body. Locke uses the word several times in this passage. ‘The Qualities observed in a Load-stone, must needs have their Source far beyond the Confines of that body’; and ‘we in vain search for that Constitution within the Body of a Fly or an Elephant, upon which depend those Qualities and Powers we observe in them.’246 And, whether or not we use the word ‘body’, it is clear enough that the theory depends upon a notion that the thing is in some sense distinguishable from its environment. It admits the fact that the plant, to be itself, must be thought of in relation to its environment, but by ‘the plant’ it means simply its body. To put the alternative in close juxtaposition; either (a) we must say that the ‘thing’ is the body, but that we cannot assume that it is selfcomplete, because it depends entirely upon its relations. That is, many admittedly essential features must be considered as residing
[246] Locke, loc. cit.
outside the ‘thing’ itself.247 Or (b) that the ‘thing’ is the whole, the body and its inseparable environment; and so things themselves are not what they physically appear. The latter conclusion seems to me unavoidable, for the following reasons. First, the ‘thing’ must mean ‘the whole thing’ and not ‘part of the thing’, and the whole thing (e.g. in the case of the plant) is the body and its environment. Secondly, though it may be desirable to draw the line somewhere between the thing and its environment, there is not the smallest justification (except for practical purposes, which are here entirely inadmissible) for drawing the line between the apparent body and its environment. And thirdly, that it is as empty a delusion to suppose that a ‘thing’ has any being (even physical being) or meaning when thought of apart from its ‘environment’, as to suppose that a word has any definite significance without a context.248 Certain conclusions may be drawn from this; and some of them have direct bearing upon the subject in hand. We may say that a complete thing has no environment, for to view a thing as complete is to view it as the universe which it implies. Thinghood is a matter of degree and circumstance. A phrase may be considered a ‘thing’, in a limited sense, but place it in a sentence and its lesser degree of thinghood is swallowed up in the larger degree possessed by the sentence. The sentence, that is, is nearer to comprehending the universe than the phrase Sic ipsis in rebus item iam materiai concursus motus ordo positura figurae
[247] Locke, loc. cit.: ‘Their observable Qualities, Actions and Powers are owing to something without them’. [248] The word ‘context’ as I have used it throughout may, of course, mean merely the adjacent words and phrases, but also that context of thought which is meaning.
cum permutantur, mutari res quoque debent.249 The thingness of a thing is its complete nature, what it is by definition. And since a thing, as we know it, can never, except artificially and for specialized purposes, be separated from its environment, the conception is finally applicable only to that which has a degree of wholeness which we can attribute to the universe alone. Let us return to the point from which we set out. We have been considering the self qua thing, and we may suppose that, whatever else we may say about the self qua self, we cannot deny its qualities as a thing. The self may be more than a ‘mere thing’, but it cannot be less. Whatever we may finally discover the self to be, the most obvious way in which it makes an advance on mere thinghood is by its consciousness. The full meaning of consciousness is not easily run to earth, and its implications are so various that I may be excused anything like a full discussion of the topic. But, as we experience it (that is, our consciousness of self), it is largely, if not entirely, social. To say that the self is conscious of itself means, among other things, that it lives in reference to ‘other’ objects. And our next step must be to discover the exact nature of its relationship to its world, and the method of its reference to it. In this it would seem that we were forced to evacuate our purely theoretical position, and step down on to the at least quasi-scientific ground of psychology. And to a certain extent this is so. But by this, we should understand that we are not ‘basing’ metaphysics on psychology, but merely taking the phenomena observed by this latter study and making [249] Lucretius, De rerum natura, II. 1020. [Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, tr. J.S. Watson (London: Bohn, 1851), p. 91: ‘So likewise even in things themselves, when the intervals, passages, connexions, weights, impulses, collisions, movements, order, position, and configurations of the atoms of matter are interchanged, the things which are formed from them must also be changed’.]
an attempt to ascertain their meaning.250 For myself, I shall keep within the most elementary and most easily ascertainable ‘facts’ of observation. The self has been considered to have three main aspects. The reason why it is impossible to call these aspects ‘parts’ is obvious; the reason why they cannot all be called ‘activities’ will appear immediately. These aspects have been variously termed; but the commonest may be tabulated in a manner which shows those that are considered equivalent. 1 Feeling Sensation (Discrimination) Assimilation
2 Cognition
3 Volition
Apperception
Will
Knowledge
Let us briefly examine the nature of each of these classes. (i) That which we call feeling or sensation is so termed because it cannot properly be dignified with the title of experience. What is the ‘real thing’ which corresponds to the word feeling? We are all aware, in our efforts to master our world, of a certain marginal experience (there seems no other word for this that is but a shadow) which is not, and perhaps never will be, co-ordinated, made ‘part of ourselves’ as we say. A man with a great faculty for what is called ‘verbal memory’ is always in danger of collecting and having ready for certain limited uses, a store of facts the meaning of which has never come home to him. He holds them [250] Bradley, Appearance and Reality, pp. 76, 120. [‘I must [try] to fix some of the meanings in which self is used. And I am forced to trespass inside the limits of psychology; as, indeed, I think is quite necessary in several parts of metaphysics. I do not mean metaphysics is based upon psychology. I am quite convinced that such a foundation is impossible, and that, if attempted, it produces a disastrous hybrid which possesses the merits of neither science’; ‘for metaphysics a principle, if it is to stand at all, must stand absolutely by itself.’]
within his memory, but they are all the time foreign to himself, and unless his faculty of memorizing is exceptional these facts would never present themselves to him in those times of sudden need or deepest emotion, when we act and speak ‘out of ourselves’ and not merely out of our memories. To put it another way, these vague feelings have never passed from memory into judgment. The simplest example will suffice to illustrate the point. All of us have in memory a certain store of maxims, and while we cannot name the day when we learnt them, the day when we first understood them stands out in clear relief, for it was connected with a real experience. ‘A maxim’, says Thomas Hardy, ‘glibly repeated from childhood remains practically unmarked till some mature experience enforces it.’251 It is only with painful experience that our first copy-book sentences pass from memory into mind, from sensation into character. A man who lives by his feelings is usually considered to be capricious, and this is so because there is no ordered experience behind his judgments. He has assimilated his ‘knowledge’ by mere spontaneous association. It may be definite enough as far as it goes, but it is essentially disordered, lacking any sort of unity, and therefore incomplete. All our knowledge tends to this condition in so far as it is uncertain of the full range of its implications. Sensation, too, is passive, except in the very limited sense in which mere association can be called active. In looking at a picture, for example, we may have a sensation of pleasure or of pain, but this can in no true sense be called an experience, because it is not vitally co-ordinated with the former body of experience which we may have gained in the contemplation of works of art. To feel it we do not need to bring to bear the whole wealth of our past experience; to have felt it is not to have added to that unified body of experience. Until this sensation passes into something more explicit, say an experience of ‘greatness’ or of ‘beauty’, it cannot [251] [T. Hardy, The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge A Story of a Man of Character, Ch. XXI (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1929), p. 159.]
be said to be ‘part of ourselves’. Irrationality and passivity, then, are the two prime qualities of sensation. But it is essential that a conscious self should live in active reference to its world. There are no experiences of the self which are not ‘activity experiences’, and this applies to both cognition and volition. Passivity, clearly, is not a possible state of the self, apart from the hypothetical complete inactivity of unconsciousness. For consciousness implies selection, and selection necessitates a body of co-ordinated experience, as apart from merely marginal sensation which may be held in the memory252 without acquiring sufficient meaning and significance to be as a part of the self or the mind. We must conclude, then, that if we are to use the expression in any coherent sense, the only real ‘aspects of the self ’ which will bear serious examination are cognition and volition. (ii) Cognition may be analysed into two parts. (a) The act of reference. And (b) the object. The first is always mental; the second may be either mental or physical. The essence of cognition is the active reference of mind to an object. And in this its difference from mere sensation becomes clear. Our only way of knowing consists in finding a place for new phenomena within the present system of our experience. The content of the memory may be amassed by a process of entirely irrational association, but the content of the mind is gathered by making new experiences logically coherent with the present body of experience, and vice versa. The mind (when we speak of cognition as an active reference of the mind to an object) can be nothing else but such unity of experience as we are able to bring to bear upon the particular situation, and in consequence it is misleading to speak of cognition as a faculty of the mind. Cognition is the mind as knowing; in each cognitive act the whole mind is engaged. Moreover, since, as we have seen fit to suppose, the universe is a connected system of relations, the true [252] Memory is, of course, only a single example. There is besides, the kind of spontaneous memory which different parts of our body acquire by practice, called habits.
object of all cognition is universal in form.253 And it is of small moment whether we say that the true object of cognition is always the mind itself (‘knowing’, thus resolving itself into ‘knowing one’s own mind’), or that its object is always the universe. (iii) An examination of volition leads us to a somewhat similar conclusion. Willing is a definite relation of the mind to objects. It is an active relation, and it is a relation of the whole mind to its object. That is to say, the will is the mind as willing. And in the same way, the true object of the will is always universal. Both Plato and Aristotle called this universal, ‘the chief good’,254 and a writer of to-day who has entered more nearly than most into the meaning of platonic idealism has described the nature of the will in this eloquent passage: I think men ever follow a spiritual light even when they seem to be most turned away from it. When we analyse their desires, even those which seem gross, we find what allures them is some beauty or majesty mirrored in this from a loftier nature. So the lustful man is tormented by an inversion of the holy spirit or creative fire. The drunkard thirsts for fulness of being as the God-intoxicated do. Vanity in us is an echo of the consciousness of beauty in the artificer of the cosmos, while hate is the dark descendant of that wisdom which is perpetually regenerating the universe. Even those lost and hopeless who pursue their desires to spiritual death are still seeking spiritual life. They follow a gleam [253] See pp. 99–100, above. [254] Plato, Republic, 505e [‘no one is satisfied with the appearance of the good—the reality is what they seek.’; tr. B. Jowett]; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk 1 ch. i § 1 [‘If, then, our activities have some end which we want for its own sake … this must be the Good, that is the supreme good.’; tr. J.A.K. Thomson], and Politics, Bk 1 ch. i § 1 [‘the state or political community … aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.’; tr. B. Jowett].
mistakenly as we may imagine light-demented moths dashing themselves at a moon on water. As in their private lusts men still follow something in essence universal, so too in their imaginations about society are they allured by images and shadows of their own hidden divinity.255 And, while the true object of volition is universal, ‘Self-satisfaction is the form of every object willed.’256 It will have been noted that in order to avoid confusion I have used the word ‘mind’ where ‘self ’ might have been equally admissible. But whatever we call it, we have arrived at the following facts. Its prime characteristic is an active (i.e. conscious) reference to objects, which psychology has analysed into cognition and volition. There are many minor activities included in these two, but we must consider that the whole activity of the self is accurately subsumed under this double heading. At the same time there is a certain air of artificiality about this analysis, because we have found it impossible to admit either cognition or volition to be anything other than the whole self directed towards a universal object. And this presents us with an alternative. We may discover either (i) that one of these acts of the self is in some sense so much more fundamental than the other that it may properly be called the self; or (ii) that the self is something which includes both cognition and volition but can be identified with neither. (i) Let us examine the first of these alternatives. Consideration would lead us to suppose that, if we were forced to choose which [255] A.E. [pseud. of George William Russell], The Interpreters (London: Macmillan And Co., 1922), pp. 127–8. [256] T.H. Green, Prologomena to Ethics, Bk 3 ch. i §154, 2nd edn, ed. A.C. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), p. 161. If I have not established the general view of the universe on which this notion depends I have at least shown that any adequate treatment of the will or the self must face metaphysical as well as merely psychological problems. And that is my object here.
is the more fundamental of the self ’s activities, our choice would fall upon the will. Indeed, it is for the will only that a plausible case can be made. For in a very real sense, at least some form of willing seems to lie behind every act of knowing. The attention required for knowledge assumes something which is not ill-called a ‘will to know’. Every epistemology postulates some such primary attitude of mind as this, though it has been described with a various terminology. A concrete example will illustrate this point. I am punished. Primarily this is merely a sensation, and as such has not entered into the realm of self at all. It becomes an experience, in a true sense, if I relate it to myself and gradually co-ordinate it with my present body of experience. Not everyone, however, is willing to do this; and so the first motion in this direction must be one of ‘willing to understand’. This is what Ward has called ‘that instinct which precedes knowledge and is the chief means of acquiring and increasing it.’257 Or again, what do we mean by men with an infirmity of will or purpose? Either that they are madmen with no power of direction over their minds, or merely that they choose to direct their will to knowing rather than doing.258 And if we count [257] J. Ward, ‘The Christian Ideas of Faith and Eternal Life’, Hibbert Journal, 23:2 (1925), 193–206, at 193. Coleridge, in ‘An Essay on Faith’, and many others call it ‘faith’. [S.T. Coleridge, ‘An Essay on Faith’, in Aids to Reflection and The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (London: George Bell and Sons, 1904), p. 341: ‘Faith may be defined as fidelity to our own being—so far as such being is not and cannot become an object of the senses’.] J. Laird, Problems of the Self An Essay Based on the Shaw Lectures Given in the University of Edinburgh March 1914 (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1917), p. 106, thinks that this initial motion of the mind is better subsumed under cognition than volition [‘all conation must be guided by some cognition.’] [258] Hamlet and H.F. Amiel seem good instances of the will (and in both cases it was a will of no mean order) directed towards knowing rather than doing. While, at some moments in his life Coleridge is a sad example of a real infirmity of will amounting almost to a negation of self.
a man mad, we mean that he cannot, in any usual sense, be called a self; so volition, again, seems the more fundamental activity. But two considerations intervene, which are calculated to prevent us from coming to the conclusion that the self is will. First, it almost amounts to a confusion of thought to call by the same name this primary motion of the mind towards thought or action, and the true form of willing; that is, to bring together the actions of willing to understand the punishment, and the actual willing of the punishment itself which could only be a result of knowledge. It were better to call this first form of volition by some such name as ‘faith’, and so avoid the confusion. And secondly, if we take volition and cognition as they really are, there is not the smallest reason for thinking the one in any sense more fundamental than the other. Our alternative must be cast in another form. Either the self is this ‘faith’, or it is something which includes cognitive and volitional activities but cannot be identified with them. And thus stated, it is clear that by identifying the self with ‘faith’, we are confusing the whole, basis and superstructure, with that which is merely an element, albeit an important element, in the foundation. (ii) In abandoning one side of our argument we are forced to take up the other; but we are still far from a definite view of its meaning. The self must be something which includes cognition and volition, but can be identified with neither. We have already seen that these things which we call knowledge and will are really none other than aspects of the self, and so we may sum up the whole of its life (which is simply an active relation to objects) as one of continuous experiencing. The form of experience may vary, but whether it is cognitive or volitional, it is always an active experience. Here then is the heading under which we may subsume the activities of the self, they are all parts of the inevitable process of experiencing. Qua thing the existence of the self is in its relation to ‘other’ things; qua self, its relation is one of active experience. And the essential being of the self may be thought of most accurately as the concrete body of its experiences. To discuss this further is impossible here. But it must at least be clear that the
conclusion is largely warranted by our discussion of the nature of thinghood. For if a thing is its activities, the self must be its activities, and the exact nature of those I have made some small attempt to elucidate. We have not yet reached a final answer to our problem, for there is still another question we must ask ourselves. What is the nature of this body of experiences? An implicit answer has, however, been given; for we have seen that the concrete body of experiences which is the finite self must, in some sense, be a unity. Experience we distinguished from mere sensation by saying that it possessed this quality of being or tending to be a unit; experience means a co-ordinated body of experiences, which is not other than a collection of experiences possessing some degree of unity.259 The process of experiencing is well described by Goethe when he says that our life is made up of our connections with the world about us, and that we must each spin our own web and sit at the centre to catch what we can.260 The web itself is made up of past experiences, and each new connection with the world about us, in so far as it is fully known and understood, is an addition to [259] All that is to be said about the self ’s continuity is implied in what I have called its unity. [260] J.W. Goethe to F. Schiller, Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, from 1794 to 1805, Letter no. 579, tr. L. D. Schmitz, 2 vols, (London: George Bell and Sons, 1879), ii. 197. [‘No one can find himself in himself or in others; in fact, he has himself to spin his web from the centre of which he exercises his influence.’] I am conscious throughout this discussion of the at least verbal denial of the true nature of the self by speaking of it as a thing in the sense of an isolated ‘body’. But it should be clear that this is merely verbal, almost necessitated, certainly intimated, by our ordinary manner of speech which for practical purposes divides our world into self and ‘others’ in a way quite unjustified by a true view of the facts of life. To reject this convention of speech would, I think, cause more confusion than to retain it; but so long as we do not argue that facts must follow our ordinary way of describing them, it matters little which course we take.
that web, and so an added means of experiencing. But can we say that a finite self, as we know it, is in the fullest sense a unit? We have seen already that finally there is only one form of unity—a whole which, by the comprehensiveness of its content, excludes the possibility of disunity. Such a unity as this we can attribute only to the universe. But every finite and limited achievement of a unity, however incomplete, necessarily implies and stretches out towards this absolute condition. In the case of the State we found ourselves led to the conclusion that to States, as they exist in the finite world, can be attributed only a degree of that quality which is their essence—Statehood. And to this point also has our consideration of the self led us. The only true, because the only perfect, self is the universe; for the universe alone achieves that unity of experience which is the essence of selfhood.261 Finite, actual selves can be said only to approximate to this ideal state of selfhood, and yet, at the same time, to presuppose it. And those among them are truest selves which possess the greatest fund of unified experience, that is, the largest and most varied, and at the same time most co-ordinated, body of connections with the world. Since it is often in error, always liable to error through imperfection of unity, and in a state of continual experiencing, the finite self is never a complete self. But having within itself the elementary purpose and matter of selfhood, this being its real nature, it must be defined as a unity of characteristic experiences. It is now possible to restate our notion of the relationship of a self to its world. The self, we saw, ‘requires’ its society, but it has become clear that this is a miserable understatement of the real facts. A self not only requires its society, but in the fullest [261] Again, Spinoza, Ethics, Bk 2 df. 6: ‘Reality and perfection I use as synonymous terms’ [See n. 77, above]. And compare Ethics, Bk 1, note to second proof of Proposition XI. [Spinoza provides three proofs of this proposition, but only the third has a note added to it, which includes the following passage: ‘a being absolutely infinite, such as God, has from himself an absolutely infinite power of existence, and hence he does absolutely exist’: see Works, ii. 53.]
sense is its society. It is a common experience that a self enlarges as it acquires new points of contact with the world, finds new interests, or contracts new friendships. And in like manner, bereavement, isolation from the practice of cherished interests, exile, and estrangement from friends, are known as no less than an actual mutilation of self. For in the one case, we have literally added to the content of self; and in the other, we have literally lost a part of ourselves.262 The great man, he who possesses a degree of self-hood above the common lot, is original because he is receptive, strong because he is susceptible, and great because he comprehends within himself so large an experience. So far from being that which is most hidden from the influence of the world, the self is that which is most nearly connected with it. ‘I have sometimes sat looking at a comrade’, records an American philosopher, ‘speculating on this mysterious isolation of self from self. Why are we so made that I gaze and see of thee only thy Wall, and never Thee? This Wall of thee is but a movable part of the Wall of my world; and I also am a Wall to thee: we look at one another from behind masks. How would it seem if my mind could but once be within thine; and we could meet and without barrier be with each other? And then it has fallen upon me like a shock—as when one thinking himself alone has felt a presence—But I am in thy soul. These things around me are in thy experience. They are thy own; when I touch them and move them I change thee. When I look on them I see what thou seest … I experience thy very experience. For where art thou? Not there, behind those eyes, within that head, in darkness, [262] There can be few whose experience has not acquainted them with the sad truth that ‘Partir, c’est mourir un peu.’ [See E. Haraucourt, ‘Rondel de l’adieu’, in Seul (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1891), p. 12. The poem begins ‘Partir, c’est mourir un peu, / C’est mourir à ce qu’on aime: / On laisse un peu de soi-même / En toute heure et dans tout lieu.’]
fraternizing with chemical processes. Of these, in my own case, I know nothing, and will know nothing; for my existence is spent not behind my Wall, but in front of it … And there art thou also. This world in which I live, is the world of thy soul; and being within that, I am within thee. I can imagine no contact more real and thrilling than this; that we should meet and share identity, not through ineffable inner depths (alone), but here through the foregrounds of common experience, and that thou shouldst be—not behind that mask— but here, pressing with all thy consciousness upon me, containing me, and these things of mine.’263 To what conclusion, then, are we led? Briefly, we have found it unavoidable that ‘The Ego that pretends to be anything either before or beyond its concrete psychical filling is a gross fiction and mere monster, and for no purpose admissible.’264 From this we have arrived at the conception of self as a unity of characteristic experience; those experiences, its ‘concrete filling’, are none other than its society; and its society is its State. The self is the State; the State is the self.265
[263] W.E. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience A Philosophic Study of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Henry Frowde for Oxford University Press, 1912), pp. 265–6. [264] Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 89. [265] It is unnecessary to explain the relation of a self to the self, for it runs on parallel lines with the explanation I gave in the case of the State. I have also thought it unnecessary to go into full details concerning the notion of degrees of self-hood or the idea of unity after what was said on these matters in Ch. 4.
The State and the Self There are a few loose threads in our discussion of the State and the self which may conveniently be gathered up at this point, though I must still postpone treatment of the most important conclusion which arises from it—the nature and meaning of sociability. Let us first sum up our conclusions. (i) The State is the social whole. If it can be shown that this whole is non-existent and a mere fiction, then we have demonstrated that the State does not exist. So far this has not been attempted; all that critics of this view of things have achieved is to show that the actual ‘States’ of what (in legal terms) is called the European State system do not present themselves as obviously possessing this quality of wholeness. This, of course, was only to be expected. To have it demonstrated with such acumen, and in such detail, is valuable, but we must never lose sight of the fact that demonstrations of this sort neither enter the realm of political philosophy, nor are of such a nature as to form any intelligible criticism of that study. Following from this, the State must be regarded not merely as a collection of persons, though it may be true that without a collection of persons no State could exist, but as a conception of life. All associations owe their being to a solidarity of opinion and belief, and with the State this is so par excellence. The reason for this is that the State is (a) the name we give to that society in the actual world that achieves the highest degree of those qualities which go to make an ideal association, and (b) the ideal association itself. (ii) The Self, so far from being an isolated centre removed from all influence of the world around, is none other than an actual unity of experiences. These experiences are the self ’s world, theoretically quite indistinguishable from the self ’s self. In short, the self is the State, and the State is the self. The idea of the individual as an isolated entity existing in its own right, living its life independently of ‘other’ things and admitting only a limited
interference of the things which go to make up its world, is a mass of contradictions. Individuality, that is, the quality which endows an individual with his nature as such, is a matter neither of apartness nor of difference, and these words give us no assistance in explaining the thing before us. Individuality means finding our activity within a whole. Immer strebe zum Ganzen, says Schiller; and that whole is at once the Self and the State.266 The empirical self is sometimes regarded as a unity. But this is not so. No ‘thing’ is a unit. What we see of it, its ‘body’, is as the runner’s momentary victory as compared with the years of patient practice which gave him the skill and strength to accomplish the act. ‘For there is not so complete and perfect a part that we know of nature, which does not owe the being it has, and the excellence of it, to its neighbours.’267 It is said, too, that the individual self is the only originator of ideas or actions, and that it is through the individual that the State, or any community, receives its life. But if by ‘individual self ’ is meant the ‘body’ which seems to be separate from its world, then it is certain that the isolated ‘self ’ has no power of origination or even of life. And if, on the other hand, the ‘self ’ here is the true, the whole self, then the statement is meaningless, for this entity is indistinguishable from its community. There is a feeling, shared by many, that to speak thus of the self is to degrade and even to enslave it. But this, also, misconstrues the tenor of our remarks. For, in the first place, theoretical truth is not necessarily the best guide to practice. And so the legal conception of self as body has a valuable part to play in common life; though such notions arising out of, and ministering to, utility [266] [J.W. von Goethe, ‘The Four Seasons’, in Selected Verse, tr. D. Luke (London: Penguin, 1984 [1964]), p. 129: ‘Immer strebe zum Ganzen, und kannst du selber kein Ganzes / Werden, als dienendes Glied schliess an ein Ganzes dich an’; ‘Always aim at what is whole; and if you cannot become a whole yourself, then attach yourself to a whole as a member in its service.’] [267] Locke, Essay, Bk 4 ch. vi §11.
in the narrowest sense, can make no claim to express the truth.268 And in the second place, all that we have said has gone to show that we can neither elevate the ‘State’ (in any sense) above the individual self, nor the self above the State, for the two things are not only indistinguishable, but actually the same thing. Taking the words in their real meaning, ‘Man versus the State’ is sheer nonsense; but we can see in it an attempt to describe a state of affairs when the individual self feels itself cramped and restricted by some larger, apparently social, body which has power to coerce him; but to call this body the State, or this ‘man’ an individual, is surely absurd. ‘Society without the individual is not more of an abstraction than the individual without society’. The blind, fettered individual, ‘untroubled by a spark’, is both the product and evidence of a blind, unconscious, and restricted society. The reflecting, sensitive individual, tied to a comprehensive world with many and intimate interests, both is, and is the child of, a unified and comprehensive society. Such an individual is a citizen; such a society, a State. It cannot be said that any single individual enters completely into the whole social experience of his society, but that part of which we avail ourselves by understanding it, is our experience of the whole; some have a comparatively complete experience, others an experience limited and restricted on every side by ignorance, insensitiveness, pride, and selfishness—which is the same thing as saying that some possess the qualities of individuality in a higher degree than others. It has been said that ‘man completes himself in the State, but without losing his own individuality’,269 and this expresses a very prevalent view. But the truth is that so far from there being any likelihood of his losing his individuality in this manner, the State is his only chance of achieving it. The State, as Hegel says, is the individual’s substance. [268] Shakespeare, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, ll. 37–40: ‘Property was thus appall’d / That the self was not the same / Single nature’s double name / Neither two nor one was call’d.’ [269] Lioy, The Philosophy of Right, ii. 76.
There is a question, causing no little trouble to writers about the State, which, so far, I have left untouched. The chief reason for this apparent neglect is that its claim to be treated as a part of the strict subject-matter of political philosophy is as slender as the claim of the problem of nationality.270 But, like the latter, custom bids us at least recognize its existence. The problem runs as follows. Every man is a member of a ‘State’—in the legal sense of the word. But there is a wider society to which he is regarded as owing some sort of loyalty. And his allegiance to his ‘State’ is often thought of as limited by his loyalty to this wider society. The question is, What is the relationship of these two loyalties? Or, as it is sometimes put, What is the relation of the ‘State’ to ‘Society’? That such a problem can arise only when we use the word ‘State’ in its strictly legal significance is clear enough. For in its true meaning a man’s loyalty to his State has none of the exclusiveness here suggested. He is a member of, and at the same time is, a whole—his State; which in turn, because it is an actual State and not fully realized, tends towards and presupposes a more perfect condition of existence. There is no larger moral society than his State, for what is wider and other than that is not in any sense a moral society. This does not rest on mere assertion. The State is that association in the actual world which most nearly achieves moral comprehensiveness. That is what the word means; and it was what Hegel meant when he said that the State is ‘the ethical universe’. It is sheer nonsense to say that ‘In ethical truth, there is only one ultimate community, which is the human race.’271 A man’s State is no more exclusive than a unified body of experience, i.e. a self. A certain body of experiences may exclude us from adopting certain opinions, but in so far as it is unified, that is, comprehensive, the only opinions it can exclude from us are those at variance with the [270] See Ch. 4, Note C, p. 86, above. [271] L.T. Hobhouse, Principles of Sociology, 5 vols (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996 [1922]), vol. 3, The Elements of Social Justice, p. 199.
truth. So it is with the real State, which, like the self, is liable to error only when it deserts its ‘statehood’. Nevertheless, it is perhaps instructive to examine the position in which we find ourselves from this purely legal point of view. The fact appears that we are members of certain restricted societies, but feel ourselves to owe some allegiance to individuals outside these limited groups. What is the meaning of this double loyalty, in itself often involving contradictions? How a man comes to belong to one society rather than another is difficult to determine, and (like all questions of origin) fortunately entirely irrelevant to our discussion. He is a member of a particular society from his earliest hours, and so great is the influence of that society over him that it is true to say that ‘a child might possibly change his country; a man can only wish that he might change it.’272 The fact is that, though we were not consulted in the matter, our debt to ‘the laws’ is of such a nature as to bind us to them for life with something more than gratitude. Whether or not a man is accustomed to think or talk in terms larger than those of his own limited society, it is permanently true that only through his particular station and the faithful performance of its particular duties, can he take hold of this thing called ‘humanity’. ‘What does and always must guide men is their personal relation to the little circle which they actually influence.’273 An analogy may serve to illustrate the relation of a man to ‘humanity’ through his society. And in this case it is more than an analogy, it is an exact description of the relationship itself. Moral sentiment—at least in our part of the world—has come to admit that love may not be spent on the opposite sex as a sex. And this is so simply because love, in its true nature, does not appear under such conditions. Love is spent morally—that is, in human [272] G. Santayana, The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress (London: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd, 1905), vol. 2, Reason in Society, pp. 173–4. [273] L. Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 3 vols (London: Duckworth and Co., 1900), ii. 329–30.
experience, with the highest and greatest satisfaction—upon a single personality. For each, the other is the sex in this regard. This is the exact relation between a man’s allegiance to his society and to ‘humanity’. The riches of the wider whole can reach us only through the (apparently) more limited loyalty; our friendship to men. The true cosmopolitan (of which but few exist) may escape the prejudice of a mis-spent and misunderstood attachment, but he precludes himself from enjoying any of the finer nuances of social life. And in so far as an actual State achieves a high degree of statehood, it will satisfy these demands; it is only when dealing with the imperfect, and therefore imperfectly true and real, that the problem of this dual loyalty arises. Among the many other points requiring discussion there is one, to which I have already adverted, which merits particular attention. I have already said a word about what is called the ‘real will’, but the investigation of the identification of this with the ‘general will’ I postponed until the nature of the self had been more fully enquired into. It has not, I think, been made sufficiently clear, in modern works on the subject that the whole of this problem and its solution lies in the view we take of the nature of the self. Writers have treated the subject from a legal, a sociological, and a psychological standpoint, without any clear realization that they are dealing with a metaphysical conception of the nature of the self and the will. Attempts to demonstrate the unity of men in society by mere insistence upon the existence of a kind of ‘fellow feeling’ and an economic interdependence between men, are doomed to failure. For such a unity can be made to rest only upon some wider and more fundamental conception of ‘the values in which, and in the will for which, mankind are one’;274 that is upon a coherent notion of the self and its relationship to the universe. The truth of the matter is to be found in Spinoza’s dictum that ‘all reasonable men
[274] Bosanquet, ‘Preface’ to Philosophical Theory of the State, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan & Co., 1920), p. xvi.
agree’;275 and if we are now looking at the matter from the aspect of volition and not cognition, it is only to discover the same solution and in similar terms. We have seen that self-hood, and its activities of thought and will, is something which cannot be attributed (any more than thing-hood) to isolated bodies. It is something which joins [us] to the universe, not separates us from it; for the universe is the only perfect self, and we are selves in so far as we approach its comprehensive existence. In matters of cognition, truth is for us the right experience and affirmation of the universe in our own minds, it is simply a joining of ourselves to the whole which admits no contradiction. So also, volition, in so far as it is real (that is, consciously directed towards real and not merely actual purposes) is a single entity in the universe, of which we partake in varying degrees. That actual life presents a superficial observer with ‘a series of special wills none of which can claim any necessary preeminence’,276 no one would deny. But in so far as they are at variance they are not properly called ‘wills’, for they are the misdirected impulses of isolated deficiency and inexperience; that is, they demonstrate a lack of self-hood through isolation and ignorance. ‘When the particular will is actually different from the universal, it is led by caprice, random insight and desire, and is opposed to general right.’277 An example may, perhaps, be excused, for though it proves nothing, it may put the matter in a clearer light. When a fire breaks out in a theatre it is at least part of the real will of everyone present that no-one should perish. Like Ulysses, each wishes to pass through the hour of danger in [275] Spinoza, Ethics, Bk 4, prop. xxxv [Works, ii. 209: ‘In so far only as men live in obedience to reason, do they always necessarily agree in nature.’] [276] Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty, p. vi. [277] Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §81, p. 85.
safety.278 But the expressions of this real and common will are, no doubt, various. Some rush for the places of exit, others shout, a few remain calm. But while the characteristic of each is that he thinks he is rightly expressing his real will, the whole fact is that some of those expressions, through inexperience in the widest sense, are more erroneous than others, that is, less comprehensive and so less real than others. As we look at things from the point of view of the ‘individual’, we find that his real will is his will qua individual. And in like manner, the general will is the will of his society as such. But, since the self and its society cannot in this way be separated, the general can be none other than the real will. As such it has qualities of infallibility and finality, for we have seen that its content is always universal. But the point of paramount importance is that in this matter of will, ‘generality’ is a qualitative term and has no reference to number. This has been insisted upon by every writer who has in any way understood the conception. The mention of the ‘will of all’ (in actual society) with the ‘general will’, can be made only to register their dissimilarity. As such they have nothing whatever in common. With this identification of the real will and the general will our discussion might end, except that it seems a little gratuitous to have introduced the term ‘general will’, only to show that it is but another name for something we have already enquired into. And, indeed, it is true that, could we keep securely in mind the real nature of the individual, the introduction of such a term would be entirely needless. But since this is difficult, thinkers have been forced to include an idea of society in their speculations, and with [278] Homer, Odyssey, xii. 62 [Probably an allusion to the section of the poem in which Circe tells Odysseus how to successfully navigate the dangers posed by the Sirens, and by Skylla and Charybdis]. Of course, to some ‘safety’ will mean merely bodily preservation, while to others it will mean a freedom (even if it entails death) from any surrender to the indignity and vulgarity of panic. But these differences do not affect the point in question.
it naturally comes the notion of a general will. We may abandon both or keep both, as we please; but for truth’s and safety’s sake the latter course is advisable. In conclusion I will notice one form of objection to the idea of a general will. It is sometimes asked, Is there necessarily a higher quality of volition when men are gathered together in a State than when they will in isolation? The answer is implicit in what has already been said, but I venture to reiterate the point. The phrase, ‘men gathered together in a State’ implies a definite relationship existing between them; and our discussion of that relationship has already led us to the conclusion that it presupposes a unity of will and purpose, not merely of action and result. ‘Others’ are a part of our self; and clearly we cannot arrive at a real will until it is the will of our whole self, and that is of our society. Obviously it is not a real will if it is only an agreement for purposes of action of a number of differently-minded persons. The will of a State, as such, is of a higher quality than the ‘will’ (so-called) of an isolated individual because, and only because, the will of a whole self is of a higher quality than the volitional impulses of an entity—the isolated ‘self ’—whose being harbours such inconsistency and is filled with such ignorance and incomprehensiveness, that we are driven to class it as a cipher, a nothing, a mere fiction.
Government and Law The real nature of a man is often obscured by the very nearness of the view we are permitted. The reason why a prophet seldom wins honour in his own country is because there he is rarely known as he really is. The familiar, homely view often obscures his full nature in the same way as its grandeur and immensity of outline is obscured when we stand too close to some monument of architecture. And, on the contrary, men sometimes appear greater than they really are when we see them against the background of a restricted life. Institutions are in like case. It is often in so far as they enter intimately into our daily life, that we are given opportunity of reading them amiss.279 To a man burning with moral zeal for the reformation of his kind, government will often seem a useless obstruction, hindering the immediate execution of his daring plans. The eager lepidopterist, conscious of nothing but his passion to secure a specimen of a certain butterfly, may find himself thwarted by the laws of trespass, and in an unguarded moment government and law will appear in the light of an evil genius overshadowing his life, intent on hindering his ends. And even if no such emergent incident leads us to hasty judgments of this kind, we all experience no small difficulty in seeing such institutions as government and law as they really are.280 But, since the question we have set ourselves on all these matters is, What are they? it is imperative that we succeed in seeing them not as they appear as they pass, entering our consciousness in this or [279] [Oakeshott’s marginal note: ‘“Il faut beaucoup de philosophie pour observer les faits qui sont trop près de nous.” Rousseau.’ The quotation has not been traced.] [280] [Oakeshott’s marginal note: ‘“Perpetual custom”, says Cicero, “makes the mind callous, and people neither admire nor require a reason for those things which they constantly behold.”’ The quotation has not been traced.]
that fragmentary form, but as they really are. Short of this, short of a theory, a view of the whole, there is no such thing as a true definition. To see this thing, government, definitely is to see it as part of a whole, and to understand exactly how the aims and means of that part fit in with the aims and means of the whole. Now, the social whole, into which must fit all that comprises human life as such, and to which every part must be referred for its meaning, we have called the State. What place does government hold within the system of this life? or, in other words, what is the relation of government to the State?281 Before I embark upon the answer to this question there is one point in the speculations of contemporary writers on this subject which demands attention. There is a certain school of writers who simplify their politics by an initial identification of the government with the State. Few of them produce any valid arguments (or any arguments at all) in justification of this saltus, and so, even if such a procedure were not amply answered by the arguments I have put forward concerning the nature of the State, little save counterassertion could properly be demanded. But there is a single argument, appearing in various forms, which we may profitably examine. To buttress the assertion that the government is the State, Mr Laski and others point out that, whatever the State is, it must act through its organs, and that its ‘primary organ’ is the government.282 If, behind the word State Mr Laski and his friends [281] Cf. ‘He [Montesquieu] regards legislation and its specific traits not in an isolated and abstract way, but rather as a dependent element of one totality, connecting it with all the other elements which form the character of a nation and an epoch. In this interrelation the various elements receive their meaning and justification.’ Hegel, ‘Introduction’ to Philosophy of Right, §3, p. 5. [282] Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty, p. 236 [‘The state … must act through organs; and … it is upon government that we must concentrate our main attention’]; Authority in the Modern State, p. 26 [‘The fundamental fact is that when we speak of acts done by America
have no notion of a social whole, and in saying that the State is the government, or the government is the State, they are merely making an assertion in the terms ‘a is a’, that is, one devoid of significance, it would be foolish to argue. But, on the other hand, if they intend to affirm that the government is the social whole, then a matter for debate is raised. But it is a one-sided affair, for it would occupy an ingenious schoolboy debater to produce even plausible arguments in favour of so fantastic a proposition. Examine any association of men we choose, and the fact that its government, rules, or laws do not comprise the whole, and are not even the primary expression of its life, is clear as noonday. A school has rules and regulations, but when these are computed we have not come to its real life at all, and to set them up as the whole, or as the primary expression of the whole, seems to me a trifle Boetian. Associations for the most meager immediate ends, such as commerce or sport, cannot be identified with their government, and a fortiori such an identification is nonsense in the case of an association for the political or perfectly realized life. The government is neither the social whole, nor the ‘primary organ’ of that whole—for ‘practical’ or any other purposes. It is not and can never be in any position other than one of subservience, for no flight of imagination can picture it as an end in itself. The the actor is a government’]. See also his note in the English translation of L. Duguit, Law in the Modern State, tr. F. Laski and H. Laski (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), p. 61. [‘The reader ought to note that M. Duguit throughout uses state as identical with government, on the ground that its power is, for practical purposes, exerted by the latter. On the justification of this cf. Laski, Authority in the Modern State, Ch. 1.’] This statement is true only if we are prepared to regard the power commonly exerted by government as equal to the power and influence of the social whole as expressed and exerted by poets and painters, teachers, preachers, and heroes, when it becomes not only an argumentum in circulo, but sheer nonsense. It may also be noted that these writers will neither identify the State with the government, nor will they admit that there is any difference between them, but obscure the whole issue by such phrases as, ‘for practical purposes’.
notion is based upon a view of the universe too meaningless for us to entertain.283 Although remarks on the origin of this or any other idea of the State form no part of my plan, this is a notion which has influenced so largely English political thinking that it is impossible to pass it by without notice. It has arisen, I think, partly from the AngloSaxon feeling that government is everyone’s work and no man’s special province, and partly from the belief, grown to gigantic proportions at the end of the nineteenth century, that Acts of Parliament are the sole effectual means of improving the life of the community.284 Englishmen have ever found it impossible to believe that government is as much a business to be learned as shoe-making or joinery, and in consequence have looked upon it as an occupation for all men, as the pre-eminent business of society as a whole. But if we stand to watch a shoemaker at his last, we see nothing intelligible unless we link up this single activity with the social whole of which it is a part, for the reasonableness of this occupation is to be found only in the larger whole of custom and manner of life which has called it into being. So it is [283] Cf. F.H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), p. 6. [‘Practice is the perpetual undoing of the condition which is implied in its own existence, and it cannot therefore offer by itself a satisfaction which is ultimate.’] [284] This may be illustrated by a couple of quotations: ‘In my own opinion, a disproportionate amount of English energy takes political forms, and there is a dangerous exaggeration in the prevailing tendency to combat all social and moral abuses by Acts of Parliament.’ W.E.H. Lecky, The Map of Life Conduct and Character (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), pp. 60–1. ‘An outstanding characteristic of the times, in which the future historian will find much food for thought, is the enormous exaggeration of the importance of politics. If politics meant in modern practice what they meant to Plato, Aristotle, or Dante, it would be impossible to exaggerate their importance. But, unfortunately, they have come to mean something else.’ L.P. Jacks, Realities and Shams (London: Williams & Norgate, 1923), p. 55.
with the legislator and him who occupies himself with the things of government. His business is a single activity of society, the rationality of which can be perceived only when we join it on to the social whole. And its own insufficiency is demonstrated by the fact that if we view it as the whole itself we make of it (in the literal sense) a preposterous monster. Societies viewed solely in the light of their governmental activities are not wholes; a government unconnected with some larger activity to which it is subservient is fortunately an unthinkable chimera. ‘If citizens be friends they have no need of justice, but, though they be just, they need friendship also; indeed, the most complete realization of justice seems to be the realization of friendship also.’285 The State is friendship; the government is that justice which has meaning only when we see it as potentially consummated in friendship. But to return from controversy to the positive matter in hand. If we are to have a true notion of the real nature of government, we must set about to view it as a single activity within the system of activities we have called the State. Just as we link up, in our more lucid moments, our own life with the life of our society, and so give it its true meaning and significance, so we must join this activity to the unified experience of the whole. And to do this we must come at some clear notion of the nature of State Action. State action is, necessarily, the action of the social whole. And since, as we have seen, the State is the individual and the individual is the State, all ‘individual’ action directed towards the ends of the State, that is the ends of the political or complete life, is State action. A father bringing his son up to appreciate poetry is thereby performing an action of the State, while a nation waging an unnecessary war is working against the ends of the State. State action implies a certain quality of action; it is action directed towards certain ends, and not merely the impulse or policy of a certain body of officials or class of society. All societies, as such, possess some of this quality of statehood, and in the same way, all actions whatsoever possess a modicum of that same quality. [285] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk8 ch.i§4 [tr. F.H. Peters].
This we cannot avoid. There is no such thing as an ‘individual’ action which is not at the same time an action of the State; there is no action so intimate or so personal that it can be called a selfregarding activity in contradistinction to a State-regarding activity. That which touches the self touches the State, for the self, qua self, is the State. Education in England is usually divided into what is called ‘State Education’ and ‘Private Education’ (or, such is the confusion of words, ‘Public Education’). This naturally assumes a merely legal definition of the State, but from importing this idea into our political philosophy untold confusion has resulted. On our definition of the State, it is clear that all education whatever, carried on within the social whole, is State education. And that which is financed from so-called ‘public’ funds is not more an activity of the State than that which is carried on as a ‘private’ enterprise. That education which leads to the most perfect development of human character is most truly State education. And it is only our distorted view of things which makes it appear an anomaly that the truest State education, at any given time, may be that which has least the form of a public institution, and that which achieves a lesser degree of this quality of statehood, may be that which has the widest public support.286 These conclusions, as illustrated in the instance of education, are in no way an advance on what I have said before about the nature of the State, they follow inevitably from the view of things I briefly sketched above. But this does not end the matter. Though all action, as such, is State action in one degree or another, examination reveals, what might easily have been suspected, that the State has many activities which proceed on a variety of plans and use a variety of means. Within the community of interests and endeavours which go to make up the life of a school, we can distinguish with some degree of definiteness two complementary varieties [286] History and personal experience afford many examples of this notion. Of all Athenians Socrates and Phidias were men who served their country best, yet one died at the hand of the government and the other in exile.
of activity. On the one hand, there is the sphere of action which comes within the special province of command; and, on the other, that which is, as we say, voluntary, or subject only to permissive legislation. The borderline between these two is somewhat vague, but being within the real whole of activity-experience, it is of no great moment how the borderline cases are decided so long as the governing principles of each kind of activity are observed. For instance, no schoolmaster would frame a rule commanding every boy to ‘be healthy’. Instead, he uses what seems to be an indirect method and, so far as command goes, says ‘play games’. If we can understand the grounds and reasonableness of this difference we are well on our way towards achieving a definite view of the nature of government and its place within the social whole. There is a special province of command, this is the realm of government. Roughly, it is the region of force, and our task is to see what is the nature of the limitations of this kind of activity, that is, what are the things and aspects of things which come properly within its purview. To do this we will ask ourselves two questions— (i) What is the end of Government? (ii) What are the means of Government? (i) In our definition of the nature of the will, we discovered that, though in many cases volitional activity is ignorant of its own ends and may even seem to contradict them by its methods, the end of all volition is universal. When I wish for a meal, my real desire is for a new state of self—in this case, a state of self in which hunger is appeased. And when I wish for another state of self, my wish is always for a perfect state of self. The good is that which all men desire. This notion does not neglect the facts of ignorance and near-sightedness which constantly thwart us in our energy of will, it is a description of the whole activity within which our blunders alone have meaning. This principle, to which I have adhered throughout, may now be applied to our view of the end of that kind of social activity we call government. As we shall shortly see, government is naturally (i.e. by its nature) limited in many respects. Its influence cannot be
universal; its scope is not co-extensive with that of the whole activity of the State. Nevertheless, in the fullest possible sense, its will is universal. Though a school rule cannot in itself command the health of each boy who comes under it, yet its desire, however indirectly it must be expressed, is always for that state of life which it can foster but not command. And its end is achieved only when the final end of the whole is achieved, for its action has meaning only when seen as contributory to the larger activity. ‘The majesty and dignity and power of the law are to be seen wholly and solely where we never look for it, viz. in the truthful, honest, mutually helpful and upright lives of those with whom, as we put it, “the law takes nothing to do”.’287 We shall misconceive the nature of government, if in fixing our attention upon the limitations of its means, we forget the universality of its end. Its action is part and parcel of the action of the social whole, of the State, and its partiality is evinced in the particularity of its powers and not in any restriction of its end. Force, law, government cannot achieve all things, but they will do so as fully as the whole, which, as such, can and does achieve its end. Every day we have the experience of the apparent refusal of actual government and law to concern themselves with certain aspects of the life of the community, but we shall completely misunderstand the reasonableness of this if we regard it as mere apathy or lack of interest. It is just because government is interested in these things, just because in its universal will it desires their accomplishment, that it leaves untouched that which its touch would mar. The occasions when government stays its hand are as eloquent of its real purpose as those when it enters our life as a regulative force. These remarks must not be taken to imply that actual government makes no mistakes, never enters where it should remain without, and vice versa. I am speaking here of the real nature of government, government as such, just as on a previous page I spoke of the will, not with a view either to displaying or discounting the ignorance which often guides it, but of the will [287] Duff, Spinoza’s Political and Ethical Philosophy, p. 299.
as such, seen in that wholeness which alone gives it being or meaning. (ii) The idea of limitations as unnatural restrictions, confining an activity which would otherwise be, and would naturally be, universal, is the basis of the utilitarian philosophy: a philosophy which thinks in terms of physical areas and material limits. However, the nature of all true limitations (and here we are particularly interested in the limitations of government) is that they are necessary, that is, self-limitations. In its essential nature, the sphere of government is not universal, and it is no hardship, no thwarting of [an] eternal plan, for it to recognize this limitation and to act under its guidance. Perhaps the true doctrine of the nature of governmental limitation is summed up in the saying ‘Might is Right’. It is lamentable that this dictum has frequently been misconceived and put to base ends, but when fully understood it forms an essential part of any true political philosophy, and, indeed, of any true cosmology. In its vulgar form it appears most uncompromisingly in the writings of Nicholas Machiavelli, though his conception is probity itself as compared with the notions of many a modern anti-Machiavel. But, in modern philosophy, the first glimpse of the true view of the conception of ‘might is right’ as applying to government is to be found in the political writings of Spinoza. Briefly it is this. Government, as such, has a limited sphere of activity. This limitation is self-limitation; and the proper province of government comprehends all that it is able to accomplish. Government may not attempt that which it is unable to achieve; that which it is able to achieve is its true and proper sphere of action. Ask and answer the question, What can government do? and we have solved the problem of what it ought to do, that is, we have defined its limits and discovered its particular nature. Its might is its right. Much of the confusion which has arisen on this point is due to a misconception of the nature of ‘might’. When we say of a man that he has a right to believe what he is able to believe we are not thereby justifying him for believing anything or nothing; we are
expressing our confidence in his wisdom and experience. We can no more believe anything we like than we can think or do anything we like. Our beliefs, our thoughts, our desires are governed by our experience. What we are able to do depends upon what we are able to desire, and not upon any hypothetical physical ability. Most men are physically capable of beating their wives, but in the truest possible sense a large proportion are quite incapable of such an action, because it conflicts fundamentally with their mental and moral attitude to life. So with government. By sheer physical coercion it could regulate many social activities hitherto left in the hands of other kinds of State action, but in so doing would defeat its own ends. It is logically impossible to think of government, qua government, performing actions which contradict its own nature, and so it is literally incapable of attempting to regulate that which it were better to leave undisturbed. Produce what instances we will of the evil effects of governmental regulation and the truth of our proposition remains unaffected. We cannot deny that ‘government’ constantly makes mistakes—that is, contradicts its own essential nature—but that it does so, qua government, is an inconceivable occurrence. In so far as a government (or anything else) commits blunders, denies its own essential nature, it becomes so much less than government. Here are two instances of what I mean. Both concern matters of small importance, but, for all that, are not less illustrative of the principle involved. In Paris, legislation (it is obviously of no consequence whether it is legislation on the part of a minor association or on the part of the ‘government’) has introduced a system of numbered tickets to ensure the fair and ordered treatment of would-be omnibus passengers. The argument behind the system must be something as follows: ‘We know that all men do not possess the graces of polite behaviour, and that even those who observe the fair rules of courtesy are apt to forget them in the rush of modern life. Law, though it wills to, cannot inculcate the graces of decorous behaviour into those over whom it holds its sway. That is beyond its might, and so beyond its right.
Nevertheless, it is able to make such regulations as can order the outward behaviour of its citizens, even if it does not touch their inward consciousness. Let us contribute what we can, and in so doing we achieve what we ought.’288 On the other hand, a law has recently been introduced by one of the American States ‘to prevent women from searching their husbands’ pockets’. To the utilitarian this would seem wrong, not because government is unable to effect what it sets out to do, but because it is interfering with what is held to be a man’s ‘private’ life. But no explanation in terms of ‘undue interference’ really meets the facts. The reason why such a law goes against the principles of government is because it would be impossible to make it properly effective. It is beyond the right of government to legislate in this manner, because it is beyond its might. But a third example, dealing with a more important aspect of social life, will illustrate this principle more generally. What I have been saying is sometimes put in the form of a contrast between law and morality. I have avoided that contrast in set terms, up to the present, because with it is so often associated the erroneous view that the will of the law is not as universal as the will of morality. Yet the contrast, when properly understood, is real enough. The sphere of moral action is the sphere of action of the social whole as a whole, and it is within this, but differing from it in the self[288] The difference between true politeness which is nothing less than an exquisite moral sensibility, and such politeness as may be enforced, is well illustrated in this passage from E. Renan, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1897), pp. 355–8: ‘La civilité extrême de mes vieux maîtres m’avait laissé un si vif souvenir, que je n’ai jamais pu m’en détacher …[mais observer], dans un monde qui n’est plus fait pour la civilité, les bonnes règles de l’honnêteté d’autrefois, ce serait jouer le rôle d’un veritable niais, et personne ne vous en saurait gré … il est clair que celui qui tiendrait à cette prescription en omnibus, par exemple, serait victime de sa déférence; je crois même qu’il manquerait aux règlements. En chemin de fer, combien y en a-t-il qui sentent que se presser sur le quai pour gagner les autres de vitesse et s’assurer de la meilleure place est une supreme grossièreté?’
limitation of its means, that government and law hold away. What, for instance, is the proper relation of law to sexual morality? The subject is wide enough to afford many examples, from which I will choose one. The difficulty of preserving a high standard of sexual morality has always been greatly increased, both in rural and urban conditions, by inadequate housing. This is no new phenomenon arising from extreme overcrowding; on the contrary it is one with which all with any knowledge of the conditions of life of the rural and urban poor have long been acquainted.289 Law has never attempted to enforce any standard of sexual morality as such, and to do so would be beyond its province. But in this instance, it is clear that legislation on the concrete problem of housing might be one of the most effectual contributions to that activity of the social whole which is continuously directed towards raising the moral standard of its citizens. A law commanding us to ‘be moral’ (that is, realize in our lives the moral standard roughly accepted by our society) would be one contradicting the very principles of legislation, and it is because government has this problem so nearly at heart that it refuses to interfere in this manner. Yet it is no passive spectator, but a hinderer of hindrances,290 a creator of conditions. Its commands, with regard to sexual morality, take the form (among other forms) of, ‘be sufficiently housed’. Its right is limited only by its might.291 [289] Cf. Helen Bosanquet, The Standard of Life and Other Studies (London: Macmillan and Co., 1898), p. 34. [‘There is no one with any knowledge of the poor who will not be able to recall instances of gross moral and physical evil arising out of overcrowded or insanitary dwellings.’] The municipal report on the housing conditions in Glasgow is the best ‘modern instance’ which has come my way. [Possibly Glasgow Municipal Commission on the Housing of the Poor (1904)] [290] This phrase has been used by Bosanquet to describe the State, but this is obviously absurd. [291] Of course, the practical difficulty with which governors are faced (at no time better illustrated that in the relation of the present government to the coal miners and owners) is so to sense the social
Again, government is properly conceived of as that part of State action which makes use of force. It can accomplish what force can accomplish, and this it must accomplish. No one imagines that a man can be forced to be brave or kind, and so the production of these virtues stands outside the means (but not outside the will) of government. Yet law can and does mitigate the effects of unkindness and cowardice, because it is possible to achieve this by means of coercion. But here we are faced by another problem. It is clear enough that law makes use of force, but, in this, how far does it differ from the action of the State, the social whole, as such? Moral opinion can coerce a man to conform to the moral code of his society no less brutally than government can coerce him to obey its laws. After all, how true is it to say that while the characteristic of government is force, that of the State is something other than force? At first sight it would seem that, if (as we are bound to do) we class all kinds of coercive persuasion under the head of force, the action of the social whole as such, no less than the action of the government, is based upon and limited by its use of force. But such a first look does not place the facts in their true light. There is a real and fundamental difference between the force or coercion used by law to prevent me from obtaining money by false pretences, and the ‘coercion’ with which we can imagine, say, the philosophy of Hegel influencing our minds and persuading our notions. When we say that the sphere of governmental action is the sphere of force, we mean that it limits itself to an immediate aim of bringing about a certain type of action (though it wills a and so to understand the actual might of government, as to introduce nothing it is unable, qua government, to achieve. See H.R. Mirabeau, Travail sur l’éducation publique; trouvé dans les papiers de Mirabeau l’Aîné, ed. P. Cabanis (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1791), p. 69: ‘Le difficile, Messieurs, est de ne promulguer que des lois nécessaires, de rester à jamais fidèle a ce principe vraiment constitutionnel de la société, de se mettre en garde contre la fureur de gouverner, la plus funeste maladie des gouvernemens modernes.’
corresponding type of mind), while such persuasion of the mind as we are conscious of in the presence of ideas, affects our attitude of mind directly, and our actions only indirectly. State action as a whole is aimed towards the mind of its citizens. It is an appeal, such as Shakespeare or Michael Angelo may make, which speaks directly to the mind. In short, the activity of the State is none other than an interaction of spirits. When Plato said that rhetoric is ‘the art of persuading the minds of men’,292 he expressed the same idea. Governmental action, as a part of State action, also desires to create a new state of mind, but it restricts itself, by its methods, to the production of a certain kind of outward behaviour, thereby creating the conditions under which the mind may receive and understand what the social whole would teach it. For the State, partly by its government, its laws, and its institutions, but still more by its spirit and culture, its , is a teacher, and it is the problem of education in all its subtleties which it sets itself to solve. At the risk of a certain amount of recapitulation, I propose now to look at the nature of government from another point of view. The characteristic action of government is legislation in one form or another, for it is from this primary operation that its other activities of judication and administration derive. In nothing has modern speculation been more fortunate than in its contribution to the theory of law. This, indeed, may account in part for the legal bias so evident in such political theory of our own time as is not subject to the undisputed sway of psychology. But we should remember that there is all the difference in the world between a legal theory of law and a philosophical theory—as much difference between these as exists between a scientific theory of matter and a theory of matter which satisfies the demands and answers the questions of philosophy. Nevertheless modern legal theory has [292] [This does not appear to be a direct quotation from Wright’s translation of Plato, Phaedrus, 261a, where Socrates describes rhetoric as ‘a method of winning men’s souls by means of words’, op. cit., p. 60. However, the view that rhetoric is ‘the art of ruling the minds of men’ is attributed to Plato by Plutarch: see Plutarch, ‘Pericles’, Lives, p. 119.]
contributed much to our proper understanding of that part of State action we call government, and to look at this from the point of view of law and the nature of law, cannot but be illuminating. One of the most interesting contributions to this subject, marred alas! by a preposterous political philosophy, is M. Duguit’s Law in the Modern State. What M. Duguit says, in effect, is that law and statute must no longer be considered as mere arbitrary commands (we may be tempted to ask who of any authority ever conceived them as such), but as subordinate to the State—society—to serve its needs. This is the function of government. But what he thinks, he says, is that the State (making it synonymous with the government) is now becoming a public servant, quitting its status as master and thereby losing its sovereignty. The whole issue is absurdly confused by the blind adherence to the legal meaning of every term as if it were the true meaning, but it seems to me by no means impossible that this new movement will succeed (while attempting to put a too exalted so-called ‘State’ in its place) in saying to government and the petty political interests and faiths of modern Europe, ‘Give place’, and relegating it to its proper position, will allow the true ‘State’ to take its rightful place as sovereign. Within the general movement there is, of course, much variety of opinion. It includes Durkheim and Duguit in France, Roscoe Pound in America, and Mr Laski in England, with their ‘sociological’ interpretation of law, and has its precursors in Germany and above all in Italy, the home of all vital legal theory from 1850 to 1890. And there are many refinements, perhaps the most interesting being that which (in intention, at least) harks back to Hegelian jurisprudence.293 To return from our digression. I suppose the popular view, the theory of the first look, is that law is a command issuing from some power outside ourselves which urges us, under certain penalties, to conform to certain standards of behaviour. The word ‘command’ has come to bear a meaning consonant only with force in its crudest sense, and often with arbitrary force. At [293] See Krabbe, The Modern Idea of the State.
all events, the source of command is envisaged as coming from outside ourselves, compelling us to conformity with something other than ourselves. Against this every theory of law which has ever attained wide acceptance has protested. The protest has taken various forms. The theory may have been that law is Reason made articulate, as with the Greeks, or that it conforms to some essential principle in the universe and so in ourselves, or again, in our own day, that it is not so much a command, but a means of organization, the aim of which is not to compel men, but to serve public need. In spite of modern detractors, we must hold that law remains incomprehensible unless we see it as the means of activity of a government which in turn is but part of a social whole. And this social whole is itself incomprehensible unless we recognize it as somehow expressing what is fundamentally real. The idea that law, as such, is somehow part and parcel of final reason cannot be abandoned without leading us to a maze of meaningless contradictions.294 Unless we see it as necessary we cannot see it as real, and unless we see it as real it cannot be recognized as reasonable. When, however, we are asked to abandon the idea of law as a command, we may pause to enquire what a command really is. If it is (according to the popular view) some arbitrary compulsion from the outside, forcing upon us a mode of behaviour which may be fundamentally at variance with our own notions or interests, then the sooner we abandon that idea of law the better it will be. But, in essence, a command is quite other than this, and has been recognized as such by every credible theory of law. A true command is a voice which tells us what we really desire. It is an educating influence, forcing upon us that which is the logical result of our real desires. And if we were wise enough we should find that it ‘breathes such sense as our
[294] In the same way as a metaphysic which distinguishes appearance and reality in the universe must point out the necessity of appearance, explain its reality.
sense breeds with it’.295 Thus, the end of law is the protection of the individual against his own waywardness, passion, ignorance and weakness. We need not hastily abandon our idea of law as a coercive command if we are prepared to take things as they really are in their wholeness. For the notion of command and force in no way prevents us from looking upon law (with the modern school of ‘sociological’ jurists) as ‘social engineering’.296 If it is a body of knowledge which men have gradually collected about the ways and means of living together peaceably, whose justification is that it expresses their real needs, and whose immediate end is to lessen the friction and waste of social intercourse, it is no less a system of commands. As the laws of mathematics and his own practical experience are like so many commands to the engineer which he must obey or fail, and which he will obey because he knows their value, so laws, which are the public registration297 of certain social facts, are commands to those who live the social life. Government is the formulator and administrator of these commands, and as such is in the position of a ‘public service’. It is ‘a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.’298 An attempt is being made to put this ‘public service’ on the same level as any other association which ministers to public needs, and in many respects this is a move in the right direction. Government [295] Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act II sc ii. [296] My knowledge of Prof. Roscoe Pound’s work is confined to a course of lectures he delivered in Cambridge in 1922, and since published. [R. Pound, Interpretations of Legal History (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1967 [1923]).] [297] ‘Law is the result of a common conviction not that a thing shall be, but that it is.’ Gierke. [Oakeshott’s translation of Gierke’s maxim is identical to that given in E. Barker, ‘The Discredited State’, Political Quarterly, 2 (1915), 101–21, at 119 (reprinted in Church, State, and Study), where the quotation from Browning at p. 163, below, is also reproduced.] [298] Burke, Reflections, i. 403.
is of the same fundamental nature as any other public service, in the same way as a social club has within it, in common with more comprehensive societies, that stuff of statehood which makes it what it is—an association of human beings. But, as in the latter case we do not hesitate to recognize that some associations have a greater degree of statehood than others, so in the former, we must not forget that government is a public service in scope and power far superior to other associations (e.g. associations for municipal supply) which, in their quality of being ‘public’, are of the same fundamental nature. It may be true that in many respects we have unduly elevated it, and that, for example, its liability for its torts should be recognized, but it argues a perverted sense of proportion to think that by binding a commercial handbook and a volume of Shakespeare in the same cover we make them of equal value. There is another aspect of government which an enquiry into the nature of law brings out. It is what I have already called its partiality. Law, it is recognized, can never form a complete guide to conduct, let alone to life as a whole. And because of this, government can lay no valid claim to the wholeness which we require of the State. A man may be, in his conduct, ‘within the law’ without realizing or acting up to his full responsibilities as a member of his society. So long as we look upon a society as a collection of individuals and government as the ‘primary organ’ of its life, we shall misconceive its nature. Our society, the State, is ‘a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection’,299 its end is ‘the excellence of souls’,300 and we can no more imagine this end achieved by means of government alone, or primarily by this means, than we can imagine ‘Paradise Lost’ achieved by a mere conformity to the rules of metrical composition. These rules, the elements of government, are meaningless unless we look at them as part of the larger whole, as vital though minor contributions to the end [299] Burke, Reflections, i. 417. [Cp. p. 96, above.] [300] Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, p. xxxix.
which of themselves they could not achieve; which, indeed, they are unable to touch or influence except indirectly through the medium of enforced behaviour. To avoid unnecessary confusion perhaps it is wise to emphasize once more that I am not here speaking of this or that government, or this or that law, much less am I attempting to justify particular examples. This is an effort to envisage the principle of the possibility of government and its organ, law. By its light particular instances may be examined, perhaps judged, at all events, understood. But to reverse the process, to require a true theory to conform to not only every true example but also every apparent and pretending example, is demanding something which it is unable to supply. It can explain real things and place them within the system of their reasonableness; but all it can accomplish with regard to those things which contradict themselves and defeat their own existence, is to demonstrate the impossibility of their comprehension within a system of any sort or kind.
Conclusion The proper conclusion to such an essay as I have made would be a theory of political life, fully worked out and comprehensively related to the rest of philosophy. This, however, I am unable to offer. Perhaps the only certain result of all my arguments is the inference that (in the words of Mr Pickwick) ‘the word politics comprises, in itself, a difficult study of no inconsiderable magnitude.’301 But even this seems to be somewhat in advance of the serene satisfaction with which modern social psychology and juristic theory promulgate their dicta on the nature of human life. My sole object in this essay has been to get a clearer view of the real nature of political philosophy, because it seems to me that this is a better approach than a ready acceptance of the questionable meanings which popular, legal, or any other specialized opinion has fastened upon the terms of this subject. In this attempt I have to a large extent failed. The real meaning of the things we call ‘political’ does not yet stand out with the clearness which I should wish.302 But that, again, seems to me in some respects an advance upon the unexamined (except psychologically) preconceptions and assumptions of our ‘political scientists’. At the outset I described my point of view by calling this an attempt to refocus the telescope of the mind upon the essential facts of political life. In consequence, all that I have said has been in terms of the problems which present themselves to our gaze, yet the problems themselves have nowhere been pushed forward for the sake of discovering their real nature. Hence the least valuable part of all that I have said is the provisional solutions I may have reached and been unable to conceal. Whatever these solutions may be, and however wrong-headed they may be, they do not affect the only [301] [C. Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Ch. XV (London: E. Grattan, 1839), p. 155.] [302] I have made a further attempt in my remarks on Sociality.
argument to which I have given my full attention, viz., that these are the problems which are the business of political philosophy, and that it must take account of this aspect of things, and in this way. I am ready to abandon many of the conclusions here reached, but not the attitude with which I have tried to approach the subject—an attitude of doubt, and especially doubt concerning the value of the present legal and psychological tendencies of speculation on these topics. I am prepared to find that I have not penetrated far enough into the densely populated country of presupposition which lies behind everything we can think or say on this or any subject. If modern political science is building its stately edifice of statistics upon the sand, any conclusions I may have reached perhaps have a no firmer foundation. But one thing is certain, that the only sure basis of any study is one constructed out of examined preconceptions, and it is towards such a view of things that all my remarks must be taken to tend. It is easy to fall into a jargon, a set way of thinking and speaking, and it is impossible to feel no sense of guilt in the too ready adoption of the conventional terms of a study. I have already given my reasons for not wishing to abandon all at once what may be called the ‘old terminology’; but the further we press we are increasingly faced with the extreme difficulty of making ourselves understood except by repeated explanations of the exact meaning we imply in the use of each word. For example, it has occurred to me more than once that I have followed too blindly the conventional ruts of political science in including a separate section on Government. It is, of course, perfectly clear that to treat the State as a governmental area is no whit less absurd than to treat it as a geographical area. But beyond this a more subtle evaluation of its constitutive elements is necessary before we can properly judge the exact place which government can hold in a true theory of the social whole. That, for one reason or another, the place it has held in political theory is out of all comparison with its real importance, there can be small doubt. To make it an element of prime importance, as English thinkers have been apt
to do, to say that no association is a state except it can show itself ruled by a government of a certain kind, would be paralleled in natural science by a refusal to believe that anything could come under the head of carbon which was not black. Just as blackness is a feature of some forms of carbon and manifestly not a feature of other forms, so government is a feature of some modes of statehood, but not of others. The discovery, due in modern times to Jhering as much as to anyone else, that law is not a system of abstract principles but rests on [the] objective purpose to be served, should have enabled us to see mere government in a truer light than, for example, Hobbes or Hume or Locke could see it, but such hardly seems to be the present result. Nor have our modern juristic theorists advanced beyond the crude and absolute distinction, which we find, for instance, in Hume’s essay, between governors and governed.303 It seems probable that a true line of advance will lead at once to a view of government in which this distinction is abandoned as hopelessly at variance with the facts, and a more accurate assessment of the place which government holds as a single activity of a social whole. With the former, I believe, we shall come to see that the problem of government is a single manifestation of a much wider problem— the problem of education: and in consequence man’s effort to solve it is recorded not merely in the history of law, but also in the history of education. When we see it whole, the great figures of educational speculation—Plato, Erasmus, Pestalozzi, Arnold, Thring, Montessori—will discover themselves as those who have attacked a problem one part of which we call ‘government’. And with the latter will come the emancipation of political philosophy from the greatest disability under which it now suffers. But the wide-spread satisfaction with first principles as they are at present conceived prevents the necessary reexamination. This satisfaction must be shaken if we are to advance. Not that we are likely to achieve a state in which we make no presuppositions, but that a study founded upon unexamined preconceptions, which no [303] e.g., Laski, Authority in the Modern State, p. 22 [cp. p. 89, above].
one has troubled to question or doubt, is necessarily doomed to sterility and inconsequence. Perhaps I shall be best able to point out the rough conclusions of this essay if I divide them into three heads, and make a few remarks about each in turn. 1. The necessity of a better view of the nature of political philosophy. 2. The necessity of a metaphysical foundation to political philosophy. 3. The necessity of a thorough examination of the present position of the study, and the presuppositions on which it is based. (1) I have already said most of what I think necessary about the nature of political philosophy. Putting aside the fact that to understand the things we call political is by no means so simple a task as is often supposed, it is equally important that we understand the exact nature, end, and possibilities of a philosophical theory. Upon this naturally depends our view of what is and what is not a contribution to political philosophy, as well as the validity of our own speculations. But in spite of the importance of clear ideas on this subject it seems to be one universally neglected. If I confine myself to remarks upon the history of political philosophy I can best illustrate what I mean. In his valuable History of Aesthetic Bosanquet takes up the point of view that much may be written about art which is not a contribution to Aesthetic, and this leads him to a division of his subject into three main heads. First, the works of art themselves, and the thoughts, feelings and experiences which they presuppose; secondly, what he calls ‘criticism’, which includes all writing about art the aim of which is either to improve it, give directions for the creation of works of art, or to describe individual productions; thirdly, aesthetic theory, the aim of which is neither to describe, to improve, or to direct, but simply to theorize, to put this art-experience into relation with the whole.
This classification, of course, assumes a certain theory of what art is, and what a theory is, but this, so far from being an objection (as many would have it), shows its superiority over other and less critical views. It is possible to approach other human experiences in the same way. Take morality and ethics, for instance. First we have moral experience; secondly the moralists, preachers and teachers who aim at producing a certain kind of morality, whose aim is therefore practical, creative or reformatory, and together with these we must class all historians of moral opinion and those who wish to reveal its cause and origin; and thirdly, ethics, the theory of morals. This seems to me to put facts in some sort of rational order, which is a sine qua non of clear thinking on the subject. And yet nine books out of ten on ethics or morals neither adopt this view of the nature of their subject, nor any other view at all. We have such phrases as ‘ethical purposes’, ‘the ethics of primitive man’, and ‘international ethics’, none of which have any significance at all if ethics is the theory of morals. There are moral purposes, and we are trying to build up an international morality. Even D’Arcy in his excellent Short Study of Ethics shows an insecure grasp of this difference between ethics and morality.304 While the most striking contemporary instance is to be found in Schweitzer’s Civilization and Ethics, where the entire conclusions of the book rest upon the uncertain basis of a confusion on on this point. He presents us with a new morality, not a new ethic.305 This misuse of words is, no doubt, in part the legacy of the nineteenth century ‘ethical movement’, just as Aesthetic suffered by the ‘aesthetic movement’ of the same period. If it went no further than a matter of words not much harm would have been done, but as a matter of fact [304] [C.F. D’Arcy, A Short Study of Ethics (London: Macmillan & Co., 1895)] [305] A. Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, tr. J. Nash (London: A. & C. Black, Ltd., 1923). [‘The ideal of the civilized man is nothing else than that of the man who demonstrates and practises the truly humane nature in all the relations of life’, p. 282.]
it has succeeded in perverting the entire outlook of many of the most influential writers. When we come to political philosophy things are in a still worse state. The latest plan for reorganizing human society, for inaugurating an international government, for industrial organization, or for town planning is hailed as a contribution to political philosophy. Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Luther, Suarez and Bonald, Hegel, G.D.H. Cole and Patrick Geddes are alike spoken of as political philosophers. University courses treat Hegel and Maine, Bosanquet and Dicey, as if they were writing about the same subject in the same way. And what is worst of all, genuine contributions to the philosophy of political life are judged as if they were contributions to psychology of law, sociology, or the so-called ‘science’ of government. It seems to me of the utmost importance that this confusion should be faced and dispelled; and the means of doing so are ready to hand. The raw material of political philosophy is political life; from that we may pass to the vast literature of utopias and practical suggestions in government and social organization, of political criticism and political reform, of law and jurisprudence, of history and party controversy. But apart from all this is the genuine literature of political philosophy. These distinctions are useful, nay, absolutely necessary, yet when they are made we cannot pretend that all our troubles will be over. It is easy enough to pick out examples to suit our classification. On the one side we have such a piece of political criticism as Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, on the other, Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts; or again, Mr Graham Wallas’s interesting excursions into social psychology, and Green’s Lectures on Political Obligation. But what are we to say about Plato’s Republic, Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, or Rousseau’s Contrat social? Can we fit them into the class of political criticism or into that of political theory? It is obvious that none of these works (and there are many others in like case) conform in the most obvious way to our system of classification. They are at once works of criticism and of theory: just as Butler’s Sermons are at once moral criticism
and ethic, and Pater’s Renaissance a contribution to history and criticism and at the same time an excursion into aesthetic.306 With such examples before us it would be futile to object to this procedure, but we should be careful to note that, unlike many modern works which incorporate practical suggestions and a practical purpose with a theoretical treatment, Plato and Spinoza and Rousseau are under no delusion as to what they are doing. They are aware that they have a double purpose and are careful not to confuse themselves and others in the way they treat it. With them we are left in no doubt as to when they are making a practical suggestion for social organization and when they are formulating a theory of social life, and they do not use arguments for the one end which are admissible only in support of the other. Plato has before him the State of Athens as he knows it. He wishes to point out its defects and to put people into the way of reorganizing it on a surer political foundation. Behind these suggestions lies Plato’s view (theory) of what a State is, and he develops the two purposes side by side. But he avoids committing the blunder of thinking it necessary that his theory should conform to every appearance of fact which any of his hearers may like to produce against him, and he avoids also the notion that the end of a theory of politics is to judge the different historical systems of government and social organization. Our classification, then, is one which applies primarily to the subject-matter itself of our study and only secondarily to literary works. But the best literature of the subject observes its essentials [306] [The first reference is probably to Joseph Butler’s widely read ‘Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel’ (1726); many editions, e.g. Butler’s Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel; and, a Dissertation of the Natureof Virtue, edited with an introduction and additional notes by T.A. Roberts (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1970). The reference to Walter Pater is to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan and Co., 1873). Three subsequent editions were entitled The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.]
even when, from a more superficial point of view, it seems to take leave of it. But when we turn to more modern writers we discover a very different state of affairs. Throughout Mr Laski’s work, for instance, runs this double strain of political criticism and attempted theory of political life, but the two purposes are confused in sucha way as to vitiate most of his remarks on both. At one moment he is objecting to a theory of political life because it does not afford him sufficient basis for judging actual political systems: ‘our political systems must be judged not merely by the ends they serve, but also by the way in which they serve those ends’.307 And at another he is using a criterion suitable for testing a practical programme in order to prove a theoretical position: ‘We shall find, I think, that there is one best method of considering our problem. Suppose that on the one hand we adopt the monist solution, what concrete difference will that make to our political life? If we are pluralists, how does that affect our activities? What, in short, are the consequences of our attitude? It is from them we may deduce its truth.’308 And in these errors of logic Mr Laski does not stand alone. Mr Hobhouse, for example, thinks he has put forward a real objection to the Hegelian theory of the State simply by saying that ‘it was designed to turn the edge of the principle of freedom by identifying freedom with law.’309 This, indeed, might be a ground for refusing to live in an Hegelian state, but it is no ground at all for objecting to a theory of the State. And if it should happen that Hegel is right, Mr Hobhouse is performing the heroic task of registering a protest against the universe. Further examples are unnecessary. My point is, that until we possess a truer view of our subject-matter we are not likely to make any notable contribution [307] Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty, p. 248. [308] Laski, Problem of Sovereignty, p. 3. [309] L.T. Hobhouse, Principles of Sociology, 5 vols (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996 [1918]), vol. 1, The Metaphysical Theory of the State A Criticism, p. 24.
to our study. And the failure of late years to produce anything of prime importance in political theory is largely owing to this refusal to discover the limits and ends of a theory and what is its relation to purposes of practical reform. There is another subject which requires a thorough treatment before we can arrive at a true philosophy of political life: we must discover the exact relation of political philosophy to ethics. And we shall be in a position to do this only when we have formulated some clear ideas on the nature of political philosophy and on the nature of ethics. I do not propose to discuss this matter now, but it is my belief that it is only a wrong view of the nature of political life, and a wrong view of the nature of the self, which has created and perpetuated the notion that there is any difference at all between political philosophy and ethics, just as it is an erroneous and untenable view of the self which perpetuates the distinction between ‘individual’ and ‘social’ psychology. And we can count it hardly short of monstrous that writers who have gained the position of recognized authorities on this subject, can cover up their failure properly to think out this relation by retailing to us stale nonsense about political philosophy being ‘applied ethics’. (2) One of my main objects has been to show clearly what is the nature of the presuppositions which all political theorists make and must make. I have not been able to catalogue them and examine them one by one—such a useful piece of work is quite beyond me. But I have tried to call attention to the particular class of presupposition which we are most in danger of forgetting. They are not sociological, nor psychological, but logical and metaphysical. Again and again in the course of our discussion it has become clear that all political philosophy depends upon a view of the universe, and so on a metaphysic. It is unnecessary for me to say that all that I have said rests upon certain views about the nature of truth, knowledge, the good, and reality, for that is obvious on every page. What I wish to make clear is that here I attach no importance whatever to these views (which I have
introduced only in order to show that some metaphysical basis is necessary). My sole object is to point out that a political philosophy founded upon no metaphysical prolegomenon, or upon one fundamentally in error, is doomed to propagate not truth, but falsehood. As things are at present the psychologists and legalists are so firmly in possession of this field of study that there is an immediate presumption against any attempt to build up a politics upon a sound philosophical basis. ‘All this is metaphysics, you cry. That is enough; there needs nothing more to give a strong presumption of falsehood’ said Hume,310 and the situation is not far other to-day. But, as a matter of fact, I repeat, all the most important questions of political philosophy are solved or missolved while we are still engaging our minds with metaphysics. The real antagonism between Hegel and Hobhouse is in the realm of logic,311 and that between Bosanquet and Laski lies in the fact that the former has a view of the universe, a theory of truth and reality, which the latter neither holds, understands, nor replaces by another.312 With certain writers it has long been a practice to retail an ethic unfounded upon anything save perhaps a rather fanciful biology, and some even have attempted to justify this procedure. But it should be clear enough that upon the threshold of ethics lie a [310] D. Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Human Understanding, and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), p. 289. [311] Mr Hobhouse is in a singular position. He tells us that he spent long years thrashing out his metaphysical position, and that his view of the nature of reality and truth is not far other than that of Hegel or Bradley. But when he comes to discuss morals, the nature of the State, and political life, all his metaphysics desert him, and his mind is given up to the undisputed sway of anthropology and the ‘politics’ of the moment. [312] Roughly speaking, Mr Laski’s metaphysics seems to be a réchauffé of Jamesian pragmatism in its crudest form.
number of perplexing questions whose nature is best described as metaphysical. If this is not obvious at the outset, it should speedily become so either by a consideration of the treatment which the outstanding works in the history of philosophy have given to the theory of morals, or from a review of the necessary preliminaries to a theory of anything whatever. That a theory must be founded upon a sound logic, that a logic involves313 a view of the nature of truth and reality—a metaphysic—should need no demonstration, and it is difficult to see on what grounds a theory of morals should be excluded from this necessity. That an exception should be made in favour of the theory of political life is equally puzzling and even more frequent. I have endeavoured to show that in the philosophy of political life there are but two chapters—the one entitled, the State; the other, the Self—and that these two are finally one. It has been thought that the State and the Self are two things. The whole was considered as a stick in which the self is the handle by which we grasp our position in our social whole, but now we are beginning to see that this wand of political life is embossed by no handle of a self, but is all of a piece. To approach it from the end of the self leads to the state, and vice versa. Self and state are aspects of a single entity. Such a position, and indeed any position we may choose to adopt with regard to this question, rests entirely upon a view of the nature of the self. ‘Now, do you conceive it possible,’ asks Socrates, ‘to comprehend satisfactorily the nature of the soul without comprehending the nature of the universe?’314 And Phaedrus can but answer, ‘Nay.’ If to understand man and his nature we must connect him with the universe of which he is a part and with the world to which he belongs and must prove this connection necessary, it is the problem itself which compels a metaphysical discussion. For the real question is, What is involved in this experience we call [313] [Oakeshott’s marginal note: ‘is?’] [314] Plato, Phaedrus, 270 [tr. J. Wright, op. cit., p. 77].
political life? And while it is the writers who see most clearly the impossibility either of building a sound political philosophy in the air or of deciding these metaphysical and logical problems by anything other than metaphysical and logical discussions who have contributed most helpfully to the study of political philosophy, it is those who have failed to recognize these necessities who have performed the signal service of confusing the issues and darkening the problems so that the study at the present time is little better than a treacherous morass whose paths have been obliterated by the repeated and aimless tramplings of so many purposeless arguments and inconsequent controversies. (3) Any possibility of contributing usefully to the study of political philosophy must depend upon our ability to speak in a language which can be understood, and this necessitates a full understanding of the present position of the subject. Whatever are the conclusions we wish to reach, the way in which we express them must be governed by the presuppositions which those who are at present hold the field are in the habit of making. If we disagree, as I think we are fully justified in doing, with the general point of view which the distinctively modern political theorists adopt, we must start from their position and question their attitude. It is more difficult in philosophy than in natural science to discover any kind of corporate advance in the study, but for all that it does not consist in merely a repetition of old ideas without any advance towards a more settled state of mind. The problems which we must attack are those which faced Plato and Spinoza, and it should at least be clear by this time that some methods of approach will lead only to disappointment and delusion. Radical fallacies are from time to time exposed, but it is no easy matter to throw off an attitude of mind. The fact which we must face is that the unpleasant scent of the outworn rags of nineteenth century materialism (which was anything but philosophical), and the musty odour of nineteenth century biological theories, still cling about our political speculations as the stale stench of last night’s cigars permeates the unaired breakfastroom. Theology has long
been under the cloud of the so-called historical method, but is now beginning to free itself; while political philosophy seems only to be advancing further into this morass of baseless conjecture. And the way in which it stretches out its hands to cling to each new fad of the populus—‘the unconscious mind’, ‘the herd instinct’, ‘crowd suggestion’ and the rest—calls to mind the actions of a drowning man. In the scientific and historical discoveries of the nineteenth century and the attitude of mind which they subsequently engendered is to be discovered the foundation of the position in which we now find ourselves, and in tracing these antecedents we shall be in a better position to understand and judge that which (we must admit) it is impossible suddenly to abolish. We must admit also that Europe is at present hardly in a position to enter upon that enquiry which alone can form a secure basis for a philosophy of political life. For a purely theoretical treatment of such subjects we have been accustomed to look to Germany, but the present state of that country forbids us to hope for anything of that nature in the near future. An excellent illustration of this is afforded by the work of Troeltsch whose post-war speculations bear the mark of that practical reconstruction, as distinct from a theory of the whole and for its own sake, which his country is called upon to make in its social life and governmental organization: nam neque nos agere hoc patriai tempore iniquo possumus aequo animo315 From France we can expect little either. French political writers, like those of America, have for the last twenty years given themselves over to the Sociology which consists in the collection and partial assimilation of vast masses of data from which it is hoped a science of society may eventually appear. The monumental works of modern political thought are the [315] Lucretius, De rerum natura, I. 41–2. [Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, p. 5: ‘For neither can we pursue our task with tranquil mind, in this untranquil time of our country.’
Sociological Review, originally inspired by Le Play and his school of social enquiry, and the Political Science Quarterly with its immense record of work on statistical methods and the science of government and administration which has been carried out in America. One of the most interesting books from America of late is Miss Follett’s Creative Experience in which she gives an admirable review of what she believes the present position to be, and it is not one which offers much hope for the immediate future.316 These activities, however, do not pretend to give us a political theory and so do not themselves endanger the formation of such a theory on its true basis. The disquieting feature which they disclose is that men’s interests and endeavours are largely turned in a direction away from a true theory. In England matters are somewhat different. Those writers who speak so much of the ‘naturalistic’ and the ‘realistic’ theory of the state which they offer us, not only (by their method of approach) demonstrate the moribund condition of true theoretical enquiry, but prove themselves more subtle enemies by pretending to give us that for which we are looking. When we ask for the real thing they do not refuse us, but give us—a serpent. For that political thought which I have called characteristically modern is neither political (in the true sense), nor is it thought,317 and the general tendency of the present day seems to me to be based upon a radical misconception of the nature of the study. However, it is no part of my intention in this place to present a review of the position in which we find ourselves, though this seems to me the most pressing of our needs. Before any convincing advance can be made it is necessary to take stock of present tendencies and prevailing notions, and this will be best accomplished by a critical review of the writings of those who have established themselves as the leaders of this branch of research. [316] M.P. Follett, Creative Experience (London; New York: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1930 [1924]). [317] See p. 65, n. 17, above.
The reader of these scattered notes will have looked in vain for any real unity of treatment, and while they are by no means free from internal contradiction, they make no pretence at a comprehensive review of the subject; and so it will not surprise him if I offer no better conclusion than this—which is at best a wall-end left irregular and unbeautiful, with the scaffolding still in its place, so that the looker-on shall be in no doubt as to its incompleteness, and the author under no delusion as to the finality of his remarks. August 1925
Part 2 The Philosophical Approach to Politics What is Political Philosophy? 1. There exist a number of books which by their titles purport to be philosophical theories of politics, or, which comes to the same thing, criticisms of philosophical theories. For, you will see, unless a criticism of a philosophical theory is itself philosophical it will not be a very valuable criticism. Aristotle’s Politics, Hobbes’ Leviathan, Rousseau’s Contrat social, and Green’s Lectures on Political Obligation are books of this kind. 2. I shall assume that, either as a matter of interest, or for some less good reason, a good many of you have from time to time tried to read some of these books; and it is safe to say that you probably found them hard going. Some of them to ordinary readers like ourselves appear to be just nonsense, or, at any rate, we are often at a loss to find their significance. We ask ourselves of this or that writer, ‘What is he getting at?’, and we are no nearer to answering the question at the end of his book than we were at the beginning. We take up these books and try to judge them by ordinary standards, and our conclusion is that either they are something new, the like of which we have not previously come across, or they are just nonsense. 3. This, I imagine, will have been the experience of most of you if you have happened upon Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The book has troubled a great many people since it was written just over 100 years ago. And I suppose the most general conclusion about it is that it is nonsense, or something perilously near to being nonsense. Usually, in an attempt to put some meaning into it, those who
have been more kindly disposed towards Hegel have regarded it as simply a rather poor attempt to advertise the Prussian state at the end of the eighteenth century. Here is the first paragraph. The completely free will, when it is conceived abstractly, is in a condition of self-involved simplicity. What actuality it has when taken in this abstract way, consists in a negative attitude towards reality, and a bare abstract reference of itself to itself. Such an abstract will is the individual will of a subject. It, as particular, has definite ends, and, as exclusive and individual, has these ends before itself as an externally and directly presented world.318 And we come to the conclusion that if this is a philosophy of politics, then, philosophy is, as Michelet remarked, merely a matter of ‘Losing one’s way methodically’, it is a conscientious attempt to look at things upside down.319 We say to ourselves, either nonsense or new. But probably the most profitable thing to do is to say either, ‘This does not interest me’, and go no further with it, or ‘This interests me’, and then try and find some standard by which to judge it. 4. The fact of the matter is, that unless we have some idea of the kind of thing a writer on the philosophy of politics is driving at we shall entirely misunderstand what he says. Of course, he has his duty to his readers. ‘The philosophical writer’, says Schopenhauer, ‘is a guide and his reader is an explorer. If they are to go together they must start together; that is, the writer must take up a point of
[318] G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §34, p. 43. [319] [Possibly Karl Ludwig Michelet (1801–93), Hegel’s successor as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin, but the quotation has not been traced.]
view which he has in common with the reader.’320 But if the reader is not prepared to go somewhere where he has not been before, they can’t expect to more than start together. And what I want to do in these lectures is to try and discover the point of view of a writer of this sort, because if we can grasp his point of view we shall be in less danger of making ourselves absurd in what we say about him; for, you know, philosophers are not the only people who talk nonsense. If a great deal of so-called political philosophy is nonsense, it is also true that almost all the so-called criticisms of political philosophies are mere absurdities, because they fail at the outset to understand the nature of the subject itself. These critics think they can usefully criticize a philosophical theory without being themselves philosophical or even knowing what philosophy is. You will, I think, find that this is so with almost everything Professor Laski has ever written about political philosophies. And it is certainly the main defect of Hobhouse’s book, The Metaphysical Theory of the State. There are very few controversies in political philosophy to-day in which the antagonists are playing the same game. The one man is playing chess, his adversary is playing against him at billiards; and whenever a victory is achieved, or a defeat sustained, it is always such a victory as a billiard-player might be supposed to gain over a chess-player, or such a defeat as a billiard-player might be supposed to sustain at the hands of a chess-player. These incongruous contests are entirely attributable to the circumstances that political philosophy has not been reasoned out from the bottom, and that the disputants have no common question before them on which they have joined issue. 5. So, I do not want to try to give you a political philosophy, for I haven’t one to give. I want to give you some sort of familiarity with [320] Schopenhauer, ‘On Philosophy and its Method’, in Parerga, ii. 6. [Oakeshott’s translation, which may be his own, refers to Schopenhauer, ‘Über Philosophie und ihre Methode’, in Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols (Leipzig, F.A. Brockhaus, 1939 [1873–4]), vi. 6.]
the point of view of political philosophy in general, and so work out some kind of criterion for judging a philosophical theory of politics. And, in the end, we may find ourselves in a slightly better position to understand, criticize, or construct a philosophy of politics for ourselves. 6. If you will allow me, then, I will not begin dogmatically by saying that philosophy consists in looking at things upside down, nor is it advisable, at first, to think of a philosopher as, it has been said, ‘a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there’. All that may turn out to be true in the end; but it will be more reasonable to start by supposing that philosophy is something, and therefore something, in some respects, different from other things. And if it takes us all our time to distinguish exactly what a philosophical theory of politics is, you must not mind that. Because, I may tell you, if you found out that you would have found out a good deal more than a great many writers on the subject. Our aim, then, is simply to try and see clearly what are the requirements of a philosophical theory of politics, to answer the question, What is a political philosophy anyway? 7. But there are many difficulties; and about one of them I must warn you. I should like to say that the whole of what I am going to tell you is uncontroversial, true for all philosophical theories that have ever been put forward; but that is impossible. It is a peculiarity of philosophy, that to give even the baldest account of it is to take up a position. For example, the question, ‘What is Botany?’ is not one of the controversial questions which worry botanists and give them sleepless nights. But in philosophy we are met at the door with the question, ‘What is philosophy?’; and it is not too much to say that if you could answer it fully you would have done all that there is to do in philosophy. And so, in trying to see clearly what a philosophical theory of politics is, we are really starting out on an attempt to make a political philosophy.
This, perhaps, appears rather absurd to you. The very idea of a number of people first calling themselves philosophers and then going about the world asking themselves and their friends what philosophy is, is absurd enough to lead us back to our opinion that philosophy is only looking at things upside down. But don’t be led! That’s mere impatience! Or, if you prefer, why not try and see what things look like upside down? There was a French painter who discovered that all the colours of the landscape seemed brighter and more interesting when he looked at them standing on his head, so he always painted pictures looking between his legs. So, even if we do not always look at things upside down, it is at least worthwhile discovering how different they look from that position. And, if we look a little closer, this is not all quite so absurd as it seems at first sight. It is true that botanists do not think about botany, but about plants, that historians do not think about history but about events and characters, that poets do not think about poetry but about their experiences, but does that mean that no one is to be allowed to think about thinking, to turn thought back upon itself? You may think it unprofitable, but it is not entirely nonsensical. If there were no plants there could be no botany; and if no one ever thought there could be no philosophy, in a double sense— there would be no subject or object for philosophy—no thinking person to think about his thought. And so, if you have discovered fully what philosophy is you have come to a conclusion on a great number of questions which are usually called philosophical questions. To put it another way: in philosophy it is impossible to divide in order to conquer, it is impossible to take one thing at a time, simply because a full answer to any one question implies a certain answer to all other questions. So, in what I have to say I cannot help adopting a position, I cannot help making controversial statements, you would probably say I cannot help being prejudiced.
8. Now the favourite way of getting some sort of clear idea of what a philosophical theory of politics is, and what, in general, philosophy is, is to go to the so-called history of philosophy and see what it can tell us. You will see, of course, that this is really a very wrong-headed way of going about it, for unless we know what philosophy is, unless we have a fairly clear idea of its aims and results, the history of philosophy must remain for us a blank,— we don’t know what it is the history of which we are studying. The history of a subject is necessarily intimately connected with the conception which is formed of it. But, if we treat it warily, I think the history of philosophy, even in this very abstract sense, has something to suggest to us, and it will be worthwhile to start by seeing what it has to say. 9. The word philosophy, as it first appears in Greek, is equivalent simply to our word curiosity. It meant curiosity about anything and everything.321 Of the writings of the so-called philosophers of that early period all that has come down to us are mere fragments preserved as quotations in later works. But we can see that what was valued were simply the opinions of those writers, opinions on all sorts of subjects. Anaximander said that ‘the moon was a ring eighteen times the size of the earth’. Thales said that ‘the Earth floats on water’. Heraclitus said that ‘the dry soul is the wisest and best’. And we are seldom, if ever, told the reasons which lay behind these sayings. Philosophy, then, as we first meet the word in history means first a curious search after knowledge and secondly a set of opinions about anything whatsoever. Intellectual pursuits are quite undifferentiated; they were all just knowledge, curiosity. [321] [Oakeshott’s note reads: ‘Solon and Croesus. Herodotus. I. 14’, probably a reference to Herodotus, Histories, tr. G. Rawlinson (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1992 [1910]), p. 16, where Croesus begins his address to Solon: ‘Stranger of Athens, we have heard much of thy wisdom and of thy travels through many lands, from love of knowledge and a wish to see the world.’]
But, in the course of time ‘philosophy’ began to mean something more definite and limited. Plato’s , it is true, is the man who has by nature the appetite for learning anything and everything, but the word philosophy was beginning to be a technical expression, meaning very much what we mean by ‘science’ when we use the word loosely,—something systematic and reasoned, something the opposite of arbitrary and capricious. So when Plato says that there will be no end to the evil of human life until either kings become philosophers or philosophers become kings, we must not read into it any of our modern meanings of ‘philosophy’. Plato meant by a philosopher a man who had a disinterested, judicious, scientific outlook, an expert in his particular line. Plato, as you know, was all for government by experts, and that is all he means by a philosopher-king. With Aristotle a great change begins; and what we, nowadays, mean by the word philosophy has been influenced by him more than by anyone else.322 Aristotle ‘was primarily a man not only of remarkable but universal intelligence; and universal intelligence means that he could apply his intelligence to anything. The ordinary intelligence is good for certain classes of objects; a brilliant man of science, if he is interested in poetry at all, may conceive grotesque judgments: he may like one poet because he reminds him of himself, or another because he expresses emotions which he admires … But Aristotle had none of these impure desires to satisfy; in whatever sphere of interest, he looked solely and steadfastly at the object.’323 He was interested in everything, he wrote or lectured on a great many different subjects—theology, ethics, logic, rhetoric, physics, biology, psychology, the science of [322] See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk A ch ii, 982b (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1960 [1952]), p. 7. [‘This science is the theory of first principles and reasons, among which is the good or the wherefor.’; tr. R. Hope.] [323] T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1920), pp. 9–10.
government, poetry and literature—and he was known to the ages which came after him as a philosopher, as the philosopher. And so, what should be more natural than to suppose that everything in which Aristotle was interested was in fact ‘philosophy’? The science or art of medicine was the sole exception: Galen says that Hippocrates separated medicine from philosophy. But with this exception, right down to the eighteenth century the word ‘philosophy’ is ordinarily used for any, roughly-speaking, ‘scientific’ curiosity or knowledge. Aristotle himself, it is true, differentiated more than his predecessors between his intellectual interests, but on the whole his influence, or that of his editors, has been on the side of ‘philosophy’ as the undifferentiated whole of human knowledge or effort after knowledge.324 In the later Greek age and with the Romans ‘philosophy’ was given an additional meaning; it was thought of as including religion also. Epicureanism and Stoicism were creeds, ways of life, and also ‘philosophies’. This is admirably described in Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, for example. The Middle Ages carried on what I have called the Aristotelian tradition—philosophy meaning the whole range and also every separate department of, knowledge, or research. Albertus Magnus, Abelard, the Alchemists, Roger Bacon were all philosophers. The ‘philosopher’s stone’ was that which would turn everything it touched to gold. What we call modern philosophy begins in the sixteenth century. And its characteristic is that it introduces a firmer and more logical differentiation of intellectual interests, one of which is philosophy; instead of philosophy being the name for all in [324] [Oakeshott’s reference to ‘Haskins on Mediaeval philosophy’ may be to C.H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), pp. 307, 341: ‘Twelfth century … habits of thought … were to persist until the seventeenth century and even later … in most mediaeval classifications of knowledge science was only a branch of philosophy … Aristotle … mingled the two in the almost universal cyclopedia of his writings.’]
general. But progress in this direction was very slow and had many setbacks; in fact the movement which began with Descartes to free philosophy, not only from theology and the domination of the church, but also from the hampering influence of other intellectual interests and points of view, is not yet completed. The sixteenth century saw also the beginnings of what we have now come to call Natural Science, and it seems to have been more or less inevitable that modern philosophy and modern science, both struggling against the dead hand of ecclesiastical prejudice, should find common cause, and should for a century or two longer remain confused. At any rate that is what happened. The astronomer Galileo was thought of as a ‘philosopher’, Leibnitz was equally a philosopher in producing his theory of monads and in his invention of the Calculus, Newton’s great work was called ‘the mathematical principles of natural philosophy’, and we have only to turn to Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne to discover the way in which the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries commonly used the word. This way of looking at things lasted longer in England than in some other European countries. At the end of the eighteenth century Hegel in his lectures on the History of Philosophy can still laugh at the English because we called the barometer and thermometer ‘philosophical instruments’. And indeed this terminology has lasted on to the present day. Canning in an after-dinner speech could speak of ‘the philosophic principles of government’,325 the Philosophical Society in Cambridge to-day is one exclusively interested in what we call the Natural Sciences, and philosophy is spoken of as ‘Moral Science’. But with the great age of German philosophy, during the second half of the eighteenth century, a change was taking place. Nobody would think of abasing, wholesale, all intellectual interests and pursuits, of pouring scorn on all curiosity and effort after knowledge, and yet it was becoming the fashion, a fashion which [325] [This anecdote is related in Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, i. 58.]
has lasted on to our own day, of abusing a body of people called ‘philosophers’. A change had evidently taken place. Philosophy was becoming a particular intellectual pursuit, and one, apparently, by common consent, which was both unprofitable and vain. ‘All this is metaphysics, you say’, remarks Hume in one of his books, ‘and there needs nothing more to give it a strong presumption of falsity.’326 If philosophy were simply a matter of curiosity about everything as it was to the Greeks, if it were simply, as Novalis said, ‘getting rid of your phlegm’,327 then no-one would be so senseless as to abuse it in the wholesale manner in which philosophy has been abused during the past century, no-one would say of it, as Michelet did, that it was just ‘methodically losing one’s way’. This suspicion is evidence of the existence of some particular kind of knowledge which is now called ‘philosophy’. Best illustration of the change. Compare Plato and Hegel on the Philosopher-King. Either they meant the same thing and disagreed, or they meant different things by ‘philosopher’ and did not necessarily disagree. Now, Hegel’s view of ‘philosophy’ was that it was of no practical use, that the great ages of philosophy came after an age of practical activity. And his view of government was [326] [Oakeshott is paraphrasing Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals; see p. 135 n. 9, above.] [327] [R. Stern, Hegelian Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 173 nn. 88–90, traces the quotation ‘Philosophiren ist dephlegmatisiren—vivificiren’ to Novalis, ‘Logologischen Fragmenten’, no. 15, in Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. P. Luckhorn and R. Samuel, 6 vols, 3rd edn (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1977–), ii. 256, and notes that it was cited in both B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value The Gifford Lectures for 1911 Delivered in Edinburgh University (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1912), pp. 60–1, and Nettleship, Remains, i. 126, where it is paraphrased as ‘to philosophize is to get rid of one’s phlegm’. Its usage in W. Pater, The Renaissance (London: Fontana Library, 1967 [1873]), p. 222, appears to have predated both, though Oakeshott was familiar with all three possible sources.]
much the same as Plato’s. So they do not disagree. It is simply that Plato has one meaning for philosopher and Hegel another. Plato thinks of him as an expert in practical life and government: Hegel thinks of him as an expert in a particular kind or way of thinking. ‘The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.’328 Illogically enough, even among those who are most abusive of this thing called ‘philosophy’, it is not always admitted that it really exists as a separate intellectual interest with a point of view peculiar to it, with individual aims and perhaps individual results. All studies have been slow to recognize their own limits, that is, to discover themselves. ‘Philosophy’ once included ‘natural science’ and now many are wanting to merge philosophy into natural science and will admit it no separate existence. Religion once dominated philosophy, and now some philosophers are telling us what we ought to believe, are making religion a part of philosophy. Both these conflicts have a long history which we need not go into. The view which I wish to put before you is that philosophy is something different from religion, different from natural science, having characteristics and an individuality of its own. You may think that all that I have been telling you is simply a matter of words, of terminology, but what I wish to make as clear as I can is that it is a matter of meanings and not words, of things, if you like. And this will, I hope, become clearer as we go on. 10. Perhaps you are wondering what all this has to do with a philosophical theory of politics. What I have been doing is trying to make as good [an] attempt as I can to start at the beginning so that we can, as Schopenhauer said, start together. How are we to discover what a philosophical theory of politics is, when we do not yet know what philosophy is? The conclusion which this history of philosophy suggests, then, is this. In its early days philosophy was just knowledge about anything and everything; now, it has come to mean a particular kind of knowledge, to be [328] Hegel, ‘Preface’ to Philosophy of Right, p. xxx.
distinguished from other kinds and to be freed from the illusory obligations of conforming to the standards and criteria of other kinds of knowledge. Or, perhaps, to call it knowledge is going further than we need. Philosophy is a particular kind of thinking, different from other kinds, and yet, naturally, having characteristics in common with every sort of activity which can be properly called thinking. There is a passage in the Phaedrus of Plato where Socrates says: on every subject, my friend, there is but one mode of beginning for those who would deliberate well. They must know what the thing is on which they are deliberating, or else of necessity go altogether astray. Most men, however, are blind to the fact that they are ignorant of the essential character of each individual thing. Fancying, therefore, that they possess this knowledge, they come to no mutual understanding at the outset of their enquiry; and in the sequel they exhibit the natural consequence, an inconsistency with themselves and with each other.329 Philosophy is something, and therefore something different from other things. A philosophical theory of politics is something, and therefore something different from any other kind of theory of politics. Philosophy is thinking, a particular kind of thinking, and a philosophical theory of politics is a particular kind or way of thinking about politics. These are our suggested conclusions, and what we have now to discover is, What is its particularity? How does it differ from other kinds of thinking? In short, what is it?
[329] Plato, Phaedrus, 237b–c [tr. J. Wright, op. cit., pp. 18–19. Cp. p. 39 n. 1, above].
The General Nature of Thinking and Philosophy 1. The conclusion, if we may call it such, of the last lecture was that philosophy is something and not just anything. Not a very startling conclusion, you may say, but one,I believe, which, if we follow it out to the end, would knock the bottom out of a good deal of what is called political philosophy to-day. For, nowadays, the latest plan for reorganizing human society, for inaugurating an international government, for disestablishing the church, or for town planning is hailed as a contribution to ‘political philosophy’. Now, there will no doubt be a suspicion at the back of your minds that this is all a matter of words, of names; and I hope you will keep that suspicion alive, for there is nothing more profitless or puerile than a dispute about mere names. But anything more than a first look at the position will show that what we have here is a confusion of things and not of words. When a writer on jurisprudence or anthropology is regarded as having criticized, perhaps even refuted, a writer on the philosophy of politics, there exists a confusion of things similar to that which would exist if a billiard player, playing billiards, were thought to defeat a chessplayer playing chess. 2. Philosophy, then, is something different from other things. But you will remember that this conclusion was only a suggested conclusion, suggested by the history of philosophy, and not a proved conclusion. And our first business this morning is to make this conclusion a little clearer, a little more significant, a little more concrete, and a little less abstract. We must give it a logical basis instead of a merely historical one. The word ‘philosophy’ I have mentioned often enough, but as yet we know very little of its significance; we must establish a conception of philosophy, and so of political philosophy, scientifically and not arbitrarily.
3. Let us, then, start with the abstract and general conception of philosophy as thinking, as thinking with a view to the discovery of truth. And we can make this idea less abstract and more concrete only by giving some clear and definite meaning to these words ‘thinking’ and ‘truth’. Only then shall we begin to see what this particular thing we call ‘philosophy’ is. 4. Perhaps the most elementary kind of thinking we know of goes under the name of Perception; in fact, it is so elementary that we commonly deny that it is thinking at all. When I say, ‘This is a book’, or ‘I see a book’ or ‘A book lies before me’ we are apt to think of it as an ‘immediate perception’. But this is an illusion. What has really happened is that I have brought to bear my past experience upon a certain object which is before me, or, in other words, what appeared to be a matter of mere sensation, turns out to be a matter of thinking. It is a process of thought which attributes the name book to the object I see. The word ‘book’ means something to me only because I can connect it with some past experience, and this can only be done by what we call a process of thought. We may think very quickly sometimes, but we none the less do think. Perception, then, is a kind of thinking. 5. On the other hand, when I say, ‘I believe in the immortality of the soul’, or ‘We ought to be kind to one another’, these, also, are conclusions reached by thinking. And yet, clearly, they are not the results of exactly the same kind of thinking as the observation ‘This is a book’. Here, then, is our problem; clearly there are kinds of thinking and how are we to distinguish between them? We said, provisionally, that philosophy was a kind of thinking directed towards the discovery of truth, but are not our perceptual judgments, our religious judgments, our moral judgments also directed towards the discovery of truth? So it appears that we have before us a number of kinds of thinking, and also a number of kinds of truth. How are we to distinguish them?
6. This, as you know, is not a new problem; it is as old as philosophy. And it has received many solutions. Perhaps the simplest one is that which differentiates between kinds of thought by saying that each kind of thinking is the activity of a separate and particular faculty. And naturally there goes with this the notion that each kind of thinking results in its own particular kind of truth. So there are as many faculties as there are kinds of thinking, and as many kinds of truth as there are faculties,—and all entirely independent of one another. This was once called the common-sense view of the matter, and it is certainly simplicity itself, because if at any time we discover a new kind of thinking we shall have no trouble in fitting it into the scheme of things, for all we need say of it is, ‘Here is another independent kind of thinking, clearly it is the activity of its own faculty and results in its own kind of truth’. 7. For those who held this view of things there existed a moral faculty, a religious faculty, a faculty of perception (which they usually did not regard as a kind of thinking at all), and philosophy itself had its own special source of wisdom and its own particular kind of truth. Psychology, for them, was the study of the number and character of our ‘faculties’. It is easy enough to see how these ideas came to fix themselves in men’s minds. In the physical world, objects are discriminated by occupying different places in space, why should not this be true also of the mind? And all we need say is, ‘Why should it be true of the mind?’ One German philosopher, discovering different kinds of thinking, invented names—Understanding, Practical Reason, Theoretic Reason. Really thought they existed. Now, this theory of thinking has two main characteristics. (a) It is the line of least resistance; it is the crudest possible and the most complicated explanation of the facts. And (b), it fails to endow the world of thinking with any kind of unity. All these kinds of thinking are separate and all result in their own kind of truth— perceptual truth, moral truth, religious truth, philosophical truth and the rest—and there it ends.
(a) The first of these characteristics offends against the socalled law of Parsimony, which declares that the more complex theory must yield to the less complex. The scientific objection to the theory that human beings are a special creation, wholly different from start to finish, from any other species of being, is an objection of this sort. It makes the world unnecessarily complicated; it explains nothing, it merely draws a line. Compare Paracelsus’ Physiology. (b) And the second, that it does not give to the world of thinking any kind of unity, is as much as to say that it is not an explanation at all. For what we mean by an explanation of a number of phenomena is some showing of how they are related, some attempt to give them unity. This theory, then, is merely an apology for the lack of one. And what is more, we have only to ask, ‘Where are these faculties? What is your evidence for their existence?’ and the only possible answer is, ‘Oh, they do not exist in that kind of way. These faculties are like the atoms and molecules of the physicist. They are not objects of observation, you cannot see them, even with a microscope, they are the postulates of a theory to explain the behavior of other objects which we do and can observe.’ And our reply is, again, ‘well, it is a bad explanation; find another.’ For what, after all, is any of these faculties but an hypostatised abstraction? To ascribe a human thought or action to a faculty in man is like ascribing the motion of a billiard-ball to a faculty in the billiard-ball. 8. But, it does not follow, because we must abandon this idea of kinds of thinking being differentiated by being the activities of separate faculties, that the whole idea of there being different kinds of thought is an illusion. To refuse to be led away into a facultylogic, to assert that every activity of thinking is the activity of the whole mind, and not of some one faculty,—it does not follow from this, that all thinking is undifferentiated, that all thinking is of the same kind and results in the discovery of the same truth. There
are no special sources of wisdom; all thinking is the activity of the whole mind. Thinking is undifferentiated at its source. 9. How then shall we distinguish kinds of thought? May not the mind direct itself towards different objects at different times? If kinds of thought are not to be differentiated at their source, perhaps they can be distinguished in their object. Let us see what we can make of this. The judgment, ‘This is …’, is obviously of a different kind from the judgment, ‘This ought to be …’. Somehow, they are the results of different kinds of thinking. The first explanation would say that one is the result of perception and leads to perceptual truth, and the other is the result of the moral faculty and leads to moral truth. But this, we have seen, is inadmissible. Our second explanation would say that both judgments are the result of the activity of a whole mind, but they are directed towards different objects, the one towards determining the existence of a thing and the other towards determining the moral necessity for the existence of a thing. Thinking is differentiated in its object and not in its source. Philosophical thinking is the mind directed towards a particular object. Political philosophy, a philosophical theory about politics, is not just any kind of thinking about politics, but thinking about a particular object in politics or a particular aspect of politics. These are questionable ways of saying what I mean, but I think they convey my meaning as clearly as I can just now. Now, I said earlier on that the characteristic of an explanation, of a theory, is that it gives some kind of unity to the things it tries to explain or theorize. What kind of unity have we given to this differentiated world of thinking? We have seen that it is the whole mind, and not some abstract faculty, which thinks on all occasions—and so far we have achieved a kind of unity. But we have seen, also, that the objects of thinking are many and we have not yet discovered whether or how they are related, that is, we have not yet explained them. So far then, our theory is only half a theory; the unity is all on one side. And what we must now do is
to give a little more and closer attention to the other side, to these ‘objects of thinking’. Or, to put it another way, our theory has abolished the diversity of faculties, but it has left the diversity of truths, left them unrelated and unexplained. Our present position is precarious. All our thinking is the activity of our whole mind, but all our different kinds of thinking do not lead us to the same ‘truth’. How are we to explain it? It is not enough to show that there are different kinds of thinking arising from a single mind, we must discover also the relations of these kinds of thinking, for there can be no differences without likeness. Definition, the old logic taught us, is per genus et differentiam; to see a thing definitely, we may say, to see a thing clearly, we must see it as different from other things and yet as like other things. 10. I am loath to introduce words which appear to have a technical significance; the more we can free ourselves from the tyranny of words and a specialized vocabulary the clearer will be our thinking, but I think I can make my meaning clearest if I attach what I have to say about this differentiation of kinds of thinking to two particular words, and in telling you what I mean by them I shall try and tell you how I think we can most profitably conceive the relation of these different kinds of thinking. For unless we can see clearly what we mean by a ‘kind of thinking’, we shall not have discovered what we mean by the particular kind of thinking in which we are specially interested—philosophical thinking about politics. The words I have chosen are ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’. 11. By the word ‘abstract’ we commonly mean anything which we cannot touch or see, anything which does not enter into an ordinary world of sense. The abstract, with us, usually means the non-material. Very often we attach the word to ideas, and speak of ‘abstract ideas’. All ideas are abstract, in ordinary language. If someone speaks of ‘morality’ we regard him as speaking ‘abstractly’, or using ‘abstract ideas’. If we speak vaguely of ‘flowers’
or ‘fire’, we, again, speak ‘abstractly’; for it is only ‘these flowers’, or ‘this fire’ which enter our world of sense and so is rescued from abstraction. Or again, we speak of certain people being interested in ‘abstract thought’; mathematicians and philosophers are both usually spoken of in this way. And when we say a book is ‘very abstract’ we mean that its arguments do not seem to touch our life as we ordinarily live it. On the other hand, the word ‘concrete’ means anything which we can touch and see, anything which does enter our ordinary world of sense. The material is the concrete: in fact, concrete is concrete. For most of us the phrase ‘concrete ideas’ would have very little meaning: ideas are not concrete, they are not material. And we can only make an argument or a book concrete by making it apply to ordinary life, by illustrating it with, as we say, ‘concrete examples’. When a speaker says, ‘Let me take a concrete example’, we know at once the kind of thing that is coming. And when we say, ‘These flowers are beautiful’, we are attaching an abstract adjective to a concrete object.330 12. Now, like most of the notions we are accustomed to live and work with, there exists a certain amount of confusion in these ideas of abstract and concrete. And the particular confusion which I want to point out here is that these ideas say two things at once, that is, they are not clear ideas. And, until we have got our ideas as clear as we can get them we are not likely to know what they are or to be able to express ourselves very adequately by them. These ordinary ideas of concrete and abstract tell us two things and tell us them at the same time. They tell us (i) What abstractness and concreteness is, and (ii) what things are abstract and concrete. [330] Cp. ‘Objective’. Usually = solid; but it is really only what we are obliged to think—see B. Bosanquet, The Essentials of Logic Being Ten Lectures on Judgement and Inference (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1895), p. 11: ‘the objective is … whatever we are obliged to think’.
They tell us not only the characteristics of the qualities we are looking for, but also in what particular things these qualities are to be found. If a man were to set out to tell me what morality is I might listen to him patiently, I might even agree with him; but if, without any further proof or agreement, he were to go on to say, ‘You are not moral’, I should know what to think of his logic. For obviously, after we have decided what morality is, it requires a separate demonstration to show that this or that man possesses or lacks the qualities we have called moral. And it requires a demonstration of a different sort. It is one thing for me to say, ‘A man who can swim two miles I call a good swimmer’, and quite another thing for me to say, ‘You are a good swimmer.’ The first is a matter of opinion; but the second is to be demonstrated only by measuring how far you can swim. And ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ are in the same case. The common notion of ‘abstractness’ implies incompleteness, inadequacy. An abstract thing is something partial, something which taken by itself lacks significance. We show this by speaking of ‘the merely abstract’. It implies unreality. But the common notion goes on from this to say that ideas are abstract, partial, unreal; that anything which is not material, tangible, or visible is abstract and so incomplete, lacking in significance. And this second step it takes without argument or proof. In the same way, ‘concreteness’ means wholeness, completeness, something adequate and significant, something real. And the common notion goes on to say that the material, the visible, the tangible are concrete, and so real, complete, significant. And it, also, takes this second step without argument or proof. 13. Now, our best course is, I think, to accept what the common notion tells us of the meaning of ‘abstractness’ and ‘concreteness’ and go on from there to ask ourselves what things, or what kind of things, are abstract and concrete. That is, where the common notion is quiescent we must be alert, where it is confused, we must be clear.
Abstract, then, means incomplete, partial, insignificant, unreal. Concrete means, complete, whole, significant, real. And we must ask, what things are abstract, and what things are concrete. 14. Let me give you three examples of things that are abstract, and you will, I think, see that our ordinary notion of abstraction is not only inadequate in that it failed to discuss what things are abstract, but actually wrong in the kind of thing it assumed to be abstract. (a) It was one of the doctrines of the Sophists that the character of what they called ‘the natural man’ was made up simply of sensations, such as pleasure and pain. Everything else was thought to be something which this ‘natural man’ acquired from society at one time or another. But Socrates, in arguing with them, showed that if this really were the case, ‘natural man’ would have no character at all, he would not be a man, much less natural. For sensations, in themselves, are isolated, individual, singular. We cannot feel the same pain twice for that would imply memory and a coordinated experience, it would imply thought. These sensations, then, about which the Sophists had been talking, are abstractions, they do not exist per se; they are a part of our way of experiencing things which if you isolate it you at once make nonsense of the whole thing. A mere feeling, absolutely alone and isolated, is something which we know nothing about, it is a mere abstraction. You will remember that we discovered the hypothetical ‘faculties’ of the mind to be abstractions, of the same kind. They are things which, if we are silly enough we can suppose, but which do not really exist at all. (b) Or again, some people are fond, in political philosophy, of speaking about ‘the individual’, and they talk of him as something which is readily isolable, as something concrete, a whole in himself and requiring nothing outside him to give him such significance as he possesses. But, where is such an individual? Is ‘the individual’, taken strictly by himself, still there, still a human being, still the same human being? Of course, the truth is that
this ‘individual’ is an abstraction of the worst kind, he has never existed and could never exist. And we can only imagine him by the greatest effort of abstract thought. (c) Or, here is a simpler example. We say that a tennis ball is round, but this ‘roundness’ is not something which exists separately and all by itself. You cannot take it away from the tennis ball; just sheer isolated roundness is nothing at all. We can imagine it, perhaps, with difficulty, but it is an abstraction, an abstract conception which we can gain by analysing the qualities which go to make up a tennis ball. And so with a number of other things—weight, colour, size—these are all abstractions if we take them simply by themselves. 15. Our aim in starting this discussion of the meaning of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’, you will remember, was in order to be able to distinguish between kinds of thinking. Kinds of thinking are distinguishable in their object and not in their source, that was our conclusion. And the difficulty was to give some unity to the various objects which we saw thought proposes to itself at different times. Well, our principle of unity is, I think, this one of abstract and concrete. 16. In abstract thinking what we do is, not to use only one faculty or part of the mind, as some people have thought, but to use the whole mind for the purpose of considering separately things which are not really separable, for making distinctions where none really exist, for obtaining the part out of the whole by the omission of other parts. For example, when we consider the size or weight of a thing separately and without any reference to the whole thing before us, we are performing an act of abstract thinking. How deeply this power of abstract thinking has entered into our ordinary lives is not always realized, and I shall have something more to say about it in a later lecture, but it is not too much to say that the common world, in which we rise and eat and go to bed, is for the most part an abstract world.
Life in a consciously concrete world, as we shall see later on, would hardly be tolerable. Very few days pass in our lives when we are not called upon to use the simple arithmetical process of counting, and this is a complicated feat of abstract thought, which we have performed so often that we rarely stop to recognize it as such. For, to count apples is to notice only one aspect of their existence, their ‘one, two, three-ness’, so to speak. And when we go a little further and say, ‘two and two make four’, we have become utterly indifferent to the nature or existence of any particular things, and are expressing an abstract idea which is applicable to any mortal thing we like to choose. Another example of abstract thinking is what is called analysis. What analysis does is to make distinctions within a given whole. This, for many purposes is a justifiable procedure, but it is always a dangerous one. For, if we go further, and say that these distinctions we have made are real and display the nature of the thing, we are likely to make ourselves ridiculous. ‘It is a very common and most ruinous superstition to suppose that analysis is no alteration, and that, whenever we distinguish, we have at once to do with divisible existence’, says Bradley. ‘It is an immense assumption to conclude, when a fact comes to us as a whole, that some parts of it may exist without any sort of regard to the rest.’331 This, of course, was what the Sophists did with the thing they called ‘sensation’, and it is what anyone does who comes to the concrete experience of society and abstracts from it individuals which never have, and never could, exist by themselves. So much, for the moment, for abstract thinking; but before we leave it you should notice that thinking can have different degrees of abstractness. We ought not to say that this or that is just ‘abstract thinking’, we ought to go and see how abstract, how partial, and how incomplete it is. And you will see that this is a [331] [F.H. Bradley, Principles of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1883), §64, reprinted in Writings on Logic and Metaphysics, ed. James W. Allard and Guy Stock, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 77–8.]
much harder matter than simply identifying it as abstract in some degree or other. 17. Of concrete thought it is very much harder to speak. In general, we know that, if it is to be really concrete, it must deal only with whole things, with things that really do exist apart and independently of one another, but further than this it is hard to go. And, naturally, just as there can be degrees of abstractness in thought, there are, also, degrees of concreteness. Socrates’ view of human experience was more concrete—or less abstract, which you like—than that of the Sophists. Or again, we can see the effort after wholeness, concreteness when Socrates asks, ‘Do you conceive it possible to comprehend satisfactorily the nature of the soul without comprehending the nature of the universe?’332 We might even translate it, ‘Do you conceive it possible to comprehend concretely the nature of the soul without comprehending the nature of the universe?’ What he was after, you see, was something that he could really call a whole; and that is just what we mean by the word ‘universe’. 18. If, then, we give some sort of unity to the diverse world of thinking by looking at it in the light of this ‘abstract–concrete’ principle, we are still left with some of our difficulties. If we say that different kinds of thinking are to be distinguished by the abstractness or concreteness of their objects, what are we to say about this word ‘truth’? Apparently our conclusion is that the result of abstract thinking is abstract truth, and of concrete thinking, concrete truth. But what is abstract truth? If we retain the meaning of ‘abstract’ which we have hitherto used, abstract truth will be conditional, partial, incomplete truth. And, if so, must we not ask, ‘Then, how truth at all?’ Truth, if it means anything, must mean the whole; the true thing is the whole thing. And have we not discovered that the whole [332] Plato, Phaedrus, 270 [tr. J. Wright, op. cit., p. 77. Cp. p. 136, above.]
thing is the concrete thing? Truth and concreteness, and reality for that matter, must mean all the same thing. What is true is real, and only what is true is a whole. And it is only by importing these ideas into the different worlds of abstract thought that we can give any meaning at all to the expression ‘abstract truth’. The world of mathematics, for example, is an abstract world; and in so far as mathematicians exploring its nature and possibilities give to it a certain unity, and therefore a certain wholeness and completeness, do they achieve something which we may call ‘mathematical truth’. But since such ‘truth’ is, and always must remain, abstract, it can be called truth only by analogy, by importing into an abstract world a unique characteristic of the concrete world. 19. We started by saying that philosophical thinking was thinking directed towards the discovery of truth, and we set out to discover what we meant by ‘truth’, and ‘thinking’. And it is no mere rearrangement and translation of words if we say now that philosophical thinking is concrete thinking. Because we know, now, something of what we mean by ‘thinking’ and something of what we mean by ‘concrete’. Wherever there is concrete thinking, there is philosophy; wherever there is concrete thinking about politics, there is a philosophy of politics. It is a common notion that philosophy deals only with abstractions, and that senseperception and natural instinct lie in the region of the concrete, but this we have seen to be what it is—a prejudice. Philosophy is that which is most antagonistic to abstraction, that is the principle of its differentiation from other kinds of thinking. 20. In this world of thinking which we have been examining there can be an unlimited number of kinds of thinking which are in some degree abstract, but, clearly, there can be only one kind of thinking which is concrete, that is, directed towards the whole. For there is no limit to the aspects of things, no limit to the partial ways of looking at things, but there can only be one kind of concrete thinking, one kind of concrete truth.
If we could put down all the kinds of thinking that exist, all the abstract worlds which the minds of men have explored or are exploring, and arrange them in some kind of hierarchy according to their degree of concreteness, then and not till then, should we have brought system, unity, meaning into the whole world of thinking. Some men have believed that they have really achieved this. And it could be achieved in two ways. (i) By arranging the different kinds of thinking in a hierarchy according to their history; according to the empirical order in which they seem to emerge in the life of the individual or of the race. Each kind of abstract thought is a stage through which we have passed in our effort to find this single concrete kind of thinking for which we are looking. Now there are obvious difficulties in the way of achieving a system of this sort, and clearly it would be much easier to discover in our own lives this succession of stages of thought, than in the life of the human race as a whole. It is all very well to say that at one stage in your life historical thinking seemed to you to give the truth you were looking for, and at another, scientific thinking,—this may be true enough for you. But it is going much further to say, as some have said, that the typical kind of thinking of the nineteenth century was historical, and to call that century the Historical Age. (ii) The other way in which this system of kinds of thinking might be achieved would be to examine simply the logical value, the value for the attainment of truth, of each kind of thinking which came before you, and see if you could put them into an order of value and not an order of mere empirical emergence in the history of the individual or of the race. Hegel thought he had achieved both these classifications of kinds of thinking, and a few people since have tried to do the same thing. But, on the whole, I think we can hardly share their opinion of their success. However, I do not propose to attempt any such thing, and I think there are some conclusions we may come to without coming to a conclusion so complete as this would be.
21. You will, no doubt, be wondering exactly what is the bearing of all this upon the philosophical approach to politics. It is this, and I think it is important. Philosophical thinking is concrete thinking, and we have seen what we mean by that. Philosophical thinking about politics is concrete thinking about politics, and I hope, before we have finished, that we shall see something of what we mean by that. But this, at any rate, is clear: if we can find any thinking about politics which is abstract, then that thinking is not philosophical, whatever else it is. And if it is not philosophical, remember, it has no bearing whatever on philosophy, it cannot properly contribute to or criticize any way of thinking which deals with the concrete. Here, then, is one task: to rehearse together the kinds of thinking about politics and find which among them are abstract and which is concrete. That we shall find many that are abstract we can have little doubt; that we shall find any that is concrete is not so certain. But, if there has been no concrete thinking about politics, if the history of thinking about politics has no instance of concrete, that is philosophical, thinking, then there still remains to us the possibility of seeing clearly what are the particular characteristics of concrete thinking about politics over and above the general characteristics of all thinking that is properly called concrete.
Political Thinking in General 1. So far, as perhaps you are aware, I have said a great deal about something we have called ‘philosophy’, and next to nothing about ‘politics’, but this morning I intend as best I can to make good this deficiency. 2. We have seen, in an abstract kind of way, what are some of the requirements of a philosophy, what we mean when we speak of a philosophical theory. Philosophical thinking we have called concrete thinking, it is an effort to see the wholeness of things, an effort not to be led away into this or that abstract view. Philosophy is not just thinking in general—at least in the sense in which we ordinarily use the word thinking—it is a particular kind of thinking. A philosophy of something, a philosophical theory, means, then, a particular method and a particular approach. And ‘politics’, which is what I want to talk about this morning, means a particular subject-matter. Or, at least, we may, just now, take it as meaning that, though I think we shall soon have to revise the idea. Because the question will come up before we have finished, ‘Just in what sense philosophy can be said to have a particular subject matter?’ ‘How can concrete thinking recognize particulars?’ 3. I have already spoken about some of the difficulties in the way of thinking concretely, of philosophical thinking, and we shall see these more clearly as we go on. But our difficulties do not end there, for the particular nature of our subject-matter—‘politics’— causes at least as many more difficulties, and from it arise many of the most insistent misunderstandings which hinder its study. Our first difficulty with many of the books on the subject is that we have a feeling that their writers do not know quite how they are writing about it, they do not know whether their thought is abstract or whether it aims at being concrete; and before long we sometimes add to this a suspicion that they do not know either
what they are thinking and talking about. Nor should it surprise us that these two difficulties go together, because they are not really two, but a single deficiency,—the how is the what. Let me explain this more fully, for it is a difficult, and I think, an important point. 4. The how is the what: how we think about a thing governs what we think about.333 At first this may appear a little nonsensical, but that, I think, is because we are accustomed to think abstractly and in an abstract world the concrete is apt to appear nonsensical. ‘If anything’, you will say, ‘it is the other way round; what a thing is, governs how I am to think about it’. But how are you to know what it is until you have thought about it? You see, an ordinary assumption is that we first have a thing (somehow) and then start to think about it; but it is a ridiculous assumption. The only way in which we can ‘have’ a thing, in any sense, is by thinking about it. For you and I, at any rate, a thing’s nature, what it is, is only revealed by thinking about it; and as we have seen there can be many ways of thinking about it,—many abstract and one concrete. If you think abstractly about something—the ‘thing’, so to say—the result of your thinking—is an abstract thing; if you think concretely, the ‘thing’ which results from you thinking is a concrete thing. But this is only a way of speaking, as you can see clearly enough, for it is only in some very ambiguous sense that there is a ‘thing’ there at all before we start thinking. The raw materials of the ‘thing’ may be there, but the real thing certainly isn’t as far as you or I are concerned. But I don’t want to get on to that, rather difficult, subject. All I want to make clear is that the nature of our thinking governs the result of our thought; if it is abstract [333] Cp. A. Huxley, Those Barren Leaves (Paris: Librairie Gaulon & Fils; Leipzig: Bernard Tauchniz, 1933 [1925]). [Oakeshott’s note ‘ad fin’ suggests he may have been referring to a speech given by Huxley to the character of Calamy near the end of the novel, at p. 347: ‘The reality remains the same; but the axes vary with the mental position, so to speak, and the varying capacities of different observers.’]
thinking, the result will be an abstract ‘thing’. Concrete thinking produces a concrete thing. How we think about a thing governs what we are thinking about. But an illustration may make this clearer. You remember I likened some of the confusion that exists today among writers on political philosophy to that which would be caused were a chess player, playing chess, to regard himself as having defeated a billiard player playing billiards, or vice versa. And all the elements of our situation are in the picture. What we called ‘thinking’ in general corresponds to ‘playing’ in general. When we say thinking is of a certain sort, we mean that it is directed towards a certain end, it may be an abstract end—and if so there is a large choice of ends of this sort—or it may be a concrete end. And when we make ‘playing’ less general, we speak of ‘playing chess’ or ‘playing billiards’. Now clearly, if to the question, ‘What are you playing?’ we answer, ‘Chess’, we must give the same answer to the question, ‘How are you playing?’, because ‘how’ there means, ‘what kind of playing is it that you are playing?’ So with thinking, what we think, the result, the ‘thing’, is governed by how we are thinking. Now the instance of kinds of ‘playing’ is clearer than the instance of kinds of thinking, simply because in the one the difference of the result— chess and billiards—is so much more obvious than the difference of the result in the other, but, believe me, though it may be more obvious, it is not more real. And this may help to explain why we have a suspicion that some writers on ‘politics’ know neither what they are writing about nor how they are writing about it. 5. Like everything else, then, ‘politics’ is a different ‘thing’ for each of the different ways we may think about it. But that even is not our initial difficulty with the subject; our first difficulty meets us when we attempt to decide the meanings of words, long before we face the meanings of things. When we use the word ‘politics’, what do we wish to be understood by it?
(i) I suppose its most general, its widest, meaning is implied in our phrase ‘practical politics’, when we say something ‘is not practical politics’. We mean by that, simply that it is not practical, that it does not fit in with, harmonize with ‘practical life’. The word ‘politics’ here means life in its most ordinary and general sense. (ii) When we say of a man that he is ‘going in for politics’, we mean that he intends to stand for Parliament, or that in some way or other he is going to connect himself with the ‘government’ of the country. ‘Politics’, here, means ‘government’. And it is by a further specialization of this already specialized meaning, that we speak of ‘party politics’. (iii) Or again, there is another meaning of the word, not so common perhaps, but none the less legitimate if it proves useful, which is at once wide and specialized: it is roughly what we understand the Greeks to have meant by the corresponding word in their language. ‘Politics’ as the study of ‘political life’; ‘political life’ being—all that we mean by ‘life’, life in a society, with all its variety and conflict, ‘its amazing welter of wills which press on one another’, its momentary harmonies and occasional orderliness, its possessing and giving and taking, its command and obedience, its law and government, its justice and mercy, and all that lies behind them. For Justinian’s Pandects only make precise What simply sparkled in men’s eyes before, Twitched in their brow or quivered on their lip, Waited the speech they called but would not come.334
[334] R. Browning, ‘The Ring and the Book’, Bk 5, ll. 1781–4, in Poetical Works, viii. 89. [F.W. Maitland quoted the passage from Browning in his Township and Borough (London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1997 [1898]), p. 20: see S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 66.]
This social life which is, at least, the environment in which what we call the self grows and matures, which includes all that we mean by culture and religion; a sensibility for society is the sense of membership of a whole indistinguishable from one’s self, and in this whole alone love and friendship are real; this is what the Greeks meant by a ‘political’ life, a life in a ‘city’—at its highest they characterized it as the ‘good life’, and at its lowest it still had the possibility of the ‘good life’ in it. Now, there seem to me very many reasons why this last meaning of the word ‘politics’ is the most suitable for us. The best of them is, I think, that were we to start with any of the narrower meanings— that which implies simply ‘government’, for example—we should soon find ourselves driven to this wide but not unduly vague meaning before we could satisfy ourselves. But, be that as it may, it is this meaning which I intend to use here. By ‘political life’ I mean organized social life and all that goes with it. 6. But, even when we have come to this decision about words, we are still faced with one other difficulty—that this so-called ‘thing’, this ‘political life’, will be a different ‘thing’ for each of the different ways in which we may choose to think about it. And our hardest task is to prevent this circumstance from creating confusion, to prevent ourselves from making the mistake of our unfortunate chess and billiard players, from being like wrestlers who wrestle and yet never come to grips. Now, the usual and easiest way of making clear that we are speaking of two different things is to give them two different names. In ‘playing’ we speak of chess and billiards and we know that they are different; but in ‘thinking’ we do not, and to a certain extent cannot, follow this course. For example, we use the words ‘real’, ‘life’, ‘will’, ‘law’ in a great many different senses, and we do not always realize that how we are thinking of them in each particular case governs what they are. Our case would be comparatively simple if for each different way of thinking of a thing we had to learn a new language; but we
are not even so fortunate as that; what we have to do is to learn a new meaning for an old and already overburdened word. The position seems to be just about as difficult as it can be; but then, thinking is difficult. And, in anything to do with ‘politics’, not only are the words we use ambiguous but, just where we require the utmost coolness and detachment, we are forced to use words commonly connected with warm feeling, with high praise or with severe reproach, which excite passions and disturb thought. ‘Freedom’, ‘right’, ‘justice’, ‘morality’,—these are not words which remain the same, but which, according to our various abstract objects of thinking, mean a hundred different things; each of them different also from that one concrete meaning which philosophy wishes always to imply. They are words which provoke the fever of battle as readily as the detachment of thought; and often a single situation will provoke both these reactions in different individuals and the result is inevitable misunderstanding and a fruitless controversy of cross-purposes, such, for instance, as has been carried on during the last ten years between most of the so-called ‘pluralists’ and the so-called ‘absolutists’ in political philosophy. 7. Perhaps I can make a little clearer this primary difficulty which confronts us directly we start to think about political life, if I put what I have been saying in another way and give you another illustration. I will choose the word ‘society’. The word ‘society’ has been used with a very great variety of meanings, and again, each meaning is a different ‘thing’; for things are meanings, and meanings are the only things we know everything about. Among some people the word is written, or spoken, with a capital letter, and to them it means simply those people whom it is nice to know, who live in a certain part of London, and have half a column in the Morning Post when they marry. This, perhaps, is a rather specialized meaning. At other times ‘society’ is used as meaning the opposite to solitude, as meaning simply companionship, human companionship. But the contrast
between society and solitude is one which will hardly bear examination. What men have desired when they have sought solitude is not some vague and empty aloneness, but society, society of a different sort—and most of them have said as much. There is society where none intrudes, By the deep sea335 says Byron. The society and the solitude which we are apt to contrast are the sheerest abstractions. Then there is a meaning of ‘society’ which is considered equally applicable to men as to animals: Society meaning just ‘gregariousness’. This is not an illegitimate use of the word, anymore than the former two uses are illegitimate, but it is an abstract use, that is, it is the creation of a kind of thinking which is abstract. And we may call that kind of thinking ‘sociology’, ‘physiology’, or ‘psychology’, or by any other name we choose. Aristotle is reported to have said something which has been translated, ‘man is a social animal’ and Francis Galton, in his fascinating volume called Inquiries into Human Faculty, says that ‘the ox of the wild parts of western South Africa’ is a ‘social animal’, but it is clear that Aristotle and Galton did not mean the same thing by the epithet ‘social’.336 Aristotle would hardly claim all the qualities for the ‘Ox of the western part of South Africa’ which he claims for man. Others, again, have meant by a society any fellowship, or joining together of men for any purpose whatever. Thus, there is the Society of Jesus or the community of Jesuits, and there is the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. This usage is extended by the French and Germans to organizations and communities whose purpose is commercial, and they speak [335] [G. Byron, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, Canto IV v. CLXXVIII, in Poetical Works, ed. F. Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 250.] [336] [F. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1883).]
of Société anonyme and Aktiengesellschaft, but in England we commonly use the word ‘company’ for this kind of ‘society’. And then, lastly, there is the use of the word ‘society’ which implies a definitely moral quality. A society is a community the essence of whose communism is moral, the purpose of whose fellowship is a moral life. When Plato said that in so far as a community of robbers was really a community it rested upon ‘justice’—a moral quality—he meant that if we look at society as a whole, if we think about it a little more concretely than we are accustomed to think, and a little less abstractly, we discover that it is a moral quality which makes it what it is. And were we to say that the bond which joins men together into anything that can properly be called a society is a moral bond, we should merely be translating what Plato said about justice into language which is a little more English and a little less Greek. 8. Now, I have explained this divergence of meaning attaching to a single word, by saying that each meaning is the result of a particular way of thinking. And if each way or kind of thinking were to keep within its own limits and not allow its conclusions to stray beyond its own particular world, there could be no contradiction implied in this variety, but neither could one meaning be held to supplement or add to another. Where there can be no contradiction there can be no criticism and no agreement, that, in the world of thinking, seems to be to be a fundamental principle. But all this can be said in another way. Variety of meaning attached to a single word introduces what we ordinarily call ‘technical language’. ‘Technical language’ implies, so to speak, a technical world in which that language has meaning and significance: ‘technical language’ implies ‘technical thinking’. But by ‘technical language’ we mean language for a certain limited purpose:337 the mark, that is, of ‘technical thinking’ is partiality, incompleteness, of limited significance, and this is just what I [337] e.g. ‘literature’ in the scientists’ language.
have called ‘abstract thinking’. Technical language consists of words applied to abstract objects. 9. If, then, we could get at a concrete view, if we could achieve concrete thinking, that is, philosophy, then, since our thinking would not be abstract, our language would not be technical. Concrete thinking alone makes use of language which is not technical: philosophy has no jargon. Now, this statement goes so much against the accepted view of what philosophy is and seems so flagrantly untrue, that I confess I have small hopes of persuading you of its truth. And, indeed, I shall not attempt to do so. Let me explain a little more fully what I mean, and if then you do not understand, I will not attempt to persuade you further, the thing must prove itself or nobody can prove it. 10. First, then, when I say that the language of philosophy is the only nontechnical language that exists I mean it as a kind of definition, or at any rate as a means of identification. Show me a ‘philosophy’ whose language proves itself to be technical, that is, abstract, and I should answer that this and no more proves it to be the product of abstract thinking, and so not a philosophy. Now, there is no doubt that some of the thinking which has been taken to be philosophical has made use of a technical jargon, but unless we are to make the absurd statement that all that has ever been called ‘philosophy’ is philosophy, we are in no way bound to accept that which is called by a name as the genuine thing unless it proves itself to be such. Philosophical thinking must show itself to be philosophical not by being included in this or that history of philosophy, but by demonstrating its own concreteness, by repelling all efforts to show that it is abstract, partial, incomplete. And, secondly, it may well be that the language of genuine philosophy appears technical if by technical we mean simply that which is not in the commonest and most ordinary use. But I have already said that technical means, for me, abstract. Abstractness
means incompleteness and partiality, and I have yet to be shown that the ordinary and common is the complete, and that the philosophical is the partial and abstract. And of this I will give you two illustrations. First, the word ‘real’. (i) In ordinary language we have a hundred different meanings for the word, but most of them boil down into something of the same meaning as is commonly given to ‘concrete’; that is, the ‘real’ means the visible, the tangible, the material. This, as we saw when we were discussing the concrete, begs the question by saying two things at once and saying neither coherently. The real as the material is an abstract conception, and its language is technical. (ii) Again, when a lawyer speaks of ‘real property’, his meaning is definite, but his language is abstract; it is, as we say, ‘a technical use’ of the word ‘real’. (iii) And what does the ‘real’ mean for philosophy?338 The ‘real’ in philosophy always means simply that which alone exists. Not, ‘that which is material’ or ‘that which is spiritual’, but only, in the first place, that which exists. Some philosophers have gone on to say that that which exists is material, or spiritual, but ‘the real’ always means simply what it says—‘that which exists’. And this seems to me to be, at any rate, less abstract, less technical than the language of the market place or of the law courts. And, secondly, the word ‘state’. This word, also, has a variety of meanings, some of which, at any rate, must be abstract simply because, as we have seen, there can be only one concrete meaning. Of these abstract meanings I shall notice only three. [338] [MS del.: ‘With different philosophies it has meant a number of different things; the material has been taken to be the real, or it has been thought that there is no reality outside mind or spirit. But when philosophy has said such things as these, it has meant always that this or that is that which alone exists and it cannot prove itself to be real by being material or spiritual, but only by being real proving itself to exist per se.’]
(i) The word ‘state’ as a term of abuse. With certain writers, if they wish utterly to condemn a man or an institution they somehow connect him or it with something they call the ‘state’. Here are two instances. The modern state, says Sorel, is ‘a body of intellectuals, which is invested with privileges and which possesses means of the kind called political for defending itself against the attacks made on it by other groups of intellectuals eager to possess the profits of public employment.’339 ‘The State,’ says Bakunin, ‘is not Society, it is an historical form of it, as brutal as it is abstract. It was born historically in all countries of the marriage of violence, rapine, pillage, in a word war and conquest.’340 (ii) The second use of the word ‘state’ I wish to call your attention to is that in which it is taken to mean nothing more nor less than the machinery of government, in the narrowest sense. ‘The State is nothing so much as a great public-service corporation’, says Professor Laski. Or again, the same writer says, ‘The State is concerned only with these social relations that express themselves by means of government.’ This also is abstract, this kind of ‘State’ is an abstraction, simply because the notion of a government existing by itself and for its own sake is, not only, as Schopenhauer says, the apotheosis of philistinism,341 but is a sheer abstraction. ‘Government’ does not explain itself, it requires some larger whole in which it can be subsumed before we recognize its real significance. Only the concrete can explain itself; the abstract, because it is what it is, is insufficient, incomplete, cannot stand on its own legs—is, in fact, all that we have already seen it to be. (iii) The third use of the word ‘state’ is abstract, but perhaps not equally abstract; it is that which is adopted or created by law. ‘A state may be defined, in legal language,’ says Zimmern, ‘as a [339] Sorel, La décomposition du Marxisme, p. 53. [cp. p. 89 n. 46, above.] [340] Bakunin, ‘Dieu et l’Etat’, Works, i. 287. [cp. p. 89 n. 47, above.] [341] Schopenhauer, ‘On Jurisprudence and Politics’, in Parerga, ii. 242. [Oakeshott’s reference is to Werke, vi. 258.]
territory over which there is a government claiming unlimited authority.’342 Or again, Anson, in The Law and Custom of the Constitution, says that in constitutional law ‘The Sovereign body or State is the power by which rights are created and maintained, by which the acts or forbearances necessary to their maintenance are habitually enforced.’343 This use of the word is abstract because it is technical and recognizes itself as such. The phrases ‘in legal language’ and ‘in constitutional law’ show that the writers recognize the limits of their definition—and that which is limited is abstract. But the concrete is the unlimited, the whole, that which is complete. We shall find then, that in a true philosophy of politics, the word ‘state’ will not be used as a name for this or that thing, because every phenomenal ‘thing’, in that sense, is abstract; but is a name for some unifying principle in political life. ‘The State’, by philosophy, that is by concrete thinking, is taken as a suitable name for that which in political life is a whole, is a concrete thing. And nothing is implied, initially, in the use of this word except that somehow, of some character, a whole exists. That ‘political life’ either is a whole or can be joined to a whole without being altogether lost. Turn back and see how far we are from Professor Laski. The State, for him, is the government, and by asserting this he has done just what we saw our ordinary unexamined thoughts doing when they dealt with what is abstract and what is concrete. He says two things at once, and so neither clearly. He says that there is a whole and that this whole is the government—and all in one breath. Now, that ‘the whole is the government’ is a proposition which requires proof over and above any proof we may give of the existence and general nature of the whole itself—but no proof is offered. And what is more, not only is his statement, therefore, questionable, [342] Zimmern, Nationality & Government, p. 56 [cp. p. 95 n. 77, above]. [343] Anson, The Law and Custom of the Constitution, i. 2 [cp. p. 95 n. 79, above].
but we have seen reason for it being untrue. Government is, in no intelligible sense, a self-explaining whole. 11. Now, if philosophy were what we have seen it to be at the beginning of its history—just curiosity about anything and everything—it would not matter much what it said or how it said it. The abstract language of everyday life, or of law, or of history would all be equally appropriate to it. But we have seen that philosophy cannot now be understood as this merely general curiosity, and consequently its language must be as carefully chosen as the language of the law or of any of the sciences. Those, however, choose their language so that it shall be abstract, for what they say is the product of abstract thinking. Philosophy, then, must see that its language is suitable to its way of thinking, that is, it must be what we have called concrete. ‘Formerly’, says Hegel, ‘men of business, statesmen, occupied themselves with Philosophy; now, however, with the intricate idealism of the philosophy of Kant, their wings droop helpless to the ground.’344 The first explanation we might give of this fact is that the thought and language of philosophy is technical and so naturally not to be understood by the ordinary man, but this explanation breaks down simply because philosophy aims at concrete thinking and in so far as it fails to achieve this, in so far as its language does become abstract and technical in the sense in which we have used these words, it fails to be philosophy. 12. Here I will try and meet a difficulty which may have occurred to you. ‘Surely’, you will say, ‘it is all very well to speak about different kinds of thinking as abstract and concrete, and even to say that some kinds may be less abstract and more concrete than other kinds, but how are you to prove that all thinking is not abstract, how can you show the existence of concrete thinking at all?’ You say that a history of philosophy cannot prove that philosophy has really ever existed, what can prove it? Well, I will [344] egel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, iii. 505.
give you three reasons for supposing that concrete thinking, that is philosophy, exists or can exist. (i) If there are various abstract ways of thinking about things there must be a concrete way of thinking about them, because the very notion of abstraction would be meaningless if no such thing as the concrete existed. Abstraction means incompleteness, partiality; and there can be no part without a whole, no incompleteness without completeness somewhere. (ii) So then, this kind of concrete thinking which strives after the real whole not only can exist, but must exist. It is the only real thinking; that is, thinking can hardly be said to be thinking unless it is concrete thinking. All abstract thinking is defective thinking and so can be called thinking only by courtesy. ‘But,’ you will say, ‘there may be a kind of thinking which strives to be concrete, but is there one which achieves concreteness?’ But this is irrelevant. (iii) Most abstract thinking is self-confessedly abstract, it aims, often consciously, at abstraction, and if it did not aim at abstraction it would be vain and useless. At any rate, then, we can say that philosophy differs from other kinds of thinking by aiming at concreteness. It aims at discovering the concrete whole of truth, and no other kind of thinking has this object.345 13. Our task is now to search among the ways in which men think about society, political life, and see if we can find any nontechnical, concrete thinking. We shall find that a number of different kinds of thinking will, at first sight, present themselves as the one we are looking for; but we have decided already that there can be only one kind of concrete thinking, and so if two or more ways of thinking about society present themselves as concrete, we shall know that certainly all save one, and possibly all, are abstract. What is not concrete must be abstract, and what is abstract cannot be concrete. [345] Concrete thinking can exist, must exist, and the only difficulty is to answer the question, ‘Where does it exist?’
14. In my next three lectures, then, I am going to examine the claims of the three most important ways of thinking about society to be concrete thinking. We must put them to the test. If they reveal themselves to be abstract, then they are not what we are looking for, and, though they serve their particular purpose, we shall pass them by and go on in our search for the one concrete way of thinking. The three kinds of thinking I have chosen to examine are The Scientific, The Historical and The Practical. I have chosen them because for each one of them the characteristic of concreteness has been claimed, each of these has claimed to be the philosophical approach to politics or part of the philosophical approach to politics. And what we want to know is, Is this claim justified? All cannot be concrete unless they are really all the same kind of thinking, because, as we have seen, there can only be one concrete. So our first business is to discover what is the essence of each of these kinds of thinking, to see if they differ and how they differ, and to see if one or none is concrete.
Scientific Thinking about Politics 1. We have come already to a certain number of conclusions.346 Our subject, we have discovered, cannot accurately be described as just ‘thinking about politics’, or ‘political thought’, because we have found that there are many kinds of thinking about politics; and what we want to know is, Which kind of thinking about politics is philosophical thinking? We then set about the business of trying to discover how we were to distinguish between kinds of thinking, and came to the conclusion that the words ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ expressed a principle by which different kinds of thinking could be distinguished. Wherever concrete thinking about politics is to be found, there, and nowhere else, is philosophical thinking about politics. And wherever any kind of thinking about politics reveals itself to be abstract, then that kind of thinking is not philosophical, does not contribute to philosophy, and must not be regarded as in any way a valid criticism of philosophical thinking. For what is not philosophical cannot criticize philosophy, and cannot, therefore, either contribute to or contradict the conclusions of philosophy. 2. But, since it usually requires more than a casual glance at a particular kind of thinking to decide whether it is really abstract [346] [At the head of the lecture Oakeshott listed three works by F.H. Giddings; The Principles of Sociology; Inductive Sociology A Syllabus of Methods, Analyses and Classifications, and Provisionally Formulated Laws (London and New York: Macmillan & Co., 1901); and The Scientific Study of Human Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; London: Humphrey Milford for Oxford University Press, 1924). He also listed but deleted Spencer, Introduction to Sociology, possibly a reference to H. Spencer, The Study of Sociology, 10th edn (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1881 [1873]), and C.S. Loch, A Great Ideal and its Champion Papers and Addresses (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1923).]
or concrete, and since a great number of different kinds of thinking have, at one time or another, represented themselves as concrete thinking about politics, and we know that there can be only one kind of thinking which is really concrete—what we have now to do is to examine the more important kinds of thinking about politics to see if we can come to a considered conclusion about their abstractness or concreteness. 3. The three kinds of thinking I have chosen for this purpose are those that I have called The Scientific, The Historical and The Practical. And I have chosen them because it is most frequently claimed that one of them is, or some combination of them is, what we are looking for,—that is, concrete thinking about Politics. 4. Now there are certain possible discoveries open to us. (i) We may discover that all these are, in different ways, abstract. That is, that none of them is what we are looking for. (ii) We may discover that one of them is concrete, in our sense of the word, and so, is what we are looking for. (iii) We may discover that they are not as separate as they look and that really, for example, historical thinking and scientific thinking about politics is the same thing. In which case, again, we may discover that among these, or some combination of these, concrete thinking is to be found. (iv) But if we discover that these three are really separate kinds of thinking, then it is impossible that more than one of them is what we are looking for,—is concrete. So we have a double question to ask of each of these kinds of thinking about politics. (i) Is it really a separate and individual kind of thinking? And (ii) Is it abstract or concrete? We might go on to ask a third question, If it is abstract what degree of abstraction does it possess, how abstract is it? But that seems to me to be so difficult a question to answer that for the present I would rather not attempt it. And, in any case, we shall
have discovered enough for our immediate purpose when we have found out whether each is abstract or concrete. 5. To-day we have to deal with what we have called Scientific thinking about Politics. (And I ought to remind you in what sense we agreed to use the word Politics: it means, for us, the whole thing we call social, human life, it means ‘society’ in its widest and most general sense.) Now, this scientific thinking about Politics has received various names. It has been called Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Ethnology and several other names;—these, in one sense or other, have at different times been regarded as the ‘Science of Society’. ‘Political Science’ has often meant simply the science of ‘politics’ in its narrowest sense—the science of government. But, at other times, it has implied something wider than mere government. Aristotle, we saw, regarded the problems of government as only some of the problems to be treated by a true science of politics, and the word is used in this University to mean something a little wider than mere government. Sociology was a word invented about the middle of the last century by Auguste Comte, and was intended by him to mean the science of society in exactly the same way as ‘biology’ means the science of life, and ‘geology’ the science of the earth. Anthropology came into fashion about the same time, and is a word which has been applied chiefly to the study of man in his primitive state, and to the study of societies, customs, laws, and religions of undeveloped and so-called ‘savage’ races. And Ethnology is hardly distinguishable from Anthropology.347 These words, then, do not all mean the Science of Society in exactly the same sense; and some of them have now come to be applied to studies which are not characteristically scientific at all. [347] [MS del: ‘a word popularized by the famous chapter in Mill’s Logic called “Ethnology, or the Science of the Formation of Character” has come to mean the study of man and his behavior.’]
6. But, whatever name suits our fancy, what we want to know is, What is the purpose and what is the method of this science, which has been called ‘The science of analytical sociology’,348 but which I have called more simply, The Science of Society? One of its ablest and sanest exponents, bearing in mind the terminology of an older science, Economics, has said that Sociology is the ‘science of social well-being’.349 Economics is the science of wealth in one sense of the word; Sociology is the science of wealth in another, and perhaps slightly wider, sense of the word. Now the notion that lies behind this conception of a Science of Social Well-being is one which has been gathered from an observation of social or political life and its conditions. In different communities the conditions and standard of social wellbeing vary greatly—habits and customs considered indispensable in some, will seem purposeless in others. And so, also, in different classes of the same society. And the first task of him who would construct a science of social well-being, social ‘wealth’, is to observe the facts. To do this he need not go far afield, he need not, like the anthropologists, penetrate into the dim regions of primitive life and savage custom, he need not, in most cases, go outside his own society. Sometimes, it would be definitely advantageous were he to confine his observations to some particular geographical area, or to a particular class of people, or to those employed in a particular trade or industry within his society. That is why it has been called by the rather barbarous name of the science of analytical sociology. 7. There are, of course, innumerable instances of studies of this sort, made on varying scales, some to include a whole nation, some with reference to a single town or village. But the essence of any study of this sort is simply the inclusion of human society, [348] See MacIver, ‘Preface’ to Community. [349] Loch, A Great Ideal, p. 44.
its conditions of well-being, growth and development, among the objects of natural science. The survey of a region with a view to determining the particular conditions of human life existing there,—its climate and agricultural fertility, its natural resources and the particular occupations of its inhabitants, the effect of the density of its population on the division of labour, the standard of health and culture, and all with a view to determining the real conditions of social well-being—a survey of this sort is not very different from the scientific survey of a particular region with a view to determining its characteristic flora and fauna, in fact it is different from it only in its object, and not at all in its method. 8. But no scientist would pretend or admit that botany consists simply ina number of disconnected surveys of this kind, or that zoology is merely a matter of mapping out different species of animal and determining where on the earth’s surface each is most commonly found. And so, this science of society, of social well-being, cannot properly call itself a science unless it reaches principles, reaches something more than a heterogeneous collection of facts. And this is what it is continually attempting. Science advances not by the mere accumulation of facts. Mere facts teach nothing. Science advances by the framing and testing of hypotheses,—guessing at causes. The only useful observations are those made under the guidance of some hypothesis. This is very well illustrated in the work of one of the great sociologists of the last century, the Frenchman named Le Play. Here is a short description of one of his lines of observation.350 Le Play, noticing the anomaly of increasing wealth and weakened manners, and the variety of conditions that prevailed in the life of families, investigated the actual circumstances of people in different countries, not from the side of their wage or remuneration only and their ability to earn wages and produce goods, but also from [350] Loch, A Great Ideal, pp. 77–8.
the point of view of their life as members of society and of the groups into which society divides itself. Thus, for him, the place with its geographical characteristics, the home, the family and its relationships, the earnings of its members, their means of social preservation, industry, thrift, property, habits, manners, education, religion, their relations to the village or town or state—all that was actual and formative in their lives was brought under one survey; and matters economic in fact or by inference came to be treated as but a part of the whole. Or again, the demand for an eight hours, or a ten hours day is, in itself, arbitrary. This Science of Society must avoid that which is merely arbitrary, for that is the denial of science, and must go further and find the grounds on which such a demand can and should be made.351 First physiological grounds, and then in relation to social habit and fact, and all in relation to a certain standard of social well-being, or as the Greeks would have said, ‘good life’ in so far as it is measurable. Here, then, is, if not the laboratory method of biology and other natural sciences, at least the observatory method of astronomy. And the outcome of it all is some kind of general principles or laws. They may be psychological principles like that of ‘imitation’, which Tarde has imagined as governing all social life; or they may [351] [Oakeshott’s marginal note refers to W.J Brown, The Underlying Principles of Modern Legislation (London: John Murray, 1912), p. 232, where the following passage occurs: ‘[T]he proposition I have stated would predispose me to adopt that form of socialism which most conserves the merits of the traditional system … the public ownership of industry does not necessarily imply an equality of material rewards for service; it does not necessarily imply public management … Nor does socialism necessarily imply the ownership of all industry by the State … it is possible to conceive of a socialistic State … in such a form as to suggest the term “competitive socialism”.’ Oakeshott also noted ‘Bentham’.]
be economic and physical principles which explain the rise and fall of population, such as Malthus suggested. And you will see that the claim of this study to be a science in the full sense of the word, does not depend upon the proved and permanent truth of all the statements which have been made in its name. Every science has made its mistakes, every science has its history of progressive discovery and continual re-formulation of laws and principles. If Malthus wasn’t correct in what he said, others have studied the subject of population since: because Einstein has improved on Newton, it doesn’t mean that physics isn’t a science. Nor, again, does the apparent vagueness and formlessness of the subject-matter of this science of society make it less likely that it will be a science in the full sense. It has often been argued that human action is so unaccountable that the idea of making any ‘science’ out of it, is absurd. But then, both biology and psychology would come under this difficulty, and both these are admitted to be sciences. Indeed, no science is exempt from this apparent deficiency. And the reason why the unaccountableness of human action makes no difference to the possibility of a science of social wellbeing is, that no science whatever ventures to predict the action of any ‘individual’, be it a human being or atom or molecule. Science as we shall see more clearly in a moment deals only with average behaviour. It is muddleheaded thinking which says that sociology is a science but not an exact science, like physiology. Sciences are exact simply by leaving out those factors which might make them inexact, and sociology can do this, or does it, as well as any other. 9. Here, then, is a study which may fairly claim to be scientific thinking about Politics—in one sense of the word. That such a study is possible it would seem foolish to deny.352 If anyone cares to study it further I should advise him to go to Durkheim’s book [352] [MS del.: ‘and, moreover, it does not labour under any of the difficulties which suggested themselves with regard to what we called the Science of Societies, or Anthropology.’]
on the method of Sociology. But, having found our scientific thinking about Politics, our next question will be, What is its significance? What kind of thinking is it? Is it the concrete thinking about Society for which we are looking, or is it an abstract kind of thinking about Society? An answer to that question clearly requires us to discuss, and come to some conclusion about, the nature of all properly so-called ‘scientific’ thinking. If scientific thinking is concrete thinking, then scientific thinking about Politics will be concrete thinking about Politics, and if scientific thinking is abstract thinking, then scientific thinking about Politics will be abstract thinking about Politics. So our question may be put in this form;—What is the nature of Scientific thinking? For our sociologists claim for themselves the use of ‘the same method which has proved so successful in dealing with the physical universe’. And for many obvious reasons it is simpler and clearer to discuss the scientific method in relation to one of the socalled natural sciences than to confine our discussion entirely to this Science of Society. But whatever we say of science in general will be true also of the Science of Society. 10. Let me take a simple example and try and gather what is to be said in general about scientific thinking round it. Imagine an elephant sliding down Madingley Hill on Tuesday afternoon. Imagine it to be a fact which we observe, and like any other observable fact science can tell us something about it. How does the scientist treat such a fact as this? In the first place he tries to put aside any emotional reaction he may have in the face of this fact—emotions of amusement or, perhaps, fear, which he might feel. These, he says, are irrelevant to the scientific outlook. In the second place, he tries to observe this fact entirely dispassionately as if he were not there at all. He might describe his attitude by saying that it was the ‘objective’ occurrence which interested him and nothing else whatever. That is to say, the scientific observer leaves himself out of account altogether; what
he wants to get at is a result which in no way depends upon the fact that he has observed it. Thirdly, if we imagine him to be a physicist, but the principle holds equally whatever branch of science he is interested in, he will try and convert this individual, unique observation he has made into the terms of his science, because elephants, as such, hardly enter into physics—even modern physics. And to do this he must forget altogether that the thing he has seen is an elephant; it is, to him simply a material object possessing size and weight— say about 2 tons. So, now, what he has got out of his observation is that a certain object weighing 2 tons is sliding down Madingley Hill. And he will go further and leave out the ‘object’ part of it. What for the physicist is sliding down Madingley Hill is simply and only, ‘2 tons’. And this process of translation must be applied to all the elements of the whole fact which is before him. The fact that it is Madingley Hill doesn’t matter to him, the fact even that it is a hill isn’t even interesting. And ‘Tuesday afternoon’ is of course, wholly irrelevant. And when the whole process of translation is finished the result will be something like this:—‘2 tons is sliding down an incline plane set at an angle of 45° and 100 feet in length, and the time taken to slide this distance, starting from rest, is 15.4 seconds.’ That is his fact, and the conclusion he can draw? Well, I suppose he can tell you, among other things, what the coefficient of friction is—but I am not scientist enough to say what else he can tell you. 11. Now, what has the scientist done? If this is an example of scientific thinking, what can we say about it? First, we saw that the scientist abstracted himself from his observation.353 The whole fact was, of course, ‘A scientist observing [353] A.N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 2004 [1920]), p. 3: ‘Nature is that which we observe in perception through the senses. In this sense-perception we are aware of something which is not thought and which is self-contained for thought
an Elephant sliding down Madingley Hill’, but the scientist himself only made use of half of it—he left himself out. The reason for this is obvious. To some extent we each live in separate worlds, my sensations cannot be yours, my toothache cannot be yours. But if this were the only world of which we knew anything we should be shut away from human intercourse. Hence arises the desire to describe the connections between things not in terms of personal sensations but in terms which do not depend upon any particular sensations. And to do this, we forget ourselves and assume a purely objective world. Secondly, he left out the facts of time (when it happened) and place (where it happened) and also the fact that it was an elephant, and reduced his observation to what could be expressed in terms of exact measurement. Science, you see, is not interested in the individual fact, this or that particular occurrence in its particularity, but is interested in it only in so far as it can be made an example of a general law. And the only things which science is interested in are those which are susceptible of physical measurement. Science asks of everything, ‘Are you susceptible of measurement?’ And if something answers, ‘No’; then Science says, ‘Go away!’ A simple way of being exact, you may think. But is there anything not susceptible of measurement? Yes and No. There is nothing that we know of which cannot be measured in some way or other; everything has a measurable aspect, and so everything can be made the object of scientific thinking. But, again, there is nothing we know of which has nothing but a measurable aspect, because, and this is the important point, measurableness, materiality is abstract, it is something which does not and cannot exist by itself. You will remember how our scientist abstracted himself from the whole situation, and then he went on to abstract all the individual qualities from the situation—and the whole process is one of abstraction, of leaving out what isn’t measurable in one of … we can think about nature without thinking about thought. I shall say that then we are thinking “homogenously” about nature.’
the recognized ways of measurement. And the whole object of this abstraction is just so as to make the result what is called ‘accurate’. You can’t say anything accurate about an elephant sliding down Madingley Hill on Tuesday afternoon, but you can about 2 tons sliding down an incline plane at an angle of 45° to the horizon. 12. Let us sum up our conclusions on this point. Science is the study of the quantitative relationships of the phenomena of the physical world. There is nothing in this world which cannot be measured in some way or other, most things can be measured in more ways than one. But any aspect of any thing which is not capable of measurement in this way is of no interest to science whatever. And everything has aspects of this kind—everything, for example, is individual, is unique, but this aspect of its existence is not measurable scientifically. The fact that Newton’s apple was a Ribstone Pippin—if it was— didn’t help him, didn’t interest him, qua scientist. The world of Scientific thinking is a world of mechanism, everything in it is a machine—the human body as a whole and each organ in it, flowers, your dog, the stars in their courses, elephants sliding down hills, and even the human mind itself—all these, for science, are machines. They may have aspects which are not mechanistic—but that does not enter into scientific thinking; in fact, we know, that everything has aspects which are not mechanistic. The scientific fact, Newton’s apple, is isolated from its historical setting and reduced to the status of a mere instance of a rule. 13. And what kind of thinking is this?—for, you will remember, what we have got to decide about it is, Is it concrete thinking or is it abstract thinking? Abstract thinking, you will remember, we discovered to be abstract because it thought about objects that were abstract, that is, partial, incomplete, one-sided; and concrete thinking was concrete because it thought about the whole of things, and about things only which were a whole.
What is the verdict then? It seems to me that even a British jury could not absolve scientific thinking from the charge of being abstract. It is taken red-handed. Science is not a true, a complete, description of one kind of thing—because we have seen that there is nothing which cannot be an object for scientific thinking—but it is an abstract, arbitrary, and therefore erroneous, description of all things. Only the measurable aspect of things interests scientific thinking; and the notion that the merely measurable, the merely mechanistic, is complete, whole, real, concrete,—or anything but abstract, partial, incomplete, unreal—is absurd. We are tempted to say that nothing could be more abstract, but we have seen that it is a much more difficult matter to decide the degree of abstractness of any kind of thinking than to decide that this or that kind of thinking is abstract in some degree or other. 14. We do not, then, deny that social science, this projected science of Society, is a science—so far as we can see it has amply made good its claim to the title—but we can say, now that we know what a science is, that it is not the concrete thinking about Politics which we are looking for. It has proved itself to be abstract thinking. Whether we can find concrete thinking anywhere, whether there is such a thing as a true philosophy of politics, is another matter; what we know at present is that this Science of Society is not what we want, and therefore can neither be held to be a contribution to concrete thinking about Politics nor to be in any sense a criticism of the methods or results of such thinking. 15. It may have occurred to you that our Science of Society is not so much a single science as a collection of different, and in some respects independent, sciences, and that possibly some of these subordinate social sciences might have more to be said in their favour than the Science of Society asa whole. Of course, if any of those subordinate social sciences are really sciences, and prove themselves to be so, we need not say anything
more about them than that, since they are sciences, they deal with abstractions and not with what is concrete. But the difficulty often is to see whether this or that kind of thinking really is or is not scientific thinking in this strict sense. And, because this applies to two such social sciences in particular, I want to say a word about them. They are Economics and Psychology. 16. Economics, it is said, is the Science of Wealth. But what kind of wealth? Wealth which is measurable, wealth which is of a certain kind. Everything has an economic value, but that is not the only value that it possesses; and there is nothing which has only an economic value.354 This is just what we said of natural science, everything is measurable but there is nothing which is simply measurable and nothing more. ‘A country’, says Mill, ‘would hardly be said to be richer however precious a possession it might have in genius, in virtues or the accomplishments of its inhabitants.’355 Why not? Because value of this sort is not economic value and so has nothing to do with the Science of Economics. ‘Wealth’, in Economics, is a technical term, and technical language, we have seen already, is abstract language.356 The laws which economists are able to lay down respecting rent, profits, wages, prices and so on, are only true in [354] [Oakeshott’s marginal note reads: ‘Pictures—the Mond and Iveagh bequests—letters in Times. (i) £30,000, (ii) £300,000.’ A letter from Martin Conway appeared in the Times, 28 January 1928, noting disagreements over the value of these two recent bequests of paintings to the National Gallery and Kenwood House in London: ‘A well-known critic … mentioned £250,000 as the approximate value of the 40 odd pictures which comprise the Mond bequest. Yet no less an authority than Sir Joseph Duveen told me personally that, in his opinion, ten of these pictures alone were worth £400,000.’] [355] J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Bk 1 ch. iii (CW), ii. 49. [Cp. p. 63 n. 14, above.] [356] Ruskin and Ricardo. ‘There is no Wealth but Life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, of admiration. That country is richest which
so far as the persons concerned are free from the influence of any other motives than what are properly called economic motives. Economics deals not with whole human beings whose motives are many and incalculable and whose interests are not confined, but with man as ruled by economic motives alone, with an ‘economic man’, with that is, an abstraction. Economics is a unified series of thoughts with regard to a particular department of human life. Economics is not a true description of one kind of action or thing, but an abstract, arbitrary, partial, incomplete description of all action and all things. It is a science, and, as such, is abstract thinking. It is not itself concrete, and cannot be held to contribute to what is concrete thinking or to criticize concrete thinking. 17. With psychology, so-called social psychology, we are in a more difficult position because there exists an almost invincible prejudice in its favour. Psychology, at any rate, it is said, is philosophy. Psychology, it is said, must be the basis upon which to build any philosophical thinking about Politics. But, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Now, the main difficulty about psychology is that it is the last of the sciences to come out from under the withering domination of philosophy. Formerly it used to be regarded as part of philosophy, as indeed did all natural sciences, and while it was in that position it was a barren study. But now, nothing is more certain than that no psychologist is worth listening to who does not keep as close as possible to the empirical facts. Psychology is the study of mind as a physical phenomenon. It studies the mind and its workings in exactly the same way as the psychologist studies the body and its workings. To the physiologist the body is a machine, nothing that is not measurable with regard to it is interesting, nothing which is purely individual is significant. To the psychologist, the mind nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.’ [Cp. p. 63 n. 14, above.]
is a machine, and he achieves this mechanistic outlook simply by refusing to see anything else. It is a process of abstraction, it is the characteristic process of natural science. And this is true of whatever kind of psychology we like to mention, as true of the so-called individual psychology as of the so-called social psychology.357 Psychology does not offer a true description of one kind of human action, but an abstract, arbitrary, incomplete description of all human action. It is a science, and therefore it is abstract thinking.358 Psychology is no nearer related to philosophy, to concrete thinking, than any other natural science. Philosophy, if it is to achieve anything at all, must remain completely indifferent both to the affirmations and to the negations of psychology. 18. So these are our conclusions. We have been inveigled down a blind alley, we have asked for bread and been given a stone—or a viper, I don’t know which to call it. Neither the Science of Society, nor any properly so-called social science, is concrete thinking about politics, is a philosophy of politics. They are not philosophy, do not contribute to philosophy, and cannot be held to criticize philosophy. 19. I have often said that what is not itself concrete thinking cannot be said even to contribute to concrete thinking, but there is a view which supposes that philosophy is the science of sciences, and that political philosophy is, consequently, the science of the political sciences. This view is so wrong headed and absurd that it hardly needs refutation; but it is so common that it does require mention. It is, however, easier to suppose that two blacks will make a white, than to suppose—if we really understand what [357] The idea of there being two different kinds of psychology— individual and social—is, of course, absurd. [358] Cf. Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, Ch. 7, ‘Psychological Illustration of the Idea of a Real or General Will.’
we mean by abstract and concrete—that two, or any number of, kinds of abstract thinking will add up to that single and unique kind of thinking we have called concrete or philosophical. The notion is, of course, a legacy of the days when everything was philosophy and a legacy which we shall do well to refuse to inherit. Philosophy, in a sense, cannot contradict any of the conclusions of any of the abstract kinds of thinking. And, again, where there can be no contradiction there can be no criticism, no supplementation—in short, no argument. For the present, we shall do well to apply this principle rigidly. Philosophy is no more the science of the sciences, no more made by the adding together of a number of abstract kinds of thinking, than the ‘general will’ in Rousseau is the ‘will of all’. The two things are of a different kind.
Historical Thinking about Politics 1. We were engaged last time in discussing the claim of a so-called Science of Society to be philosophical thinking about Politics. We were led to this discussion by the discovery that a philosophy of politics was not any kind of thinking about politics, but a particular kind of thinking about it; and its characteristic quality we have called its concreteness. Many different kinds of thinking about politics have claimed this quality of concreteness, but, by an examination of what we mean by concreteness we discovered that, since only one kind of thinking could be concrete—though many could be abstract—a great many of these claims could not be substantiated. In fact, the most liberal terms we found ourselves able to offer these claimants to a title often eagerly, but usually ignorantly sought, were that only one of them might win it, and possibly none of them. At any rate, the conditions on which the title might be rightfully claimed are clear: what we have to ask of each claimant is, ‘Abstract or Concrete?’ Some, without thinking, answer, ‘Concrete, of course’ in the same way as a man might answer the question, ‘Are you a gentleman?’ But the kinds of thinking which answer in this way are under a misapprehension; it is no dishonour, it is no reflection on their sincerity or usefulness, to admit that they are abstract. Natural Science, indeed, we saw, has realized this, and has, of late, more readily admitted its abstract character, and has thereby became both freer and more useful—it never did anyone any good to try and appear to be what he was not. And so, our conclusion was that scientific thinking about anything whatever, politics included, is abstract thinking. This measurable, mechanistic world which is the world of science, whether it be the science of chemistry, physics, biology, psychology, economics or of social welfare, is an abstract world. It does not offer what we are eager to find,—concreteness. We must, evidently, look elsewhere for that.
2. And to-day I propose to look at what I have called Historical Thinking about politics, to see whether that possesses the quality of concreteness which would warrant us saying, ‘Here is a kind of thinking about politics which can properly be called a philosophy of politics.’ In our vague way, we are not accustomed to regard History as a kind of thinking; as a particular way of thinking about things which can also be thought about in other ways.359 But there, as often before, we are wrong. We didn’t think, until we looked carefully, that the ordinary process of perception was a kind of thinking. So history, also, is a kind of thinking; nothing which, so to speak, passes through our minds can avoid being a kind of thinking. In fact, all that we ever do to things may be described as thinking about them in one way or another. Our thinking may be very quick so that we don’t recognize it, or it may go further than mere thinking—but none the less it is, or starts with, thinking. 3. Now, with regard to the philosophy of politics two claims have, at various times, been made on behalf of history or historical thinking. (i) Sometimes it is actually claimed that historical thinking about politics, that an historical view of society in general or of a particular society, itself gives a philosophy of politics, itself is concrete thinking about politics. (ii) And at other times it has been claimed that, if this view is not quite true, at any rate historical thinking, an historical view, or study, is the only sound basis upon which to build a philosophy of politics. These two claims have been preferred, and our business is to try and see clearly what is intended by them. 4. The first of these claims—that which says that an historical view of society is itself a philosophy of society—has been made in three [359] Cp. R.M. MacIver, The Modern State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), for pseudo-historical thinking. Nothing can be historical without being something else first.
different forms; or rather, of the many forms in which it has been made the most important can be reduced to three. (a) The first of these forms has been called the ‘philosophy of history’. The notion is, that if we could discover any general laws which govern the history of the world, we should have created out of a mass of, at first sight, rather disconnected events and characters, a real whole, and this whole is a philosophy. It is an attempt to discover the general laws which govern the whole course of history: history, of course, meaning the whole story, in all its ascertainable detail, of man’s life on the earth and such natural events as can be intimately connected with him. These laws are regarded as the unchanging truths of which the different events recorded in history are instances. The facts, the events themselves, are settled by the historian proper, and when settled they enter the province of the philosopher, who, by the discovery of these general laws, makes a philosophy. For example, the historian may say, ‘The French Revolution produced Napoleon’, and from that, and by means of reference to other similar facts, the general law that, say, ‘Anarchy is followed by despotism’, might be deduced. And when all events that ever happen in human history are brought under some law of this sort, then we shall have a philosophy, then we shall have true philosophical thinking, concrete thinking about the course of human life on this planet. That is the claim. (b) But the claim that historical thinking about society, about politics, is concrete has sometimes been made in a less grandiose form, and a form which does not strike us, at first, as being really historical. Nevertheless I think it is so. This particular claim has been made under several names, but the most common one, nowadays, is Anthropology.360 The argument is roughly this. [360] [MS del: ‘7. (i) This Science of Societies is usually called Anthropology, though many of those who have written about it prefer the name Sociology. But whatever we call it, the conception which lies behind the name is this.’]
Civilization—the whole of men’s manners and customs, the sum of his physical, mental and moral achievements—is thought to be a progressive movement in a definite direction, according to fixed laws. ‘These laws once understood, we may calculate towards what goal we are tending and what we may expect in the future, even as the astronomer foretells the movements of the heavenly bodies.’361 If we look to the past history of human societies we can see the earlier stages of this development, just as we can discover in fossils and other ‘remains’ earlier forms of existing physiological structures. As in the physical world we can recognize the less developed and the more developed organism, so among these various ‘societies’— or ‘social organisms’, as some have called them—we can recognize something which we can call primitive, embryonic; and something also which we can call more developed, mature. This process of recognition, the effort to detach and classify discoveries of this kind about human societies, is called Anthropology; and it362 is occupied with the principles which underlie all human societies considered in a process of development.363 The data for this study is gathered from various sources. Partly from what we ordinarily call history, partly from the observation of existing societies in all stages of development, and partly from the results of other studies and sciences like comparative philology, geography, and geology. [361] F. Müller-Lyer, The History of Social Development, intro. L.T. Hobhouse and E.J. Urwick, tr. E.C. Lake and H.A. Lake (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1920), p. 35. [362] [MS del: ‘is a science which may be defined as the Science of Societies in the same way as Biology is taken to be the science of life. This science’] [363] B. Kidd, ‘Sociology’, Encyclopedia Britannica, xxv. 323. [‘Sociology … must be regarded as a science occupied quite independently with the principles which underlie human society considered as in a condition of development’.]
When it has gathered together the vast mass of facts which are to be discovered, it is the business of this study to draw from it principles which can give to variety some sort of unity. One day, perhaps, says a writer on this subject, this study will determine with precision what is common to the individuals of all human peoples. We have before us a plurality of civilizations, all of which contribute to some single line of development, or, at any rate, all of which follow general laws of growth and development.364 And were we really to discover something which we could call the normal line of development in the growth of the social organism, it would afford at least a useful guide to legislators and governors in their provision for the future. Let me give you some examples of the kind of questions which this Anthropology tries to answer, and the kind of results it achieves. If we have before us a number of independent societies, if we know something of their past history, of the way in which they have developed, can we not, for example, come to some conclusion on such questions as, What is the relation in a society between structure and growth? Up to what point is structure necessary to growth? After what point does it retard growth? At what point does it arrest growth? Or again, the principle which Sir Henry Maine formulated, that social organization passes from one of status to one of contract, that is that a society in which, like in feudal England, a man’s position is determined by his membership of the group he belongs to, is more primitive than one in which each man is free to enter into contracts and so freely determine his position,— such a principle as this is one of the findings of this study. [364] [MS del: ‘The Science which makes it its business to formulate these laws is this Science of Societies. And what is the final result at which this science aims? Perhaps that would be best described by saying again that its results will be with regard to civilizations what the results of biology are to physical life. Some may doubt the value of many branches of this great science of Societies.—Spencer, The Study of Sociology.]
Now, for the past century almost, an attempt has been made to build this up into a science of something of the same nature as the analytical sociology we discussed last time; but this attempt may be said to have failed. It is, of course, believed not to have failed by some of its professors; but the arguments for its failure seem to me conclusive. For those of you whom it interests I would suggest that the discussion in River’s pamphlet called History and Ethnology presents a very fair view of the modern position.365 Maitland, a great many years ago now, summed up the situation when he said: ‘It is my belief that by and by anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing.’366 And what has happened is that it has become history. We can go to the various primitive societies which exist to-day, we can draw conclusions about the social life and civilizations of the past from ‘remains’ of various sorts which have come down to us; that is, we can find out a great deal about what happened in those times or in these places; but can we go any further? I think not. We have not enough facts from which to draw scientific conclusions: and the facts we have are not of the right kind. We have not enough facts to say what is normal and what is abnormal in the growth of societies: we have no knowledge of what a ‘normal’ as opposed to a ‘violent’ death of a society is. Nor, indeed, have we got any certainly separate examples which we can classify: for unless we can prove that our examples are really separate, all chance of making an inductive science disappears. So, Anthropology has chosen to be history; it is an historical form of thinking. We cannot say that Father-right always follows Mother[365] W.H.R. Rivers, History and Ethnology (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York and Toronto: The Macmillan Co., 1922). [‘During the last ten years...a movement has brought [history and ethnology] into much closer relationship...twenty or thirty years ago...anthropology was wholly under the dominance of a much cruder evolutionary standpoint’, p. 3.] [366] F.W. Maitland, ‘The Body Politic’, in Collected Papers, 3 vols, ed. H.A.L. Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), iii. 295.
right as a method of inheritance; we cannot say that inhumation is a primitive institution which societies always practise before they reach the more developed method of cremation of the dead; but we can say that here, in this society, one preceded the other, and in that society the opposite process took place. That is, we can make historical statements about primitive societies, but not scientific statements. (c) The third form [of] the claim that historical thinking itself supplies a concrete view, a philosophy, of society is less ambiguous. It says in so many words, ‘Show us the history of a society and I will show you its philosophy.’ ‘Reality is history,’ as a modern writer has put it. If you want to know the real nature of a thing, if you want to see something as a whole, concretely—then got to its history. This has been said of a great number of things, and among them of political life. Professor Westermarck, having the notion that all our moral judgments arise from individual emotions, set about to prove his thesis by an examination of ideas of right and wrong among all peoples and at all times. The nature of moral judgments was to be ascertained, he thought, by means of historical thinking. Or again, it is asserted that Aristotle’s theory of the State—a philosophical theory—is based upon an examination of 150 different constitutions which, it is said, he undertook. If this were true, Aristotle would be a forerunner of the modern school which holds that ‘Reality is History’, but we know that Aristotle thought no such thing. To imagine him making a theory of the State by examining the fortunes of 150 examples is to imagine him as an American professor of Political Science. 5. So much, then, for the three forms which this claim that historical thinking is concrete thinking has taken. But before we go on to examine the validity of this claim we ought to notice a modification of it which is even more common than the full claim itself. This modification says, roughly, that although Reality may not be History, although historical thinking may not itself
be concrete thinking, at any rate it is the basis for all sound philosophical theory;—it is the foundation at least, even if it is not the superstructure. Or, as it is sometimes said, with regard to the philosophy of politics, the historian discovers the facts which the philosopher interprets. Happily this claim will not require a separate examination. For, (i) if historical thinking proves to be concrete thinking, then it is philosophy and we need have no talk of foundation and superstructure, facts and interpretations; and (ii) if historical thinking turns out to be abstract, then, as we have seen it cannot be thought of as contributing to, contradicting, or criticizing concrete thinking, and again talk of foundation and superstructure will be so much nonsense. Concrete thinking cannot be founded upon that which is abstract any more than it can be that which is abstract. 6. We have, then, before us historical thinking as it enters into political life. For it concreteness has been claimed; can the claim be maintained? It has often been refuted on the ground that we do not yet know enough about history and that we shall be able to tell more accurately what its possibilities are when it is a little older. But criticisms such as this seem to me altogether beside the mark. The only way of discovering whether the claim of historical thinking to be concrete thinking is justified is by finding out exactly what kind of thinking historical thinking is. A kind of thinking is concrete or abstract from beginning to end, it can never change its nature, for its nature is its end. And if historical thinking is concrete thinking, then historical thinking about politics is concrete thinking about politics; or if the one is abstract, then the other must be abstract too. We have, then, first to show that historical thinking is really a separate kind of thinking, and not merely scientific thinking under another name; and secondly to show whether it is abstract or concrete.
7. I need not spend time in demonstrating to you that history really is a kind of thinking. In our less critical moments we may be apt to imagine that history is merely a matter of recalling past facts and events, and that this process of recalling is an ‘immediate’ process in which we are passive, merely receptive. But this is just as silly as thinking that what we call ‘perception’ is an ‘immediate experience’ of a totally different kind from what we call ‘thinking’. In the same way as perception is thinking, an elementary kind of thinking, a quick kind of thinking, perhaps, but thinking none the less, history is thinking also. Every historian is something more than a passive, receptive agent through which the events of the past pour themselves; he is critical, selective, he is a thinking agent. 8. Now, the chief and outstanding characteristic of historical thinking is that it deals always with what is individual and unique. In the language of logic, the historians’ judgments are singular judgments, and consequently categorical judgments. Historical thinking examines the interrelations between things regarded as individual and unique. Things may, of course, be unique from a great number of different points of view, and the point of view which is most important for history is the uniqueness which is given to an event by time. History deals with things, or aspects of things, into the essence of which time enters, giving them thereby particularity and uniqueness. ‘The great object of teaching history,’ said Lord Bryce, ‘is to enable people to realise … that there is not such a thing as a normal world.’367 That is to say, the first lesson of history is that the ‘averages’ with which science deals do not represent the individuality of things. The world of averages is an abstract world. But the world of history is made up, essentially, of that which is particular and unique. There have been many battles, but it is this or that battle, Bouvines or Waterloo, which the historian deals with, not battles [367] [J. Bryce, ‘On the Teaching of History in Schools’, Historical Association Leaflet No. 4 (London: Alexander & Shepheard, 1907), p. 4.]
in general. Consequently, for the historian, history never repeats itself: unique events cannot repeat themselves without ceasing to be unique. Both Napoleon and Alexander may have been influenced by similar motives in their attempted conquests in the East, but what is interesting to the historian is not the similarity of the motives—which must always be a matter of conjecture and of degree—but the fact that these were Napoleon’s motives, and if Napoleon’s, then unique; because, though motives may repeat themselves, Napoleon’s motives obviously cannot. 9. Now, this characteristic of history shows it, at any rate, to be a totally different kind of thinking from what we have seen science to be. Science, we saw, has no interest in what is unique and individual; it deals solely with what is average, what can be repeated. An elephant may only once have slid down Madingley hill—that is an historical event—but what science gets out of it is only an instance of the laws of mechanics and forgets altogether that it was either an elephant or Madingley hill. For the historian it may be significant that June 1st 1794—‘the glorious first of June’ when Lord Howe won his victory—was a fine day; for the scientist its ‘fineness’ is only significant as one figure in the calculation of the average hours of sunshine per day for the year 1794. And so on. 10. As a consequence from this, we can never argue in historical thinking that ‘so and so must have taken place’, that this or that ‘must have happened’. History asks not what must have happened, but only what did happen. Every event, for history, has a particular and unique place and time, and we can never say of a particular event that it must have happened in a particular way unless we know it did. The general laws of science do not enable the scientist to say anything about particular individual cases, they hold good only for the average, and so are useless in dealing which that aspect of events with which historical thinking is interested. Historical
events are individual because to each is assigned, or for each is assumed, a particular place and a particular time. Historical events, that is, are phenomenal. History assumes the existence of a world of events and facts, independent of being known each of which is individual, and then tries to work out relations of cause and effect, of before and after, which are also individual. And all of these are distinguished by being in the past. If the historian’s dream came true, every single event which has ever happened in the world would be laid bare in its singularity, its relation to those events which stood near it in time and place would be revealed, and we should have one vast series of events, some of which might be connected as cause and effect, but all of which would be connected by being within this world of space and time. 11. That is the unity which historical thinking can give to things. It can show a proximate cause, it can connect in space and time; in the end it might show that nothing is an anachronism, for everything has some cause, can be explained somehow. But what sort of an ‘explanation’ is it that history gives? What is the unity with which history endows these particular, unique events? History reveals proximate causes, reveals connections in space and time, but never reveals necessary connections. Indeed, when we saw that in history we can never speak of what ‘must have happened’, we saw that history has no use for the distinction between necessary and accidental. There are no accidents in history; nothing is contingent. History tells us nothing of men apart from society—but this says only what has been, it is not a judgment of necessity, nor can any law on average be properly calculated from it. We may say that it was a ‘pure accident’ that William the Conqueror’s horse should step on a hot ash and throw its master to the ground, so causing his death, but since that was the way in which William died, for history, the word ‘accidental’ has no meaning. That is how he died; it is a unique event, and if he had died in his bed it could not have been more unique, because
its uniqueness lies in the fact that it was William’s death, there was only one William, or so history assumes. Or again, where is the necessary connection between the Pacific Ocean and its name? we might say that it is a ‘pacific’ ocean, but the historian would step in and say, ‘No, you are wrong. That was not the ‘reason’ why it was called Pacific.’ The reason, the historical reason, of course, is that Núñez de Balboa looked out into the Gulf of Panama and saw that it was calm. That is history. There is no necessary connection, there is no rational order. Why should the observed character of a small bay at a particular moment give a name to an ocean? From a non-historical point of view we might even say that it was all a mistake; but in history, of course, there are no mistakes. History can explain, then, but it cannot justify; it can place an event in a temporal-spatial order of cause and effect, but it can do nothing else. When Dicey says that ‘in the ordinary course of things the law of England [with regard to property] would have been amended before the end of the eighteenth century, or soon after the beginning of the nineteenth century’ but the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars delayed the changes, what does he mean by ‘the normal course of events’?368 There is no normal; what was abnormal in what actually took place? You see, he is speaking as a lawyer and not as an historian, for the historian refuses to know anything about anything except what did actually take place, qua its having taken place and in no other relation at all. 12. Historical thinking, then, results in a series of unique events, which are connected, in so far as they are connected, by the categories of cause and effect, and of space and time. The explanations it offers, those explanations which are characterized as ‘historical explanations’ are limited to this world of space and time and proximate cause and effect in space and time, and do not [368] [A.V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law & Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1905), p. 123.]
show rational or necessary connections. History explains things, not by placing them within the abstract whole of things physically measurable like Science, but by placing them within a world of space and time, a world which is so far not a whole that we are more often than not at a loss to show the rational or temporal connections between events. Also, the historical series, those singular phenomenal events in time, is one which is without an end—part of it is always in the future. We can never know the whole; and history gives its explanations of things by referring to a ‘whole’ which it can never know as a whole. The historical series is forever incomplete. 13. Now, we saw that Scientific thinking was abstract for two main reasons. (i) It leaves out of account the scientist himself and postulates facts quite independent of himself. And (ii) it is interested in only a single aspect of things—that which is physically measurable—that which is a machine. Science is not a true description of one kind of thing, but a partial, incomplete, abstract description of all things. What are we to say about History? Is it abstract or concrete thinking? Are its objects abstract or concrete? At any rate, we can say at once that it is not abstract for exactly the same reasons as scientific thinking is abstract. Historical thinking is a different kind of thinking from Scientific thinking. And yet, in one respect it is similar. Historical thinking is abstract in the same way as science is abstract in that it leaves out the knower, the thinker himself, and postulates an objective series of facts and events wholly independent of him. On this first point it is abstract; but can we go further? Yes, I think we can. History, also, deals with only one aspect of things, a partial, incomplete, one-sided aspect—that is, their uniqueness in time and space. Science dealt with the abstract universal, the average; history deals with the abstract individual. The whole to which it refers things for explanation is not a rational whole, but one of time, and so not really a ‘whole’ at all—for part
of it is forever buried in the unknown future; and in consequence no single historical question can ever be finally solved, so long as a single historical fact is uncertain, all are relatively uncertain. History, then, is not a true description of one kind of thing, for we may have a history of anything. It is an incomplete, partial, arbitrary and therefore abstract description of everything. It seeks and finds in things their abstract individuality. Like science, it is abstract and not concrete thinking. 14. Historical thinking is abstract; historical thinking about politics and political life is abstract thinking. It has proved itself to be abstract, and by so doing it has proved itself to be capable neither of being, of contributing to, nor of criticizing that which is concrete thinking. Whether we shall find this concrete thinking anywhere remains yet to be seen, but we know, at any rate, that it is not historical thinking. 15. This may be difficult for us to believe, because we live in an historical age, an age which has been brought up to value an historical explanation above all other kinds of explanation— even scientific. Historical analysis and explanation has a power not short of tremendous over our minds; it is apt to satisfy us when we have been shown the historical cause, and we think we have discredited a thing or a doctrine by revealing its origin or the way and circumstances in which it developed. But in all this we are merely yielding to the prejudices and faulty logic of our age. ‘We must ceaselessly remember,’ says Professor Laski, ‘that the monistic theory of the state was born in an age of crisis and that each period of its revivification has synchronized with some momentous event which has signalized a change in the distribution of political power,’369 therefore it is an unsound theory. There is the apotheosis of historicism! When dealing with a philosophical theory we must, according to Professor Laski, be at pains, above all, to think historically. Or [369] Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty, p. 233 [cp. p. 94 n. 76, above].
again, he accuses some political theorists of not being content with ‘the actual experiments with which history presents us’,370 he accuses them of a failure to stick to the historical facts, which is, you see, simply accusing them of concrete thinking, or an attempt at concrete thinking. The data of philosophy is not to be found in history: to basea study on history is immediately to make it abstract.
[370] Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty, p. vi.
Practical Thinking about Politics 1. Both Scientific and Historical thinking have turned out to be abstract. It was not so much a matter of proving them to be abstract which we undertook, but simply of seeing what they were in their essential nature, and so allowing them to demonstrate their own character. If a kind of thinking, before it has examined itself, imagines itself to be concrete, and then turns out to be abstract, it might appear to have suffered a certain loss of dignity. And, indeed, both science and history have, in the past, paraded themselves in the borrowed plumes of concrete thinking. But since the plumes are borrowed, science and history suffer only an apparent loss when they are taken away. We hear so much nowadays about ‘Truth’ and the quest for truth, and no kind of thinking can justify itself unless it can somehow show that it is engaged in this quest. But, as a matter of fact, no kind of abstract thinking can be properly said to contribute to the ‘truth’, in the strict and full sense of the word. The Truth, in its only intelligible sense, is the whole, and the whole is not made up of abstract parts. Nevertheless, there are other things besides the truth, in the full sense, which are worthwhile, and to convict a kind of thinking of abstractness should not I think carry with it a necessary loss of dignity. It is true, of course, that to call a kind of thinking abstract is to say that it can be called ‘thinking’ only by courtesy, but abstract thinking has its uses, even if it does not lead us to Truth, even if it is not really thinking at all. And one of the results which I think will follow from our discussion to-day will be that abstract thought is necessary to human existence; the whole of human life, as it is practically lived, is based on abstract thinking. Life produces abstraction in order to preserve itself, just as the biological organism grows to its environment.
2. Our subject to-day is Practical Thinking. It is clear to most of us that science is a form of thinking, and it is clear to us, when we stop and think a moment, that history is a kind of thinking also, but it is, perhaps, more difficult to see that the Practical is a form of thought also. And, indeed, until we grasp the principle that every human activity is a form of thinking we shall not see clearly that this is the nature of Practical activity. 3. What do we mean by practical thinking, by practice? In one sense of the word, of course, there is nothing that is not a practical activity. For if we make ‘practice’ synonymous with ‘activity’ of any sort, then there is nothing in human life which cannot in some way be brought under the heading of the practical. That is what Aristotle meant when he said that ‘Thought also is activity.’ Even thought, you see, thought of any and every kind, produces some sort of change in the mind, if not in the external, phenomenal world. Another way of putting this same idea is to say that behind all activity of mind, thinking in the proper sense, lies an activity of will. You cannot ‘think’ until you have willed to think. But this, we have seen, is a misleading way of expressing it. There is no such thing as the will; it is an abstraction. Kinds of thought, we have discovered already, cannot be distinguished by saying that they are each the activity of a separate ‘faculty’ in the mind. Nevertheless, that is one of the ways in which men have tried to distinguish practical thinking; it is, they said, the activity of the ‘practical reason’. But we have already seen sufficient reason to reject this explanation, first because the practical reason, like the will, and the moral faculty and so on, is an abstraction; and secondly, if it did really exist, to differentiate between kinds of thinking by saying that each is the activity of a separate faculty is no explanation at all. It is not an intelligible differentiation. 4. All thinking is activity and therefore practical, in a wide sense, but there is a particular kind of thinking, which can be distinguished
from other kinds, not by being the product of a practical faculty, but by being expressly directed towards ends which are practical. All thinking is practical, in the sense that it must be willed and that it in fact does produce some practical alteration of mind or circumstance, but not all thinking is directed solely towards the production of such a practical change. By practical thinking, then, I mean here that thinking which expressly aims at producing a change, maintaining an existence unchanged, or giving criteria by which our growing, developing, changing practical life may be ruled and guided. 5. Now, it is clearly appropriate to the subject-matter of politics that a great deal of thinking connected with it should be of this practical nature. And as a consequence of this obvious fact it has often been held that the philosophy of politics is not philosophy in the strict sense at all, but is a kind of thinking which stands on the borderland between speculation and practice. And those who imagine political philosophy to be of this nature often take the opportunity of judging it from both points of view. Where it is philosophically adequate they discover some practical disadvantage and vice versa. The political philosopher is alternatively accused of inexperience in matters of practical politics or inadequate philosophical training. But what I hope to show is that any work which can properly be praised for the depth of practical political insight it displays or censured for a corresponding inexperience is not a work of political philosophy, is not concrete thinking, but abstract thinking. But before we go into that we must first discover what practical thinking really is. 6. Practical thinking in general, and practical thinking about politics in particular, is of various kinds. That is to say, there are a variety of ends, all of which can properly be called practical in the sense that they aim at maintaining an existence unchanged, producing a change, or giving criteria to guide such processes of maintenance or change.
Practical thinking issues in a ‘programme for action’; that is its widest and most general form.371 Sometimes this programme is aimed at maintaining unchanged what exists, but more frequently it seeks to introduce some reform, either an actual change in political organization, or a change by way of the recognition of what in fact exists but is forgotten or misjudged. Some of these programmes for action, also, are concerned with what we should ordinarily call moral questions, moral rights and obligations; while others deal with things which can claim the importance of being expedient, or merely prudential, but hardly of being morally necessary. But all these distinctions are illusory and only carry us a certain distance. In some way or other, I think, all practical thinking about politics will be found to involve a reform of some sort— either a change of mind or of outward circumstances; they all tell us what we ought to do, in one or other of the many senses of ‘ought’. And perhaps the best way of explaining the nature of this kind of thinking is by studying a few examples from which we can draw out the principle which lies behind them, the idea which they express. 7. In the very dawn of political thinking, Plato drew up a series of proposals for the reorganization of his own community, Athens. These he embodied in part of the work known as the Republic and in that which is called the Laws. I need not now go into the exact character of his proposals. Briefly we may say that, under the influence of a system of government which he saw practised in a neighbouring state and of an ideal of life which he had inherited [371] [MS del.: ‘But programmes for action are not all of the same kind, and I think it will be useful to make a distinction. It is not a very happy one, it expresses at best a half truth, it is abstract, but I think useful. Programmes for action may be direct towards (i) the expediencies of an action or (ii) the morality of an action. They may be programmes for expedient action or for moral action. And I think it will be useful to examine these separately.’]
for his own community, he constructed a new and purer ideal and wished to embody it in institutions and an organized life thoroughly appropriate to it. It was not a matter of reorganizing the government alone, but the whole social life and ideas of the people as well. In his suggestions Plato often shows great practical sense and insight, though the workableness of his plan in detail is somewhat doubtful. At all events, in the Republic and the Laws we have—amidst a great deal of an entirely different character—the product of some of the most powerful practical thinking about political life that has ever been done.372 Plato’s great successor Aristotle has left us the record of much thinking of this same kind, which is to be found both in the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics. The Politics, like the Republic, tell us, among other things, what we ought to do, and the Nicomachean Ethics is, to a large extent, a practical treatise on morals. Not, perhaps, practical in the crude sense in which, we shall see later on, some writings about morality are practical, but none the less undeniably setting forth a moral ideal, and both exhibiting, and urging us to follow, a programme of moral action. None of these writings of either Plato or Aristotle can be said to contain nothing but thinking with this practical end in view, thinking with a view to influencing and directing action, but all of them are partly the product of thought of this kind.
[372] [Autograph note on a separate sheet inserted in the MS at this point: ‘Practical Thinking. Illustrate with Reforming Thinking—Plato’s Republic: bring out the view of life, the view of human nature and destiny which it contains, and show that this might be necessary when an idealist philosophy is made the basis of a reform—but that it is not inherent in such a philosophy, because if it is a philosophy, then it is not a guide to life. Plato’s ‘militarism’, his view of civilization and the purpose of life and ‘justice’ are his, are ‘opinions’ and not philosophy. It is not an Ethical theory—it is moral prejudice. ‘Justice’ with Plato is a moral term, not a philosophical.’]
8. Later centuries have produced much thinking and writing of this same kind.373 Some of it, like that of Locke, in his Treatises on Government, mixed with thinking of other kinds, and some of it evidently with no aim other than a practical one. On the one hand there are the innumerable proposals for the reorganization of society or of systems of government, many of them resulting in actual experiments. An example of this kind of practical thinking is to be found in the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx, the writings of Mr G.D.H. Cole, or Bertrand Russell’s extremely interesting work on our Industrial Civilizations.374 And, on the other hand, there are the sermons and exhortations which propose to us new moral ideas and ideals and urge us to follow them,375 like Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, Bishop Butler’s Sermons and many of the works of Carlyle and Ruskin. 9. Now I am somewhat at a loss to explain why these writings, embodying the results of this particular kind of thinking which I have called Practical, should ever have claimed to be part of the literature of Political Philosophy. The claim may have originated from the firm belief that whatever Plato and Aristotle wrote was philosophy, by definition; and it is certain that in more recent years this claim has had some colour of justification lent it by the teachings of those who call themselves Pragmatists. But to explain this phenomenon is not part of the case I wish to put before you. What I wish to do is first to show that the claim has been made, [373] [Oakeshott’s reference is to Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 285, but which edition is unclear.] [374] [Probably B. Russell, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1923).] [375] [MS del: ‘there are suggestions like those put forward by the Guild Socialists and the Syndicalists and such as are to be found in Mr Bertrand Russell’s extremely interesting works on our Industrial Civilization, and there are the more purely “moral” works, which suggest a changed mind rather than a changed mode of life.’]
and then to examine the grounds which have been alleged in its justification: and, as I hope we understood from our last lecture, no argument drawn from an examination of the history of this claim will help to justify it. 10. Now this claim, that plans for the reorganization of society or programmes for moral action are part, or the whole, of political philosophy, or, vice versa, that political philosophy is a guide to conduct, telling us what we ought to do both in a moral sense and in the sense of presenting us with a programme of practical reform which does not come within the narrow meaning of morality,—this claim is so frequent among modern writers that I hardly need to demonstrate that it has been made, and has been made in exactly the way I have described. But, in case you should have failed to notice the insidious suggestions of writers who take this view, I will point out a few instances of it. The claim is made, sometimes, in its most general form. Professor Hobhouse says that a philosophical enquiry is ‘that which deals with the aim of life, with the standard of conduct, with all that ought to be, no matter whether it is or not’.376 ‘Social philosophy’, says Mr Ginsberg, is the study of institutions ‘from the point of view of what they ought to be’.377 Following this line of thought, it is quite natural for Professor Laski to put forward his by no means original thesis that the criterion by which we ought to judge a philosophy of politics is to be found in its practical consequences. ‘Suppose,’ he says, ‘that on the one hand we adopt the monist solution, what concrete difference will that make to our political life? If we are pluralists, how does that affect our activities? What, in short, are the [practical] consequences of our attitude?
[376] Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State, p. 14. [377] M. Ginsberg, The Psychology of Society (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1921), p. 43 [italics in original].
It is from them we may deduce its truth.’378 And in objection to a certain philosophical theory he says that ‘our political systems must be judged not merely by the ends they serve, but also by the way in which they serve those ends’, implying that a philosophical theory is a judgment of the practical usefulness or moral worth of political institutions and ideas.379 On other occasions the claim has been made in a less generalized, but not less categorical, form. Writers have taken objection to certain philosophical doctrines either because they are immoral, or because their result would be an alteration for the worse of our political life. C.E. Vaughan, who is at heart always a moralist, is continually, in his two volumes on the history of political philosophy, objecting to philosophical theories because they are immoral; and the ground for such an objection can be none other than that what is not morally right cannot be philosophically true; that is, that philosophy ought to tell us what we ought to do.380 Another series of writers have said that ‘the theory of the real will’ is philosophically unsound because it is either immoral or politically damaging. The theory of the real will is ‘essentially aristocratic’ and it makes ‘the particular form or government that happens to exist … sacrosanct’, says Mr Ginsberg.381 Mr G.D.H. Cole says that ‘if the doctrine of a real will … is accepted, all arguments for democracy … go by the board’.382 And Professor Laski’s writings are full of statements which either make or imply this claim about philosophical theories. [378] Laski, Problem of Sovereignty, p. 3 [cp. p. 134, above]. [379] Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty, p. 248 [cp. p. 110, above]. [380] [C.E. Vaughan, Studies in the History of Political Philosophy Before and After Rousseau, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press; London and New York, Longman’s, Green & Co., 1925).] [381] Ginsberg, Psychology of Society, p. 49. [382] G.D.H. Cole, Social Theory, 4th edn (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1930 [1920]), p. 92.
Here are three instances from his latest book, A Grammar of Politics. He says, ‘it is important at the outset to insist that a true theory of politics depends above all things upon [the] rejection [of the idealist theory]. For what, at least ultimately, is involved in its acceptance is essentially the paralysis of the will.’383 And in the chapter on ‘Sovereignty’, he says that ‘the conception that authority, not merely is, but ought to be, limited, is fundamental to political philosophy.’384 ‘The modern theory of sovereignty … insists that there must be in every social order some single centre of ultimate reference … and it is at least probable that it has dangerous moral consequences.’385 And, if you remember, it was the dangerous moral consequences of a certain philosophical theory which call forth all Professor Hobhouse’s energy to refute it. 11. Philosophical theories tell us what we ought to do, both morally and, in the narrow sense, politically. They are the results, therefore, of what we have called practical thinking, that is, thinking with a view to maintaining a situation unchanged, producing a change, or giving criteria for producing such a change or maintaining such a situation. This is the claim that has been made, and is made continually; and I think I have produced sufficient evidence that I am not putting up a man of straw for the sole pleasure of knocking him down again. This is, in fact, a claim which is common to most of the writing on the so-called philosophy of politics to-day, and the tacit claim of the greater part of such writing in the past. And the question we must ask is, Is such a claim justified? If practical thinking is concrete thinking, then it is justified; if not, not. So what we have to discover is the exact nature of this kind of thinking we have [383] H. Laski, A Grammar of Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1925), pp. 30–1. [384] ibid., p. 63. [385] ibid., p. 44.
called practical, and then ask the usual question, ‘Abstract or Concrete?’ 12. Like history, practical thinking moves in a world which is in various ways incomplete. History deals always and all the time with unique events, each having its own place in space and time, and the same is true of practical thinking. In dealing with men in ordinary, practical, circumstances the scientific statements of psychology are, as such, useless, though they may now and again afford us some suggested insight or knowledge.386 A good psychologist, in the true scientific sense, is not, as such, a good judge of men, because he is always at a loss when confronted with the unique individual practical experience. It is interesting that it is said of the greatest English psychologist of this century who died a few years ago, James Ward, that ‘human nature was always something of a closed book to him, and one of his gravest faults was his lack of ready insight into the feelings of others.’387 Practical thinking moves in a world of unique individuals, not bloodless ‘averages’ and lifeless ‘normals’. Practical thinking, like both science and history, deals with the phenomenal world.388 It does not understand the statement that ideas and not things exist, or that our real world is one of objects and not things. The practical world is an objective phenomenal world, in time, and therefore changing; in space, and therefore [386] Cp. J.H. Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Burns, Oates, & Co., 1870), p. 409. [‘A special preparation of mind is required for each separate department of inquiry and discussion … in a well-known passage of the Nicomachean Ethics … Aristotle says …“it is much the same mistake to put up with a mathematician using probabilities, and to require demonstration of an orator.”’] [387] J. Ward, Essays in Philosophy With a Memoir of the Author by Olwen Ward Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. 48. [388] Practical thinking deals with classes—usually; when it gets beyond that it deals with individual things.
individual. You will perhaps remember the way in which that master of practical thinking, Dr Johnson, ‘disposed’ of Berkeley’s theory that material objects, as such, do not exist—he kicked the nearest chair to him and asked whether ‘that’ did or did not exist.389 It is often said of some plan or other that it might be all very true in theory, but that it would not work in practice.390 I do not wish to press this crude distinction between theory and practice, but it has a meaning. And what we usually mean by it is that if a thing seems to be coherent and consistent with itself in the world of theory it is not necessarily so in the world of practice, and vice versa. The practical world is a limited world, with its own criteria of consistency, with its own standard of ‘truth’. Some have held that practical truth is the only ‘truth’, but that introduces questions into which we cannot go now. It seems to me that a kind of consistency can be achieved in the world of practical thinking similar to that which is achieved by both science and history, and that it is neither necessary nor reasonable to suppose that the practical world is the only one we know anything about. Another fundamental characteristic of this world of practical thinking is that it is an unfinished world, that is, the word ‘ought’, the words ‘will be’, the words ‘shall be’ all have a meaning in it. History, we saw, was an uncompleted series; the practical world is likewise uncompleted, but in a slightly different sense. For, while [389] [See J. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G.B. Hill, rev. L.F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1964), i. 471: ‘we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”’] [390] [Oakeshott’s marginal note reads: ‘See Paper in The Nature of Deity’. Possibly a reference to J.E. Turner, The Nature of Deity (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1927).]
practical thinking is always striving to achieve a change, historical thinking is always striving to understand a change. This practical world is the world of morality, and morality, as you know, is an endless ‘ought to be’. No sooner do we achieve some moral success than a further ‘ought’ rises up to urge us on. Moral life is moral growth, not moral existence; it is a series without an end, an ideal never achieved, an ideal, in fact, which to achieve is the only irreparable failure. Again, practical thinking is confused thinking; and this is not only an empirical fact but, I think, a necessary fact also. We have seen already how our ordinary, practical way of looking at the notions of ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ were confused, and that they were confused because the whole assumption of practical thinking is that the material is somehow the real. A good illustration of practical thinking is to be found in the law. Legal ideas are practical ideas considerably purified and straightened out, but still essentially of the practical world. The Self for the lawyer, as for the practical man, is the body: if you tamper with a man’s body, if you stick a knife into it, you are held to be interfering with a man’s self, and no argument will persuade us to the contrary. The law deals with actual individuals but with actual individuals artificially defined. Everyone before the law is equal, but what two persons in the world have equal abilities, powers, personalities? They are equal because they are abstract. 13. To sum up, then, before we go before the jury with our case. Practical thinking is objective, it moves in a phenomenal world and consequently leaves out the thinker from its calculations. Practical thinking, that is, is no more self-conscious thinking than is either science or history.391 It is, moreover, incomplete in that its world is our incomplete world, a world always waiting to be made into a real world. It [391] Practical thinking = practical hanging together, etc. The practical world. We speak of ‘the world’—but we mean the world for the purposes of practical life.
is a world of time and space in which it moves; it deals with an uncompleted series. The objects of practical thinking are the things which exist at a particular moment and in a particular place. Practical thinking aims at and achieves change; its world is one of movement, of coming to be, of birth, life, growth and death. But need I go further? May we not stop the case and dismiss the jury? Practical thinking pleads with us so persuasively that we are unable to deny that it is abstract. It is abstract because it leaves out the thinker himself; and it is abstract, also, because it deals with particulars whose particularity consists entirely in space and time. There is, perhaps, nothing so abstract as that which is at any particular moment. Our practical world is an abstract world; we are continually taking a partial view, leaving things out of account, in order to be able to deal with a situation. It is safe to say that we could not live in a consciously concrete world, a world in which everything was seen as a whole, for such a world would be neither phenomenal, nor subject to the ordinary notions of space and time. It would be a world in which ‘ought’ and ‘shall’ would have no meaning, where growth would be an anomaly and change an impossibility. And such a world as that, is certainly not one in which practical thinking moves. Practical thinking does not give a true description of one kind of thing, but a partial, incomplete, abstract description of everything which can come within the scope of human will and human desire. Practical thinking is thinking for a limited purpose, for the purpose of making the practical world consistent for the moment. It is, essentially, abstract thinking. 14. I have already called your attention to some of the anomalies which the claim of practical thinking to be concrete has produced in the writings of some of our political thinkers, but I think it would be helpful if I tried to make clearer the extent to which this claim nullifies a great many of the arguments current in
these writings. There are two main objectives which Professor Hobhouse has brought against what he calls the idealist or metaphysical theory of the state: (i) that it gives neither a guide nor an incentive to conduct in political or individual life, and (ii) that it is in itself an immoral doctrine. He says that this theory is ‘worse than useless as a guide in the problems of national life’, and that its effect is to ‘soften the edges of all hard contrasts between right and wrong’.392 And he sums up his whole attitude towards it by saying that ‘it is designed to turn the edge of the principle of freedom, by identifying freedom with law: of equality, by substituting the conception of discipline, of personality itself, by merging the individual in the State; of humanity by erecting the state as the supreme and final form of human association.’393 Now, if these were merely isolated arguments in a reasoned case there would be no need to take any notice of them, but as a matter of fact, the whole of the case of Professor Hobhouse and Professor Laski rests upon them; it is from this practical, moral attitude alone that they criticize the idealist theory, and I think I have shown that it is, consequently, no criticism at all. The theory itself may or may not be true, but at any rate we can safely say that neither Professor Hobhouse nor Professor Laski has offered any valid criticism of it; their argument is simply a non-sequitur, an ignoratio elenchi. The criterion of concrete thinking can never be practical usefulness or moral purpose, it can only be logical necessity.394 This language of Professor Hobhouse, the way he uses words such as ‘freedom’, ‘discipline’, ‘equality’, and ‘the State’, are abstract; they are words signifying things in which he believes, elements in his practical political creed, and he simply fails to understand when [392] L.T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), pp. 78–9, 83. [393] Hobhouse, Metaphysical Theory of the State, pp. 23–4. [394] Cp. Bosanquet, Logic, II. end.
they are used with a concrete meaning, referring to what is and not what ought to be. 15. But ‘philosophy’, too, has, on occasions, overstepped its mark. It has claimed to be a guide to practice, it has claimed a moral authority; but such a claim is false. Philosophy is not a guide to moral or political conduct, and the conduct which is hypothetically supposed to follow from a certain philosophy is not a criterion of the truth of that philosophy. The practical world is made up of past, present, and future; it gives meaning to ‘ought’ and ‘will be’, and ‘has been’. But philosophy knows nothing about ‘ought’, its only verb is, ‘is’.395 And this should be clear enough if we only took the trouble to think. We do not judge whether a theory of comedy is a good or a bad theory by seeing whether it makes us laugh or not. A joke can be judged by this standard, but a theory of humour cannot. And what Hobhouse and Laski are saying is (so to speak) that the idealist theory is a bad one because it does not make us laugh. But a philosophical theory cannot be judged by this practical standard, and the repercussions of a theory on the practical world are not necessary, but merely historical. ‘In the bombing of London I had just witnessed’, says Hobhouse, ‘the visible and tangible outcome of a false and wicked doctrine …[the Hegelian theory of the godstate].’396 If, as Hobhouse says, this theory is a philosophical theory, then the notion that its outcome was visible and tangible, was in the practical world, is pure nonsense. You cannot dispose of a philosophical theory by saying that it is wicked any more than [395] [Oakeshott appears to be citing a different edition of F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies to the 1876 edition referred to above, as the remark he presumably had in mind, that ‘All philosophy has to do is “to understand what is,” and moral philosophy has to understand morals which exist, not to make them or give directions for making them’, appears there at p. 174 rather than at p. 193.] [396] Hobhouse, Metaphysical Theory of the State, p. 6.
you can dispose of a theory of laughter by saying that it is not funny. ‘To preach morality is easy’, says Schopenhauer, ‘to give a rational ground for it is hard.’397 Whether this is true or not, at least it is certain, that to preach it is not to give it a rational ground, and to give it a rational ground is not the same thing as to preach it. ‘Tell me,’ says Fichte, ‘what sort of a man he is, [how he acts] and I will tell you what philosophy he will choose.’398 It may be possible by a lucky guess, but there is no necessary relation between any philosophical theory and practical activity, when both are understood to be what they are.
[397] [Schopenhauer’s maxim ‘Moral predigen ist leicht, Moral begründen schwer’ is the motto on the title page of ‘Preischrift über die Grundlage der Moral’(Prize essay on the Foundation of Morality), in Werke, iv, at p. 103, and is a paraphrase of his own remark in ‘Über den Willen in der Natur’ (On the Will in Nature) that ‘Moral-Predigen leicht, Moral-Begründen schwer ist’: see Werke, iv, at p. 140.] [398] [Probably an allusion to J.G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, tr. P. Heath and J. Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 16: ‘What sort of a philosophy one chooses depends, therefore, on what sort of a man one is.’]
Pseudo-Philosophical Thinking about Politics 1. I have called these lectures the Philosophical Approach to Politics, but perhaps you will have wondered whether all you are to get is only an approach to the Philosophical Approach to Politics. Frankly, I doubt whether you are going to get any more than this; for I have not very much more to offer. That, of course, sounds all very ‘philosophical’, in the accepted sense of the word: no philosopher of repute deals in more than the prolegomena to his subject. But the reason for this, which is somewhat of an exaggeration, is not that philosophers are really triflers where knowledge is concerned, but that this process of thinking things out to the end is a long and difficult process which no individual can hope to get very far with. However, I shall not consider that I have altogether wasted my time, and I hope you will not think that you have wasted yours, if I do not get further than showing you what, in general, I take philosophical thinking to be (and especially philosophical thinking about politics), and only go into details in order to illustrate the general principles. I have not got a complete philosophy of politics to give you, and if I had I could not possibly give it to you in the couple of lectures which remain. What I take my less ambitious task to be, is to give you some kind of criteria by which to judge those political philosophies which may from time to time be offered to you. 2. It would I think be less than the truth to say that so far we have been engaged on a work of mere destruction, for the very good reason that in the realm of thinking there is, and can be, no such thing as ‘mere destruction’, ‘merely negative’ ideas. To deny something is to make a positive statement: the reasons that we give for making, the grounds of, a destructive criticism, are always positive. In philosophy it is impossible merely to destroy, because destruction proceeds from a positive ground, and it is the
ground, and not the mere fact of destruction, that is interesting in philosophy. Some philosophers prefer to describe themselves as critical and not speculative, but the distinction is illusory; criticism must imply a positive ground.399 In the language of logic, there is no such thing as a purely negative judgment. We might say that what we have been doing so far is to follow out a process of negative definition; but even that says too little. At all events, what we must do now, is to try and see a little more clearly what the positive ground is which we have used as the basis of our denial of the concreteness of scientific, historical, and practical thinking. What is implied in the series of denials we have so far made? I can add nothing to what I have said already: allI can hope to do is to make it clearer, to turna negative into an affirmative. 3. We have been trying to find something which we have called concrete thinking about politics, but so far we have been baulked in our enterprise by a series of kinds of thinking, all of which turned out to be separate, and abstract. And if we turn to the literature of the so-called philosophy of politics itself we shall, I think, suffer a certain amount of disappointment there also. You can see that my task would be considerably lightened—and yours also—if I could point to even a single example of this pure, concrete thinking about politics; but, so far as I know, that is not yet to be found anywhere. On more than one occasion in the history of Europe it has come within an ace of being accomplished but, either because the time was not yet ripe for a proper differentiation of kinds of thinking, or because the heat of actual political desires and conflicts clouded alike the minds of writers and readers, it has always failed of full achievement. Plato’s Republic contains the conclusions and the reasoning out of many different kinds of thinking; neither Plato nor Aristotle, [399] See C.D. Broad, Scientific Thought: A Philosophical Analysis of Some of its Fundamental Concepts (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1923).
in their writings on political life, ever quite forgot their desires, ever quite rose out of the abstract world in which ‘ought’ and ‘will be’ have meaning. Or rather, on occasions both of them did achieve a concrete view, but neither has left to us any one work in which concrete thinking is entirely unmixed with these other, abstract views. The same is true of Spinoza, of Hobbes, and of Rousseau; while it may be said of such writers as Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Locke that they never achieve a concrete view, theirs is unmixed abstract thinking about political life. It is either historical, or practical, or a mixture of both, but, in any case, irredeemably abstract. Rousseau, perhaps, has come as near as anyone to a consistently concrete view of political life, but how far short the Contrat Social falls of the real thing, we have only to read it to discover. Hegel, too, has his moments of real concrete thinking about politics, but the Philosophie des Rechts constantly lapses into abstraction. Hegel himself condemned all the fallacies of abstraction I have mentioned, but that did not prevent him, at moments, from speaking as if he really believed that historical thinking were concrete thinking. It is on the question of the nature of history that his political thinking is, I think, deficient. It was Heine who started the legend that Hegel, like all political philosophers, simply devised philosophical justifications for all the interests of his own state,400 but it is only partially true, and just in so far as it is true Hegel fails to be a political philosopher at all. Later writers, under the baleful influence of either history, or psychology, or reforming enthusiasm, have without exception produced works which fail to be thoroughly and comprehensively concrete in their thought. Nevertheless, in many of these works we have hints of concrete thinking which have not been entirely obscured by abstract considerations and illustrations. And we must make what we can of those hints.
[400] [Oakeshott’s reference, ‘VI. 68’, has not been traced.]
4. I want now to try and put before you a little more definitely than I have so far succeeded in doing this idea of concrete thinking; for in so far as we really understand the nature of concrete thinking we understand philosophical thinking. The way in which we come to understand or ‘know’ anything is by referring it to an appropriate environment or ‘world’. Things as entirely separate and isolated cannot be understood; it is only in so far as they are seen to fit in to a known, or partially known, environment or ‘world’ that they can be said to be known. And, as you can readily see, this process of fitting something into an environment, is a process in which both the thing and the environment will undergo some change, will be known to us more fully. This ‘environment’ (I cannot think of another word to use for it, though this one is misleading) may be called a ‘world’ because, so far as it is really understood and known, it forms some kind of a unit or universe, it has some element of apparent selfsufficiency or completeness about it. Examples of ‘worlds’ of this kind to which we refer our experiences in order to understand them, in order really to experience them, are easy to find. Each one of us has, in this sense, a kind of private world of thoughts and experiences, which we call our ‘selves’ or our ‘Experience’, to which we refer all our fresh experiences as they come to us. Or, rather, their ‘coming to us’ is simply a process of referring them to the more or less coherent whole of experience we all have. And, when we do not understand something that we meet, or fail to notice something which comes our way, it is simply because no place could be found for it in the world of our experience. Or again, when we deny something, when we say, ‘No, that did not happen in that way’, what we mean is that our world of experience, in order to keep its unity, must reject something which comes to it looking like a fact. Our world of experience is the criterion by which we judge things; and the more we experience, the better that criterion will be, the more valuable will be our judgments.
Other examples of these worlds of experience are to be found in Natural Science, in History, and in Practical thinking. It is by referring our ‘facts’ to these worlds of discourse, by finding them a place, by fitting them in, that we understand them as ‘facts’. So, all our various ways of abstract thinking are processes of referring fresh experiences to appropriate worlds of abstract experiences in order to understand them. And the acquisition of ‘knowledge’— historical, scientific, or any other kind of ‘knowledge’—is a process of continual slight violation of the unity of our experience which results in a wider and more complete unity than before. And it is only in terms of these worlds of discourse, these little ‘universes’, that conceptions of truth and reality may be understood. What is true, what is, for example, ‘historically true’, is that which has a place in the unified world of history, is that which does not violate the unity of that world of thinking. That which cannot be fitted in, that which this moving, changing unity we call the world of history has no place for, is false, not true, not what really took place. And so on. This is historical thinking; this is how we become aware of historical facts. 5. But here a difficulty arises. If these so-called ‘worlds’ are abstract, then they are not in the full sense ‘worlds’ at all. Because ‘abstract’ means partial, incomplete; and ‘world’ means that which is a whole, a unity. And so we have the contradiction of a ‘partial whole’. But is there (the question occurs), is there a world of discourse which is not abstract, is there a unity which is not incomplete, a whole which is not partial? If these abstract ‘wholes’ are really only shadows, of what are they shadows? And so there is born in our minds the idea of a universe which is the whole, outside of which nothing exists and which, consequently, can claim a real unity, a real completeness and not the mere shadow of it. And if these lesser worlds of discourse could be called ‘worlds’ only by analogy, then the ‘truth’ which consists in winning a place in one of them, is ‘truth’ only by
analogy, and the ‘reality’ with which these ‘worlds’ endow things is not a finally ‘real’ reality, but only an abstract, partial reality. The truth that is really true, and the reality that is really real, belongs, clearly only to these things which have a place in the real whole, the whole, the universe. Or, if you like, it belongs to that aspect of a thing, that view of a thing, which has a place in the real whole, the universe. Concrete thinking, then, may be described as the attempt to see things, to place experiences not within this or that lesser ‘world’ of discourse, but within the complete world, the whole; and this is to see things, for the first time, as they really are, to see the truth of things in the complete sense of ‘truth’. Concrete thinking is an effort to find out what things really are, and nothing else whatever. And this can be discovered only by referring them to a real, concrete, world of discourse and not an abstract ‘world’; by referring them to the universe. That such a world exists is, as I have shown, a necessary implication of the notion of knowledge in any sense; the abstract assumes and implies the existence of the concrete, partiality assumes completeness somewhere. Nor need we, I think, be put off by those who assert that this concrete whole may exist, must exist, but we cannot know anything about it. We do at least know that it must exist if we are to be said to know anything about anything, and we know also something of its specific nature. The unknowable, to which some people retire, is an absurd idea because it is self-contradictory, it is nonsensical. 6. Now, clearly, the more we know about this complete whole, which we have called the whole, the more we shall know about things as they really are; and the more we discover about things as they really are, the more we shall know about this whole to which they belong. It is a reciprocal process. And before I go any further I wish to point out two characteristics of this real universe, the world of concrete thinking, two characteristics which are implied in its being the real universe. I must be dogmatic because there is
no time to be anything else, but I hope you will see the ground for the assertions. (i) This universe is a unity. Some people have played with the notion that this ultimate whole is a plurality, but the idea seems to me to be self-contradictory. That which contains everything cannot itself be a plurality. It may contain, in some way or other, a plurality; but it, seen as a whole, must be a unity of some kind. Natural science may, and does, contain a great many individual ideas, but it contains, and can contain, no isolated ideas. Its title to being a kind of thinking rests upon the degree of unity with which it can endow the various ideas which its different departments and studies produce and use. That which is entirely isolated, entirely unrelated, is that which does not exist. The isolated is an abstraction; something which we can never experience; for to experience something means to break down its isolation. And what is true of natural science is true a fortiori of the real universe. An ultimate plurality, in the sense of a number of permanently isolated and wholly unrelated elements, is something we can neither experience in any way, nor properly call a universe in any sense. It is a denial of the presupposition of all thinking. (ii) This unity, this ultimately real whole of things, is not a constructed, or built up whole, but an existing whole.401 It is misleading to speak of it as all of experience; it is the whole of experience. Experience, human experience, is continually increasing; the world is growing older and riper in experience every day.402 And if this ultimately real whole of experience, this universe were just all of experience, then concrete thinking would forever be impossible, for it would be a process of referring experiences to a whole which we could never know as a whole, [401] For example, Hegel, in the Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, attempts a survey of the whole of experience with reference to a unifying principle. Aristotle’s complete works represent an attempt to cover all of human experience. [402] Cp. Plato, Theaetetus.
which in fact was the incomplete ‘whole’ of history, part of which is always in the future. All of experience may not be before us, but the whole of experience, the whole which experience of any sort implies, can be. That whole is something which, in a sense, we construct; but, in another sense, it is both unmakeable and indestructible. The idea of all of experience is an idea which belongs to the world of phenomena; the idea of the whole of experience belongs to the world of concrete thinking. All of experience is a ‘world’ which is yet to be completed, a world whose meaning lies in the future and the past; the whole of experience is simply the world of real things into which past and future do not enter. That which really is, is; there never was a time when it did not exist, and the future can discover nothing new. Past and future, in fact, do not belong to the concrete world; they are abstractions. The concrete world knows only the category of existence; to see a thing concretely is to see it as it is. So then, the universe in relation to which things are to be seen as they really are, is one from which all the abstract notions of ‘will be’, ‘shall be’, and ‘ought to be’ have been expelled; it knows only that which really is. 7. How, then, shall we start to build up a concrete view of this kind? By what process do we come to see things as they really are, see them, that is, related in the only world of discourse which is a ‘world’, a ‘whole’, in the full sense? And, in particular, how are we to build up a concrete view of political life, of society? For concrete thinking about that particular experience we call social life, you see, is just simply seeing these experiences as they really are, seeing them related in the real world. There are two pieces of advice which I can offer. If we want to see things as they really are we must (i) Start from where we are now, start from anywhere you like, start from any abstract notion, any isolated experience, you care to choose. But (ii), we must move. To remain content with seeing an experience as isolated, to remain content with mere unresolved plurality is, you see, not
only to fail to understand things as they really are, but it is to fail to understand them in even the most abstract and most limited sense of understanding them. To understand things is to see them as parts of a unified world of discourse; to understand things is to move away from the mere plurality of our crudest and most abstract experience—mere sensation—towards some kind of unity. The effort which is at the bottom of thinking of every kind is to see the many as a unity. In abstract thinking, the effort is to see the more abstract ‘many’ in terms of a less abstract, but nevertheless still abstract, ‘one’. In concrete thinking, the effort is to see the abstract many in terms of the concrete, the real whole; to see the many as they really are. So then; start from what experience or experiences you like, but if you are to accomplish anything you must move from plurality to unity. Philosophy is the attempt to find the real unity of human experience, or, in other words, to see human experience as it really is. Political philosophy is the attempt to find the real unity of political or social experience, of social life, or, in other words, to see society, political life as it really is. To discover the ultimate principle of sociality.403 The question is, the only question is, What are the facts? Not, What are the facts when understood as parts of this or that abstract world; but, What are the facts when fully understood, when understood as parts of the one real world, the universe. It is not, you see, that some things are just abstract, just unreal, just don’t exist—that is nonsense. There is nothing which is wholly abstract; things are abstract only when seen in relation to this or that abstract ‘world’. ‘Everything is real, so long as we do not take it for what it is not.’404 [403] Cp J. McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901). [‘Hegel has defined for us an absolute and ultimate ideal, and this not as a vain aspiration, but as an end to which all reality is moving.’, p. 193.] [404] Bosanquet, Logic, i. 258.
We must not take the crude course of denying the existence of anything and everything which does not fit into our scheme of things; we say, on the contrary, that things are constantly seen abstractly, constantly mistaken, constantly misunderstood; the results of these mistakes, abstractions, and misunderstandings are things which do not exist and have not ever existed, things which are in no sense real; but, things which can be misunderstood can also be understood, facts that can be misinterpreted (that is, taken for what they are not) can be rightly interpreted, and the results of this right understanding and right interpretation are real things, things as they really are. You see, there is no such thing as the bald ‘fact’ to which some people appeal; the ‘fact’ is its significance, the ‘fact’ is its meaning, and so what the ‘fact’ is, depends on how we look at it, whether or not we understand it. The real facts of social life are not the apparent, isolated ‘facts’ which meet in our ordinary practical experience of social life; the real facts are these abstract facts of ordinary, abstract experience, transformed, seen as they really are and always have been. It is no change that is produced by this seeing things as they really are; it is simply recognizing reality, the reality which is always there, but is usually rejected in favour of some abstract ‘fact’, which, though useful, is yet false and unreal. 8. But to get back to political life in particular. How are we to construct a concrete view of society? Our first principle was that it does not matter where we start; all starting points are equally good for the search for the real thing, because ‘everything is real so long as we do not take it for more than it is.’ Now the ordinary experience of society, the kind of experience from which it is useful to start because it is a kind we are brought up against every day, is one of plurality and contradiction. Plurality, because there are any number of things in our social experience which are either unrelated to one another or unsatisfactorily
related. Contradiction, because not only are many experiences unrelated, but many are also contradictory. This plurality is easy enough to resolve by placing the experiences within a scientific or historical world of discourse, but since these are abstract worlds, it will be only an abstract resolution of plurality, we achieve only an abstract unity. It is easy enough, also, to say, ‘At any rate, practical life gives unity to this plurality; solvitur ambulando!’ But this, too, is an abstract unity and not a finally real one. And the same is true of the contradictory experiences of social life. Our problem, you understand, is to see how this plurality can be resolved into a real unity, that is a unity which shows us the plurality as it really is. For simple plurality, and a fortiori, simple contradiction, cannot be understood except in terms of some kind of unity. As I have said again and again, what we mean by understanding or experiencing a thing is seeing it as possessing a place in a unified system of things. All understanding of real things, all knowledge, is in terms of a real world, a whole, a unity, a universe. To explain, to understand this plurality and contradiction of social life, then, we must see it in terms of the real universe, the concrete whole: and that is just the business of political philosophy. 9. I want now to give you some slight description of some of these pluralities and contradictions of our ordinary social experience. These, you see, cannot be ‘facts’, because they are things imperfectly understood, but we may call them, if you will, the data of a true political philosophy; they are our starting point. 10. The largest and most comprehensive of these contradictions is that described by the phrase, ‘The State and the Individual’. A first glance at our social life and its organization cannot fail to give us some impression which, if it does not require for its description the phrase, ‘The State versus the Individual’, at least requires, ‘The State and the Individual’. Everywhere we see on the one side a governmental organization, making and enforcing rules and
regulations which on occasion will appear to be thoroughly in harmony with the needs and desires of the individual men and women who they affect, but in some cases will seem to conflict with those needs and desires; and on the other side, a series of individuals, each endowed with individual desires and purposes, sometimes assisted and sometimes hindered by this thing which most people agree to call the ‘State’. The juxtaposition or the contrast of, in this sense, the State and the Individual, is a matter of the commonest, everyday, practical experience. The eager collector of butterflies, conscious of nothing but his passion to secure a certain specimen, may find himself thwarted by the laws of trespass. The man who wishes to sell opium, thinking, perhaps, that opium is the door to a happy life, will find himself in prison. The playwright may find the production of his play forbidden. The householder who wishes to build a brick garage in his garden must first submit his plans to the district surveyor. And the man who believes that all war is wrong, and the use of force a sin, may be deprived of liberty of speech and action, may even be forced to take part in that which is abhorrent to him. The State and the Individual are, we are tempted to say, the fundamental ‘facts’ of political life; but the question is, Are they true ‘facts’, or is this phrase a misleading way of stating the real fact of political life? And our conclusion will be that, simply because we have here a theoretically unresolved contradiction, these are not the true ‘facts’. We must look elsewhere. This broad, inclusive contradiction of the State and the Individual has many narrower applications and more restricted instances. It is said, for example, that the main characteristic of political life is the distinction between the governors and the governed. Hume said it, and Professor Laski says the same thing: ‘the modern state is clearly visible as a territorial society divided into government and subjects’. ‘Whatever be the nature of political institutions, their central fact is always the legal duty of the many
to obey the few, with the right of the few to exercise the power at their disposal to compel obedience.’405 Or again, there is the common distinction between the service of the State and the service of oneself or some other ‘private individual’. Some people we speak of as being in the employment of the ‘State’, civil servants, postmen and soldiers; while others we regard as being employed by and employing private persons. And there is the case, which no book on casuistry fails to treat, of the man whose private desires and even duties conflict with his public obligations. 11. Another element in these general data of political philosophy is the obvious and insistent variety of desires and ambitions, purposes and occupations, of the individuals who make up our society. ‘Anyone, indeed, who looks at the character of modern life would find its most distinguishing feature in the existence of a multiplicity of wills which have no common purposes which drive them to identity,’ says Professor Laski,406 and that is, of course, a matter of the commonest experience. ‘What exists is an amazing welter of wills which press upon each other’, says the same professor, and he continues with the statement that ‘the startingpoint of every political philosophy is the inexpugnable variety of human wills’.407 At any rate, then, we start together, we start from the same point as our professor, and the only difficulty I have with his theory is that I am unable to discover that he ever gets any further than his starting point. Our two principles were, (i) to start from where we are, (ii) to move. Professor Laski adheres passionately to the former only of our principles.
[405] H. Laski, Communism (London: Williams & Norgate, Ltd, 1927), p. 124; Authority in the Modern State, p. 22. [406] Laski, A Grammar of Politics, p. 32. [407] op. cit., pp. 31, 34.
12. The expression ‘Rights and duties’ indicates another of the juxtapositions of political life, and one which is equally a matter of common, practical experience. These stand over against each other, not as contradictory, but as, in a way, complementary. The whole of social life could be analysed into a series of rights and duties, and for the most part it would probably be possible to avoid what seem to be fundamental contradictions. Practical life, it is true, does present some apparently unresolvable contradictions in the world of rights and duties, but, for the most part, they are the extreme cases only. 13. The last of these juxtapositions and contradictions with which a first glance at our political life acquaints us, which I want to maintain, is that expressed in the phrase, ‘Law and morality’. Here too is something which is a common experience. To conform to the law is not necessarily to have fulfilled our whole moral duty, to pursue our moral obligations may bring us into conflict with the law; that which is legal may, perhaps, not be moral (in our opinion), and that which is moral may turn out to be illegal in the opinion of the lawyers. Here is another of the common contradictions of practical political life with which our political philosophy must start. 14. Now, I have spent the greater part of this lecture in trying to show you that a description of anything, political life included, in terms of mere variety, mere juxtaposition of elements, mere contradiction of characteristics, does not amount to a true description, is in no sense a true explanation. We know anything, we understand anything, only in so far as we see it as a unity, as a whole thing which can endow its elements with some common principle. And since it is the object of political philosophy to understand political life, to discover the real facts, to find out what it really is, its first obligation is to give unity to variety, harmony to contradiction. If the wills of individual men in society are really
‘inexpugnably various’ then it is an admission that we do not and cannot ever understand them.408 To be merely various is to be wholly incomprehensible; it is only in so far as variety is seen to lose itself in some kind of unity, in so far as the many are seen as parts of the one, that we can be said, in any sense, to understand them. Political philosophy, then, may start with the merely various, the merely concurrent or contradictory, but if it were to remain there, to leave these conceptions unaltered , it would fail to be political philosophy in any intelligible sense, for it would fail to be a concrete description of political life. The problem, then, which political philosophy has to face is that of making intelligible an experience of political life which is fragmentary, contradictory, and, at first, unintelligible. It must find, somehow, a resolution for these contradictory elements and forces, a unity for this crude variety. For crude variety and mere contradiction are not, and cannot be, ‘facts’, in the true sense of the word, because they are themselves selfcontradictory and unintelligible. That is a ‘fact’ which can sustain itself, whose existence in this manner is not contradicted either by itself or by the other components of its world. And mere variety and simple contradiction must disappear unless we are to content ourselves with a philosophy which is unreasonable and a ‘real’ world which is unintelligible.
[408] [Oakeshott cites Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, p. 6, but this phrase does not occur there. He may have had in mind Laski, A Grammar of Politics, p. 31: see previous note.]
Philosophy Again 1. Social life comes before us in our practical experience as a collection of sometimes contradictory, and always ill-related, relations. It presents us with the phenomenon of ‘a vast multitude owing allegiance to a comparatively small number of men’.409 It is, for the most part, a world of hard contrasts, of rigid distinctions, and unresolved contradictions; and any social experience which does not come within this description is adequately represented by saying that it consists of related particulars or individuals whose relation leaves them still particular and still individual. Social life consists in relations, of one sort or another, between the individual units of society, and relations between these units and the whole society itself. The State and the Individual are separate things, somehow related, but how related we do not know, except that the individual seems to be somehow subordinate to the State, somehow owing its obedience, though often this obedience be either ignorant or unwilling or both. The relations between the individuals who compose a society are sometimes explained by saying that they are ruled by a system of rights and duties. But this is an explanation of one plurality in terms of another, and so no explanation at all. To speak of rights and duties—of either or both—is to use the vocabulary of practical life, it is to admit plurality and to resolve it only for practical purposes, into a practical unity and not a real unity. Somehow we are conscious that we have not understood our political life, have not seen it as it really is, until these rights and duties, claims and counter-claims, appear, not as ultimate and unresolvable, but as the spectra into which the prism of practical thinking splits up the single ray which is social life, life in society as a whole. Rights and duties do not explain themselves and so are not terms in which anything else can be adequately explained; [409] Laski, A Grammar of Politics, p. 21.
we must find the ‘whole’ to which they both belong. And again, in our practical experience law and morality as often as not stand over against one another, and, at any rate, are never the same thing. They must be related somehow, but how? They must belong to a single universe, for otherwise they are condemned to live in permanent isolation, condemned that is to be permanently unintelligible. These, then, are some simple examples of the kind of data from which any attempt to explain social life must start.410 We are given, so to speak, the isolated parts of a jigsaw puzzle, and our business is to find the picture which they make. 2. There are, I think, three main ways in which the various efforts to explain this phenomenon of social life have found expression. (i) By the assertion of ultimate and permanently unresolvable plurality. The data, these isolated elements of social life, belong to no unity; their essence is their isolation. In the terms of our metaphor, this amounts to the assertion that the parts of the jigsaw puzzle make up no picture, their whole essence lies in the view of them we get as we see them jumbled up in the box. That this is an altogether inadequate explanation of political life I need hardly say again. Explanation means to find unity, and the only unity which this explanation finds is in the fact that after all these parts are in a box which contain them all. If this were the only explanation we required, then it is safe to say that we can achieve it without any very arduous process of thinking. This is the pluralist explanation. (ii) The second explanation offered us may be called the utilitarian explanation, though it is much older than what we usually call utilitarianism. It consists in explanation in terms of
[410] But cp. The Trial and Death of Socrates, pp. 109, 124. Practical life itself does, in a measure, resolve these contradictions. [It is difficult to be sure which passages Oakeshott had in mind here as it is unclear which edition he is citing.]
compromise.411 The individual elements of society and the society itself are permanently separate and often antagonistic, but a unity may be found, amid this warring chaos, in terms of the greatest good of the greatest number. Individuals are separate and isolated in society, but social life is a unified life because it is governed by, not the warring and contradictory claims of every individual, but the single and unified claim of the majority. This is a unity created by the suppression of those elements which make for disunity. I need hardly argue that this gives us no satisfactory unity, no intelligible explanation, for that is clear enough. It is an abstract and false unity, it is akin to the unity of scientific thinking which is achieved by the elimination of all disagreeable elements. It is, in fact, no unity at all, and we have got no further than the assertion of ultimate plurality could take us. The old, and well worn, theory of the Social Contract gave to social life a fictitious unity of this kind. (iii) The third way of explaining social life is what I take to be the characteristically philosophical way. It asserts that this explanation can only be satisfactorily achieved by means of, or in terms of, a unity which rejects no real element and leaves no real element isolated; a unity which accomplishes the resolution of all the contradictions and isolations of our ordinary practical experience of social life. And this can be achieved only by concrete thinking, by an explanation in terms of the one real whole, the universe. If this could be achieved it would neither be abstract nor inadequate; in such a picture all the real elements of social life would be seen as they really are, that is, in terms of the real whole. And it is this attempt which I wish to explain a little further. 3. In a true philosophy of politics there would be two chapters, entitled, respectively, the individual, and the state; and a political [411] Cp. I. Kant, The Philosophy of Law An Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence as the Science of Right, tr. W. Hastie (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1887). [Oakeshott also noted ‘Hume’ and ‘Bentham’.]
philosophy would fall short of truth which did not show, also, that these two were somehow really one. For until it has shown that it has not achieved concreteness: it is still in the valley of abstraction. I do not propose to give you now these two chapters as I conceive they should be written, that would be too large and difficult an undertaking for me, and, in any case, it is my aim to get you to think them out for yourselves. But I want to spend a little while in showing you the kind of way it might be done. 4. Let us start with the individual. It is no exaggeration to say that the problem of individuality in all its forms is the most fundamental problem of philosophy, is, in fact, the only problem in philosophy; so you must not expect me to give you a complete answer. All I can give you is a few hints to show you how important and how difficult the subject is.412 What is individuality? We might do worse in trying to answer the question than to take the hint which the word itself gives. An ‘individual’ is something which is indivisible, which cannot be divided.413 That seems to give some clue.414 The individuality of a thing is just the amount of the thing which makes one—from which nothing can be taken away without the unity ceasing, and to which nothing can be added in such a way that it is absorbed and not merely attached. Our ordinary way of attacking the question would be, I suppose, to assume that anything which showed a physical unity of this [412] See Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value; Bosanquet, Logic, i. 24 [‘it is never true in the plainest sense that a thing or matter of fact has its essence in mere distinction from another’], i. 138 [‘we must take the individual unity to be a matter of degree’], i. 147 [‘If we are told to count even all the “things” in a room, we shall find ourselves obliged to ask what is to be reckoned as a “thing”.’], and index; and Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 95. [413] Cp. ‘Identity’. [414] See thesis; quotation from Locke. [Possibly a reference to the discussion at pp. 99–100 above.]
sort was an individual in the true sense, but that way lies only a morass. However, let us see the kind of morass in which it is likely to land us. An individual thing is, then, anything which seems to stand out from other things—its environment—with a certain observable degree of self-subsistence and self-containedness. On the outside we place this ‘thing’ and over against it, defining its limits—which are usually physical limits—is, its environment. Now, in order that this may be a coherent answer to the question, What is an individual thing? you can see that we must be able to decide, more or less unambiguously, exactly where the ‘thing’ ends and the ‘environment’ begins. And yet, even in our everyday experience, the difference between the individual thing and its environment does not stand out with the degree of clearness we should desire. A plant, for example, we might say, the individual thing, is something which can demonstrate its physical self-subsistence by not suffering any change by being removed from one environment to another. An individual thing, you remember, we said was that which is not divisible without ceasing to be what it is. But, in the case of the plant, how far does that which is removable in it depend, for the continuance of an identical existence, upon what we have called its environment? Even if it were possible to remove the plant, without destroying its individuality, from its particular situation in the earth and the atmosphere, it is still true that the plant, to be what it is, depends upon access to some soil and some air. So, as I say, if we start with the idea that the individual is that which stands out from its environment, is independent of its environment, we soon discover that a good many things we have hitherto regarded as ‘individual’ are not really so. Indeed, in so far as the ‘thing’ really depends upon its environment it cannot be distinguished from its environment without destroying it, without elevating it into a lifeless abstraction. And if that is so, we must find some other way of defining individuality than by saying that it is the physically independent.
So we come back to the idea that the individual is that which cannot be divided, that which is a whole. If a certain physical object is really quite inseparable from its environment, then it is not an individual; the real individual is the whole made up of this abstract ‘thing’ and its equally abstract ‘environment’. But that is just a hint. 5. And what happens when we transfer ourselves from the world of things to the world of people, the social or political world. All the same difficulties are there—and most of them are even more difficult than before. For the relation of so-called ‘individual persons’ to their environment—an environment of other so-called individuals and of merely physical objects—is infinitely more close and more subtle. Is the ordinary, physically distinguishable body any more independent of its so-called environment than the plant? We should suppose that he would be a good deal less independent. So, either we must say that by ‘individual’ we mean simply that which is physically distinguishable, or we must come to the conclusion that the individual is really that which is indivisible, that which is a whole, and so quite indistinguishable from a great deal of what we commonly call its environment.415 And unless individual is to mean simply that which is abstract, that which is a part and has no real self-existence, I think we must choose the latter alternative. ‘The “individual” man, the man into whose essence his community with others does not enter, who does not include relation to others in his very being, is … a fiction’,416 is a pure and complete abstraction. The individual apart from the community has only a pale abstract existence; he is not real, for he is not really individual.
[415] The expression a ‘fish out of water’ meaning, ‘a man out of his natural environment’, an ‘unnatural’ man. [416] Bradley, Ethical Studies, p. 152.
We cannot go any further down that road just at present, but I hope I have given you a hint of the difficulty and importance of this subject which I have called one of the two chapters in any true political philosophy. Individuality, in the abstract sense of apartness, isolation, that which is cut off and physically separable, has been the starting point of nearly all English political philosophy. A man’s ‘true self,’ says Professor Laski, ‘is the self that is isolated from his fellows,’417 and he echoes the fundamental presupposition of nearly all English, and most continental, political philosophy. But to start with this supposition, and to retain it unchanged and unmodified is, I believe, to start with an error and gradually elevate it into a falsehood. Whatever in the end turns out to be the true concrete view of individuality, this at least is false. This sentiment for isolated ‘individuality’ which was in the Lutheran Reformation a feeling has been elevated into a philosophy which has the distinction of being probably the most shallow ever invented by man. A ‘great individuality’ is not a man who is most isolated from other men, possessing the smallest measure of the characteristics common to men and the civilization common to his society; but he is a man in whom we feel the universal humanity has reached a very high degree of development and differentiation, one who concentrates in himself a great deal of human nature, he is strong because he is susceptible and original because he is receptive. It is the eccentric who is commonplace because he is exclusive, and weak because forever afraid of being in debt to other men. That, if anything, I should have thought would lead us to a more concrete view of the human individual. 6. The second chapter, and the last, of a true political philosophy I have said would be called The State. Its aim is simply to answer the question, What is the State? Its aim is to give as concrete a view as it can of the State. But Political philosophy in seeking the concrete individual finds, I believe, the concrete state, and in seeking the [417] Laski, A Grammar of Politics, p. 31.
concrete State finds the concrete individual. Now, we may start with whatever notion of the State we choose, we may start even with the absurdly limited and incoherent view that the state is the government, but in end we shall be led, I think, to the view that the State is the social whole, is concrete society. In the old theory, which started with this so-called ‘individual’, it was always supposed that the various individuals who formed a community of any sort were held together by a tie, and something that was no more than a tie. For so long as you retain this idea of the individual there cannot be anything more than the loosest sort of tie to bind different individuals together, something more intimate would inevitable destroy the current notion of individuality. The State, then, was simply a collection of these isolated and independent ‘individuals’ held together by an external and voluntary tie, and held together, it was usually thought, for certain limited purposes only. That this could pose as an adequate description of a human society is only less amazing than that the corresponding theory of individuality could pose as an adequate description of human beings and their relations. The two, indeed, stood together, and they fall together. I have already indicated what I take to be the meaning for philosophy of the word State. It is simply, and only, a suitable name for that which in political life is a whole, a concrete thing, an individual. And nothing is implied in it, initially, except that somehow, of some character, a whole exists; that is, that in political life there is a real thing. The quality, possessed by anything which would indicate that it is a ‘state’, is the quality of wholeness. The State is the social whole. If it could be shown that this whole is non-existent and a mere fiction, then it would have been demonstrated that the state was a mere word with no corresponding thing behind it. But, so far, no-one has attempted to show that the State, in this sense, does not exist; all that the critics have succeeded in doing, or have attempted, is to show that this or that, which has been called a State, is not really a social whole at all. And this is very much
what we should have expected, because, in the sense in which philosophy speaks, there must be a whole of some sort; because ‘whole’ simply means, that which really exists, simply means these isolated and contradictory experiences seen as a whole. 7. Now, arising out of this position, I think it would be better if philosophy gave up making such free use of the word ‘state’, and spoke of ‘statehood’ instead. For, as we have seen continually, ‘wholeness’ is very often a matter of degree; some things are more of a whole than others; and if we spoke of degrees of statehood or wholeness with regard to the various human associations, I think we should be saying something relevant. For example, an association of persons such as a university is clearly more of a whole, clearly embodies more nearly the whole life and interests of its members, than (say) a tennis club, which is an association of people qua tennis players and not qua people. And so on. But when we come to speak of the State absolutely, we must mean an association of persons which not only includes more of the whole life and interests of those persons than any other association, but includes actually the whole life and interests of its members. And the two questions which demand an answer are, Is there such an association as this? and, Which of the associations of our experience is it? With regard to the first question, we may answer that, in the full sense, there must be an association of this sort. For what are the consequences of supposing it not to exist? First, if it did not exist no association at all could exist, for, as I have said before, the part implies the whole, the incomplete stands upon that which is complete. And secondly, if the State, in this full sense, did not exist, then we should be abandoned upon the limitless sea of pluralities and contradictions which, not being able to explain themselves, and yet, which exist in some way, necessarily assume a whole in which they can live in harmony. Somehow, I will not say somewhere, but somehow, then, the State,
in this sense exists, a whole which gives meaning to all our isolated experiences of society is a sine qua non of thought and life. But the second question is more difficult to answer. Which of the associations we know is the State, is this whole which is required to explain and give meaning to our particular experiences? That it will necessarily be what is called The State in ordinary language or in the language of law, there is no reason for supposing. We might as well suppose, because landed property is called, in law, real property, that it is necessarily real in the full, concrete sense of the word. And yet, if we look closer, we shall find, I think, that the claim of the State, in ordinary language, to be the State of political philosophy, to be the social whole, is not altogether unjustified. What other association of our experience is more comprehensive, embodies more of the whole life and interests of its members? I do not mean just the government, but the whole organized life which we are accustomed to call comprehensively the State. I think that a very good case could be made out for this State of ordinary experience being the true state, but all the case could prove would be that this State was the most comprehensive single association we know, not that it was the absolute whole, the real, complete state. Obviously it is not that. All we can say of it is that it possesses a greater degree of statehood than any other single association we know. 8. But the philosophical view of the State does not stop there. The real state is the absolute whole, the whole which alone is really a whole, which we cannot find completely embodied in any one form of association. For it is not a particular association, but the principle which underlies and is implied by all associations, however limited their ends may be. The State, for philosophy, is not a thing in the phenomenal world, it is a principle which explains all phenomena, which explains what is isolated and contradictory. In fact, the State is to the political philosopher what the universe is to philosophy in general, the necessary presupposition
of all intelligible existence. Social life is inexplicable in terms of its mere plurality, nor does the idea of a compromise, a balance of forces, afford a true unity: there is no unity outside a whole which includes every part within it, a whole which does not deny contradiction and plurality, but which resolves them. The State is the whole which all social life presupposes. 9. Here are our two chapters, the Individual and the State. The individual we have found to be, not something which is isolated and different from anything else but something which is large enough to be indivisible, large enough to be an independent whole. The individual is not some centre cut off from experience, but grows with its experience, is, in fact, made up of its experiences. This was all suggested; it was too large a subject to go with fully. And our conclusion was, roughly that an individual thing, or individual person, requires much of what we call its environment. That is to say, the difference between the individual and its environment is not always clear, and it is often quite clear that to take away its environment is to destroy the thing or to change it completely. The individual person, also, is not distinguishable from much that we call his ‘society’; in fact, the only finally intelligible sense in which we can use the word individual is one which means a whole active experience and association. An individual is, in the end, all that he knows and meets, is a whole of experience, is that whole of him which can exist independently, because it is selfsupporting and complete. Anything less than this is a mere abstraction. The only individual there can be is a whole. But how does this differ from the whole which we have called the State? I do not think it differs at all; and that is what I mean when I say that until we have seen that these two chapters are really a single chapter we have not achieved a concrete view of society or of the individual. The State is the whole which all association presupposes, and the individual, in the end, cannot be defined as anything less than the whole to which he belongs, the whole which makes him what he is.
So the conflict between the State and the individual, which was real enough in common experience, real enough so long as we thought of the individual as some isolated abstraction and the State as a phenomenon in a phenomenal world, is resolved. When we discover what each really is, they are found to be the same thing. Social life, this political life which we have been in search of, turns out, when it is viewed concretely, not to be a matter of claims and counter-claims of individuals against each other, for the individuals who could live in a world of that sort would be mere abstractions. Each claim is made, each obedience owed, each right justified by and in the whole, not between individuals, but between the individual and the State, the social whole. And, in the end, this is a claim made upon himself, a right demanded of himself, an obedience owed to himself. How is self-government possible? asked Rousseau. This is how it is possible, we answer; and I believe it to be substantially the same answer as he gave himself. It is because, in the end, the State is the only true individual which exists, and the individual the only State. What to an abstract thinking was continually a matter of conflict, what was a contrast between ‘is’ and ‘ought to be’, is, in this concrete world, an harmonious existence, for the concrete world, being the whole, contains and resolves all conflicts and all isolations. In an abstract way of putting things we say that the service of the state is a matter for civil servants, soldiers, and others employed directly by the government; but, when the ‘State’ means this whole of political life, everything we do is done both for and by the state, and everything we suffer is suffered by and on account of the State. There can be no state education as contrasted with private education—all education is an education of the whole by the whole. We can no longer speak of the ‘modern state’ or the ‘nation state’, for that is to lapse at once into abstraction. And so on. If we could see this picture, this relation of the many and the one, of the whole and its parts, clearly, see it in every detail of its organization, and see also every implication it involves, we should
have a true political philosophy, and until we see this we have nothing at all that can properly be called a political philosophy. 10. But what sort of a conclusion is this? Have you proved, you may ask, have you proved that this whole of social life is a really concrete whole, and if it is not, does it not imply that after all political philosophy is abstract thinking? Surely, in the end, the only true whole, and consequently the only true individual, is the universe, and you cannot pretend that this political whole is the universe? When Socrates wanted to express his conviction that the real individual could only be found in the real whole, he said, ‘How do you conceive it possible to comprehend the nature of the soul without comprehending the nature of the universe?’ It is not the social whole, but the universe which explains the individual; it is the universe with which concrete thought is concerned. All this, I think, is true. Political philosophy in so far as it is political, in the end, fails to be true philosophy, fails to be concrete thinking. A complete political philosophy does not merely involve a complete philosophy in general, but is it. Philosophy has, for centuries, at the hands of men with abstract interests, suffered an unnatural division. But it cannot be divided up into these parts without easing to be concrete thought; ethics, metaphysics, logic, aesthetic, and politics are not parts of philosophy, because concrete thinking can have no parts. Philosophy is just concrete thinking, in the sense I have tried to explain, and in so far as it is political philosophy, in so far as it is willing to view things merely in relation to this social whole, it fails to be philosophy. If you once embark on a philosophical study you cannot stop short of the whole thing: it has no departments. Philosophy is the concrete view of anything: and to see any one thing concretely it is necessary to see it in relation to the whole, that is, it is necessary to see everything else concretely. In the end, then, political philosophy is abstract thinking also, unless it is willing to go beyond itself, and become philosophy itself. And this, indeed, is what it has done wherever it has achieved real concreteness—in
those rare and splendid moments in Plato’s Republic, in Aristotle’s Ethics, in Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, in Rousseau’s Contrat social, and in Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts. 11. Philosophy, then, is concrete thinking, and consequently can have no departments; it is all or nothing. It has nothing whatever to do with science, history, or practical thinking. They are not the basis for any relevant criticism of a philosophical idea, and it, in turn, can have nothing to say to the conclusions of any kind of abstract thinking so long as it does not overstep its proper function and limits. Unlike many kinds of abstract thinking, in philosophy there are no authorities. ‘[For] metaphysics a principle, if it is to stand at all, must stand absolutely by itself,’ dependent upon its own inherent reasonableness and consistency.418 Philosophy, clearly, does not and should not satisfy the whole of our desires and necessities. It is not the whole of life; and the concrete truth, which is its object, has very little, if anything at all, to do with life as we live it. Philosophy satisfies, that is, only the theoretic side of our nature, the side which throws aside questions of what ought to be and what has been and what will be simply to ask the question, what is? In other words, philosophy seeks the facts and nothing else whatever, and seeks them simply and only for the sake of finding them, and not of doing anything with them when they are found. Philosophy does not seek the isolated facts of ordinary experience and abstract thinking, these are its data, and what it seeks are the concrete facts, the whole fact. For, as Bosanquet says, ‘if anything at all has been made clear in the history of philosophy, it is surely that as we get to truth … we get away from [isolated] facts’,419 because they are not really facts at all, they have no meaning and consequently no existence. Philosophy [418] Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 120. [Cp. p. 101 n. 11, above]. Cf. Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 235. [419] Bosanquet, Logic, ii. 320.
can recognize nothing in the shape of a self-sufficient element or autonomous detail, that which alone is self-sufficient, that which alone explains itself, alone is real, is the whole. The truth is the whole. Philosophy has been well defined as ‘finding bad reasons for what we believe by instinct’.420 The important thing is that they should be reasons. Philosophy is simply the effort to have done with all abstractions and think concretely. 12. Before I end, I feel that I ought to say a word as to the use of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular. In the ordinary sense, of course, it has no use at all, and to try and ‘make use’ of the conclusions of concrete things is to misuse them. They are not intended as a guide to life. Philosophy, as we have seen, needs for its pursuit neither profound knowledge of human nature nor the superficial acquaintance with things in general which is called ‘knowledge of the world’. It is wholly independent of experience, in the ordinary sense, and nearly independent of book learning—they are no authorities in the ordinary sense. And, consequently, utility does not belong to philosophy. Philosophy, Hume thought, was just a way of looking at things, a way we describe by saying that it looks at the whole truth of things. It is not an attitude of mind which we can always preserve, we cannot live permanently in that kind of atmosphere, but along with it goes a certain detachment, a certain lack of prejudice, a certain sense that all is not as easy as it seems and that nothing is really commonplace, and it is in this attitude, which belongs incidentally rather than necessarily to philosophy, that its chief use in life is to be found. And, as far as political philosophy is concerned, I think this idea of the individual and of the State, the idea of the Social whole which we get in a true political philosophy, though it has no great value for practical political life, does give us a heightened sense of what it means to live in a society which cannot be counted altogether valueless. [420] Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. xiv: ‘Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.’
The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence: Essays and Reviews 1926–51
Michael Oakeshott Edited by Luke O’Sullivan
Preface Preparing the third and fourth volumes in the series of Oakeshott’s Selected Writings for publication posed copyright problems not raised by the first two volumes, which consisted entirely of material from the Oakeshott archive at the London School of Economics. Volumes one and two therefore only required permission from the British Library of Political and Economic Science. Obtaining permission to reproduce the material in volumes three and four, however, involved negotiating with around twenty different parties. In some cases—where, for example, a journal or magazine had changed hands, or was now defunct, or a book had long been out of print—this proved problematic, as it was not immediately obvious where the copyright lay. The editor is obliged therefore to Gabrielle White, Permissions Assistant at Random House Archive and Library, for investigating the status of the material in the Cambridge Journal. In the majority of cases, however, a copyright holder was found, and given the total absence of a budget for obtaining the rights to reprint the material included in this volume and its companion, it is gratifying to be able to record that in every case the owners of the rights were prepared either to accept a significantly reduced fee or in some cases even waive their fees altogether. So far as the material in this volume is concerned, I am very pleased to be able to thank the following individuals and institutions for their willingness to accept less than their regular fee and for consenting to republication: Sophie Buchanan on behalf of The Spectator; Toby Lichtig on behalf of the Times Literary Supplement; Linda Nicol on behalf of Cambridge University Press, for permission to use material from Philosophy; Julia Pieri on behalf of Express Group Newspapers, for permission to use material from the Evening Standard; and Gemma Puntis on behalf of Oxford University Press, for permission to use material from
the Journal of Theological Studies, Mind, and the English Historical Review. For their generosity in agreeing to waive their fees altogether I am particularly indebted to: Helen Burton at the department of Special Collections and Archives, Keele University Library, for permission to use material originally published by the Le Play House Press; Professor Rudolf Hanka, Chairman of the Cambridge Review Committee, for permission to use items from the Cambridge Review; Dr Robin Leavis on behalf of the estate of F.R. Leavis, for permission to use material from Scrutiny; and Anna Towlson of the London School of Economics, for permission to use material originally published in Politica. Once permission to use the copyrighted material had been obtained, of course, it was necessary to raise the funds to pay for the rights. I am grateful to the British Academy for the award of a Small Research Grant which was sufficient to cover the costs involved in purchasing the reproduction rights for both volumes. This assistance was all the more welcome as the editor was without an academic affiliation for a significant portion of the period during which this volume and its companion were in preparation. Thanks are also due to Professors Robert Grant and Terry Nardin, who lent their support to the grant application. Imprint Academic, publishers of the Selected Writings, have continued to play a vital role in the success of the series; their ongoing support is a major contribution to Oakeshott studies. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their continued support as I suffered the vagaries of an academic career. Without their help this volume would never have been completed. My wife Olga also deserves my thanks for her assistance with the proofs, which saved me from some heinous errors. All those remaining are of course my own. London and Singapore, 2007
Introduction This volume collects all of Oakeshott’s essays and reviews published between 1926 and 1951 and not previously republished elsewhere.1 Together with its companion for the years 1952 to 1988, it will make the vast majority of these pieces easily accessible for the first time. The laborious experience of consulting them in their scattered state provided the initial impetus for collecting them into book form, but more than convenience is involved; these writings supply valuable continuity between Oakeshott’s relatively small number of published books. There were only four major works; Experience and Its Modes (1933), an early philosophical treatise; Rationalism in Politics (1961), a collection of largely previously published essays, mainly on political theory; On Human Conduct (1975), a definitive restatement of themes in the previous two works; and On History (1983), another late work, mainly devoted to the nature of historical understanding. But as Oakeshott himself put it, ‘the mind … is always in motion’, and his early, middle, and late books were all written in very different styles.2 Consequently, the relationships between them have been disputed. But as Auspitz has noted, ‘[Oakeshott’s] changes did not come all at once. They began to appear piecemeal in his essays
[1] For these previously published essays and reviews see M. Oakeshott, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, ed. T. Fuller (New Haven: Yale, 1993), and M. Oakeshott, What is History? and Other Essays, ed. L. O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004). A full list of the contents of these volumes is online at http://www.michaeloakeshott-association.org/bibliography.htm. [2] #91: The Origins of Modern Science, p. 297. (NB. Footnotes in this format refer to selection numbers and page numbers in this volume.)
and reviews.’3 From the first, he was regularly reviewing books on subjects reflecting his own interests: theology, philosophy (including metaphysics and ethics), history and historiography, and political theory. He also reviewed a variety of literary and topical works. Collectively, they provide valuable contextual material to complement his books, which were sparing in their references and tended to address arguments rather than persons. Furthermore, taken together, the reviews are a distinctive record of the development of the humanities and social sciences in England over a good portion of the twentieth century; they tell us about the changing times through which Oakeshott lived, as well as about his own intellectual development. And quite apart from such academic considerations, many are exemplary specimens of the reviewer’s craft that remain entertaining to read even if many of the books they dissect have been forgotten. Some of the longer reviews became essays in their own right, like those in the short-lived Cambridge Journal that Oakeshott established on his return to Cambridge after the end of World War Two. Others were not reviews at all, but a contribution to a debate, such as the little-read piece on ‘History and the Social Sciences’ from 1936, or an effort to develop his own thinking, like ‘The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence’ from 1938. This latter essay is the longest in the volume; it was both a summingup of the state of jurisprudence and a statement on the nature of philosophy, and as such it gives the volume its title. Its place in his thought has been much disputed, for reasons we will examine below, so its appearance here ought to be particularly welcomed by Oakeshott scholars. Oakeshott once remarked that ‘it is impossible to be profitably critical without having a point of view’.4 This claim implies that [3] See J.L. Auspitz, ‘Modality and Compossibility’, in The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott, ed. C. Abel and T. Fuller (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), p. 10. [4] #89: The Life of Reason, p. 292.
the various pieces published here express viewpoints of his own, suppressed or explicit. Ideally, then, one would like an overview of what these were, but few readers will peruse a volume such as this from start to finish. The remainder of this editorial introduction is therefore the best place to ask what emerges when writings that were never intended to be put together are treated as a unity.
I: Religion In the mid-1920s, theologians and philosophers were digesting the implications of the nineteenth-century geological and Darwinian revolutions when the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity emerged. Oakeshott’s first ever review was of Science, Religion, and Reality, an attempt to come to grips with these developments. Edited by Joseph Needham, another member of Oakeshott’s Cambridge college, Gonville and Cauis, it had some eminent contributors. They included the former prime minister Lord Balfour, the experimental physicist Arthur Eddington, and the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Needham actually thanked Oakeshott in the Preface for his assistance, but the two men drifted apart in the 1930s, as Needham intensified his Christian and Marxist commitments while Oakeshott abandoned from his youthful sympathies for religion and socialism. In 1926, however, Oakeshott shared Needham’s interest in the effect of science on Christian belief. Oakeshott’s approach was always to try to insulate the two from one another by arguing that in effect they were talking about different things. The scientific conception of the universe ‘consisting solely of physically measurable relationships’ was distinct from the ‘practical’ view of life found in religion. He consistently protested against any confusion between them. There could be no scientific proof of the existence of God, and any attempt to fit the notion of miracle into a scientific account of natural phenomena was ‘naïve’. Science could not be said either to prove or disprove the claims of Christianity. With respect to the question of miracles, for example, ‘[i]t is impossible to attach any relevant meaning to the notion of [a miraculous] event which “violates natural laws” when these laws are conceived as statistical generalizations’; the
transformation wrought in physics by quantum theory had clearly influenced Oakeshott’s conception of a scientific ‘law’.5 Even if Christianity could be preserved in principle by arguing that scientific criticisms of it were irrelevant, there were historical as well as scientific issues to deal with.6 Oakeshott was if anything more concerned with the impact of historical than of scientific scholarship, declaring that ‘the most pressing feature of our theological thought’ is ‘the exact bearing upon Christianity of the modern historical criticism of the New Testament’. The revolution in Biblical criticism appeared to have left literal or dogmatic belief in Christianity in tatters. The only solution was to separate Christian belief from historical as well as scientific knowledge; the critical perspective on the past and the past required by religious practice were entirely different.7 The religious past was a practical matter, so could only be judged by practical criteria; any other form of criticism committed the error of ignoratio elenchi.8 This phrase later cropped up repeatedly in Experience and Its Modes as part of Oakeshott’s argument for the mutual independence of the various modes, but first emerged in this theological context. Indeed, the arguments as well as the terminology of these early discussions of religion became crucial to Experience and Its Modes. The claim that the distinctive presuppositions of different forms of experience made them irrelevant to one another was later extended to include history and philosophy, but began here, in the context of these religious debates. The price of this manoeuvre, though, was the admission that ‘the time has … passed when it is any longer profitable to attempt to “prove” the
[5] #31: A New Argument for God and Survival, p. 94. [6] #2: The Christian Religion and Its Competitors To-day, p. 40. [7] #46: The Historical Element in Religion, p. 138. [8] #19: Experience of God, p. 71.
existence of Providence or Purpose’.9 Put another way, the ‘truth’ of Christianity became entirely a matter of its pragmatic efficacy in generating a community of believers and perhaps of its poetic success in conveying an ethic. Oakeshott’s position marked him as an Anglican ‘Modernist’, and left no room for the accommodation with Roman Catholicism sought by the ‘high church’ wing of Anglicanism. The Catholic position entailed the very conflict between religion and history that he was anxious to avoid; it conceived of Christianity as ‘something static, made, and not even in a process of being understood’, and dismissed any ‘doctrine or practice which does not conform to this definite and positive religion’ as ‘un-Christian’.10 But Modernism too could harden into the dogmatism of seeing a religion as a set of doctrines. The fundamental question here was how Christianity could change while retaining its identity. For Oakeshott, Christianity was really ‘something which has always existed and must always exist—a striving to make theology give some answer to “the force and patience of the present time”’.11 It was impossible to distinguish the essential from the inessential in the development of Christianity, and there was no essential core, such as ‘the mind of Jesus’, that had remained unmodified throughout history. Christianity then became no more and no less than ‘the deposit of its constituent centuries’.12 Oakeshott rejected the suggestion that the history of Christianity was simply that of a perverted departure from an original ‘feeling of pity or compassion’ towards a system of institutional control based on fear.13 He was even more scornful of the idea that ‘Christianity (or anything else) can [9] #3: Providence — Divine and Human, p. 41. [10] #9: Essays Catholic and Critical, p. 48. [11] #10: Modernism in the English Church, p. 50. [12] #18: The Making of the Christian Mind, p. 66. [13] #16: What is Conservatism? and The Pathetic Fallacy, p. 63.
be discredited by recounting its history’; it was, in effect, what he later called a confusion of the historical and practical modes. Thus, as well as assisting Oakeshott to formulate his philosophy of modality, his early theological reflections led him to articulate an important principle regarding historical identity. ‘[T]he identity of a historical phenomenon cannot be preserved by mere adherence to a fixed original datum, because (a) there can be no identity without a real change of some sort, and (b) there is no fixed original datum for us to adhere to.’ As a corollary, ‘[i]f there has been change and development there must also be an identity, for without an identity there can be no change.’14 These principles later played an integral role in his critical philosophy of history. It was probably in this theological context that Oakeshott first used the phrase ‘a world of ideas’. Being a world of ideas was something he later declared was an essential characteristic of any mode of experience, but here he was talking specifically about the historical identity of Christianity when he wrote that, ‘[i]n the development of a world of ideas a former stage, as such, is always lost in a later.’15 By 1933 he had generalised this into the view that any form or ‘mode’ of experience was a dynamic whole; the theoretical worlds of experience of philosophy, science, and history no more stood still than did the practical world to which religious belief belonged. While Oakeshott believed that all religion must involve some kind of relationship to the past, it did not justify ‘the importance which traditional Christianity has attributed to past events’. But he never followed up his own suggestion that ‘the only adequate defence’ of Christianity ‘would be in terms of a philosophical view of the nature of time and its relation with eternity, and a philosophical theory of belief ’.16 The religious standpoint was [14] #19: Experience of God, p. 71. [15] #18: The Making of the Christian Mind, p. 66. [16] #46: The Historical Element in Religion, p. 138.
becoming an increasingly marginal one in philosophical circles; Russell was among those leading its rejection.17 Oakeshott restricted himself to distinguishing Christian speculative philosophies of history from the critical concept of historical understanding.18 Speculative Christian histories distinguished certain events on the grounds of their pivotal role in the divinely ordained process ‘to indicate their eternal significance’. But from the critical point of view, no event could be singled out as pivotal simply as such; its importance was entirely relative to the series of events under consideration. The criterion of significance, eternal or otherwise, was a practical one with no part in historical understanding as Oakeshott understood it.
[17] #24: Religion without God, p. 80. [18] #39, Christianity and the Nature of History, p. 122.
II: Historiography and Philosophy of History Much contemporary social science also struck Oakeshott as at least implying an all-embracing theory of human history that traduced the bounds of critical historical thinking. Sociologists, for example, were self-consciously attempting to transpose the biological theory of evolutionary adaptation into an interpretation of the human past as a process of development ‘towards democracy, peace, and a world economy’.19 Insofar as this kind of rationalistic optimism was present in social science, Oakeshott opposed it.20 But it was not the only source of pseudo-scientific social science. He was also hostile to any positivistic philosophy which treated physical science as the only form of all valid explanation. Yet Oakeshott was not hostile to sociological science as such. Scientific knowledge in the broad sense was ‘always in the form of universal generalizations’, and he saw nothing illegitimate in the attempt to ‘discover and establish generalizations about the life and conduct, or some particular aspects of the life and conduct, of societies’. The roots of this enterprise lay partly in the attempts of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers like Hume and Smith to erect ‘a science of man and society based upon the newly elaborated empirical methods of physical science’; an impeccable genealogy.21 Some contemporary sociological work could strike Oakeshott as ‘brilliant’; he praised T.H. Marshall’s famous study of the genesis of the civil, political and social rights making up modern English citizenship, Citizenship and Social Class. Inevitably, however, it was a piece of ‘histoire raisonné’ that resulted in ‘less than a concrete picture’ because of the nature of the sociological perspective. The sociological treatment of the human past [19] #39, Christianity and the Nature of History, p. 122. [20] #75, Science and Society, p. 240. [21] #71, Man and Society, p. 234.
required that ‘each event or situation must be transformed into an instance of a general rule’; events consequently lost the exclusive status as differences that they had when treated historically. Oakeshott also greeted Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia as an ‘acute and valuable’ book, despite some acerbic remarks about its ‘turgid’ style and ‘alarming terminology’. He found in it a congenial kind of contextualism; Mannheim’s ‘sociology of knowledge’ was ‘an examination of the political and social ideas of an epoch or a community from the standpoint of their genesis and context in the culture of the community in which they find place’.22 Social change according to Mannheim was the result of conflict between ideologies, or ‘mental fictions which are accepted by those who are anxious to stabilize the social order in which they find themselves’, and utopias, ‘ideas … which represent our desire to replace our existing social order by another’. Crucially for Oakeshott, these two groups of ideas were not dependent in any simple way on a material base. If Mannheim had gone too far in attempting to ‘prove the inadequacy of all so-called “classical logic” and all non-sociological approaches to human knowledge’, he had still produced an ‘extremely suggestive work’. Nor was Oakeshott automatically hostile to psychology. He received Money-Kyrle’s argument in Psychoanalysis and Politics that ‘human behaviour is irretrievably ambivalent, alternating in love and hate’ in a way that ultimately generated ‘two forms of … moral conscience’ as ‘candid’ and ‘moderate’. These dispositions in turn corresponded to two styles of politics, ‘the one authoritarian and the other “humanistic”’. If this Freudian viewpoint resulted in some over-simplification, Oakeshott nevertheless accepted the aim of psychoanalysis—a ‘redemption of mankind by greater self-knowledge’ which aimed to confine ‘conflict to realities’—as a plausible one.23 [22] #50, Ideology and Utopia, p. 147. [23] #111, Psychoanalysis and Politics, p. 367.
Oakeshott was also sympathetic to Koestler’s Insight and Outlook, a search for the ‘psychological common denominator’ in all creative activity, including science and moral conduct as well as art.24 Koestler claimed to have found it in the idea of the sudden ‘simultaneous association of two habitually incompatible contexts’. To reach this conclusion Koestler relied, as did MoneyKyrle, on the idea of ‘two opposed tendencies in emotional behaviour’, one ‘self-assertive (aggressive-defensive)’ and the other ‘self-transcending (integrative)’.25 There is even a possibility that Oakeshott learnt something from these psychological works. At least, both relied on a notion analogous to one he sometimes adopted in his later writings, in which modern political history and theory are explained in part as a tension between two contrasting approaches to government ultimately traceable to two contrary dispositions within the European character or personality. In ‘History and the Social Sciences’ Oakeshott aimed to distinguish the critical historical attitude from the positivistic and practical views of history that he believed were conflated in the model of social science advanced by the economic historian M.M. Postan, a fellow member of the Cambridge history faculty. Oakeshott began by asserting that there were a variety of ways of thinking about the past, none of which was ‘preeminent’, but argued that to call all of these ‘historical’ ways of thinking about the past invited confusion.26 Firstly, the specifically historical type of view of the past was unique in being based exclusively on the use of evidence. Mythical, traditional, and religious views of the past, or even the ‘imagined or fancied’ past of historical fiction, might make use of evidence, [24] #83, Insight and Outlook, p. 277. [25] #83, Insight and Outlook, p. 277; see also M. Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 278, 325. [26] For the Postan debate see also L. O’Sullivan, Oakeshott on History (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), pp. 109–10.
but they were not exclusively based on or bound to it. Secondly, and relatedly, the historical view of the past was not a ‘relevant’ view. The relevant past is the significant past; the past that has been ‘influential in deciding the present or future fortunes of men’. ‘Significance’ focuses on the ethical or moral importance of the past for us, on its goodness, rightness, or legitimacy. Such practical attitudes to the past were indispensable, but they were not characteristic of the exclusively historical view that focussed exclusively on understanding one or more events as an outcome of earlier events. Historical understanding was the appreciation of ‘differences’, which positively required ‘imagination’. It implied ‘the perpetual recreation of lost worlds’ that were themselves always constructed as ‘changing identities’. The historical past was a dynamic, not a static, construction. Nor could the historical concept of an event be made analogous to the scientific concept. As we saw above, Oakeshott considered that natural science aimed at ‘a statistical generalization’ in which an event was a discrete ‘point-instant’. It conceived the world in ‘the most abstractly universal manner possible’, seeking ‘to generalize the world under the category of quantity’. By largely accepting the positivist account of physical science, but denying that historical events were reducible to the quantitative terms characteristic of purely physical events, Oakeshott devised a neat strategy for disarming his opponent.27 The physical world knew nothing, strictly, of ‘the past’ at all. ‘[F]or the historical way of thinking, the position of an event or situation in the past, and its pastness, are both essential aspects’, but ‘the world of scientific generalizations is a world ignorant alike of past and future as such; it … recognizes time only within its own world as a method of relating its concepts’. Nevertheless, Postan’s historical work was not to be judged by the positivistic theory of history he advanced; Oakeshott allowed that the practitioner of [27] See E. Podoksik, ‘The Scientific Positivism of Michael Oakeshott’, in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 12 (2004), 297–318.
an activity may still perform it well while being ignorant or even mistaken about the nature of its presuppositions. All Oakeshott objected to in the end was the claim that psychological, sociological, or economic explanations were ‘scientific’ in exactly the same way as the physical sciences: [T]here cannot be a science, in the strict sense, of human affairs … but it does not follow that the scientific enterprise and the approximation to a social science that has been achieved … are wholly without legitimate influence upon the way in which we think about the ends to be pursued in human affairs … it is impossible to separate absolutely … that sort of learning from experience we call ‘science’ and that sort of learning from experience which is involved in judgments of value. And one of the important oblique effects of the scientific enterprise has been to make necessary a reform in the way in which the ends pursued in society are stated, and consequently the way in which they are thought about. Oakeshott could even accept speculative philosophy of history as a vehicle for discussion of social ends, so long as it was not confused with history proper. He gave a qualified welcome to Berdyaev’s The Meaning of History, a pessimistic vision of ‘European man … emerging from modern history exhausted and with all his creative forces spent’. Berdyaev had provided an ‘original and intelligent … diagnosis of the present condition of European civilization’ alongside ‘a set of moral judgments which determine the relative value of human ideals and activities’.28 This only underlined, though, that the present and future, and not the past, were the ultimate focus of all speculative philosophies of history. [28] #45, The Meaning of History, p. 137.
Collingwood’s The Idea of History, on the other hand, was unmistakably a contribution to the critical philosophy of history. Subsequent research has shown Knox’s posthumous edition of Collingwood’s papers on ‘the character and possibility of historical knowledge’ to be less definitive than supposed in Oakeshott’s declaration that it represented ‘all that is recoverable’.29 Nevertheless, posterity has generally endorsed Oakeshott’s verdict that Collingwood was then ‘ahead of every other writer’ on the subject, and Oakeshott himself definitely agreed with Collingwood’s claim that ‘history had come to take its place beside natural science’. It is not clear, however, that The Idea of History actually endorsed the goal of historical interpretation Oakeshott ascribed to Collingwood, of ‘understand[ing] a writer more profoundly than the writer understood himself ’. Oakeshott had earlier advanced this interpretative ideal as the goal of Hobbesian studies, and later ascribed it to Nietzsche, but it does not fit well with Collingwood’s notion of re-enactment as the aim of understanding an author exactly as (not better than) he understood himself.30 It really reflects Oakeshott’s own belief that history offered a kind of understanding of events necessarily unavailable to the individual, or indeed the society, concerned. Oakeshott’s major criticism of Collingwood was that he assimilated all knowledge to historical knowledge, and consequently implied a ‘radically skeptical philosophy’. Collingwood himself would not have accepted this, though he had argued that history and philosophy merged at their boundaries— something that Oakeshott never believed. Moreover, Collingwood was also more convinced than Oakeshott of the power of history to make a positive contribution to the conduct of practical political affairs. Despite these important differences, Oakeshott [29] #60, The Idea of History, p. 197. [30] #38, Thomas Hobbes; #67, p. 110; Masters of Political Thought, p. 226.
considered his argument ‘profoundly thought out and brilliantly expounded’.31 Smellie’s attempt to explain Why We Read History gained a less than enthusiastic reception, though Oakeshott complimented him on his ‘urbanity and sense of style’.32 He thought Smellie’s work illustrated that ‘the contemporary interest in history is centred upon the use to be made of it, upon the dogma it can be made to prove’. The practical concern with the future ensured ‘we pervert history to our purposes’. He reprimanded Smellie for approving Lord Acton’s injunction to ‘[j]udge … character at its worst’, something that he had been opposing at least since Experience and Its Modes.33 In fact, Oakeshott was by no means immune to allowing his own prejudices to colour his view of the past. Still, his shortcomings in this regard do not undermine the force of the qualitative distinction between historical and practical views of the past. However necessary it is for legal or political decisions to pass ethical judgment on the past, historical propositions were not statements about the rightness or goodness of what had been done. That historians had to recognize the presence of ethical and moral beliefs in the words and actions of their subjects was axiomatic, but an entirely different matter. Oakeshott also emphasized the impractical imaginative pleasures of historical reading. The ‘historical masterpiece … arouses no extraneous passions and releases us from the burden of history as the intellectual and moral preface to the contemporary world’, which is what, politically speaking, it always must be. The joy of reading a history of the Popes, he remarked, lay in the fact that it was ‘fascinating’ rather than ‘important’. He entirely agreed with Butterfield’s rejection of ‘Whig’ history, or the ‘finding [31] #45, The Meaning of History, p. 137. [32] #68, Why We Read History, p. 228. [33] M. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1933]), p. 158.
significant in the past only that which led subsequently to positive achievement’, and admired The Origins of Modern Science, which emphasized the mediaeval roots of the early modern revolution in scientific thought, for having avoided this temptation to ‘read the story backwards’.34 E.H. Carr’s history of the Russian revolution, however, had failed to avoid that pitfall. Despite a ‘profound, perhaps unrivalled, knowledge’ of his sources, Carr’s identification with the Bolshevik cause had become so complete that he frequently lost his historical perspective. His treatment of the history of Soviet Russia was ‘almost a replica of St Augustine’s attitude towards the history of the Roman Empire’; in other words, part of an inevitable unfolding of world history. We have already noted Oakeshott’s view of history as ‘the art of understanding men and events more profoundly than they were understood when they lived and happened’, and thus revealing a meaning in events ‘which was not their meaning for those who participated in them’. Carr’s uncritical adoption of the terminology of the actors in those events only interfered with this goal; the historian, like the novelist, ought not to identify himself too closely with his subjects.35 There was an admitted difficulty in that ‘[t]he historian has no vocabulary of his own; he is obliged … to use the language of morals and politics’, but the only solution was to ‘be wary of its implications’, including the tendency to reduce individuals entirely to types. Despite his scrupulousness over ‘simple fact’ and willingness to highlight ‘disingenuousness in the arguments of the Bolsheviks’, Carr’s work lacked this ‘critical attitude’; he tended to see the actors in the events of 1917 simply either as ‘revolutionaries’ or ‘bourgeois’ and ‘to measure them by their own standards’. [34] #91, The Origins of Modern Science, p. 297. [35] #101, Mr Carr’s First Volume, p. 325.
It was not only Carr who failed to keep the historical and the practical perspectives on the past separate. At the end of the period covered by this volume Oakeshott clearly felt that both philosophers and historians still had an uncertain grip on this distinction. The positivistic concept of historical fact remained in evidence, and the goal of history continued to be conceived of as practical; it was to fulfil ‘the “social purpose” of recalling to a society its past experiences’.36 For Oakeshott, this excluded all historical subjects with no obvious contemporary relevance, and involved an implicit denial of the intrinsic imaginative fascination of the past.
[36] #69, Father, a Portrait of G.G. Coulton, p. 230.
III: Culture Oakeshott’s insistence on the importance of imagination was not intended to reduce history to an aesthetic spectacle, but he always valued literary and artistic imagination highly. In John Cowper Powys, author of The Meaning of Culture, he found a kindred spirit. Oakeshott took Powys to be exploring three possible views of culture, identifying each through the contrary concept involved. The first concept of culture contrasted it with ignorance, and associated culture simply with the accumulation of fact. This ‘passion for amassing a vast quantity of knowledge’ was the least satisfactory notion of culture, and Oakeshott’s comments on a character in the novel Hunger and Love suggest he regarded it as characteristically modern.37 More satisfactory was the contrast between culture and anarchy associated with writers like Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot who identified culture with the assimilation of the best literary and artistic works. This view was superior to the first in that it ‘seems to have some answer for death; it is not the hopeless pursuit of an ever-retreating aim’. In Powys’ view, however, there was something beyond even reconciliation to mortality, and Oakeshott concurred. It was a kind of Epicureanism, expressed in the contrast between culture and despotism, and analogous to religion in being a ‘way of life’. Despotism here was being in permanent thrall to the future, resulting in an inability to value ‘not the fruit of experience, but the flower—something we know only in a present enjoyment and cannot garner’. This sense of culture was particularly relevant in 1930, when the one thing that the various struggling ideologies shared was the subordination of the individual to some future good. Even in England, where the threat of ideological politics was smaller than in continental Europe, the capitalist preoccupation with [37] #21, Hunger and Love, p. 76.
consumption involved mortgaging oneself to the future in a way inevitably detrimental to happiness. The threat posed by modernity to culture was the theme of Robert’s The Modern Mind, which argued that ‘during the last three centuries or so … poetry, and religion, whose language is poetic, have lost at the expense of a logical and matter-of-fact attitude to mind and use of language’.38 But in 1937 Oakeshott, though he later expressed a profound cultural pessimism in two re-tellings of the Tower of Babel story as a metaphor for modernity, wanted to qualify Robert’s view. Insofar as such a loss of poetic sensibility really had occurred, it was an exaggeration to single out the rise of scientific thought as the only factor responsible. The ‘relationship of science and religion’, as we saw, was ‘not one of direct antagonism’ for Oakeshott; ‘the one never denies what the other asserts’. Treating religion in terms of analogies drawn from politics or business was just as likely to prove harmful as taking a scientific view of it. Oakeshott found serious difficulties with the notion of modernity as decadent. There were clearly elements of Joad’s thesis that decadence was ‘the valuing of experience for its own sake, irrespective of the quality of the experience, the object of the experience … being left out of account’39 that Oakeshott would have agreed with. But in applying this notion to particular periods or persons, the arbitrary character of the judgements involved became clear. Amongst the signs of decadence were ‘the craze for speed … art as self-expression … the eighteenth century, selfishness, the present day, Debussy (“because he produces on me a lowering effect”) and Virginia Woolf ’. There was surely some humour in Oakeshott’s remark that while Joad ‘thinks that the douceur de vivre disappeared in 1914’, he himself ‘should have put it at 1906’—when he was five. In his late forties, Oakeshott still resisted a completely pessimistic view of the world; his verdict [38] #52, The Modern Mind, p. 152. [39] #74, Decadence, p. 239.
was that Joad ‘doesn’t understand the charm of fashion, and any man who has no sympathy for this is likely to find the human race both puzzling and more stupid than it really is’. One of the greatest threats to a civilized cultural life in the modern world was a simple lack of leisure. Oakeshott was delighted by Whistler’s The English Festivals, hailing it as ‘charming and profound’.40 The meaning of observing festivals was to recognise and appreciate ‘the rhythm of the natural and the civilised year, making of it a microcosm of the wheel of life’. But festivals were fragile as well as durable traditions, threatened not only by war but by many of the other changes in British life in this period, including the mass adoption of radio and television. Oakeshott, no lover of either urban life or technology (witness his remark that ‘the indiscriminate competitive exploitation of the internal combustion engine has transformed our manner of life without demonstrably improving it’), wrote a lengthy essay on the B.B.C. following the 1949 report of the Committee on Broadcasting. By this time, television as well as radio broadcasts were well-established, but Oakeshott did not treat the arrival of the small screen as particularly noteworthy. He focussed instead on arguing that the B.B.C., ‘a Corporation self-dedicated to the improvement of mankind according to a recipe of its own’, was abusing its status as a monopoly by carrying out an ‘enterprise of evangelization’ in a manner that smacked of ‘self-righteousness and priggishness’.41 The B.B.C.’s monopoly amounted to ‘a far-reaching experiment in universal education conducted by persons whose activities are … virtually uncontrolled’. In a thinly concealed contrast with France, Oakeshott treated ‘the easy acceptance of the B.B.C. by a nation which for so long has avoided an authoritative Academy of Letters and a unified system of school or university education’ as symptomatic of a creeping rationalism, liable to encourage ‘one of [40] #65, The English Festivals, p. 223. [41] #102, The B.B.C., p. 334.
the less good products of contemporary education: the extensive mind, curious, interested, pseudo-sympathetic, preferring many contacts to few intimacies, preferring fact to thought … the quiz mentality’. In other words, the least satisfactory type of culture. Oakeshott suspected that the proliferation of broadcasting would inevitably have an effect on the quality of the material, if only because ‘the opportunity of turning on the tap corrupts the listener in the same manner as the ready supply of tinned food corrupts the cook’. Yet the B.B.C.’s monopoly was less of a problem than its sense of moral mission. Given the importance of the idea of economic competition in later twentieth-century conservative thought, we should note in particular his remark that ‘there is little evidence that competition itself produces diversity—rather the reverse. We enjoy a variety of newspapers, but wherever there is genuine competition there is less diversity (except in opinion) than makes no matter’. What was most needed was not more competition but less paternalistic central direction. This sense that cultural life was undergoing a crisis had only been exacerbated by the war, and was reinforced at the philosophical level; Oakeshott believed Nietzsche had provided ‘a profound and imaginative diagnosis of a crisis in European culture’.42 Such admiration was still unusual in the late 1940s, when scholarship, as he observed, had only just begun to extricate Nietzsche from ‘the exaggerated reverence of his injudicious admirers … and the protests of the injured’, and the association with National Socialism had not yet been undone. But it is a point of similarity between Oakeshott and other major English philosophers of the later twentieth century, such as Bernard Williams.43 Oakeshott could certainly adopt a Nietzschean (or at least romantic) tone on occasion, once declaring that the ‘only two [42] #66, Nietzsche, p. 224. [43] ‘By the end of the twentieth century, most avant-garde English intellectuals found themselves probably closer to Nietzsche than anyone else’: K. Ameriks, Kant and the Historical Turn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 46.
subjects worth discussing’ were ‘love and death’.44 He certainly shared Nietzsche’s belief that a liberation from the ‘commonplace’ was a condition of first-rate authorship. In a discussion of the decidedly Nietzschean subject of aphorisms he pronounced that the unity of such a collection could only come from ‘the reactions of a single mind to its various experiences’. Where authors failed to achieve something uniquely their own, these collections would inevitably be failures. But a personal view of experience had to be the very opposite of dogmatic; it required the author to be ‘satisfied with the delights of conversation without requiring indisputable conclusions’, and to avoid the ‘vulgar, mawkish, and sentimental’. The idea of conversation, an important theme in Oakeshott’s work after 1945 as a metaphor for the contingent relationships between the various forms of experience, surfaced here as early as 1931. Oakeshott was under no illusions about the difficulty of producing great art. In comments with a teasingly autobiographical ring (though no unfinished novel has yet turned up among his papers), he remarked that ‘there is nothing like writing a novel for revealing one’s emotional limitations’. In fiction ‘all the concealments at the disposal of the historian, the scientist, or the essay-writer are discarded and the mind is thrown back upon its essential self and stands or falls by what it can create’.45 The same could be said of philosophy; and given Oakeshott’s Nietzschean sympathies and strong interest in literature, it is unsurprising that he regarded style as being as important as substance in a comprehensive interpretation of a philosophical work. Certainly, the presence of any contradiction in a text was ‘a lapse to be observed’, but ‘the concern of the literary man is as much with the quality of mind as with the actual argument’.46 Only ‘the mere philosopher’ regarded ‘style, mood, intention, and emotional spring’ as ‘irrelevant’. [44] #20, Afterthoughts and Aphorisms, p. 73. [45] #56, Reason in Politics, p. 189. [46] #89, The Life of Reason, p. 292.
IV: Philosophy In the inter-war era the Absolute Idealism that partly inspired Oakeshott’s early thought was in retreat. Having been an orthodoxy from roughly 1875 onwards, it was now attacked on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the first philosophical works Oakeshott reviewed was a General Theory of Value by Ralph Barton Perry, a former student of probably the best known of the American Idealists, Josiah Royce. But Perry had become more impressed by another of his teachers, the pragmatist William James, and increasingly emphasized knowledge derived from common sense and natural science.47 Perry’s ‘new realism’ and the ‘critical realism’ of another American, Roy Sellars (father of Wilfred, who eclipsed him in philosophical fame), were typical of the change in direction; both argued for materialism rather than Idealism. Oakeshott’s review of Woodbridge’s The Realm of Mind is further evidence of the arrival on the international scene of American philosophy after 1918. He complained that ‘The relation of mind and body and of minds with one another is taken as a fact to be stated, not a problem to be solved’, and was rather dismissive of the book.48 In fact, Woodbridge’s work was attempting a kind of Aristotelian naturalism that aimed to bypass the whole problem of mind-body dualism, and Oakeshott did not really do Woodbridge justice in making him sound like a naïve defender of a commonsense belief in an external world. Still, there was no disputing Widgery’s verdict in Contemporary Thought of Great Britain that ‘Idealism counts for little at the present time’.49 Oakeshott found Widgery’s theism as unsatisfying as Widgery found Idealism, but he accepted philosophy was no [47] #5, General Theory of Value, p. 43. [48] #7, The Realm of Mind and Three Conceptions of Mind, p. 45. [49] #8, Contemporary Thought of Great Britain, p. 46.
longer dominated by a single orthodoxy. He did take issue with Widgery’s desire for philosophy to have a social purpose, however; to give such a role to philosophy blurred the boundary between critical thinking and dispensing practical moral advice. Ethical Principles in Theory and Practice by the German biologist turned philosopher Hans Driesch committed exactly this error in Oakeshott’s eyes. Driesch had merely presented his own opinions on ‘sex, marriage, war, education, property, patriotism, birth control, etc’ dressed up as the inevitable conclusions of his own speculative philosophy of history.50 Similar criticism was levelled at John Macmurray, the Grote Professor of Mind and Logic at London University, who left the impression that ‘all thought is for the sake of action’, and that the only aim of philosophy was to solve practical difficulties. Macmurray’s belief that a future ‘scientific psychology’ would perform the main task of interpreting thought, seemed to Oakeshott to make philosophy redundant. Of course, Idealism did not disappear instantly. It retained some appeal throughout the inter-war era, though Oakeshott’s discussion of Bradley’s Collected Essays made no mention of it. He located Bradley’s work on psychology and ethics within the tradition of an ‘English analytical school’ whose earlier members included Bentham and James Mill rather than within an Idealist context.51 Normally, Bentham and Mill senior are labelled as utilitarians having little in common with the later British Idealists, and Bradley and Sidgwick were undeniably implacable philosophical opponents when it came to ethics, but in Oakeshott’s mind such divisions were clearly not insurmountable. However, Oakeshott did review some late Idealist works, including Morris’s Idealistic Logic and Wauchope’s Deviation into Sense, that made clear he still regarded ‘objective idealism’ as ‘a very respectable doctrine’. [50] #23, Ethical Principles in Theory and Practice, p. 78. [51] #47, Collected Essays, p. 142.
Oakeshott accepted that ‘[i]t is the business of philosophy continuously to renew itself ’,53 and acknowledged that the ‘modern technique of mathematical and symbolic logic’ pioneered by thinkers such as Frege, Russell, and Whitehead had ‘opened up new fields’.54 Nevertheless, he saw no need to simply abandon the older logic and always remained sympathetic to scholastic thought, at least in its proper context. He praised the historical perspective that could make the Summa Theologica appear ‘as an intellectual adventure and not … a kind of staff-college doctrine’, and Gilby’s book on medieval philosophy inspired him to some more general reflections on the relationship between logic and philosophy. There was, Oakeshott believed, an important contrast between ‘the science of logic’, concerned with ‘the good manners of argument’, and dialectic, which is ‘between two and is a cooperative effort to trace disagreement to its source’. Both were indispensable to philosophizing, but they were distinct. The ‘business’ of logic is ‘not with the truth of our conclusions but with their conclusiveness’; it aimed to ‘get rid of formal defects in our thinking, to avoid a bungled argument’, by pointing out ‘[i] ncorrect statements, recklessness in enumerating contradictories, illicit inference from negatives to affirmatives’, and the like. But in dialectic it was possible to ‘call upon myth and analogy … recognize that even equivocation can be benign and that all circles are not vicious’. So, while logic was ‘an indispensable rudder’, it was also in a sense subordinate; ‘the game is not played for the benefit of the referee’, and ‘the friendly opposition in disputation … is as ready to understand a clumsily expressed argument as to counter with the distinctions necessary to put it right’. That said, Oakeshott acknowledged ‘dialectical as well as merely logical fallacies, sophisms, sham arguments, false or strained analogies’. 52
[52] #29, Idealistic Logic; #84, p. 90; Deviation into Sense, p. 280. [53] #38, Thomas Hobbes, p. 110. [54] #87, Barbara Celarent, p. 287.
These were ‘more subtle offences against good taste in disputation, to be exorcized by a sympathy for rational argument rather than by the application of a clear rule.’ Oakeshott did review a work by Whitehead, who had made a major contribution to the analytical philosophy of logic in Principia Mathematica. Faced with Adventures of Ideas, however, Oakeshott employed the tactic so beloved of analytic philosophers faced with works in another style, and affected not to understand it. As a contribution to speculative metaphysics he found in it ‘some profoundly thought-out ideas and many brilliant apercus’, but claimed he was simply unable to comment on Whitehead’s overall philosophical doctrine.55 The analytic approach was not the only philosophical movement sweeping through Cambridge in the 1930s. Marxism was also very popular, and from the first, Oakeshott was largely hostile. He declared the essays in Aspects of Dialectical Materialism a nonsensical collection of disturbingly dogmatic uniformity.56 Marxism had become an ‘official philosophy’, displaying an orthodoxy more appropriate to a ‘religious creed’ than a philosophical doctrine. Indeed, Marxist thought presupposed a scheme structurally analogous to Christian apocalyptic; it was interested in the past only as a revelation of the conditions of future emancipation. The ‘esoteric’ character of Marxism also ensured anyone objecting would ‘unavoidably … find that what he has been objecting to is not the true doctrine, but merely one of the numerous “distortions” which the authentic philosophy has suffered’.57 However, Oakeshott did not have the same attitude to Marx. Although he described Marx’s teaching as ‘cloudy and dogmatic’, and even questioned whether Marx was best thought of as a philosopher, he also acknowledged some of Marx’s thought on [55] #35, Adventures of Ideas, p. 105. [56] #34, Aspects of Dialectical Materialism, p. 100. [57] #51, This Freedom of Ours, p. 149.
history as ‘profound’, and his work as ‘full of ingenious ideas’.58 He named Marx with Nietzsche and Weber as a founder of a ‘tradition of great vitality in the recent history of social investigation’; hardly a contemptuous dismissal.59 Moreover, any Marxist prepared ‘to be critical … and to seek the value in the work of others of a different persuasion’ could expect a fair hearing; Lindsay’s Marxism and Contemporary Science won praise for its ‘subtlety and fair mindedness’.60 Oakeshott was less interested in philosophical affiliations than in avoidance of triviality. He did not laugh at the attempt ‘to construct a philosophy of psychical research’ into paranormal phenomena inspired by the positivism of Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer, observing that the ‘neutral monism’ it recommended at least ‘removes in principle the difficulty of understanding how mental and material … systems may influence one another, how minds may interact’ and perhaps even ‘how minds can survive death’.61 Only those whom he felt were not doing philosophy in the right spirit aroused his ire. ‘Philosophical fun’, he remarked, ‘is a specialized taste; and when it is devoid of wit there are few who do not find it tiresome’. 62 Collingwood’s The Principles of Art did not win praise for its close adherence to the thought of Hegel (or anyone else), but for its careful use of language. The right approach was ‘to make certain that we know how to apply’ a word, in this case ‘art’, ‘where it ought to be applied and refuse it where it ought to be refused’. Oakeshott, though sometimes associated with the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1950s when ordinary usage became of intense interest in Anglo-American philosophy, was already consistently [58] #51, This Freedom of Ours, p. 149. [59] #50, Ideology and Utopia, p. 147. [60] #90, Marxism and Contemporary Science, p. 295. [61] #86, Matter, Mind, and Meaning, p. 285. [62] #22, Adventures in Philosophy and Religion, p. 77.
emphasizing the philosophical importance of an exact use of language in the 1930s. While Oakeshott stressed that ‘every notable discovery involves the destruction of hitherto accepted knowledge, and has to overcome the inertia of what is already established’, he did not think that the task of philosophy was completed by such destruction.63 In true philosophy, ‘destruction is followed by construction’, and it was thus incumbent on Collingwood to provide a positive notion of what art is. But in the end, whether or not readers found themselves in agreement with Collingwood’s thesis that art proper has ‘two characteristics: expression of emotion and imagination’, mattered less than the opportunity ‘of following a masterly discussion of … fundamental questions’. In Oakeshott’s reviews, a conception of philosophy emerges in which reasoning is an end in itself and the rewards of thinking through a problem are intrinsic. While he was prepared to allow that a ‘modest dogmatism … belongs to all bold and lucid thinking’ in philosophy, he rejected all sceptical doubts about the value of reason as such.64 For example, he took Chestov to task for having made ‘a philosophy out of misology’.65 The only way that Chestov had been able to reach his conclusion that the history of European philosophy revealed ‘an unexamined prejudice in favour of what is reasonable’ was by conflating Reason and scientific rationalism on the one hand and science and common sense on the other. But a belief in philosophical reason was not a commitment to a mechanistic view of physical science, and a valid judgment did not have to be ‘ecumenical’. The ‘possibility of judgments which are universally valid in no sense depends upon there being anything whatever universally believed’, and ‘[w]hat is reasonable and mere normality (what is satisfactory to common sense) are not the same thing.’ [63] #75, Science and Society, p. 240. [64] #84, Deviation into Sense, p. 280. [65] #30, In Job’s Balances, p. 91.
Oakeshott could sympathise with Chestov’s desire to defend spontaneity in art and life, and preserve art’s ability to jerk us out of everyday existence. To say that ‘Everything for Dostoevsky is abnormal, fresh, sui generis’ was an unobjectionable critical verdict, but it was ‘true of every artist; it is just what art means’. But there was no need to reject reason and philosophy (or science and common sense, for that matter) to value spontaneity. Oakeshott’s defence of reason deserves emphasis because his post-war polemics against rationalism sometimes wrongly lead critics to think that like Chestov, he was hostile to reason as such. What Oakeshott was criticising, however, was the view that only reason in its narrowest sense was important;66 human irrationality was ineliminable, but not necessarily destructive. ‘[T]o behave rationally is not necessarily to be without anxiety, love, hate, inner conflict, or potential conflict with others’.67 Rationalism for Oakeshott was linked with a certain philosophical interpretation of the nature of scientific inquiry, one with deep historical roots in the Cartesian project of a ‘universal science or general philosophy’. Its modern heirs included those philosophers who regarded their central task as following out the implications of mathematics and natural science. He had no issue with mathematics and natural science being important philosophical concerns, but he did object to them being made its only concerns, or the exclusive foundations of the unity of knowledge, as some suggested.68 This sensitivity to scientific Rationalism may well have been so pronounced because Oakeshott was gradually emancipating himself from a philosophical variety of it. In his earliest works, under the influence of Plato and Spinoza as well as Hegel, he had treated philosophical definition as the only fully satisfactory form of thought, but later increasingly emphasized the need to [66] #72, Reason and Unreason in Society, p. 235. [67] #111, Psychoanalysis and Politics, p. 367. [68] #80, The Modern Approach to Descartes’ Problem, p. 268.
discriminate between different kinds of thinking that stood on an equal footing. To that extent Oakeshott was in sympathy with the philosophical project Collingwood and others called a speculum mentis, a ‘mirror of the mind’, in which the different departments of thought were reflected. But he was never very inclined to attempt to construct a disciplinary hierarchy of the sort Collingwood and others had attempted, and became even less so over time.69 Certain passages in Experience and Its Modes from the early 1930s still favoured the idea that philosophy was a more satisfactory form of thought than all others, but Oakeshott never attempted, for example, to show in quasi-Hegelian fashion how practice was superseded by history which in turn gave way to science which ultimately produced philosophy. The various forms of theoretical and practical thinking he identified had an equal status, with the exception of philosophy, which somehow escaped the need for the presuppositions to which the others were subject. If there was a hierarchy here, it was a pretty flat one, with philosophy simply standing over everything else. It has sometimes been claimed that Oakeshott never really changed his view of philosophy, because in both his earlier and his later writings he espoused a conception of philosophy as the ceaseless questioning of presuppositions. While this notion of philosophy is indeed present throughout his work, this claim ignores both the later abandonment of his early emphasis on definition as the outcome of philosophical reasoning and the fact that in his earlier writings he tended to feel, at least in some moods, that definition was not the only characteristic of philosophy but also made it superior to other forms of thought, as distinct from simply different to them. Oakeshott had still not fully emancipated himself from the idea of philosophy as the comprehensive definition of concepts by 1939, and the tensions it produced are visible in The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence. This piece, an attempt to identify the conditions for a satisfactory theory of the nature of law, represents [69] #85, The Life of Reason, p. 283.
Oakeshott’s last major statement on the nature of philosophy before the war. Consequently, its place in the development of Oakeshott’s thought has been constantly disputed. There is no reason to expect all the various parts of a philosopher’s work to fit neatly together as if they were all pieces of some grand design. But on one interpretation, The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence is particularly anomalous; the one place where Oakeshott favoured the idea of a hierarchy of forms of explanation which he always eschewed elsewhere. Taken in isolation, certain passages do seem to support this view. For instance, he said explicitly that a philosophy of law ‘will be one explanation of law in a hierarchy of explanations’, and that ‘[i]t has the authority to create this hierarchy by supplying a universal criterion by which the adequacy, the relative completeness of all explanations may be determined.’70 When these statements are placed in context, however, it becomes clear that Oakeshott made no real attempt to rank the various types of non-philosophical explanation of law he distinguished during the course of the argument: analytical, historical, psychological, sociological, etc. He wanted only to establish that the philosophical explanation of law must be more satisfactory than any other form, and this is identical with the approach found in Experience and Its Modes and other early writings in which the relative merits of other forms of thinking were not at issue once their inferiority to philosophy had been demonstrated. The talk of a hierarchy thus turns out to be misleading. The piece nevertheless remains important, even if it does not constitute the major and inexplicable departure that it has sometimes been presented as, because it sheds light on some of the key features of Oakeshott’s conception of philosophy. For one thing, his discussion of theories of law exemplifies what might be called the hermeneutic affinities of his thought. The hermeneutic theory of a circle of meaning insists that no statement is intelligible [70] #53, The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence, p. 176.
in isolation; any given utterance must be placed in the context of the world in which it was made to be correctly understood. Moreover, the understanding that results is subject to the same kind of condition; it can only be meaningfully criticized when the reasons that led to it are appreciated. Thus, Oakeshott stressed that any particular statement about the law ultimately implied a broader theory about its nature; he also advanced the general principle that text and interpretation are one and inseparable … what we call ‘the text’ is itself an interpretation, a meaning, for which (in interpretation) we substitute another, different or more extended, interpretation or meaning. Theory, explanation, interpretation are attempts to find and expound the meaning in what is given, and what is given and its meaning are not two things … but one.71 In the inter-war years Oakeshott was alive to developments in German as well as British philosophy. He raised no objection to the selection of Husserl, Dilthey, Max Weber, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger as the most influential German philosophers since ‘the last great orthodoxy— Hegelianism’. While he believed that some members of that list— Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in particular—had ‘no counterpart in English thought, the main problem confronting both English and German philosophy was the same. It was “[w]hat, in this age of science, is the real task of philosophy?”’72 Part of the answer lay in understanding (and practising) philosophy historically. By this one should not understand the attempt to reduce philosophy to history, as Collingwood wanted to do in his later work. Rather, Oakeshott believed that our [71] #53, The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence, p. 155. [72] #44, An Introduction to Contemporary German Philosophy, p. 135.
understanding of philosophy should be sensitive to the time and place in which it was written. This position was intended to avoid a number of dangers, one of which was the idea of a philosophia perennis, of philosophy as uncovering timeless and universal truths. But another, related, error was the progressive approach, a view of philosophy as ‘a gradually developing body of doctrine’. The history of philosophy, as Oakeshott understood it, displayed no unbroken continuity; philosophers from different periods could not simply be read as if they were ‘all talking about the same thing’.73 He was dismissive of most philosophy textbooks, finding them ‘at best … dully informative, at worst merely confusing and misleading’, especially when compared to ‘the great classics of philosophy’ which belonged to ‘another and brighter world’.74 The best introduction to philosophy was still ‘Plato’s Republic … not because its doctrine is acceptable but because it reveals a master at work’, and the ‘range of a subject is usually better displayed in arguing an interesting case than in summarizing the views of x, y, and z’.75 In philosophy, just as in art and history, Oakeshott placed a high value on imagination. Philosophical imagination was what most impressed him about Santayana’s Dominations and Powers,76 and he considered it the mark of a great philosopher.77 But he was not defending an aesthetic irrationalism as the correct standard for the evaluation of philosophical works; only to ‘think in metaphors and not to restrain one’s fancy must always be defects in a philosopher’. Rather, he related imagination to ‘the conception of a comprehensive theory’. A philosopher was imaginative insofar [73] #100, The Great Philosophers, p. 323. [74] #44, An Introduction to Contemporary German Philosophy, p. 135. [75] #114, Introduction to Politics, p. 369. [76] #109, Dominations and Powers, p. 362. [77] #38, Thomas Hobbes, p. 110.
as he had achieved a complete system, embracing the whole of physical and human nature. Though Oakeshott thought such imagination ‘comparatively rare … in English philosophical writing’ (Hobbes was his only example), at least two English works that appeared in the immediate post-war era struck him as extremely valuable. The first was Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, conventionally located within the analytic tradition. Ryle famously attacked what Oakeshott called the ‘hypothesis … which, perhaps more than anything else, distinguishes modern from ancient philosophy … that every human being has a body and a mind (or is both body and mind)’.78 Oakeshott seems to have been prepared to accept ontological monism, but he considered Ryle’s version of it was in danger of being too reductionist, because it retained the old materialist language of body which would presumably have to be abandoned alongside the old way of conceiving mind; he felt Ryle had been too confident in talking of a ‘physical world’. Moreover, he felt Ryle’s account of Idealism as ‘the “reduction” of the material world to mental states and processes’ was an ‘unfortunate abridgment’, no doubt because it seemed to identify Idealism exclusively with the subjective strain associated with Berkeley. The idea of a category mistake which Ryle used to attack this dualistic hypothesis proved hugely influential, however, and is now frequently encountered in fields far beyond those in which it was originally employed. It may well be, too, that Ryle was the inspiration for Oakeshott’s later use of the term ‘categorial error’ as denoting an inappropriate confusion of different ways of thinking that we saw he attacked in his inter-war writings as the logical fallacy of ignoratio elenchi. Be that as it may, Oakeshott hailed The Concept of Mind as ‘philosophical writing of the highest class’. He was similarly enthusiastic about Urban’s effort to get ‘beyond realism and idealism’, which he thought indebted ‘to both Rickert and Alexander’. Urban sought to reconcile Idealism (the belief that ‘the [78] #97, The Concept of Mind, p. 317.
known cannot be independent of the knower’) and Realism (‘the belief that what is known must be an antecedent reality’).79 The proposed solution rested on the argument that neither Idealism nor Realism ‘is a belief concerning fact; both are beliefs about the meaning of knowledge’, and that therefore the conflict between them was dialectical rather than empirical. There was, Urban concluded, a ‘harmony between Idealism and Realism in such concrete enterprises of knowing as the physical and social sciences, history, and Geisteswissenschaft’. This was not dissimilar to Oakeshott’s own post-war position; with respect to the nature of historical understanding, for example, he argued in effect that historians might treat evidence in realist terms, but that philosophically speaking the historical past was entirely ideal, with no objective existence independent of the community of historical readers and writers.
[79] #99, Beyond Realism and Idealism, p. 321.
V: Politics The changes in political philosophy mirrored philosophy at large; Idealism was increasingly deprecated, though works were still being written in this vein.80 For example, in 1929, John Mackenzie, a student of Edward Caird and Henry Jones and a friend of McTaggart, published Fundamental Problems of Life which treated society as a metaphysical reality and the purpose of the state as the realisation of a Common Good that in turn required the existence of co-operative groups. This notion of the Common Good (regarded by Oakeshott as a descendent of Rousseau’s General Will) struck him as fundamentally ambiguous. He complained that it was unclear, in Mackenzie at least, whether the General Will and the Common Good were moral or metaphysical notions. Nevertheless, in 1936 Oakeshott was still prepared to assert that the ‘Idealist theory of the State is the only theory which has paid thoroughgoing attention to all the problems which must be considered by a theory of the State’, and that Bosanquet’s The Philosophical Theory of the State ‘remains (with all its defects) the most comprehensive account of this theory’.81 At the same time, he believed that it ‘has yet to receive a satisfactory statement’. His later political thought can be read partly as a reconsideration of this problem of the relationship between the individual and the group as it had been handled within the Idealist tradition.82 If Oakeshott was unhappy with the received Idealist tradition, he was still less happy with what was succeeding it. Catlin’s Principles of Politics proposed making political theory into a science ‘in the strict sense in which chemistry is a science’. At the heart of this project was a quantitative approach based on economics, though Oakeshott observed that ‘the book contains [80] #49, Bernard Bosanquet’s Philosophy of the State, p. 143. [81] #49, Bernard Bosanquet’s Philosophy of the State, p. 143. [82] #11, Fundamental Problems of Life, p. 51.
few references to statistics and statistical generalization … the most hopeful method of constructing this science’.83 Catlin’s project rested on an empirical individualism; a single person was the bearer of a single will, and thus regarded as an ultimate unit of political decision with preferences that could be counted in the form of votes. In fact, Oakeshott was not hostile to the quantitative approach as such, at least in the 1920s; he went so far as to say that ‘[a]ny attempt to develop a genuinely quantitative study of politics deserves encouragement’. What he objected to was Catlin’s ‘clinging so closely to the economic analogy’ for politics.84 Oakeshott and Catlin did have something in common, however: an interest in Hobbes, on whom Catlin had written a short introduction.85 Both were part of a ‘revival of interest’ in Hobbes traceable to the later nineteenth century. By the inter-war period this revival had become a ‘flood’ which has never really ceased. Oakeshott later played a significant role in it by editing the Blackwell edition of Leviathan and authoring a number of essays. The essays have been superseded as scholarship, but they pioneered a then novel but increasingly popular ‘liberal’ reading of Hobbes (suggesting controversially that ‘Hobbes … had more of the ground of liberalism in him than even Locke’), and remain useful evidence for the development of Oakeshott’s own thought.86 [83] #15, The Principles of Politics, p. 61. [84] #15, The Principles of Politics, p. 61. [85] G.E. Catlin, Thomas Hobbes as Philosopher, Publicist, and Man of Letters: an Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1922). [86] Oakeshott’s revised introduction to Leviathan is republished in M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 2nd edition, ed. T. Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991). Four other essays were republished as Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975). For a detailed study see I. Tregenza, Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003)
Oakeshott nevertheless cautioned against too narrow an emphasis on Hobbes’ contemporary relevance.87 A philosophical reading of a philosophical text was compatible with, indeed required, ‘a genuinely historical attitude’. The historian could offer a ‘detailed consideration of the actual meaning of a philosophical text, regardless of its present significance or of any view we may hold about the truth or error it contains’ that was at once a necessary part of the enterprise and the source of ‘inspiration for fresh thought’. A crucial part of this historical enterprise was making clear that philosophical works cannot merely be treated in terms of their conclusions; what a given author thought, and why he thought it, were ‘inseparable’ in Oakeshott’s view. The trend in the history of science in this period was to emphasize the mediaeval background of the seventeenth century, and the same was true in Hobbes studies, which stressed the continuity ‘in politics, religion, and philosophy’ with earlier centuries. This historically oriented approach produced a metaphor for Hobbes’s philosophy as a ‘palimpsest’, a manuscript that has been written over many times. This metaphor is applicable to all philosophy, and requires that any philosophical work must be viewed as an accretion, as composed of a number of layers. At the same time, the metaphor does not exclude originality. Every philosopher may add a new layer of their own, and a truly great philosopher may still be original. Hobbes’s writings really had been ‘a profound revolution in European thought’, but his originality did not lie in his conclusions; rather, it was the reasons he gave for them.88 These made him ‘the most profoundly philosophical individualist in the history of political theory’ and ‘the first great theorist of the political world in which we live’. Oakeshott’s Hobbes was a theorist of the rule of law. Far from the Hobbesian ruler relying on force to strike terror into its subjects and control them accordingly, sovereignty had strict [87] #38, Thomas Hobbes, p. 110. [88] #38, Thomas Hobbes, pp. 138, 110.
limits; it concerned only ‘the control of men’s actions’, meaning that both ‘the intellect and the conscience are excluded’. There was nothing in Hobbes of the Platonic belief that government was responsible for the right ordering of the soul; it was partly for this reason that Oakeshott was inclined to see Hobbes in a liberal light. Thus, despite hailing The Political Philosophy of Hobbes as ‘excellent and timely’, he could not endorse Strauss’ view that ‘the distinctive innovation of Hobbes is … his rejection of law and his substitution of right or claim as the principle from which the State is to be deduced’.89 The relevant consideration here is the kind of individualism on which Hobbes based the state. Contemporaries distinguished between a ‘hedonistic ethical’ type of individualism, in which freedom is defined by the will of the individual, and a ‘universalistic’ theory focussed on the common good. Hobbes was conventionally regarded as espousing hedonistic individualism, but Oakeshott regarded this as a mistake; ‘the true nature of Hobbes’s individualism has yet to find its expositor’. In 1935 he offered the suggestion that ‘Pride, and not Fear, is the masterconception of this political philosophy’.90 Of course, pride excluded making immediate gratification the highest good, but it also precluded submerging the individual in communal association. Oakeshott’s ‘liberal’ reading of Hobbes had ramifications for his philosophical and historical views on politics in the postwar period. Historically, it prompted him to focus on the fact that modern governments were more powerful by an order of magnitude than their mediaeval and early modern counterparts. But this growth in the power available to governments had also had consequences for political philosophy. Philosophers had moved away from a consideration of problems of authority to problems associated with the use of government power that bore [89] #49, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, p. 145. [90] #38, Thomas Hobbes, pp. 117.
no direct relation to questions about the sources, nature, and limits of governmental authority. A central problem in theories of authority is the nature of obligation. To Oakeshott’s mind, the liberal democratic tradition had equivocated over this issue; Locke, for example, had tried to give obligation a dual basis in both natural law and consent, but had only confused matters.91 He therefore welcomed Carritt’s attempt to deal with obligation in Morals and Politics, which he described as trying to do ‘for political philosophy what other writers, like Moore, Broad, Prichard, and Ross, have been doing … for ethics in general’.92 But Oakeshott was unconvinced by Carritt’s attempt to show that political obligation was a species of moral obligation, presumably because it too failed to shield political obligation from reduction to something else. That liberal democracy must include some notion of political obligation was necessary if it were to rest on a commitment to the rule of law as distinct from mere force. While Oakeshott knew that the maintenance of authority inevitably involved an element of force, and conceded that Machiavellian analyses of power had their place, he always resisted philosophical attempts to identify law and authority with mere coercion.93 Here he agreed with the last great representative of Italian Idealism, Benedetto Croce, who described political action in the abstract as simply ‘action guided by the sense of what is useful and directed towards a utilitarian goal’. To this extent politics was indeed intelligible in exclusively Machiavellian terms. Yet ‘political action is never self-sufficient but always exists in the wider world of the moral consciousness’, so that ‘policy is always unavoidably related to some moral ideas’.94 Oakeshott was in complete accord with Croce over the impossibility of an absolute separation of morality and politics, [91] #67, Masters of Political Thought, p. 226. [92] #40, Morals and Politics, p. 124. [93] #55, Swords and Symbols, p. 187. [94] #59, Politics and Morals, p. 196.
but what may surprise those who only know Oakeshott as a ‘conservative’ from his essays in Rationalism in Politics is his sympathy for the socialist ethical critique of capitalism. Although Oakeshott found Selsam’s Socialism and Ethics suffered from an ‘ignorance of history’, and levelled against it the familiar charge that socialism had become a form of religion, he also declared the book ‘worth while’.95 Selsam had used both Marx and Spinoza as foundations for a naturalistic ethics according to which the state exists to satisfy human needs and desires. This did not convince Oakeshott (he thought all such attempts were doomed), but he nevertheless found some virtue in Selsam’s analysis of capitalist society. Nor would one expect to find the supposedly ‘conservative’ Oakeshott writing that ‘the social democratic position … is one that must have great inherent attraction for many people’ in England; yet he expressed admiration for Durbin’s ‘lucid and intelligent analysis’ of ‘State organised private monopoly capitalism’ in The Politics of Democratic Socialism, and shared Durbin’s alarm at the central control of the economy that was becoming the norm. What he did not share, of course, was the suggestion that an alternative form of planned economy (exemplified by Russia) was the answer. Oakeshott was convinced that ‘a shooting war is no solution’ to the emerging cold war conflict, but he disagreed completely with the argument that the way to avoid nuclear conflict was to be ‘more progressive than the Russians’.96 To support ‘democratic socialist planning’ in Europe and elsewhere removed the reason for opposing Russia in the first place. ‘If Russia is “progressive”, God help us all if the USA were to become more progressive’, was Oakeshott’s considered verdict on the ‘utterly unconvincing thesis that if you want to stop a Russian you must become a Socialist’. [95] #81, Socialism and Ethics, p. 271. [96] #78, How to Stop the Russians without War, p. 262.
The Communist threat provoked Oakeshott’s only recorded foray into media punditry. A retiring man, the experience of seeing a photo of himself in the Evening Standard next to the headline ‘MAN WHO TOOK LASKI’S JOB ATTACKS THE COMMUNISTS’ likely put him off any further ventures.97 Nevertheless, the piece gives some interesting insights into the changes Oakeshott believed the war had wrought on the British political climate. ‘Up to about 1939’, he declared, it was possible to … be a Communist … from a variety of motives, none of them entirely foolish or deplorable. The Russian Revolution, like the French, could appear as the dawn of a glad day. And in the time of Hitler’s rise or the Spanish Civil War one might join the party out of the generous impulse to side with the down-trodden. The rise to international prominence of Stalin’s Russia had changed this situation. Communism now stood ‘for the subjugation of the world, including the peoples of Russia, to the oligarchy which now rules in Moscow’. It was simply ‘Russian imperialism’. The correct response, however, was not to promote a countervailing and equally ideologically-inspired ‘American imperialism’ that could result in an armed clash. It was to try to remove the menace without further war; ‘our aim must be to assist in overthrowing that oligarchy by working upon the weaknesses of the regime’. However correct it was, the socialist critique generally struck Oakeshott as a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Both socialism and capitalism saw the good life as ‘nothing other than the enjoyment by more and more people of more and more everything’. Both relied on ‘the plausible ethics of productivity’, an ethic which had become ‘one of the most damaging moral superstitions of our time’. The dominance of economic concerns in modern politics threatened individual freedom from both left and [97] #92, The Coming Defeat of Communism, p. 306.
right.98 Freedom here meant the ability to exercise ‘independent judgment and moral choice’. It was not to be identified with either security or prosperity: ‘an excessive desire and hope of security is an emotion which has long since invaded and overrun European life and politics’. Security and prosperity were undeniably goods; but they were not the same as the ability to choose for oneself; what socialism offered was the role of a recipient rather than a consumer. Freedom was further threatened by ‘the gross pressure of numbers which goes to compose a morally worthless public opinion, and the moral delusion that when we have discovered how to do something we are well advised to do it’. The only alternative in a productivist society, whether socialist or capitalist, was between a ‘tyranny of the majority’ (Oakeshott actually used Mill’s phrase), in which ‘[t]he desires of the masses (in so far as desire is allowed to appear at all) are to be the standard for everyone’, and a ‘tyranny of those who determine the need, the “scientists”’. ‘Of the two, any sane man would no doubt choose the former; but it is a desperate alternative.’99 Oakeshott singled out Orwell’s totalitarian satire 1984 as an example of the kind of ‘precise and microscopic imagination’ and ‘ironic vision’ that he found equal to the task of examining this modern predicament. The liberal tradition that he had found so unsatisfactory in the inter-war period now became a tradition of liberty ‘coeval with our civilization’ and ‘in danger of being destroyed’.100 Having survived the ideological assault of National Socialism, post-war liberalism now faced the threat of being eaten by one of its own children, the abstract rationalism to which it had given rise and which had influenced left and right in equal measure. [98] #103, Modern Capitalism and Economic Progress. See also #25, John Locke, pp. 345, 82 respectively. [99] #108 Liberties of the Mind, p. 359. [100] #61, The Liberal Tradition, p. 200.
Oakeshott’s strident criticisms of the Rationalist supporters of central planning meant contemporaries sometimes accused him of taking aim at a straw man, and he certainly went too far in describing post-war British government as tyrannical and as a despotism.101 Nevertheless, one should take into account the radically utopian mood that followed the end of the war. Some writers really were prepared to make very radical claims that would surely have sounded very alarming to almost anyone who did not share their beliefs. Oakeshott found himself reviewing works by authors claiming that ‘the political arrangements of a society … should be based wholly upon the discoveries of scientific research’; that ‘the fundamental problem of government is one that can be treated by exact biological methods’;102 that socialism in Britain would have arrived when the majority of working people were employed in the public sector, and that this system, if implemented internationally, would produce world peace;103 that ‘within democratic socialist planning the individual can be given a larger social justice, a greater security, and a more complete freedom than under capitalism’;104 and that through a combination of scientific and Marxist methods, ‘it would be possible to set up and get working within a few months a comprehensive, productive and distributing mechanism for the whole world’.105 Yet Oakeshott was not hostile in principle either to a ‘more equalitarian’ or a ‘more prosperous’ society. He believed Lloyd George had already introduced measures tending in this direction. He also accepted that Britain was ‘a society recovering from war’, and that the current system needed ‘maintenance and reform’. But [101] #64, The Analysis of Political Behaviour, p. 221. [102] #75, Science and Society, p. 241. [103] #63, Contemporary British Politics, p. 204. [104] #77, The Triple Challenge, p. 261. [105] #88, The Freedom of Necessity, p. 290.
he was convinced that Attlee’s Labour government and the ideas of its supporters were departures from British law and custom.106 Oakeshott was no economist, so it is impossible to extract more than the most general alternative proposals from him; but instead of proposals for ‘the curtailment of private enterprise’, he wanted to see taxation of income and capital overhauled. In particular, he would have welcomed ‘a thorough investigation of the morals and economics of bequest and inheritance’. Monopolies ‘impervious to the criticism of the market’ also needed to be more carefully regulated, whether they were monopolies of capital or labour.107 In economics as elsewhere, Oakeshott was keen to warn against dogmatic orthodoxies. Popular Keynesianism treated economic institutions as ‘pieces of machinery held in stock, to be shuffled about, selected and rejected, brought or kept in use or put by for another occasion’, but it was important to remember that they were ultimately ‘ways of being active’.108 The same held true, of course, for institutions of all kinds, including political ones. An institution was not a pile of bricks and mortar, but a way of doing things that had come into being over time; it was not something that could be erected overnight. This Burkean attitude to institutions is one reason Oakeshott has been classed as a conservative, but he found most contemporary statements of conservative doctrine almost as flawed as socialism. The conservative opposition of a philosophy of natural law to the socialist ‘philosophy of the mandate’ struck him as ‘perhaps the least convincing of the current formulae of current moral criteria’. It might offer an escape from ‘the absurdity of attributing absolute authority to the will of a temporary majority’, but it was unsatisfactory for at least two reasons. It was ‘too abstract to offer much practical guidance’ and second, it was ‘merely an external limit’. Both Burke and Hegel had demonstrated the necessity of [106] #103, Modern Capitalism and Economic Progress, p. 346. [107] #63, Contemporary British Politics, p. 204. [108] #103, Modern Capitalism and Economic Progress, p. 345.
a community being able to criticize its political life according to standards that were intrinsic to it: according, in other words, to its own constitutional tradition. The natural law tradition tended to regard legal rights and duties as limitations on or interferences with an original freedom, but (perhaps following Hobbes) Oakeshott rejected this position. Human beings were not naturally free, at least in the sense of being possessed of rights and responsibilities; freedom was an historic achievement. ‘The “private individual” … is an institution, a social, indeed for the most part a legal creation.’109 Any failure of conservatism to appreciate this point made it more liable to accept the rationalist approach to planning as just another form of limitation or interference, and not as something different in kind. Natural law, of course, was not the only basis for conservatism. Conservatism, like any other ‘historical phenomenon’ (including Christianity), was no more than the product of its changes, and if there was an ‘essence’ to it, it lay in a continuity that did not exclude change.110 Even when the problematic foundation of natural law was excised from conservative thought, however, it remained liable to be unduly satisfied with what had already been achieved and to regard what had gone before as better than what was currently in existence. In opposing socialism, conservatism needed to offer not reaction, ‘but something quite modestly better than the present’. In communicating a political programme to the public, it was important that the limits of political action were made clear; ‘the most a politician can do is to ensure that some, and these by no means the most important, conditions in which the good life can exist are present’. To hope for more than this from politics presupposed a change in human nature. Unfortunately, the conservative response seemed not to be to try to reverse the trend towards centralised state intervention greatly accelerated by [109] #76, The State and the Citizen, p. 248. [110] #16, What is Conservatism? and The Pathetic Fallacy , p. 63.
the war, but to adopt the same predilection for central planning observable on the left. In the post-war era, Oakeshott began demanding a revision of the terms in which politics was understood. In particular, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ obscured tendencies shared across the political spectrum; the demotion of parliament ‘to the position of an executive body for carrying out the items of a programme determined … by an irresponsible body’, and insensibility to formal and procedural considerations. This critique was a precursor to his later notion of an ‘enterprise association’, or the idea of the state as an association in terms of a common purpose willing to disregard any rules not directly instrumental to the purpose being pursued. For the socialist and the fascist, the existence of a parliamentary opposition seemed pointless, ‘an expensive luxury, a piece of wastefulness’. Yet the maintenance of the rule of law required an opposition ‘to oppose, to criticize, to expose foolishness, corruption and mismanagement wherever they lie hidden’. Indeed, Oakeshott saw a large part of political activity as preventative; power had a tendency to constantly find new centres in which to concentrate, and the true politician (of any party) aimed to counteract this trend. Left unchecked, power tended to corrupt its wielders and reduce the degree of freedom in society by upsetting the established legal order which provided an important source of predictability in conduct. Somewhat paradoxically, law acted as a ‘method of social integration’ by creating a framework within which each individual could ‘exercise … the springs of human enterprise … the only source of happiness’. Against this background, J.D. Mabbott’s The State and the Citizen in 1948 was hailed by Oakeshott as the most important work since Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State in 1899.111 Mabbott not only saw the need to limit the authority of the state, he grasped that the basis for doing so could not rest on natural rights or on moral motivation. Moreover, Mabbott had understood [111] #76, The State and the Citizen, p. 248.
that the unity of the state was not generated by ‘a general will or a corporate self ’. Oakeshott entirely agreed that this ‘dangerous mythology’ (which had often, as we saw, been espoused within the Idealist tradition) prevented a proper understanding of the historic, institutional nature of individuality. However, Oakeshott did object to Mabbott’s effort to protect activities such as art and religion by arguing that they were ‘non-social’ in the sense that they were ‘beyond the reach of any association to procure’, and they could only be preserved and protected by state action, not produced by it. Mabbott did not take account of the fact that ‘there can be no such thing as a non-social action or activity in the sense of a concrete action performed or activity pursued which is devoid of social consequences and owes nothing to society’. The fact that an activity like art ‘has no practical end to serve does not deprive it of social consequences’. The same was true of religion: ‘[n]either the language of the poet nor the idiom of worship … is private.’ Oakeshott acknowledged that any attempt by the state to achieve ‘direct legal control of artistic, scientific, or religious activity (beyond the control, often very material and going very deep, inherent in the civil and criminal law)’, would destroy these activities, but they were still only ‘free’ because of the existence of the state in the first place; they were not ‘naturally’ free activities. Another work that struck Oakeshott as of major importance was Brogan’s The Price of Revolution, which he called a ‘tour de force’.112 Most political theory consisted either of ‘vulgar realism’, or ‘the exploration of necessary relations between a collection of abstract nouns’, both approaches that obscured the actuality of political situations: ‘[W]e first raise the dust and then complain that we cannot see. Half of human activity becomes incomprehensible to us, and the rest is misconceived’. Brogan had avoided these faults by taking a carefully defined theme—‘the history and significance [112] #110, The Price of Revolution, p. 364.
of violent change (political and technological) in the modern world’. Brogan’s argument was that since the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, ‘we have been living in an age of revolution’. Yet revolution was an inefficient and ‘uneconomical’ means of political change; the ‘cost is to be counted not merely in the good that they destroy (that is often exaggerated), but in the very elementary goods (such as order and decency) which they endanger, and in the displacements of society which they cause … which go on revealing themselves for generations’. This conclusion was irresistible to Oakeshott, for whom gradualism was a central article of political faith. At the same time, it was not grounds for despair; Oakeshott welcomed Brogan’s ability to ‘avoid the contemporary habit of exaggerating our situation into a kind of cosmic tragedy—a Predicament’, and he shared Brogan’s view that what was important in politics was ‘not being deceived about our situation and doing our best in almost unendurably “interesting” circumstances’.
VI: The History of Political Thought One way of avoiding being deceived about our political situation was to be historically informed. The history of political thought could not suggest any positive courses of action, but it could dispel ignorance and illusion. The best historian in this respect was one who ‘keeps severely to the matter in hand … and writes with brevity, precision, and lucidity’.113 What irritated Oakeshott most was the superficial general survey. The effort of Curtis, the Round Table founder, to find a ‘guiding principle’ for politics in world history (which he duly located in the idea of a commonwealth) met with short shrift.114 Curtis saw a more or less unbroken development of the democratic ideal from ancient Greece onwards; he believed that Jesus had expounded its principles, and that Edward I had tried to put it into practice. This unsophisticated indifference to historical change displayed ‘more courage than judgment’ in Oakeshott’s view. But he found the same fault in professional scholars.115 For example, Bowles’ Western Political Thought had been constructed round a sort of fixed skeleton of constants, themselves immune from change. The ‘European mind’ is something to which this history happens … Something called ‘science’ or ‘the scientific attitude’ emerges, disappears and re-emerges at irregular intervals; but itself suffers no detectable change. Bowle had written of ‘the main stream of European civilization’, Oakeshott remarked, as if it were ‘being turned on and off by a celestial controller’. [113] #37, Richard Hooker als politischer Denker, p. 109. [114] #32, Civitas Dei, p. 96. [115] #62, Western Political Thought, p. 201.
Towards the end of the period covered by this volume, however, Oakeshott detected a notable increase in the quality of research on the history of European political thought. The 1950s saw the appearance of some scholarly editions that were to prove very long-lived, and that greatly advanced the study of the Renaissance and early modern periods.116 Moreover, work had progressed on a much earlier period, the ‘complicated and overwhelmingly important first four centuries of the Christian era’.117 The relationship between Christian religious ideas and political thought forms a recurring theme in Oakeshott’s reviews. The earliest work on the history of political thought he reviewed was on seventeenth-century England, a period in which politics and religion were ‘indistinguishable’.118 He credited its author Belasco with some sharp observations, in particular that ‘the Toleration Act does not mark the birth of religious toleration, but establishes for the first time, with the connivance of all Protestant Churches, the right of religious persecution of the state’. In his later writings Oakeshott always emphasized that the Reformation resulted in a massive transfer of religious authority to the state that had been inimical towards individual liberty. When Plamenatz described Hobbes, who from Oakeshott’s point of view was one of the most important defenders of individual liberty, as a utilitarian, he did not protest.119 However, he did not share the enthusiasm of one of his predecessors as Professor of Political Science at the LSE, Graham Wallas, for utilitarian thought.120 Oakeshott typically saw both Bentham and Mill as ambiguous figures because of the tension between their [116] #106, The Discourses of Niccoló Machiavell; #96, Patriarcha, pp. 355, 315, respectively. [117] #104 The City of God and Introduction to St. Augustine, p. 348. [118] #12, Authority in Church and State, p. 54. [119] #94, The English Utilitarians, p. 311. [120] #58, Men and Ideas, p. 195.
consequentialism and the rule of law, though there was a gradual softening of his attitude towards Bentham over the years.121 He may also have thought that neither Bentham nor Mill were as self-conscious as they might have been about the theological origins of Utilitarianism; he commented that Paley provided a clear ‘example of the way in which the hedonistic foundation of Utilitarianism was developed from the Natural Law theory by positing the happiness of mankind as the evident will of God’.122 Utilitarianism, and indeed democratic thought in general, was a product of an optimistic ‘Enlightenment … confidence that from tolerant discussion’ the truth would emerge.123 This was the strand of Enlightenment thought which had produced Rationalism. But there was another source of democratic thought that lay in ‘scepticism (doubt not only concerning the power of human intelligence to arrange a satisfactory state of society, but also concerning the whole idea of a permanently good society)’. Clearly, it was this latter strand of democratic thought with which Oakeshott himself was most in sympathy, and the idea of the ambiguity or division within democracy was a constant preoccupation of his post-war work. It was already visible, however, in some of Oakeshott’s interwar writings: for example, his critique of Lockean liberalism. Built on a commitment to freedom and property, it espoused values which any political philosophy favouring the rule of law would endorse; at the same time, its stress on science and progress had contributed much to a later rationalism prepared to override these commitments in the name of the common good. It lacked the absolute commitment to individualism that Oakeshott demanded; he contrasted Montaigne’s ‘radical, Epicurean’ type [121] Bentham and Mill were ‘admirable writers (or at least one of them) but unsafe guides’: #51, This Freedom of Ours, p. 149. [122] #56, Reason in Politics, p. 189. [123] #73, Puritanism and Democracy, p. 236.
of individualism, which he himself clearly favoured, with Locke’s more insipid variety. We noted above that despite the exaggerated criticisms of democracy, parliamentary government, and discussion Oakeshott made as part of this critique of Lockean liberalism as ‘absurd and exploded’, he rediscovered the virtues of democracy and parliamentary government when they were seriously threatened by the volkish ideology of national socialism, with its claim to embody the will of the superior racial group. From the national socialist point of view, the clash was between a decadent Western individualism and a dynamic German nation; for those who opposed national socialism, the battle was between freedom and a particularly perverted notion of group personality. This problem of the relation between the individual and the group was one of the themes of Gierke’s Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, an influential product of late nineteenthcentury German historiography. In 1934 there appeared a translation of the section on the period 1500–1800 by Ernest Barker, the first Professor of Political Science at Cambridge. For Gierke society had an independent, metaphysically real, existence that was prior to the state and independent of it, and his story of the early modern and Enlightenment period purported to show how the growing individualism of modern Europe had been destructive of society’s communal associations. He regarded Hobbes in particular as responsible for introducing an atomising conception of the state that was a threat to any cohesive form of society. In England, the rise of German nationalism meant that any positive account of group personality was increasingly regarded with suspicion, and Hegel in particular was often viewed as having attempted to reassert the reality of group personality. This was an interpretation with which Oakeshott disagreed, so it is no surprise he considered English Hegel scholarship to be ‘maddeningly
disappointing’ in this period, with noble exceptions.124 He rejected the idea that the Philosophie des Rechts was part of an early nineteenth-century ‘Age of Reaction’; it ‘belongs so obviously to the Age of Reason … that its inclusion [in an Age of Reaction] is almost absurd’.125 In 1939, he felt that the best guides remained Bradley and McTaggart, both of whom had by then been dead for some time. This perhaps rather overlooked the work of Edward Caird (and indeed Robert Flint), but it is true nevertheless that the number of valuable books on Hegel in English prior to the 1970s was small; Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies remains a classic example of a text commendable for its commitment to liberal values but worthless as a guide to Hegel. Oakeshott’s earliest political writings displayed some sympathy for Idealist and pluralist theories of the reality of group personality, but by the end of this volume he had completely rejected them as strategies for limiting the power of the state and maintaining the rule of law, his two most important political goals. His later writings on political philosophy and on the history of political thought should be read as repudiations of it. In political philosophy, he consistently argued that the only reality groups could have was legal, and that all forms of personality, both individual and group, were historic and artefactual. In the history of political thought, individualism was a positive achievement, and the existence of social groups gave no grounds for placing corporate welfare before that of the individual.
[124] #56, Reason in Politics; #41, The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel, pp. 189, 126, respectively. [125] #26, The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Age of Reaction and Reconstruction, p. 87.
A Note on the Texts Unlike the previous two volumes in the series, this third volume consists entirely of previously published material, meaning that obtaining a good text was generally unproblematic. Assembling the various essays and reviews was greatly facilitated by the existence of the comprehensive bibliography maintained by the Michael Oakeshott association.126 Photocopies were made and either transcribed by the editor or electronically scanned using optical character recognition software and checked for accuracy. Obvious errors in spelling and punctuation in the originals have been silently corrected, and to assist the reader, fuller bibliographic details have been provided.
[126] See note 1, above.
Science, Religion, and Reality Review of Joseph Needham (ed.), Science, Religion, and Reality (London: Sheldon Press, 1925). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 27 (1926), 317–19. This book, consisting of ten essays by various hands, has already attracted considerable and deserved attention. Its subject is one of perennial interest, and it achieves the by no means easy distinction of making what I take to be a genuinely significant pronouncement. It is fortunate in being introduced by Lord Balfour who ‘sets the problem’ with great clearness. The rest of the book falls naturally into two parts, the first three essays being historical, and the last six devoted to an exposition of the respective spheres and claims of science and religion. Dr Malinowski opens the discussion with a valuable essay on Magic, Science, and Religion, drawing his material chiefly from a first-hand study of native life in Melanesia. He points out that magic, science, and religion each play a distinct part in the life of primitive man. Scientific knowledge is definite though limited; and it is never confused with a belief in magic, which is invoked only when knowledge fails. ‘It is most significant that in the lagoon fishing, where man can rely completely upon his knowledge and skill, magic does not exist, while in the open-sea fishing, full of danger and uncertainty, there is extensive magical ritual to secure safety and good results’ (p. 32). In Dr Malinowski’s view, religion is necessarily, though not primarily, public, and yet the ‘social’ and the ‘religious’ are not to be confused as so many anthropologists have done. It is never found in conflict with science. Magic is ‘a practical art consisting only of means to a definite end to follow later one religion [is] a body of self-contained acts being themselves the fulfilment of their purpose’ (p. 81). Dr Singer writes with his usual learning on the history of science in its relations with the various religions and ecclesiastical powers from
the great age of Greece to the end of the eighteenth century. And Professor Aliotta of Padua, in what is in some respects a rather confused essay, treats of the final stages of the struggle in the nineteenth century. It is never quite clear to the reader whether he is speaking of ‘naturalism’ or of ‘science’, and modern pragmatism is repeatedly taken as offering a critique of the scientific method, whereas it usually represents itself as a theory of knowledge—a very different thing. Professor Eddington, writing on the Domain of Physical Science, gives an altogether admirable account of the method and aim of modern physics, which is applicable in principle to all the sciences. The scientific conception of the universe is the most abstract of all conceptions, it is of a universe consisting solely of physically measureable relationships, and physical science is a closed system created for the study of those relationships. Comparing this essay with Prof. Hobson’s Gifford Lectures we may note a marked agreement in the main outlines of the picture. Dr Needham’s essay on Mechanistic Biology and the Religious Consciousness is in part a criticism of the neo-vitalist theory of biological life and in part a historical survey of the various theories of life and their relationship with religious and ecclesiastical opinion. He himself, with the majority of biologists (though there are distinguished exceptions), is a mechanist. The interest in the historical part lies chiefly in his thesis that in the past religious minds have shewn an instinctive attraction for some sort of vitalistic theory of life, but that, on the whole, it should be doubted if ‘even from a narrowly apologetic point of view, it [is] wise to nail the colours of religion to the precarious mast of neovitalism’ (p. 235). I would suggest that religion is not scientifically required to nail its colours to any biological mast. This essay seems to confuse, in its various ‘philosophical’ arguments, the main point that the so-called mechanistic and vitalistic theories of life are purely methodological hypotheses applied only to an abstracted aspect of organic phenomena, and not theories of the nature of life at all. Things can be mechanically described which
cannot be defined in terms of mechanism. Science does not set out to give such a definition; and it is a matter of method to be decided among biologists (on purely biological grounds, not in any sense ‘philosophical’) whether the vitalistic or the mechanistic hypothesis is the more pragmatically useful and productive (cf. p. 17). Dr Oman’s contribution on the Sphere of Religion contains the exposition of his view of the nature of religion which his contributions to this journal have indicated.1 Religion can be understood fully only by the religious (p. 262), and the failing of many of the theories of religion hitherto put forward is that they have been formulated, often on sound enough logical principles, but without any true conception of the nature of the subject in hand (p. 265). Religion deals with environment in a practical and not a theoretical manner, ‘by way of feeling and value’ (p. 283). It stands in its own right, resting upon the sense of the Holy, which is stirred only by what is valued as ‘sacred’—the ‘sacred’ meaning a valuation of absolute worth which cannot be expressed in, or reduced to, any less absolute terms (p. 289). Religion and Psychology are dealt with by Dr William Brown, who reviews and appreciates various psychological theories chiefly relating to mystical experience. He distinguishes between the philosophical and the psychological treatment of religion, and recognizes that the latter is not required to, and cannot, do justice to questions of validity. Professor Webb’s essay on Science, Christianity, and Modern Civilization, shorter than the others, grapples with the difficult question of the ‘philosophy’ of Christianity. It has much to say of interest, but there is missing from it any consideration of the most pressing feature of our theological thought, noted by Aliotta (p. 155), viz. the exact bearing upon Christianity of the modern historical criticism of the New Testament. The Conclusion by the Dean of St Paul’s is first a judicial summing up of the foregoing essays, and secondly an unequivocal statement of his own views on the relationship of Science and [1] Cf. Journal of Theological Studies, 25 (1924), 275.
Religion. The conflict, he says, still exists, but is not inherently necessary in the subjects. ‘A religion which does not touch science, and a science which does not touch religion, are mutilated and barren. Not that religion can ever be a science, or science a religion; but we may hope for a time when the science of a religious man will be scientific, and the religion of a scientific man religious’ (p. 348). The title ‘Science, Religion, and Reality’ embodies the only serious defect of the book. The ultimate relation between any human activities is, as Lord Balfour says (p. 16), a question of metaphysics; and, while the importation of the ‘Reality’ into the title suggests that we are to be offered a treatment of the ultimate nature of the relation between science and religion, the contents of the book are, wisely enough, largely confined to a historical, scientific, and theological discussion, and philosophy enters only by the back-door of biology.
The Christian Religion and Its Competitors To‑day Review of Rev. Alan Coates Bouquet, D.D., The Christian Religion and Its Competitors To-day. Being the Hulsean Lectures for 1924–5, etc. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 27 (1926), 440. These four lectures and the epilogue are inspired by a double purpose; for with his analysis of various competing interests, Dr Bouquet is able to give us some hints of his view of what the Christian religion is, and this adds greatly to their value. Since they are in the nature of an exposé of some of the false gods of our time we cannot expect them to exhaust their subject, but the competing interests which Dr Bouquet has chosen are none of them men of straw: he has selected them with discernment and brings to his judgments considerable practical experience as well as wide reading and a balanced enthusiasm. They are Secularism, or no religion; Pantheism; Traditionalism; and Relativism, or the belief that Christianity will yield to something truer. Secularism is a clumsy critic, rarely troubling to distinguish religion from the name; it is a kind of ‘stark insensibility’ whose many forms agree in being ways in which we ‘lay waste our powers’, and fail to satisfy the religious sense which is part of nature. Pantheism may ‘explain the world’, but it lacks practical power for the direction of life. Religion is, after all, nothing if not practical, and the real value of the historical element in Christianity is best explained in terms of this necessity. Even so, it is doubtful whether this forces us to go so far as to say that ‘the Christian religion champions the essential reality and uniqueness of all events, and the reality of time’ (63). That the current mode of presenting Christianity will remain unchanged few will think probable, and the view put before us is
that we should have less to fear from any change which may occur if we learnt to think of religion, the church, and the ministry in terms of their more fundamental features. It is not another religion which is the chief competitor with Christianity at the present time, but the worship, in some form, of the world, that is, no-religion.
Providence — Divine and Human Review of Ebenezer Griffith-Jones, D.D., Providence — Divine and Human. A Study of the World-Order in the Light of Modern Thought, vol. 1 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 27 (1926), 440–1. This is a conscientious attempt to deal with the doctrine of Divine Providence ‘under evolutionary categories’. ‘The validity of the essential Christian doctrines is taken for granted’, and we are conducted through the various departments of the physical universe, in each of which the workings of purpose and providence are pointed out. Part of the book is taken up with a restatement of the conventional view of the ‘providential order’, and the rest with displaying the scientific evidence for a teleological view of the universe. The main problems considered are those connected with purpose and evil, and the universe is regarded throughout as the ‘conditioned will of God, not His free personal activity’. There is a second volume to follow in which human history is to receive similar treatment. We may, perhaps, doubt whether the time has not now passed when it is any longer profitable to attempt to ‘prove’ the existence of Providence or Purpose. Rather we should ask, ‘what kind of a Providence can we believe in?’
The Metaphysics of Evolution Review of Thomas Whittaker, The Metaphysics of Evolution, with other essays (London: Williams and Norgate, 1926). First published in Cambridge Review, 48 (1927), 230. The greater part of this book consists of critical and historical essays and notices reprinted from either philosophical journals or volumes previously published. The earliest takes us back to the first years of Mind, the most recent is from the 1925 volume of that journal; but Mr Whittaker claims that the title expresses the main thought, being one of his most permanent interests, of all the essays. In spite of the fact that the author’s chief motive is ‘to arrive at something positive through criticism,’ the interest which they satisfy is, for the most part, historical. His excursions into Classical Greek, Hellenistic, Mediaeval and Renaissance philosophy show a life spent among the writers of those times, and his own views appear chiefly as incidental to these explorations.
General Theory of Value Review of Ralph Barton Perry, General Theory of Value: Its Meaning and Basic Principles Construed in Terms of Interest (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926). First published in Cambridge Review, 48 (1927), 230. As philosophy passes more and more under the misleading influence of the natural sciences it adopts their principle of divide et impera and is becoming increasingly cut up into exclusive fields, each with its warning to trespassers; all of which is making it increasingly difficult to see the wood for the trees. One of the more modern and more useful of these divisions is the Theory of Value, which is designed to consider a problem which cuts across older categories such as ethics and aesthetics. The problem is, What is the nature of all determinations of value? In this formidable work Prof. Perry gives us no more than the allgemeine Teil of his theory of Value, and there is a second volume to follow called Realms of Value. The aim of philosophy, he says, is ‘to bridge the gap between common-sense and science,’ but the result seems to give some countenance to the definition of philosophy as ‘a fussy acquaintance with things in general.’ The argument is that value is ascribed to objects in respect of the interest taken in them, and by far the larger part of the book is taken up with a minute analysis of interest, leading us into biology, neurology, psychology and sociology, and in fact amounting to a natural history of interest, though its logical structure is all that is relevant to the discussion of Value. This tends to make the book somewhat tedious reading. But the more interesting, because the more relevant, chapters are the first five, in which value is defined in terms of interest, and the last three, where the structure and implications of value judgments are considered.
The Principles and Problems of Philosophy Review of Roy Wood Sellars, The Principles and Problems of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1926). First published in Cambridge Review, 48 (1927), 429. The aim of this book is to afford an introductory text book of philosophy which shall give students ‘a feel for philosophy’ rather than mere information: a very worthy endeavour. It is evidently written with an eye to the teaching system of American universities, and for all we know will be found to fill the requirements of that system admirably. The form it takes is a survey of as much of the whole field of philosophy and pseudo-philosophy as can be got into 500 pages; and, for its purpose, seems to us both too long and too much taken up with ‘philosophical’ jargon. But the notion of an elementary text book of this kind for the use of beginners is the product of a mistaken way of approaching the subject, and this one is not likely to be more disappointing than others. In addition, the book is intended to be a contribution to philosophy; Prof. Sellars is a ‘critical realist.’
The Realm of Mind and Three Conceptions of Mind Review of Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge, The Realm of Mind. An Essay in Metaphysics (New York: Colombia University Press, 1926); and Alejandro A. Jascalevich, Three Conceptions of Mind: Their Bearing on the Denaturalization of Mind in History (New York: Colombia University Press, 1926). First published in Cambridge Review, 49 (1927), 93. We may all envy Professor Woodbridge for his simple philosophical creed, the two main articles of which seem to be that ‘a modern metaphysician must be analytic and empirical,’ and that we are ‘given’ certain ‘obvious natural facts,’ one of which— ‘that the material world is a fact’—he even goes so far as to say is ‘too obvious.’ From this basis, by arguments which cannot be stated shortly, he arrives at a variety of conclusions; that ‘mind is not properly a being, but a realm of being,’ that this realm possesses a logical structure which our thinking discovers and may be called ‘objective mind,’ and that since many minds are also given they must somehow be related. But he has a short way with such problems. The relation of mind and body and of minds with one another is taken to be a fact to be stated, not a problem to be solved. ‘It seems quite gratuitous for metaphysicians to belabour the problem how two minds can read the same book, when it is daily solved by librarians.’ It does not often occur to Professor Woodbridge that to be content, in this way, to take things as ‘facts’ is the negation of philosophy. Dr Jascalevich is a disciple of Professor Woodbridge. His book consists of an historical study of three conceptions of mind— those of Aristotle, St Augustine and Descartes. His aim is to show how each of these writers is ‘an interpreter of a contemporaneous mentality’ and to show them also as contributing to a general movement which he calls ‘the denaturalization of mind in history.’
The value of his comparison is, however, somewhat limited by the fact (which he admits) that, whereas Aristotle treats the mind as a psychologist, both St Augustine and Descartes approach it as a problem in metaphysics. The price of these books seems somewhat out of relation to their size and value; both would have been more fittingly published in paper covers.
Contemporary Thought of Great Britain Review of Alban Gregory Widgery, Contemporary Thought of Great Britain (London: Williams and Norgate, 1927). First published in Cambridge Review, 49 (1927), 156. Mr Widgery has written a well-informed and thoughtful book on a subject which presents not a few difficulties and ambiguities. In the main, it is a review of contemporary British thought about the universe, which includes not merely what may be strictly called philosophy, but also the kind of ‘free speculation’ in which certain scientific and other writers are apt to indulge, and the thought about the universe which takes the form of a so-called philosophy of life, such as that to be found in the writings of Thomas Hardy, the value of which lies rather in the intensity and passion with which it is felt than in its ultimate coherence. And it might have added to the clearness of the picture had these been distinguished at the outset. The first chapter deals with thought of the third kind as exemplified in such writings as those of Hardy, Chesterton, and Wells. Under the heading of Naturalism we are given an account of some of the contemporary ‘scientific’ speculations about the universe, but perhaps it might have been shown more clearly how a man may have a naturalistic attitude to the universe without elevating it into a philosophy and that the death of naturalism as a philosophy has by no means involved its death as an attitude. In Mr Widgery’s opinion the philosophical doctrine called Idealism counts for little at the present time. Pragmatism has failed to take its place, and, although he sees little sign of any ‘dominant movement’ in contemporary thought, he is inclined to regard what is called Realism as the philosophy which possesses the most vitality. In the penultimate chapter, called Theism, an interesting set of writings is discussed, but with certain exceptions these leave the impression of being so many escapes which their
authors have discovered when wearied with the inconclusiveness of thinking. At no time in reading this book do we feel our fingers on the very pulse of the present, and indeed one of the conclusions we are encouraged to draw from this account of contemporary thought is that, although still alive, it has no such pulse. But, in spite of its rather atomic method, the book is not without its glimpses of a comprehensive view. Contemporary thought is anti-dogmatic and empirical, it is occupied in the main with details and is eclectic in character. In a book of this size there are necessarily sides of contemporary thought which receive but scanty treatment, and here both aesthetic and so-called social philosophy are left more or less untouched. But, although Mr Widgery’s constant demand that a philosophy should be also a ‘philosophy of life’, ‘dominating the minds and guiding the lives of the people’, is, I think, a little misleading, his readers will carry away a picture of contemporary thought, certainly significant, and perhaps as clear as circumstances allow.
Can We Then Believe? Essays Catholic and Critical, and The Inescapable Christ Review of Charles Gore, D.D., Can We Then Believe? (London: Murray, 1926); Edward Gordon Selwyn, M.A., B.D. (ed.), Essays Catholic and Critical (London: S.P.C.K., 1926); and Walter Russell Bowie, The Inescapable Christ (London: Murray, 1926). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 28 (1927). Bishop Gore has planned his latest volume to be a summary of three earlier books which went under the title of the Reconstruction of Belief. This, like his other works, impresses us with his sincerity and real belief in all he writes, so that we can never be wholly out of sympathy with him. But this hardly lessens the difficulties of his position. What he gives us here is not so much a theology as a series of descriptions of religious beliefs which are represented as Christianity. Constantly the language in which he writes is that of religion and not of theology, and the sanctions to which he appeals—power in human life, the certainty which comes with accepted belief—are religious and not theological. Questionable as many of his statements of detail may be—for Dr Gore seems often more certain than facts will sometimes allow—the chief dissatisfaction with which the book leaves us lies in the seeming arbitrariness of many of its more fundamental arguments and distinctions which often relieve one element in our experience only at the cost of another. The main position of Essays Catholic and Critical is somewhat similar to that of Can We Then Believe?, but there is lacking in this larger work the simplicity—almost naiveté—which characterizes Dr Gore’s attitude. It is impossible to give an account of the various essays which compose this volume, but it is, perhaps, worth while to indicate its general tendencies. Christianity is conceived of as something static, made, and not even in a process of being understood; it is a ‘definite, historical, and positive
religion’. Consequently ‘the Church is not primarily a society for spiritual or intellectual research, but a society of which it belongs to the very essence to put forward the emphatic claim to be the bearer of a revelation’; and Christian Theology is simply Christianity rendering its own life and truth explicit or, at most, a process of deducing the implications of Catholic doctrine. Any doctrine or practice which does not conform to this definite and positive religion is ‘un-Christian’, and any theologian who does not first accept it is ‘non-Catholic’. These judgments necessitate some standard, and it is found in the authority of ‘revelation, in the form of the message of the Gospel’ as interpreted by ‘a genuine consensus of competent and adequately Christian minds’ or ‘the general Christian consciousness’. This view seems to carry with it a general readiness to judge scholarship by its results, and to conclude that it is faulty when it does not come to ‘catholic’ conclusions. Sometimes also we are presented with ill-examined or even false alternatives, as when we are bidden choose between the Dominical institution of Baptism and the Eucharist, and ‘the hypothesis of a fortuitous origin’, or between the rejection of the mystery hypothesis of the origin of the Eucharist and ‘the end of historic Christianity as we know it’. No sort of discussion is allowed of the exact theological value of Dominical institution, which, whatever our views, can hardly rest satisfactorily on mere assumption. History, at best, we are told, gives no more than ‘a very high degree of probability’, but the difficulty of basing the whole value of this absolute religion upon a probability of any sort does not seem to have been fairly faced. There are many points of interest in the volume, but I cannot but think that it loses force owing to the fantastic nature of some of its arguments—when, for example, we are asked to believe that a thing is true while it is admitted that the question of what it is, is still open (pp. 101, 114, cf. Can We Then Believe? p. 165). We miss from this collection of essays any clear consciousness that Christianity is a difficult thing to understand, and a still more difficult thing to explain at once unambiguously and coherently.
Although Dr Bowie disclaims any intention of presenting a ‘compendium of theology’, he is moved by a genuinely theological impulse, a desire to find a meaning in the religion of Jesus Christ, and a meaning, above all, which is intelligible to the present day. A theology, whether or not in the end it turn out to be true, must at least be reasoned and coherent, and the value of Dr Bowie’s book lies very much in the fact that he has seen this more clearly than most.
Modernism in the English Church Review of Percy Gardner, Modernism in the English Church (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd, 1926). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 28 (1927), 316, 316–18. Dr Gardner has given us an interesting sketch of Modernism to-day in theology and in practice. But, although he tells us that it is ‘a tendency rather than a school’, his view of it is not altogether without ambiguity. A ‘consensus of Modernist opinion’ is contemplated as possible (though not actually extant), and Modernism is even spoken of as a ‘religion’. We leave the book with the impression that Modernism is somehow connected with particular tenets, but with no sense of it being something which has always existed and must always exist—a striving to make theology give some answer to ‘the force and patience of the present time’—and, indeed, we are told that before 1800 there is small trace of any such tendency. In Dr Gardner’s view the only sound philosophy upon which Modernism can be based is ‘activism or pragmatism’.
Fundamental Problems of Life Review of John Stuart Mackenzie, Fundamental Problems of Life: An Essay on Citizenship as Pursuit of Values (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd, 1928). First published in Journal of Philosophical Studies, 4 (1929), 264–6. The reader will remark, and probably welcome, two general characteristics of this book before he has got very far. First, Professor Mackenzie seems to aim at finding some meeting-place for the extremes of modern political philosophy, and in this his book may be compared with Mr Hsiao’s Political Pluralism. Such a meeting-place may be a mere compromise, or it may include and supersede the extremes; and in so far as Prof. Mackenzie has been successful in this matter the meeting-place he discovers is of the latter kind. And secondly, the general view of life to which the reader is introduced is one achieved under the influence of Goethe and Carlyle; and in this matter the author seems to speak to us with the voice of the past—our generation is not, on the whole, much given to quoting these authors. The sub-title describes the book as An Essay on Citizenship as Pursuit of Values, and the argument may be briefly stated as follows: After considering in the First Part the general nature of value, we reach the conclusion that human life consists in the pursuit of values—not, characteristically, in their attainment. Or, if there be attainment, then it is the achievement of a finer sense of the values to be pursued. Where, then, is the wholeness of life to be found? Religion, it is true, gives us a sense of the whole we aim at, a foretaste of completeness, but this sense does not become a concrete experience unless we see that all values contribute to a Common Good. Values may be intrinsic or instrumental, but they are values only in so far as they find their place in this Common Good. This has been recognized by many writers, but it does not follow that the ‘actual or effective will of a community’
is always directed to this end, and the problem is to discover the means by which the Common Good can become the object of the effective will of a society. And we are told that the means we are seeking is to be found in Co-operative Creation, creation by a cooperative group as opposed to the mere individual and the crowd. Readers of Miss Follett’s books will be familiar with this idea, but Professor Mackenzie discusses it in detail in a long chapter called ‘Co-operative Groups.’ The Common Good, his argument continues, implies a Commonwealth. And the three main aspects of this are Cultural, Economic, and Political; which he discusses in relation to Rudolf Steiner’s work on the Three-fold State. In each of these aspects he finds the conception of a common good, compounded by the pursuit of values, intrinsic and instrumental, and achieved by means of co-operative creation. The book ends with a consideration of the problem of a world commonwealth, and some remarks on marriage, the family, population, and education. The book naturally raises many points of interest, into all of which it is impossible to enter here. And the three I choose are probably not the most important. (i) In a chapter on the Value of Truth the author discusses the theories of ‘correspondence’ and ‘coherence,’ and though he concludes that the coherence theory is, on the whole, the better, he says that the correspondence theory at least offers an adequate explanation of historical truth. This is an instance of a meeting of extremes, and it seems to me that the compromise suggested is confused and consequently misleading. ‘Correspondence’ must be seen as an inadequate form of ‘coherence,’ or vice versa, before a true meeting is achieved. One or other must be aufgehoben. And the same is true of the effort to find a meeting-place for the so-called Pluralist and Absolutist theories of politics, which, I think, are contradictory only so long as Pluralism is taken to be more, and Absolutism less, than it is. (ii) In discussing the conception of a Common Good, Professor Mackenzie compares it with the older conceptions of a General Will and a Group Mind. A great many modern writers seem to
me to go wrong in taking the General Will to be a psychological idea, whereas it is fairly clear from Rousseau, and quite clear from Hegel, that they regarded it as an ethical, or even metaphysical, conception, and consequently in no way connected with the Group Mind, which is essentially psychological, where it is not merely a legal fiction. ‘General’ means rational or real with Hegel, and ‘toujours droit’ with Rousseau, and the subsequent confusion is, for the most part, the work of their critics. And so the idea of a Common Good, as a modern translation of an old phrase, is possibly less misleading than the General Will, but is certainly open to the same objection that its language is moral, not metaphysical, and consequently liable to be misunderstood. It depicts a process in terms of change or development, and the necessary identity which change implies is lost sight of. (iii) In the chapter on Cooperative Groups there is some consideration of the State, as one among other groups which make up society, and the author follows Mr McIver in taking the State to mean ‘an independent, or largely independent, political organization established and recognized in a particular country or region.’ (p. 185). The only objection to this procedure is that it leaves us without a word for the distinctively moral aspect of human societies. If we call the State what Hegel named the Civic Community, there is no word left for what for what he called the State, except Commonwealth, which has other associations. And since this has resulted, in some quarters (though not with Professor Mackenzie), in a denial of the supremacy and even of the existence of this aspect, such a use of the word ‘State’ seems to me more misleading than it is sometimes considered. On practical questions the book is eminently sane and moderate—indeed, the reader sometimes finds himself wishing for a more definite, if less well-balanced, statement of opinion. It is a book full of the thoughtful consideration of a man who has kept well abreast of the modern literature of politics, and is as alive to the new as he is conversant with what is old. One particular for which most readers will be grateful to Professor Mackenzie
is the justice he is able to do Bosanquet, by a quieter and more dispassionate estimate of his politico-philosophical writings than some of his critics have achieved.
Authority in Church and State Review of Philip Seth Belasco, Authority in Church and State (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 30 (1929), 426–8. The main subject of this book, which covers a wide and miscellaneous field of topics in a rather unsystematic manner, is the practical problem of authority in Church and State in seventeenth century England. And, for the greater part, it is taken up with an exposition and criticism of the ideas of the early Quakers on this subject. But, at the same time, ‘the book seeks, however modestly, to serve as an introduction to the problem of Authority in Church and State’, that is, the problem in a wider and more permanent sense. And this gives it a dual character: it is an historical survey and an account of the author’s own position. The first concern of the reader will be to ascertain how Dr Belasco joins these two interests, for it is clear from the beginning that he intends them to have a logical connection. Apparently he unites them in his belief that a knowledge of past history is a sine qua non to solving present problems: the present stands on the past logically as well as chronologically. How far, and in what sense, this is true is a difficult question, and we ought not to allow ourselves to be misled by the current assumption that it is unlimitedly true in every sense. But, putting aside the general question, there are two dangerous paths into which this belief may lead a writer: it permits a hasty and facile identification of present with bygone situations and problems, and it encourages vague and unhistorical generalizations about the past. And Dr Belasco, though he has felt the seduction of both these paths, has perhaps found the second the more fascinating. For example, the word Quaker evidently signifies for him two separate things which, however, he does not always distinguish. Sometimes he takes the Quakers to be representatives of a kind
of general mystical attitude, admitting the validity of no external authority whatever, which turns them from historical persons (few of them made such extreme claims) into an abstract point of view; and at others, they are an historical religious sect ‘intimately related to the conditions of their age’ (42). Thus, he tells us in consecutive sentences that Fox was the founder of Quakerism, and that it existed in England long before Fox raised his voice; at one moment the Quaker spirit means any assertion of the unlimited authority of conscience, any insistence that the letter kills, and at another Quakerism is placed in the historical sequence of ideas which first transferred Divine Right from the Pope to the King and later to the individual conscience, and is therefore seen to belong in origin essentially to the seventeenth century. In these circumstances, then, the reader will, I think, do well not to pay close attention to the connexion Dr Belasco finds between the two sides of his book. So far as the book is an historical study of the relations of Church and State in seventeenth century England, it has much to recommend it, though there are defects along with merits. Dr Belasco appears sometimes to make an attempt to separate, and then bring together again, politics and religion; but in this century they were so far indistinguishable as to make any suggestion that they can be set over against one another misleading. Frequently, also, the history is a little too simple, as when he says that ‘in the Commonwealth period, Englishmen achieved a certain measure of freedom’ (45). But often he has a more subtle view to put, and his observation that ‘the Toleration Act does not mark the birth of religious toleration, but establishes for the first time, with the connivance of all Protestant Churches, the right of religious persecution of the State’ (228), is altogether admirable. In dealing with the Quakers in general the author gives a sympathetic and well-documented account of their practical attitudes towards the civil and ecclesiastical power, but I think he is mistaken (at any rate on the evidence he adduces) in supposing that this attitude— even in the case of Penn—ever amounted to a thorough-going
theory. The Quakers questioned a great many of the assumptions of politics and organized religion, but they took without criticism ‘the commonly accepted practical virtues of Christianity’ (‘conscience’, indeed, meant very little else than the free operation of this particular moral attitude), and for all their freedom of outlook on political and ecclesiastical questions, they certainly encouraged moral obscurantism. The last section is taken up with a defence of William Penn’s attitude towards James II’s religious policy, which is ably conducted and is in many ways the best part of the book. On more speculative matters Dr Belasco cannot be said to go very deep. His interest is exclusively in practical questions, and indeed the problems of Authority and Sovereignty have for him, as they had for most of the writers he examines, no other than a purely practical bearing. He has no use for any but a pluralistic theory to explain a pluralism of opinion. And he is much influenced by the New Individualism of certain contemporary political thinkers—an individualism which appears to differ from the old only by being warmed up to satisfy a new generation. On the whole the book seems accurate, except in a few minor details: Descartes is said to come after the Quakers (14), but Barclay is spoken of as ‘referring to the Cartesians’ (36); and Burnet is made Archbishop of Canterbury. But its most awkward feature is the difficulty the reader experiences (owing to the style of exposition adopted) of ascertaining whether an argument is the author’s own, somebody else’s, or merely hypothetical.
Clemenceau Review of Jean Martet, Clemenceau, tr. Milton Waldman (London: Longmans, Green and Co). First published in Cambridge Review, 51 (1930), 332. This book consists, in the main, of conversations between Clemenceau and his secretary M. Jean Martet, who is an Eckermann rather than a Boswell. Clemenceau became a legend before his death, and the legendary Clemenceau is so engaging a figure that it would be absurd to complain of this account of him and his opinions. The conversations begin in 1927 when Clemenceau remarks, ‘I am not ill, I am just dying.’ And though for the most part they deal with war-time and post-war affairs, his earlier life comes in for some discussion. The legendary Clemenceau is a strange contradiction: an Epicurean—not a scholar—who has been drawn into politics. Au Soir de la Pensée introduced him to the English public as a man of wide, if miscellaneous, intellectual interests: this book shows him an undaunted man of action, a man of violence and of one idea, who can hate his enemies with the utmost intensity and love his friends with moderation. But he is always willing to retire from the political arena to his cottage in La Vendée—or, while still in Paris, into a kind of inner Vendée of sardonic merriment—and declare that ‘looked at from Vega, the greatest statesmen do not seem to deserve so much hate.’ In these moods, and in this book they seem to predominate, he never tires of expressing his love for the great age of Greek life and art, his contempt for Rome, and his belief in the decadence of modern Europe. ‘Roman architecture,’ he remarks, ‘gains greatly by being in ruins.’ It is an interesting book, and has several interesting illustrations. Like most of us I suppose, Clemenceau looked his best ‘at 10 years of age.’
The Meaning of Culture Review of John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture (London: Cape, 1930). First published in Cambridge Review, 51 (1930), 367–8. It seems that three different notions of culture have gone to shape our civilization. And, while it is impossible to reconcile them, there are few periods of our history when they have not been operative together. The first is the notion of culture as the indiscriminate acquisition of knowledge of whatever sort or kind: the pathetic, febrile eagerness for encyclopaedic information. This notion is, I believe, congenial both to youth and to old age. It is instinctive in youth, the natural condition of which is activity ill-distinguished from external achievement: in old age it is calculated, because often the only superiority old age can claim is sheer quantity of experience and, since it may be expected to make the most of what it has, its inclination will be towards a quantitative view of culture. Nevertheless, it is, I believe, a fanatic, breathless view, totally out of harmony with the real conditions of human life: it has no answer ready for death. The opposites here are Culture and Ignorance. The second is the notion of culture as the acquisition of ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world.’ This is naturally associated with the name of Matthew Arnold, and seems to lie behind many of the literary opinions of Mr. T. S. Eliot. It is a selective view, and appears to offer some escape from the purposelessness and anxiety of the other view. In literature we are bidden read ‘the classics’, in life follow a path beaten by ‘great men’; art consists of ‘the masters’—who are, so to speak, born old. This view seems to have some answer for death; it is not the hopeless pursuit of an ever-retreating aim. And here the opposites are Culture and Anarchy. These two notions of culture, dominated by a stronger sense of the past and the future than of the present, lie together at the root
of our civilization; their voices have been loudest, their influence predominant. But there is a third view, which begins by throwing over altogether the notion, common to both the former views, of culture in terms of acquisition. It proposes neither a quantitative, nor (in the usual sense) a qualitative, but a personal criterion for culture. Behind it lies an improvident desire for freedom, integrity: like Montaigne, it is ‘besotted unto liberty.’ Nothing is essential but an integrated self whose purpose is not to remember, adopt or assimilate, but to live a life contemporary with itself. The past and future are nothing to it except in so far as they come alive in the present. The sense of mortality, which, I suppose, every notion of culture must meet, in this case leads, neither to feverish activity, nor to a desire for a ‘classic’ permanence, but to a determination to find an altogether extemporary satisfaction in life. What is valued is not the fruit of experience, but the flower—something we know only in a present enjoyment and cannot garner. Death is not outrun; it is denied, dismissed. This notion opposes Culture to Despotism; and, I suppose, may not improperly be associated with the name of Epicurus. Mr Powys’ book is an exposition of the meaning and implications of this third notion of culture. ‘The essence of culture,’ he says, ‘is the conscious development of our awareness of existence.’ Culture does not show itself among men as something acquired and noteworthy; it does not, in order to flourish, require to ‘show’ itself at all. And where it is confronted with opposition, it can afford ‘to use the weapon of ironical submission,’ for it can sustain no irreparable defeat so long as it refuses to compete with ‘the world.’ It is the determination, and all that this involves, ‘to abide by one’s own taste—though naturally with many ironic reserves.’ ‘The least possible amount of culture, when what it does is to set free and round off the natural movements of the individual psyche, is better than the greatest possible amount of it when it hangs heavy and stiff upon the outside of one’s skin.’ Culture is, then, a way of life, a religion. It does not imply that we consider our own path the noblest or the wisest, but simply that we know
it to be our own and value it as such. Culture desires to avoid, not ‘specific errors,’ but any hint of tyranny. The book is written with distinction, and there is no doubt that it embodies the experiences of a peculiarly sensitive mind. But, as an exposition of this notion of culture, it appears to me in some respects defective. It moves round the idea, but its grasp is not always sure and the elusive prey escapes. For example, this view of culture can tolerate no separation of pursuits or interests, everything is seen to subserve a single end, and Mr Powys insists upon this. But his book is divided into two ‘parts’—The Analysis of Culture, and The Application of Culture—and twelve chapters— e.g. Culture and Literature, Culture and Religion, Culture and Poetry, Culture and Happiness—and in so far as these divisions are insisted upon they introduce another and quite extraneous view of culture. It seems to me that his form of exposition disagrees with what he wants to say. This, perhaps, is not very important; but if we could do without talking in a way contradictory of our real view, we should be less in danger of thinking in this way. Then again, Mr Powys sometimes falls into a way of speaking which belongs, not to his view of culture, but rather to the view which opposes culture to anarchy. He speaks of ‘the classics’, ‘good books’, ‘important things’; whereas whether a thing is important, or a book good depends (in his view) not on the intrinsic character of the thing or book, but upon the person with whom it comes in contact. And there is a hint now and again of a desire for that spurious intellectual cosmopolitanism which affects to be equally at home with all literatures and equally sympathetic to all religions. We ought, I think, to notice these things, because an allegiance to a particular view is uncertain until we have thrown overboard all that conflicts with it. And this, I think, Mr Powys has not quite achieved. At times, also, he lapses into exceedingly commonplace advice on what to read and how to look at pictures which, in a writer of less distinction and sincerity, would appear to come perilously near to Mr Arnold Bennett’s worst ‘How to live on twenty-four hours a day’ style. And his chapter on Culture and
Painting is little better than a rag-bag. However, these are faults mainly of exposition, and if the book had been thrown into a less imposing, less atomic form, all that is commonplace in it (and there is very little) would, I think, have fallen away from sheer lack of place or relevance. And we should be left with a book on the level of its best chapters—those on Culture and Nature, Culture and Love, and Culture and Human Relations—full of uncommon insight. The value of the book seems to lie partly in its appropriateness to the present time. It presents a view of culture which, indeed, depends upon no particular circumstances and which, on the whole, meets more difficulties than it raises, but, what is more, it meets some of the difficulties which are peculiarly our own. This is not the place to consider how far an attempt to follow it out would lead to a way of life very different from our present way. Mr Powys sees clearly enough that there is, to say the least, no pre-established harmony between his notion of culture and the modern world, but I should like to have found in his book some more positive discussion of whatever relation there is. As it stands, culture seems to offer an effective escape, but behind its happiness hovers always, in crass contradiction, the confused and gloomy background of life as it is passed by ‘the world.’ But I must not appear ungrateful. The book has the rare merit of being entirely free from any infection of sentimentality; and, though it cannot be said to have performed for its notion of culture what, for another notion, Culture and Anarchy performed, it is certainly worthy of its theme.
The Principles of Politics Review of George Edward Gordon Catlin, The Principles of Politics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930). First published in Cambridge Review, 51 (1930), 400. This is an attempt to make political theory into a science ‘in the strict sense in which chemistry is a science.’ It begins with a discussion of the character of science and of previous attempts at the construction of a political science, and reaches the admirable preliminary conclusions that such a science must not be afraid of being abstract, and must free itself from all pretension of founding a science of history or of predicting historical events. Prof. Catlin is conscious, also, that a political science must, somehow, be quantitative, but he does not develop this idea, and the book contains few references to statistics and statistical generalization, which (I should have imagined) would be the most hopeful method of constructing this science. ‘Politics’ is the scientific study of ‘the act of social control or of government, in the broadest sense of that word.’ And ‘the will,’ or ‘the individual as a will,’ is taken to be the unit of political science: ‘for politics the will is an atom.’ But beyond this, Prof. Catlin appears to prefer an economic to a chemical analogy. The individual, we are told, desires a system of ‘control’ which guarantees him security: he is a ‘consumer,’ not of economic goods, but of security. This he obtains by ‘supporting’ some ‘security-producing authority.’ And here it is possible to introduce a genuinely quantitative conception: ‘in so far as this transfer of support from one security-producing authority to another takes place by the acts of individuals, it is not only quantitative but admits of actual measurement.’ The unit of measurement is ‘the vote.’ This is, of course, ‘an artificial measure; it is token-money. It stands for one conventional unit of “support”.’ And so on. The State is ‘an organization of persons to maintain the effective production
of a given type of political goods.’ And, ‘the economic law of decrease of profits in proportion to increase of prices beyond the limit of marginal utility has its parallel in the political field in the curve of effects resulting from increased doses of force.’ How far all this, and other things in the book, will appear intelligible to a reader unacquainted with Professor Catlin’s earlier work, The Science and Method of Politics, I cannot say. It is not, I think, likely to appear less fantastic. Any attempt to develop a genuinely quantitative study of politics deserves encouragement, but I do not myself see the necessity of clinging so closely to the economic analogy. And for the rest, I have found it peculiarly difficult to ascertain what exactly Prof. Catlin’s views are. It is a large book with, on an average, two inches of footnotes to a page. It might, perhaps, be described as a systematically tangential discussion of the idea of a science of politics. I have failed entirely to discover a connected argument running through it, and have been compelled to conclude that Prof. Catlin’s learning (which is evidently great) is better than his judgment.
What is Conservatism? and The Pathetic Fallacy Review of Keith Feiling, What is Conservatism?, Criterion Miscellany, No. 14 (London: Faber and Faber, 1930); and Lllewlyn Powys, The Pathetic Fallacy — a Study in Christianity (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1930). First published in Cambridge Review, 51 (1930), 512. Both these are excellently and vigorously written books, both are short; and together they discuss two questions of considerable contemporary interest. They stand apart because, while Mr Feiling believes in Conservatism, Mr. Powys considers Christianity a moribund religion. But, what is more interesting, they stand together because they are faced by the same problem, that of historical identity. Conservatism is an historical phenomenon, and as such it must be supposed somehow to have changed and yet to have remained the same. Mr Feiling makes it his business to attempt a description of ‘the continuing spirit of Conservatism’ (in virtue of which he considers it to ‘remain the same’), and also to discuss why it has never been realized completely in history and what steps might be taken to achieve its realization now. He insists equally on identity and change. The essence of Conservatism, it appears, is a belief in quality, inequality (as a fact to be faced), energy and permanence, and ‘reciprocity is the essence of Conservative justice.’ The programme is, briefly, to stop listening to our ‘elder statesmen’ and ‘to face the facts as we find them.’ And if, when he concludes that ‘our cause survives only by continued absorption of liberal ideas,’ we are tempted to enquire, In defending Conservatism, have you not transformed it? He would quite properly reply that it is not he, but history which has transformed it. There has been change, but since there has been continuity also, identity has not been lost. The main defects of his view, genuinely Conservative defects,
appear to me his undue satisfaction with what has already been accomplished in the way of establishing equality of opportunity, and his belief that ‘the founders of Conservatism’ were better than their successors. Christianity, like Conservatism, must be supposed to have changed and yet to have remained the same. Mr Powys, however, insists upon it remaining the same without changing—and this is the main ground of his contention that it is moribund. For the rest, it appears to be based upon the belief that all religion is a product of fear and is a mere interference with ‘a clear and enlightened vision of life.’ The original essence of Christianity, for him, seems to be a feeling of pity or compassion. But ‘from the beginning Christianity has been perverted.’ And his book is, for the most part, an account of this perversion. A view of anything, however, and specially of a religion, which regards its history as a tale of mere perversion, appears to me to be based upon a fundamental misconception: in an historical phenomenon, change cannot be merely dismissed. And the notion that Christianity (or anything else) can be discredited by recounting its history is, I should have thought, as much out of fashion as it is out of logic. ‘Your father was a serf, mine was a chemist. And what do you propose to conclude from that?’ says a character in the Cherry Orchard. But, in spite of his weak arguments, Mr Powys seems to me to have more of the ‘stomach of truth’ in him than many modern apologists for our religion.
God and Man Review of Hastings Rashdall, God and Man (Papers and Sermons), ed. H. D. A. Major and F. L. Cross (Oxford: Blackwell, 1930). First published in Cambridge Review, 52 (1930), 39. Dean Rashdall was not among those who think it boring and unnecessary to convince other people; he was, indeed, an instinctive controversialist, and he believed in controversy because he believed controversy promotes truth. In short, although his general attitude was sincerely speculative, his mind had in it a hard streak (absent from the minds of the greatest philosophers) which permitted him the joys of advocacy. As a philosopher and theologian his chief weaknesses were his inability to forget, or put aside, the practical aim of a moral teacher, and his inability to escape from the language of a belief, the substance of which he had rejected. He was, however, a subtle, systematic (if cautious) thinker, unwilling to cover up the deficiencies of an argument by an appeal to ‘experience’, or to close an argument with the assertion that the ‘human intellect’ could go thus far, but no farther. All these characteristics are illustrated in this third volume of his collected papers. There is great variety in the subjects discussed. And besides those which deal with such topics as Immortality, Theism, the Trinity, and Justice, there are three or four historical essays on mediaeval theologians.
The Making of the Christian Mind Review of Gauis Glenn Atkins, The Making of the Christian Mind (London: Heinemann, 1929). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 31 (1930), 203–8. Professor Atkins describes his book as an attempt to trace the development of the Christian mind. He maintains that there has been ‘an essential development’ which has made Christianity ‘richly different from what it was at the beginning’. The chapters follow one another in what appears to be intended for a chronological order, and each represents a new phase in the making of the Christian mind. The making of creeds is followed by the organization of a church, the mystical mind succeeds the sacramental mind, until the ‘rediscovery of the mind of Christ’ by the ‘humanitarian mind’ of the present age ‘completes the long cycle’ (315). But the history of Christianity, as indeed the author appears at moments to recognize, has not been so simple as this; nor perhaps may we claim that this latest age has completed the process. Each chapter, then, represents not so much a new phase in the development, as the emphasis of an element present from the beginning. Thus, arriving at the Church half-way through the book, what we are shown is not something which did not exist before, but a fuller development of what existed from the beginning. And this half-chronological, half-expository scheme of the book makes it less coherent than it might have been had one or other plan been excluded. Of the historical aspect of the book I can say little. There are some passages of insight; but the author is perhaps a little facile in his explanations and too ready to let us into the real ‘secret’ of this or that. It is peculiarly free from obvious party bias, but not, of course, entirely free from the broad assumptions which the membership of a particular church carries with it. What interests me more, however, are the presuppositions which lie behind
the plan of the book, and it is because these are not concealed (though I can scarcely suppose them to have been fully thought out) that the book deserves attention. They are important because they are the kind of presupposition which lies behind any history of Christianity. And the chief merit of this book is that the author has recognized their existence, while its chief defect lies in his failure to see them clearly. Professor Atkins starts with the thesis that the history of Christianity shows an ‘essential development’, and his book is mainly concerned to trace the ‘fact basis’ of this development. But behind this lies a question which must find some sort of answer: What is the character of this development? If the Christian mind has changed, in what sense is it still Christian? Is it still Christian because, underneath the change, it has always adhered to some essential core of truth, or why? In more philosophical language, Where does the identity of Christianity lie? This problem of identity is not so acute with some other religions as with Christianity. With them there has often been little change of surrounding civilization and little internal development; Christianity, however, has suffered both extensively. But that scarcely excuses Professor Atkins for giving us not one answer, but five (perhaps six), each inconsistent with any other, and all save one inconsistent with the main thesis of the book. (i) His first answer is this. ‘The historic Jesus is the source which, through changing form and circumstance, have (sic) kept it Christian’ (22 n.). But if all that has changed is ‘form and circumstance’ our problem does not arise, for in no sense can there be said to have been an ‘essential development’. ‘The Reformation went deep, but it did not reach the historic foundations of Christian faith’ (116): it ‘did not radically change the Christian mind’ (265). This I take to mean that, inasmuch as it was a ‘back to Jesus’ movement, it still adhered to the source which alone could ‘keep it Christian’.2 In this mood, then, Professor Atkins identifies [2] Yet on p. 272 he remarks that ‘catholicity of spirit is the very essence of Christianity’, and that it was ‘lost’ at the Reformation.
the Christian mind with the mind of Christ, which again is not distinguished from what he takes to be the mind of the historic Jesus (316). Christianity is simply ‘Jesus’ religion’ (45). ‘Essential Christianity’ is the Sermon on the Mount; and to depart from the Gospels is the surest way of leaving Christianity (253, 275, 315– 316). ‘Back to Jesus’ is the road to Christianity (315, 317). And the mind of Jesus or ‘Jesus’ ethic’ has proved itself strong enough ‘to survive [unchanged?] any change in temporal condition’ (37). This, however, seems to me not only a contradiction of the main thesis of the book, but also a denial of most of what Christianity has usually been taken to mean. Christianity cannot be simply ‘Jesus’ religion’ because, at present, it involves ideas or beliefs about Him and about His death. (ii) Professor Atkins’s second mood is similar to the first, but distinguishable from it. ‘Where Christianity has, in any period, grown too external and in the way of being lost in some form, it has corrected that by being recalled to the reality of the inner life; or again, the process has been exactly reversed. And yet every correction has been always along the line of something implicit in it to begin with, and the final result has been the enrichment of its life’ (216). The ‘something’ with which Christianity began is, of course, the mind of Jesus. But mere action and reaction, always governed by and returning to the fixed content of a historical source, does not appear to warrant the name of ‘essential development’. And, though it is asserted that the end is richer than the beginning, it is difficult to see how this could be so, even if it were possible to agree upon some point as ‘the end’. (iii) At other times the whole of the development of the Christian mind is viewed as the ‘substitution’ (e.g. of ‘a mind about Christ for the mind of Christ’, 45) of something foreign in place of the mind of Jesus : or as a ‘departure’ (140) from that mind. Indeed, Professor Atkins goes so far as to say that ‘it would be possible to maintain that the mind of Jesus, as revealed in the Apparently a loss of its ‘essence’ does not constitute a break in the identity of Christianity.
Gospels, has had, in great ranges of historic Christianity, less influence upon the conduct of life than the mind of Mohammed upon Mohammedanism’ (297). Or again, the mind of Christ has never wholly been lost, or else Christianity would long ago have itself been lost, but it has been much overlaid’ (315). Indeed, in this mood, every phase which he distinguishes in the history of Christianity he regards as simply the ‘overlaying’ of the mind of Christ by something foreign to it; and progress lies in ‘some lightening of its baggage-train’ (317). Similarly, the so-called development of which he is writing appears as nothing more than ‘interplay’ between ‘the essential and timeless contribution of Jesus with the whole content of Western civilization’ (51); interplay, that is, between two elements the first of which shows no change at all and never coalesces with the second. But in what sense is all this a development of the Christian mind? (iv) In another mood Professor Atkins uses the word ‘modification’ (248) to represent the character of the development he is considering. Or, meaning the same thing I think, he speaks of it as consisting of a series of ‘adaptations’ to meet new conditions. Thus, the first stage is the ‘shading and colour’ (34) which the mind of Jesus suffered at the hands of His first disciples. What Jesus bequeathed was not a ‘Programme’ but a ‘spirit’ which could be adapted to meet all circumstances. And this adaptation, though it may depart from the original in some respects, does not thereby cause a break in the identity of the religion (88). Here we seem to catch sight of something which might be called development. But what is given with one hand is taken back with the other, for the ‘contribution of Jesus’, His mind, is ‘essential, timeless, and changeless’ (51, 316) and departure from it constitutes a real break of identity. (v) In two passages (one of which, however, is ambiguous)a fifth view is suggested. The development of Christianity is in the nature of an ‘interpretation’ of the mind of Jesus (88, 319). This is a common conception. But, since it also implies the existence of a historical ‘source which is prior to the interpretation both
chronologically and logically, and, at the same time, draws a distinction between ‘what has come to us’ and ‘our interpretation of it’, it seems to me indefensible. It has, however, an advantage over the other views, in that it may plausibly be made to seem consistent with real development and change. (vi) Professor Atkins, however, has yet another mood. ‘Jesus’ contribution’ was the historical beginning of an ‘essential development’ which he calls the making of the Christian mind; but Christianity is not mere adherence to this source, nor the mere amplification of a fixed and original datum, it is ‘the deposit of its constituent centuries’ (324). And in this mood he sees that it is contradictory to look for Christianity in a ‘back to Jesus’ movement—‘the issues of Christianity have never been backward’ (334). I cannot say more about this view than that it seems to me to contain the germ of a notion of Christianity more defensible than any other; and that Professor Atkins’s book would have been better not only had he adopted one instead of six contradictory presuppositions, but if he had adopted this last rather than any of the others. Had he done so his book would have been very different from what it is. Now, for the purposes of this review all I have attempted is to shew that Professor Atkins’s book rests upon conflicting presuppositions. I have discussed these because they (or others to take their place) lie behind every history of Christianity, and the sooner they are thought out the better our histories will be. And I think it is important to see that they are not conclusions to be drawn from a study of history, but real presuppositions, and therefore necessary to be thought out first. It is for this reason, I suppose, that historians frequently treat them as matter of mere opinion, or as an opportunity for free speculation. There is, however, a further and wider question which I have not more than touched upon: Which presupposition about the nature of the development of the Christian mind is the most coherent? And all I can contribute towards the answer is the following elementary suggestions. (i) The notion that there has been no development
or change is indefensible both historically and logically. (ii) The identity of a historical phenomenon cannot be preserved by mere adherence to a fixed original datum, because (a) there can be no identity without a real change of some sort, and (b) there is no fixed original datum for us to adhere to. (iii) If there has been change and development there must also be an identity, for without an identity there can be no change. Christianity is neither a bottle filled once and for all time, nor one into which anything may be poured so long as the label is retained. (iv) All these phrases—adaptation, interpretation, substitution, etc.—are misleading, remarks Professor Atkins (323). They certainly are; and that is the best reason for not using them. What we must keep hold of is the fact that we are discussing the development of a world of ideas, and consequently any ‘physical’ analogy is bound to be misleading. Ideas are not like bricks to be added one above another, nor are they like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle merely to be replaced by one another. The first idea we have is in no sense the ‘foundation’ of all that grows from it; nor may a later stage be tested by comparing it with a former. In the development of a world of ideas a former stage, as such, is always lost in a later, and there can be no returning. (v) We must give up speaking of the ‘essence of Christianity’ if that means merely ‘the most important part of Christianity’. Whatever Christianity is, it is not its ‘essence’ unless that be taken to mean the whole of it.
Experience of God Review of Herbert Henry Farmer, Experience of God: a Brief Enquiry into the Grounds of Christian Conviction (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1929). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 31 (1930), 302–3. This book is what it claims to be—‘A brief enquiry into the grounds of Christian conviction’. And I may say at once that it appears to me admirable both in plan and execution. It is divided into three parts. In the first it is suggested that religion claims that the objects with which it is concerned are real and that they are spiritual. And Mr Farmer distinguishes three elements in religion in virtue of which this claim is made: the coercive, the pragmatic, and the reflective. The coercive force in a religion belongs to what is sacred or seen to be of absolute worth; the pragmatic justification of a religion is its power to make a man at home in his world; and the reflective element in a religion is its theoretical coherence. The reflective element, however, is not a separate element but a combination of the other two. In discussing the coercive element Mr Farmer’s argument appears to take the form, ‘Religions in history all show a coercive element, and (when this has been analysed) we must attribute it to religion in general’; but he omits to show us how he first identifies the religions in history. And if this coercive character is one of the means by which a religion (and ‘the touch of God’) is distinguished from something else, then it were better not to confuse the issue by appealing to history, or by speaking of ‘the coercive touch of God’; for, according to this argument, whatever is (in this sense) coercive, is of God. The argument next turns to meet certain challenges to religion,—the challenges of bias, of theory, and of fact. And an exceptionally good account is given of the bias ‘arising from the modern comparative study of religions’. Perhaps ‘bias’ does not quite express the meaning of the charge against this study from
the point of view of religion. What Mr Farmer is really (and rightly) saying is that this challenge to religion rests upon either the fallacious idea that the psychological or historical origins of a belief are relevant to its force or justification as a religious belief, or the absurd notion that because beliefs have changed and are various they are all equally valueless. The chapter on the challenge of theory, however, appears to me irrelevant. For, if ‘theology is a consequence of religion, not a cause of it’ (and even then not a necessary consequence), any challenge which a theology as such seems to offer a religion as such is beside the mark and is no challenge at all, because it is based upon an ignoratio elenchi: and this is equally true of any other genuinely theoretical argument— e.g. a scientific argument. Under the head of the challenge of fact the questions of pain and evil are discussed. The last part of the book consists of a rather formal application of these ideas to Christianity. This part is less satisfying than the rest, but that is probably on account of its brevity. Though, at moments, there is a suspicion that the more general argument of the earlier parts of the book is being used to justify existing theological conceptions rather than as a basis from which to criticize and reform them. However, here as elsewhere, Mr Farmer succeeds mostly in asking the right questions, even if he does not always provide satisfactory answers, and his argument rarely falls below a very high standard of relevance and consistency.
Afterthoughts and Aphorisms Review of Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts (London: Constable and Co., 1931); and Francis Herbert Bradley, Aphorisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930). First published in Cambridge Review, 52 (1931), 287. The reader who has long ago abandoned the hope of discovering wisdom in the pages of those slim volumes of Great Thoughts and Golden Words may yet, I think, find something worth his while in a book of aphorisms which springs from the experiences of a single mind. For what is tiresome in those collections of miscellaneous thoughts is the lack of any sense of unity, any sense that here are developed, with more or less consistency, the reactions of a single mind to its various experiences. Each thought, however great or golden, is solitary and consequently lifeless and unavailing. But, in a book of aphorisms which proceed from a single mind, he may expect to find some unity and consequently some enlightenment. And these expectations are, I think, fulfilled in both these books before me. They will not, of course, be interesting to everybody. Like most collections of pensées, they will not be of much interest to anyone not interested in himself, or not interested in what are, perhaps, the only two topics worth discussing—love and death. But to the right kind of reader they will afford, not a feast, but an exquisitely cooked cold luncheon. For there is nothing slipshod about the style of these aphorists; and, as Mr Smith says, aphorisms are salted not sugared almonds, and a mind without some element of frigidity, even of cynicism, is not likely to produce any worth our tasting. The world which, ten years ago, burst upon us in Trivia was fascinating indeed. And what was intriguing was not merely the perfection of these ‘pieces of moral prose,’ but the revelation in them of a mind at once whimsical and profound, and one almost wholly disabused of what is commonplace. Here was a mind aware
of the problems of life and metaphysics but temperamentally relieved of the necessity of finding any save a whimsical answer to them; aware, also, that local gossip is always more interesting than international politics, that men’s weaknesses are more interesting than their virtues, and not ashamed to admit it. Here was supreme confidence, a Montaigne-like confidence, in personal appreciations; a man satisfied with the delights of conversation without requiring indisputable conclusions; a man reconciled to existence only on account of its extreme oddness; and a man without reticence. And here was a world in which asparagus and mislaid umbrellas jostled with the European situation for attention, and always won; a world in which men and women were continually meditating upon the universe at tea-time, and reflecting upon the odd contrasts of human existence—that minds which contemplate the universe should also catch buses, lose their luggage and buy shoe laces. And to this world, also, belong these Afterthoughts. Here the same oddities are remarked and the same difficulties propounded. Personal identity: ‘How my reason totters in her contemplative tower, when people say they have seen me in the street.’ The contrast between dreams and achievements: ‘How many of our day dreams would darken into nightmares if there seemed any danger of their coming true’; and between achievement and enjoyment: ‘There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.’ The same enthusiasms: ‘When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at last real conversation begins, and life is delicious.’ The same detachment: ‘People say life’s the thing, but I prefer reading.’ ‘I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don’t desire.’ The same limits of endurance: ‘I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel.’ The same sensitiveness: ‘How amazing are those moments when we really possess our possessions.’ And the same ironical inconsequence; ‘The world, as I know from books, is full of abominable evil; indeed, I myself, not many years ago,
had some collars stolen in the wash.’ But these Afterthoughts are not all whimsies: there is acid here, as well. ‘Most people sell their souls and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.’ ‘When people come and talk to you of their aspirations, before they leave you had better count your spoons.’ ‘If with an excess of interest you peer into the lives of others, what you will probably find is that you will have to pay their debts.’ And there is one topic on which Mr Smith is never inconsequent and rarely lighthearted— literature. A man may if he will, be a dilettante, but let such a one keep off literature. And here, as in his pamphlet, The Prospects of Literature, there is a note of disappointment when he touches the subject of contemporary literary achievement. In everything he is fastidious, and most of all in literature. To turn from Afterthoughts to Aphorisms is to find oneself in a far less personal, less whimsical and less artificial world; there is nothing here which could be mistaken for a pose. For at once it is clear that to Bradley life, and not reading, is the thing. There is the same subtlety, the same absence of prejudice, the same acid tang, but there is also an added note of seriousness. Professional philosophers have not earned much of a reputation for themselves as sages where ordinary life is concerned: who does not prefer the Maximes of la Rochefoucauld to the arid verbosity of Schopenhauer’s Aphorismen? But Bradley here is among the exceptions; this posthumous volume of thoughts has little in it to connect it with the life of a professional philosopher. And yet, readers of Bradley’s philosophical works will not be surprised to find that the larger part of these aphorisms is concerned with love, nor to find that what he has to say is always fresh and often profound. ‘If a woman loves you, you are seeking you know not what when you desire that she should also understand you.’ ‘Love in its essence tends to be immoral, for it is the instinctive reference of all to the pleasure of one being.’ ‘With two, love may be platonic, but with three this is harder.’ There reappears here, also, the insistent problem of personal identity; and here too is the recognition of the radical disharmony of human existence.
‘The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.’ ‘Love is the passionate attempt to find oneself in another. And oneself is unique.’ ‘To love unsatisfied the world is a mystery, a mystery which love satisfied seems to comprehend. The latter is wrong only because it cannot be content without thinking itself right.’ But I have said enough to show the reader that he will find in these books many delightful, and some hard, sayings. And he need not be fearful of stumbling upon platitudes. By this I do not mean he will find nothing he has not experienced or thought of for himself, I mean he will find little insignificant or merely tiresome, and nothing vulgar, mawkish, or sentimental.
Hunger and Love Review of Lionel Britton, Hunger and Love, etc. (London and New York: Putnam, 1931). First published in Cambridge Review, 52 (1931), 351. This book of over 700 pages contains the story, told in the form of a kind of back-handed soliloquy in the second person plural, of the early years and struggles of a shop-assistant named Arthur Phelps, who suffers from a kind of intellectual and moral claustrophobia. ‘The call of the belly and the search for a mate’, together with his passion for ‘culture’ are the triple themes of the book. The dishonesty of his employers, the inaccessibility of knowledge and beauty, the prurience of bishops and mayors and the general obtuseness of mankind—these and other things beat upon his mind until ‘you begin to get a sense of the Sinister overshadowing civilization, overspreading the life of mankind’. Mr Bertrand Russell in his introduction says that Arthur Phelps, the hero of the book, is a man ‘with a first-rate mind’. But it is a mind with peculiar obsessions,—a passion for amassing a vast quantity of knowledge and a feeling that ‘it is degrading to a man to live without producing an effect.’ Phelps feels that if he does not succeed, he must fail; and he lacks any real enjoyment of his own appreciations. In fact, what we are given is not the portrait of a ‘first-rate mind,’ but the portrait of another pathetic Kipps or Lewisham with his ‘schema’ and his ‘certificates.’ And the world in which he lives is not the universal world of love and hunger, but pre-war England. It is true that the author has tried by means of astronomical references, to create a kind of solar, firmamental environment, but it remains superficial; what is insistent is the atmosphere of England before the war. And Arthur Phelps, in spite of his rebellious mind, is a child of his age. And what, I think, is most impressive in the book is not the attempt ‘to get over a new conception of the human,’ but the way in which the
ideas and sentiments of pre-war England have been caught, and the sense of ‘growing barbarousness,’ ‘the smell of blood in the air’ which belonged to that time. The ferocious irony with which the England of mid-1914 is attacked in the last three or four chapters is, I think, the best part of the book.
Adventures in Philosophy and Religion Review of James Bissett Pratt, Adventures in Philosophy and Religion (London: Macmillan and Co, 1931). First published in Cambridge Review, 52 (1931), 511. This book consists of four dialogues and a fantasy, of which the most considerable is the first, entitled Socrates’s Adventures in Wonderland: or the Dawning of Dualism. Socrates, returning to earth, meets with representatives of the more important modern philosophies, and one by one he exposes their shortcomings. These philosophies are considered mainly as so many attempts to overcome dualism, the dualism of mind and body; and each of them fails. And Socrates, while he is undergoing a kind of sentimental apotheosis at the end of the dialogue, asserts his belief in the reality of the physical and the psychical. This is followed by Mr Layman’s somewhat tedious Adventures in the New Theology. The rest seems to me nonsense. The author appears to regard his book as a paragon, a piece of ‘good-humoured fun’. Philosophical fun is a specialized taste; and when it is devoid of wit there are few who do not find it tiresome.
Ethical Principles in Theory and Practice Review of Hans Driesch, Ethical Principles in Theory and Practice, tr. W.H. Johnston (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 32 (1931), 326–7. The larger part of this volume is taken up with a discussion of the duties of man. There is a metaphysical introduction to this discussion, and a conclusion in which ‘enlightenment’ or culture, and religion are considered. The major premiss of the argument is that man has been given certain faculties, the development of which is part of the world-plan. And the professor believes that once this is granted man ‘must follow the moral theory which has been developed in this book’. But when the phrase ‘moral theory’ is used it should be understood to mean, not what it usually means, but simply the fruit of Professor Driesch’s reflexions upon such topics as sex, marriage, war, education, property, patriotism, birth control, etc. If we accept the premiss, then, we cannot avoid agreeing with the professor’s views on these subjects. The topics are arranged in a kind of system, but that does not, I think, make the discussion of them more valuable or less random. The reasons we are given for the performance of these duties are often original. For example, all the usual reasons why I should not kill another man are rejected in favour of this—because I ‘do not know what death is’. And an interesting distinction is made between what is absolutely wrong, and what is wrong but admits of certain ‘apologies’. For example, capital punishment is absolutely wrong: but the intentional killing of a man in self-defence admits of apology ‘when the worth of the person attacked is clearly higher than the attacker’. In this country we are not accustomed to go to our professors of philosophy for moral guidance. The reason for this is not, perhaps, because we have any very precise idea of the difference
between philosophy and moral teaching, but because we see no reason to suppose that a good philosopher is necessarily either a wise (in the practical sense) or a good man. And this book is not, I think, likely seriously to shake our faith. Professor Driesch’s general position may be said to be benevolent rather than liberal, cautious rather than revolutionary, puritan rather than pagan, and Eastern rather than Western. But, as Schopenhauer remarked, Moral-Predigen ist leicht, MoralBegründen ist schwer; and Professor Driesch has certainly chosen the easier task.
Religion without God, The New Divine Order, and Philosophy without Metaphysics Review of Fulton John Sheen, Religion without God (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928); Karl Heim, The New Divine Order, tr. E. P. Dickie (London: Student Christian Movement, 1930); and Edmund Holmes, Philosophy without Metaphysics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 32 (1931), 434–5. The reader will, I think, find Dr Sheen’s book not so radical as his title might suggest. In the first place, it is a study of modern theology rather than of modern religion. And secondly, the characteristic of modern theology which is discussed is its determination to dispense with theism. ‘Without God’ means, without ‘God as traditionally understood’. The author, indeed, complains that, in spite of the fact theism is rejected, the word ‘God’ still appears in the writings of the philosophers and theologians which he is discussing: the word God, he concludes, has taken on ‘an entirely new meaning’. But the argument which would persuade us that no conception of God is intelligible which falls outside traditional theism is verbal rather than instructive. And that modern theology cleaves to the word God, yet gives it a new meaning, seems to me neither surprising nor alarming. The main position of the book is the thesis that modern religion replaces the belief in God by ‘a faith in the conservation of human values’; it replaces theism by a form of humanism. After tracing this rejection of theism through the writings of Alexander, Whitehead, Otto, Russell, Croce, etc. (and this he calls the negative aspect of modern religion), Dr Sheen discusses the modern philosophies of Value, for value, he says, ‘has become the primary object of religion’. And he then proceeds to ‘pass a reasoned judgement on
them in the light of history and the philosophy of “the most learned of the saintly and the most saintly of the learned”, St Thomas’. The discussion of the ancestry and history of ‘the contemporary idea of religion’ is skilful and informing. And it is followed by an exposition of the shortcomings of this idea when compared with the Thomist position. In the hands of a writer less alive to the necessities of argument, this concluding section might easily have been no more than a continuation of the merely historical theme; but that is not here the case. And the result is an instructive, if tantalizing, book. The author is more than merely a learned Thomist, but I believe his argument would have been more cogent had he been content to leave behind the guide-book (which he knows so well) at the outset of the journey. The main idea which lies behind Prof. Heim’s book—which consists of three essays on Spiritual healing, Time and Eternity, and the message of the New Testament—is an attempt to work out some of the implications of the belief that religion is not a function among functions, a mere ‘faculty’, but an essential element of all human activity. Old dualisms—such as Nature and Spirit, Time and Eternity—must be reconsidered: and with them go also into the melting-pot of criticism notions such as that of miracle. The book represents, not (like Barth’s work) a return to Kant, but a return to Goethe and Schiller, the champions of an undivided and indivisible life. The theme of Mr Holmes’s book is not, so far as he is concerned, novel. Philosophy is the ‘love of wisdom’, an intimate knowledge of reality which can be achieved only if we abandon ourselves to intuition and feeling. Metaphysics, on the other hand, is radically intellectual, the product of a vicious specialization; and in its hands philosophy becomes a mere game to be played according to the ‘laws of thought’. Not only must philosophy and metaphysics be distinguished, but ‘there is no place for metaphysics in philosophy’. The dispute is not, of course, merely verbal. Mr Holmes’s metaphysical position is certainly uncompromising and is superficially unambiguous, but scarcely an appropriate subject for argument.
John Locke First published in Cambridge Review, 54 (1932), 72–3. In spite of his other titles to fame, John Locke must, I think, be remembered and considered first as a philosopher. For, although the philosophical work for which he is justly famous was the product of the leisure hours of a life spent for the most part in political activity, and was neither published nor completed until he had turned fifty-eight, Locke’s philosophy is so characteristic of the man and has exercised so great an influence upon subsequent thought that it must take a place in history which it never took in his life. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a work hindered by many weaknesses both of conception and composition. It springs, in the first place, not from any radical doubt, any purging scepticism, but from curiosity and a mild perplexity. Locke’s insatiable curiosity is written all over his Journals, and his biographer says that he ‘knew something of almost everything that can be useful to mankind.’ Indeed, the view that it is equally unwarrantable either to doubt everything or to make extravagant claims on behalf of the human mind, which may be said to be the message of Locke’s philosophy, was as much a prejudice and a compromise with which he began as the conclusion with which he finished. Locke is a cautious, patient thinker, not given to paradox and as little controversial as may be: there is nothing audacious about his speculations, and nothing dazzling or even brilliant about his writing. The Essay has perhaps less of the character of a tour de force than any other philosophical work ever published. And these, it seems to me, are in the nature of defects in a philosophical writer. Mere ‘soundness’ is a vulnerable quality in a philosophy; it is more at the mercy of time than audacity and brilliance. For in philosophy what is daring is provocative and will always retain its power to awaken, while what is cautious and sound is after a while forgotten, having
about it a soporific effect. And it is always more difficult to doubt radically and intelligently than to believe. And again, it was not for the man who refused the opportunity of a career and preferment in the church for fear he might fail to make his mark there, when he turned to philosophy, to set before himself any but a modest task. For the Essay is no system of philosophy, but a cautious attempt to determine the limits of our knowledge by enquiring into the character of the mind. It is a view of the limits of human understanding. And this attitude, also, more sensible to divisions, distinctions and separations than to agreements and unities, is responsible for many of the defects of Locke’s philosophy. From its very plan his work was destined to be inconclusive and to result in a compromise. And it is the quality of compromise which is at once the distinction and the weakness of this philosophy. In virtue of this quality Locke was said (by Horace Walpole) to be the first philosopher who introduced common-sense into his writings. But it is a dangerous mixture. Common-sense and philosophy are not apt to agree; and when common-sense is represented as the criterion of philosophic truth the result can be nothing but error. But what is characteristic and important in a philosophical thinker is not so much the conclusions he reaches as the way he sets about it. And it is here that Locke shows himself to be a genuine, perhaps great philosopher. Apart from ‘a mind covetous of truth,’ which is of course elementary, Locke stands out by reason of the independence of his thought. His thinking is his own; he does not make the foolish attempt to be a scholar and a philosopher at the same time. He was not ill-read in philosophy; but he knew that the philosopher’s business is to think rather than to read, to know his own mind rather than that of others. ‘This,’ he says, ‘I am certain, I have not made it my business either to quit or follow any authority in the ensuing discourse: truth has been my only aim, and wherever that has appeared to lead, my thoughts have impartially followed, without minding whether the footsteps of any other lay that way or not. Not that I want a due respect to other men’s opinions; but after all, the greatest reverence is
due to truth: and I hope it will not be thought arrogance to say, that perhaps we should make greater progress in the discovery of rational and contemplative knowledge, if we sought it in the fountain, in the consideration of things themselves and made use rather of our own thoughts than other men’s to find it. The floating of other men’s opinions in our brains makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true.’ Locke’s independence and his modesty are remarkable in that they are, perhaps, the only uncompromising traits in a character otherwise given over to moderation. And further, Locke was not only an independent thinker and a candid thinker, but he chose a style of writing in agreement with his cast of mind—a colloquial style. He was as unwilling to use the language of the schools as merely to rehash the ideas of his predecessors. But in this matter of style he cannot be said to have been altogether successful. For, whatever the merits of saying what you mean in the language of social intercourse, it leads sometimes to misunderstanding which might otherwise have been avoided. And, for example, Locke’s colloquial use of the word ‘experience’ resulted in an ambiguity which rends his philosophy from end to end. He was not a great enough writer to follow the track which avoids at once jargon and ambiguity— that is nur für die Schwindelfreie. Nevertheless, Locke’s instincts were those of a philosopher; and his great achievement is to have thought systematically and to have escaped making a system. A philosophy of this kind, something constructed to satisfy the thinker’s own mind, without the attraction of brilliance or the provocation of audacity, is not one for which we should predict a long and influential career in the world. And the fact that for a century Locke’s Essay was a centre of philosophical interest, not only in England (where commonplace philosophy has more chance than elsewhere) but also and particularly in France (where compromise is viewed with suspicion and modesty mistaken for weakness) seems to call for explanation. The fact of Locke’s influence upon eighteenth century French thought is undeniable. The Essay was translated in 1700, and it was adopted as the
official philosophy of the Encyclopedists until they could provide one of their own; and even then, what they provided was very much after Locke. Voltaire leads the chorus of acclamation in the Lettres Anglaises. A multitude of writers, he says, have written the romance of the soul; Locke has written its history. D’Alembert says in the Encyclopédie: ‘ce que Newton n’avait ose ou n’aurait peut-être pu faire, Locke 1’entreprit et 1’exécuta avec succès.’ Diderot admits himself a disciple. And Helvétius and Condillac recommend Locke by appropriating the greater part of his philosophy. Nevertheless, it was not, I think, merely on account of its merits that Locke’s philosophy exercised so great an influence. What was influential was not so much Locke as a perversion of Locke; for the French thinkers saw in this Christian, English, Puritan, cautious thinker the founder of Deism and the apostle of Materialism. They made a system of what was never, in Locke’s view, more than a methodical attempt to think clearly about the limits of knowledge, and in the name of that system they upset the world, for a little while. It was, however, in England itself that Locke’s influence was most direct and genuine. Hobbes was infected with materialism, Berkeley and Hume (both of whom owed much to Locke) with paradox, and Locke, in spite of criticism and opposition, took, and for a while held, the supreme place in English philosophy. But, for the Englishman, what is interesting and memorable is not so much the author of the Essay, the father of the socalled ‘philosophy of experience’ or the foundation member of the Royal Society, but rather the Locke who was in at the birth of the Whig party and who provided liberalism with its gospel and creed. It is the ‘friends of freedom’ who Locke’s earliest biographer thinks will welcome his biography. Liberalism was not, of course, the invention of Locke; but, standing between two ages, he served as the filter by means of which Puritanism was drained of its immoderation and its ‘enthusiasm’ and was converted into what the eighteenth century knew as Whiggism and the nineteenth as Liberalism. Liberalism is Puritanism made respectable, and nobody contributed more than Locke to this
piece of ‘rescue-work.’ Locke’s doctrines of toleration (a limited toleration), of liberty (a reasonable liberty), of individualism (not a fanatical individualism), of the sovereignty of the people (to be exercised sometimes) and of property, are the seeds from which modern liberalism sprang. And perhaps ‘the rights of nationality’ and ‘the perfectability of the human race’ are the only ideas of importance which have since been added to liberalism. Locke believed in science, in freedom, in progress, in property and the pride of ownership, in stability, in moderation, in compromise, and he believed that truth (liberal truth) is great and will prevail; and it is because of his formulation of a view of life no less than of politics governed by these beliefs that he is counted the father of liberalism. Others, no doubt, before him had been liberals, others have done more than he in the practical application of these ideas, but no one has possessed a more comprehensive grasp of this least comprehensive of views. Locke was the apostle of the liberalism which is more conservative than conservatism itself, the liberalism characterised, not by insensitiveness, but by a sinister and destructive sensitiveness to the influx of the new, the liberalism which is sure of its limits, which has a horror of extremes, which lays its paralysing hand of respectability upon whatever is dangerous or revolutionary. And liberalism was for Locke as much a part of his temperament—Locke ‘who never said anything which could shock or injure anybody’—as a thought-out view of life and politics. Now, whether or not we should remember this side of Locke’s character and work with gratitude must, I suppose, be a matter of opinion. But it is at least remarkable that at the present time the gospel of Locke is less able to secure adherents than any other whatever. At one time it seemed that liberalism, under the stimulus of the romantic movement, might be transformed into something less boring and upholstered; but the spirit of Locke prevailed. And it appears likely that the fate now of this liberalism is to die of neglect. The moderate individualism of Locke has no attraction for those who have embraced a radical, an Epicurean
individualism. Locke’s ‘steady love of liberty’ appears worse than slavery to anyone who, like Montaigne, is ‘besotted with liberty.’ Democracy, parliamentary government, progress, discussion, and ‘the plausible ethics of productivity’ are notions—all of them inseparable from the Lockian liberalism—which fail now to arouse even opposition; they are not merely absurd and exploded, they are uninteresting. Not a little, indeed, of the revolt against so-called Victorianism is in fact a revolt rather against Locke and his legacy of liberalism. This liberalism may have given us our liberties (though that is doubtful), it may be a view of things which will come again, but just now it is not one which commands attention or indeed respect. I am not, of course, referring merely to liberalism in politics and liberalism as a social gospel. The liberalism of Locke has invaded other interests than these; but everywhere it is equally dead. The liberalism, for example, which made a revolution in theology respectable and determined its limits is no less dead than that which sponsored the respectability of democracy. And everywhere what has been fatal to liberalism is its boundless but capricious moderation. Locke’s life and character, like his philosophy and like his liberalism, are full of instructive contrasts. His influence upon the politics of his time was immense, but always indirect; he could never be persuaded to take the stage. He was a successful politician, but a man without guile or ambition. He was a bachelor who kept accounts; a bourgeois who never had a home of his own; a man of property without any property. His life was spent in a great variety of places, in England and on the Continent, and in a great variety of occupations; but there is nothing of the cosmopolitan in his character. He was a busy man of affairs who appeared always to be at leisure. It was, however, fitting that he should live the full span of a man’s life and should die, in the eighteenth century, without an epigram on his lips. He was moderate in everything except his love of moderation. There is nothing at all of pretension in his character; he was meek, and until recently he inherited the earth.
The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Age of Reaction and Reconstruction Review of The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Age of Reaction and Reconstruction, ed. F.J.C. Hearnshaw (London: Harrap, 1932). First published in Cambridge Review, 53 (1932), 332. This book, which is the seventh and last but one of the King’s College series of lectures on social and political ideas, consists of eight lectures on as many social and political thinkers of the period 1815–1865, prefaced by a general survey of the period. The Age of Reaction (1815–1830) is represented by Chateaubriand, Hegel, and Coleridge; the Age of Reconstruction (1830–1865), by Owen, Mill, Comte, Austin, and Hodgkin. The reader will not, of course, expect to find here anything new; but among the essays are some which perform a useful service by giving a brief and lucid account of the ideas of one of these writers. From this standpoint, the best essays are the editor’s on Austin, Theodora Bosanquet’s on Comte, and Dr F. M. Page’s on Owen. On the other hand, the essay on Mill is untroubled by an idea and is a mere compendium of common-place biography and still more common-place criticism; and the essay on Coleridge (by Keith Feiling) is disappointingly short and inconclusive The Master of Balliol’s essay on Hegel is a courageous attempt to distil the Philosophie des Rechts into fifteen pages, but Hegel’s book belongs so obviously to the Age of Reason (the subject of a previous course of lectures) and not to the age of Reaction, that its inclusion here is almost absurd.
The Making of the State Review of Mariadas Ruthnaswamy, The Making of the State (London: Williams and Norgate, 1932). First published in Cambridge Review, 54 (1933), 359. This book appears to me to contain a great deal of sound sense put down without pretension and in a very readable manner. The author says that the special claim of the book to attention rests on the fact that in it the making of the State is studied from the standpoint of India. But he is too modest: the book is much more than that. It is a very sensible account of the different forces and elements which go to make a state; an account illustrated not only from the history of Indian institutions, but also from those of contemporary Europe, and Greece and Rome. Nevertheless, the final chapter, called ‘The Making of India’, is one of the most interesting [and] lucid chapters in the book. There is perhaps one general difficulty which might be pointed out. The first chapter is called ‘An Outline History of the State’, and the whole book is cast in the form of an historical survey of the making of the State. But in what sense has this useful abstraction ‘the State’ a history? A history must surely be concerned with this or that State, and must depend for its value upon the degree in which it succeeds in elucidating the actual and particular course of events. There are, no doubt, common forces to be found in the making of every state,—religion, custom, law, etc. But if one is writing a history, what is important is to shew, not merely how a particular state conforms to some general rule or other, but exactly how, for example, religion has contributed to its development. This book, then, like so many others, suffers from the fact that it is not a genuine history—for ‘the State’ has no history—but an analysis cast into a misleading historical and chronological form, and therefore not a genuine analysis.
Interpreting the Universe Review of John Macmurray, Interpreting the Universe (London: Faber and Faber, 1933). First published in Cambridge Review, 54 (1933), 395. Every student knows that to popularise is to abridge, and that abridgment involves (if nothing worse) false simplicity. Popular history and popular science are alike in this respect. And it is impossible to suppose that popular philosophy can escape this fatal defect. These difficulties, however, have not deterred Professor Macmurray from setting down in a popular form what may be called a theory of knowledge. We begin with ‘immediate experience.’ This is the given material; thought is reflection upon ‘immediate experience,’ and philosophy is ‘one of the more elaborate and systematic forms of our reflection upon experience.’ Thought, however, is merely ‘symbolic’; it substitutes ideas for immediate experiences. It is, in fact, a ‘substitute activity’ which aims always at overcoming some practical difficulty. All thought is for the sake of action. This general view, which is developed in the first three chapters, is, of course, grotesquely simple. But, what is worse, we are left with the impression that there is nothing deceptive in this simplicity. If there is anything a writer of popular philosophy should give, surely it is a sense of the difficulty of the problems involved; but here everything is so easy, obvious and unquestionable. The rest of the book is taken up with an examination of three ‘interpretations’ of the universe—the mathematical, the biological or organic, and the psychological—the last being the most comprehensive and at the same time the least developed of the three. What is wanted now is a ‘scientific psychology.’ The mathematical interpretation held the field between Descartes and Kant, the organic between Kant and the present day, the interpretation of the future is to be psychological. The book
is easily and interestingly written; but it is difficult to decide whether after all this attempt to popularise philosophy is not more foolhardy than courageous.
Idealistic Logic Review of Charles Richard Morris, Idealistic Logic: A Study of Its Aim, Method, and Achievement (London: Macmillan, 1933). First published in Cambridge Review, 55 (1933), 152. This book is properly described as a study of the ‘aims, method and achievement’ of Idealistic Logic. It is at once expository and critical, and is the work of an adherent to the main doctrine. After some general introductory chapters, there is a good account of the ‘traditional logic’ and its downfall, from which we are led through the revolution for which Hume and Kant are held jointly responsible. The account of Kant’s logical theories is specially full and interesting; and the more or less historical chapters are excellently conceived and carried out. The modern statement of the Idealist logical doctrine is next examined in four chapters. And these are followed by a full consideration of Cook Wilson’s view, which is recognised as containing the most sympathetic and one of the most important criticisms of the Idealist position. The book, it is stated, has been developed out of a course of lectures. It is written with great candour and lucidity, and the reader is presented with no unnecessary difficulties. There is, perhaps, little new in this account of Idealistic logic, but the whole position is freshly and attractively discussed. I think that chapters eight and nine might be improved if the references to Bradley’s works were made explicit in a few footnotes.
In Job’s Balances Review of Leo Chestov [pseud. of Lev Isaakovich Shvartsman], In Job’s Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truths, tr. C. Coventry and C. A. Macartney (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1932). First published in Scrutiny, 2 (1933), 101–4. Chestov is a writer who has already made something of a stir on the continent; but this is a disconcerting book, for it is difficult to know how to take it. It is disconcerting on two accounts. First, to the English reader it is odd to find a professional philosopher pressing a philosophical doctrine—in this case a theory of knowledge—neither by means of an independent analysis of experience, nor (in the main) with reference to the writings of other professional philosophers, but with reference to writers such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. I do not, of course, mean that it is to be expected that those who make a profession of philosophy have the monopoly of philosophic acumen; I mean that it is surprising to learn that writers like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy have a theory of knowledge at all. And secondly, it is disconcerting to meet a writer who makes a philosophy out of misology. There have been, of course, many who have doubted the competence of reason to give reality (whatever that may mean); but rarely has a writer like Chestov come forward who makes a philosophy out of this doubt. And I think if we consider these two points we shall learn something of what Chestov has to teach us. Let us take Chestov’s misology first. His doctrine (which is stated most clearly in the first and last chapters, and illustrated in the six intervening chapters) is that, since Thales, almost the whole of European philosophical thinking has been on the wrong track. Philosophical writers, with few exceptions, have believed in reason and have sought for a truth which is universally valid. They have accepted unquestioned the principle of ‘the autonomy of reason’; they have succumbed to an unexamined prejudice
in favour of what is reasonable. And the result has been that philosophical thought, while boasting that it is ‘free thought’ (thought, that is, without reservation or presupposition), has been anything but free. Now, in spite of what Chestov says, there can be no real disadvantage in disentangling our thoughts, and I find a certain confusion in this charge which he brings against almost all philosophers and specially against Aristotle, Spinoza, and Hegel. Philosophical thought would be open to the charge that it is ‘unfree’, the charge of prejudice, if it never doubted reason; but this is an hypothesis which cannot be asserted. And if and where it has doubted this ‘autonomy of reason,’ but has found it impossible to maintain the doubt, then surely it is ‘free’ on account of its belief in reason. Of course, if we say that philosophical thought is ‘unfree’ whenever it reaches a decision, then a belief in reason is certainly slavery; but so also is a disbelief in reason. In short, it is not (as Chestov suggests) the failure to reject reason which necessarily leaves thought ‘unfree,’ but the failure to doubt it: and while it is true that few philosophers have rejected it, the impression Chestov gives that few also have had the courage or the candour to doubt it, is certainly false. But there is another and more serious difficulty in Chestov’s doctrine. He writes all through as if ‘the autonomy of reason’ and the autonomy of scientific explanation were the same thing. Reason, ‘rationalism,’ science, and common sense are lumped together; and philosophy, because it believes in reason, is said to be committed to a view which sees the universe as a single, uniform, mechanical whole, a whole in which nothing is disconnected, in which everything is necessary. But this confusion of reason and science, which (in spite of what Hegel taught us) was almost a commonplace fifty years ago, is now a little out of date. There may be a ‘case against reason,’ but it should not be confused with the cases against ‘rationalism,’ science, or common sense. And again, this identification of reason and ‘rationalism’ leads Chestov to confuse ‘what is universally valid’ with ‘what is universally believed.’ He has little difficulty in showing that if we stick to what is universally believed we shall
confine ourselves to merely ‘normal experiences,’ and that both science and common-sense have a horror of what appears to be abnormal. But the possibility of judgments which are universally valid in no sense depends upon there being anything whatever universally believed. The valid should be distinguished from the merely ecumenical. What is reasonable and mere normality (what is satisfactory to common sense) are not the same thing. Chestov’s philosophy, then, is a philosophy of misology. If thinkers, instead of reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, had read Dostoyevsky’s The Voice from Underground or Tolstoy’s The Diary of a Madman, they would have discovered that the universe is not an ‘organic’ whole, a whole of related parts, but a whole in which things ‘exist freely,’ a whole in which there are no necessary connections, in which one thing does not ‘follow’ from another. This ‘vision’ of the universe is what we get when we have conquered the prejudice in favour of reason, this is the revelation of the world which came to Plotinus and Pascal; and it is true. And why is it true? Because, it seems, suddenness, disconnectedness, spontaneousness, unexpectedness are the unmistakable signs of truth. But the strength (or weakness) of a misological philosophy is that it is barred from giving reasons for its conclusions; and this brings me to the first point I put down for consideration. Since argument involves self-contradiction, the misologist must retreat on to the ground of ‘assertion’ and ‘evidence.’ Everywhere in this book there is assertion; the belief in reason is said to be the ‘lie’ at the heart of philosophy. And to support this assertion we are given, not argument, but ‘evidence’, ‘example’, and ‘illustration.’ The evidence Chestov calls to support his doctrine is, in some ways, the best part of the book. His chapters on Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are certainly interesting. But I find it difficult to believe that either of these writers was conscious of the theory of knowledge attributed to him here. The great truth to be got from Dostoyevsky is, it seems, ‘the conquest of the self-evident’; he teaches us to reject what is merely to be expected, what is normal, ordinary or (in Chestov’s language) reasonable. Everything for Dostoyevsky
is abnormal, fresh, sui generis. But surely this is true of every artist; it is just what art means. AndI cannot see that it involves a theory of knowledge or a philosophy at all. It is not philosophy; it is instinct. For the artist, this is not a ‘valid’ way of looking at the world; it is the only way. More profound, I think, is Chestov’s study of Pascal. There he is dealing with a writer perplexed with the problem of knowledge, if not as a philosophical problem, at least as a theological problem; and a writer whose conclusion is almost misological. And naturally enough, such a doctrine as Chestov’s will find (or at least look for and appear to find) support also from Plotinus. Philosophy, then, is free thought ; and because it is free it is misological. Philosophy is ‘what matters most,’ it is the attempt to find the meaning of life, to fix le prix des choses; and because it is these it is misological. La raison a beau crier, elle ne peut mettre le prix aux choses. And again, philosophy rejects the merely scientific, the merely mechanical explanation of the Universe, and therefore it must be misological. And on each of these points there is, I think, a certain amount of confusion and misconception. Chestov says: ‘my task has consisted in showing that reason has not the power which it claims.’ Certainly he asserts it, certainly he illustrates it. But it is difficult to determine in what sense he ‘shows’ it; for how can it be shown, explained? And this book, in spite of its eloquence, has not succeeded in convincing me that a misological philosophy is not a self-contradiction; indeed, this difficulty presents itself so constantly that as one reads one’s first instinct is often to suspect an underlying irony.
A New Argument for God and Survival Review of Malcolm Grant, A New Argument for God and Survival and a Solution to the Problem of Supernatural Events (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). First published in Cambridge Review, 55 (1934), 332. The project of constructing a new proof of the existence of God is one which must have kindled the ambition of many thinkers. The very improbability of the success of such a project must, for the ambitious thinker, increase its attractiveness. And a book which purports to offer a new proof of this sort is certain to win attention; the believer will open it with confidence, the atheist with apprehension. But it must be said at once that this book affords no ground for either the hopes of the one or the fears of the other. Its purpose is to construct a ‘scientific’ argument for the existence of a personal God and for a belief in human survival—‘an argument for religion which would be acceptable to scientific criticism.’ And, briefly, the argument is this. Science has discovered ‘that there are laws of nature to which phenomena conform,’ and for the scientist natural laws seem ‘to hold uninterrupted sway over the course of events.’ But the honest scientist is obliged to admit the possibility that events may happen (indeed, may actually have happened) which violate the known laws of nature. And if such events can be found they afford all the evidence necessary for a firm belief in the existence of a Supreme Being. For some cause must be assigned for these violations of natural law, and that cause is God. The question to be settled, then (and the only question) is, Is there sufficient evidence for a belief in miracles—miracles being defined as ‘events which violate natural law’? And the question is answered in the affirmative; the greater part of the book being taken up with an attempt to prove (a) that ‘psychical phenomena’ have been studied by scientists, and (b) that they are miraculous, they violate natural law. God, therefore, exists: and further, there
are adequate grounds for believing in human survival in ‘a world essentially like our own.’ Now, for me at least, the most disappointing feature of the book is that the proof adduced of the existence of God is not new: it is, probably, the oldest and most naive of all the many arguments. The only novelty here is the attempt to demonstrate the miraculous character of all psychical or occult phenomena; and this, besides being novel, appears to me misconceived. Miracles are defined as events which violate natural law; but, since Mr Grant’s conception of ‘natural laws’ is somewhat vague and certainly antiquated, his proof of the existence of miracles will lack cogency for the modern scientist. It is impossible to attach any relevant meaning to the notion of an event which ‘violates natural laws’ when these laws are conceived as statistical generalizations. And further, a theological argument, conceived with the express intention of influencing religious belief, of helping men who ‘look round in despair for some remedy to cure the age of its evils,’ but which is confined to proving merely that a God exists, without worrying about what sort of a God he is, must surely be considered to be barking up the wrong tree.
Civitas Dei Review of Lionel Curtis, Civitas Dei, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1934; second revised edition 1950). First published in Cambridge Review, 55 (1934), 450. In this book Mr Lionel Curtis, like a modern Augustine, reviews the history of the world from ‘the dawn of civilization’ to the present day in search of a ‘guiding principle in politics.’ And the principle he enunciates is that the only stable and progressive form of community is a ‘commonwealth,’ the essence of a commonwealth being the acceptance of the decisions of the majority as binding and the willingness of each member to put the interests of others on a level with his own. ‘A commonwealth is simply the sermon on the mount translated into political terms.’ Hellas provides an example of this commonwealth ‘in its miniature form,’ Jesus expounded its principles, and ‘the statesman who made selfgovernment possible for areas wider than city-States was Edward I,’ for he added ‘the principle that electors can be bound by those they elect,’ to ‘the principle that majorities can bind minorities.’ It remains now for ‘national commonwealths’ to learn to ‘function as organs of one international commonwealth.’ It would, of course, be foolish to expect anything critical or profound from such a review of the history of the world, and it must be said that the history here is chiefly of the most generalised and superficial kind. Many no doubt will find Mr Curtis’ thesis attractive; few, if any, will find it novel. And, personally, I admire the courage displayed in this undertaking more than the judgment.
Natural Law and the Theory of Society Review of Otto von Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500 to 1800. Five subsections from Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, vol. 4. With a lecture on ‘The Ideas of Natural Law and Humanity’, by Ernst Troeltsch, tr. and intro. Ernest Barker, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934). First published in Cambridge Review, 56 (1934), 11–12. These two volumes contain a translation of that part of Gierke’s great work, Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, which covers the period 1500 to 1800 and which deals, in the main, with the exponents of political and legal theories based upon an idea of Natural Law. They contain also a translation of a lecture by Troeltsch on The Ideas of Natural Law and Humanity and of three or four valuable pages from Gierke’s work on Johannes Althasius, and a long Introduction to the whole by Professor Barker. And we must be grateful that the translator has given us not only Gierke’s text, but his notes and bibliographies also, which take up the whole of the second volume. Gierke as an historian of political and legal theories is an impressive writer. He is impressive first on account of his profound acquaintance with the vast mass of political writings which belong to this period between the Reformation and the French Revolution; and secondly, because of his lucid judgment, his power of classification and his ability to generalise felicitously about these writings. He is a genuinely critical historian; and the period he deals with in this part of his work is one which must have intense interest for those whose business or pleasure it is to consider the history of political and legal ideas. The difficulty and the danger in composing a history of political ideas lies in the fact that it is almost impossible not to de-individualise the various writers who
come under review. Each tends to be represented as an example (with, of course, certain peculiar traits) of a general idea or theory. It is all very well to say that Hobbes or Rousseau cannot be understood apart from the background of Natural Law theorists in which they appear to take their place; but it is no less important to hold on to the fact that, while a writer like Hobbes may reach conclusions which place him along with others in a ‘school,’ his reasons and arguments may be so unlike those of writers who appear to be of a similar persuasion that to think of him as a member of this ‘school’ may be seriously misleading. For what is significant is not so much a writer’s conclusions and dicta as his reasons and arguments. ‘Schools’ of thought are classifications of beliefs, and these, where they cut across a classification of reasons for belief, must present us with an imperfect view. Gierke, so far as is possible, avoids the more pressing dangers which beset an historian of ideas: but it is not possible to avoid them altogether in a work of this kind. He has a deep understanding of the writers with whom he deals—with the possible exception of Rousseau— and it is only to be regretted that his history stops short at Kant; but for that he was not responsible. But Gierke as a thinker is, I think, less impressive. Clear and vigorous in his historical writing, when he comes to expound his own theory of the reality of group personality he becomes vague and inconclusive. His writing is excellent when he is pointing out and analysing the individualistic foundation upon which the whole Natural Law theory of Society was constructed. But when he comes to put something better in its place his views do not impress us with the force of necessity, they lack the power of a fully thought out theory. Professor Barker’s Introduction (which may be read in conjunction with Maitland’s well known introduction to his translation, published in 1900, of an earlier section of Gierke’s work) is an excellent piece of work, which greatly adds to the value of these volumes.
His faculty of lucid and orderly exposition is seen here at its best; and the sections on the Law of Nature and the School of Historical Law, apart from their intrinsic value, are a great assistance to understanding what Gierke is writing about and its importance. In other parts of this Introduction Professor Barker considers and gives us his views upon two much-discussed topics—the relation of Society and the State, and the nature of group personality. It is impossible here to consider these views with the seriousness they deserve. But it may be remarked that in dealing with society and the state we are presented with a relationship between two separate entities, the one lying ‘behind’ or ‘stretching outside’ the other. ‘Though the state … has supervened, as it were, upon Society, Society still remains. If Society has turned itself into a legal association, it has not turned the whole of itself into that form.’ There is a ‘voluntary life’ and ‘voluntary activity,’ and this is the ‘material on which there is stamped the form of the state.’ Now, these categories of matter and form, outside and inside, behind and before, prior and subsequent—which are not, perhaps, consistent with one another—are, I think, scarcely satisfactory: and they are relics of that ‘individualism’ in political theory which while it is explicitly fled from is often implicitly succumbed to. And the notion of the State taking up and directing a separable part of the life of Society corresponds closely to the seventeenth century notion that when man entered political society he surrendered, not the whole, but a part of his natural rights—and it is a notion from which Hobbes might have rescued us if we had listened to him. Our political theory, it seems, is still under the domination of the categories of these seventeenth century thinkers, categories which we all recognize to be unsatisfactory but which nobody has yet shown us how to replace. The theory of group personality which, after an extremely lucid exposition of the views of others, Professor Barker propounds, is not at first sight attractive. At least, it is not so to me. It is an attempt to appropriate what appears to him the best elements of other well-known theories, it is in the nature of a compromise. And it
is to be doubted whether any theory can be satisfactory which is a compromise. The theory is too complicated to be dealt with here, but it turns upon the notion that the ‘inner core of the legal personality of groups’ is their ‘purpose,’ for this purpose is the one permanent element. But whether we are right to look for the essence of personality, in any sense, in some permanent core, seems to be doubtful. Professor Barker suggests, further, that legal personality, unlike psychological or moral personality, is a construction, not a datum; but that it is not on that account less real. But he would appear to be on dangerous ground when he says that psychological and moral personality are ‘an immediate datum of perception and consciousness.’ A better line of attack would, perhaps, be to take personality in all its forms as a ‘mental construction’, one form being not less ‘artificial’ than another. The volumes are excellently produced and exceedingly free from typographical errors. Page 198 is numbered 189; and the page heading of pp. 177–197 differs for no apparent reason from that of pp. 163–175. But these are negligible imperfections in a notable and very successful production.
Aspects of Dialectical Materialism Review of Hermann Levy, John Macmurray, Ralph Fox, Robert Page Arnot, John Desmond Bernal, and Edgar Frederick Carritt, Aspects of Dialectical Materialism (London: Watts and Co., 1934). First published in Cambridge Review, 56 (1934), 108–9. Reprinted in The Cambridge Mind: Ninety Years of the Cambridge Review 1879–1969, ed. E. Homberger and others (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 134–9, as ‘Dialectical Materialism: An “Official Philosophy”’. Dialectical Materialism is described by those who profess it as the official philosophy of modern Communism; and this at once indicates its unique character, and makes any fresh exposition of its principles a matter of some general interest. Professor Macmurray, in one of the essays which compose this attempt to expound once more the notions of Dialetical Materialism, says that ‘there is something fundamental in the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism which distinguishes it from all other philosophical systems which I know, and which establishes a gulf between it and them.’ But he understates the case: Dialectical Materialism has more than one characteristic peculiar to itself, and the idiosyncrasy of being an official philosophy is the most peculiar of them all. To anyone who has attended to the history of philosophy this claim to an official character must appear a little naïve; even an indiscretion, when we consider how often the ‘reception’ of a philosophy has been a symptom of its decay. An official religion, or an official art, perhaps; these are not absurd ideas: but a received and an official philosophy, surely this is a little too heroic. Yet Dialectical Materialism boasts an imprimatur: and its defenders will not hear of it being anything but a philosophy, the philosophy; they will not tolerate the suggestion that perhaps it would be better to describe it as a religious creed.
And this characteristic is not without implications. The reckless courage with which this philosophy is defended, the jealousy with which the teaching of its inspired Early Fathers, Marx and Engels, is guarded against change and contamination, the violence with which all competing prophets are hustled out, like profane hecklers at a political meeting, must make a mere thinker wonder whether his life is not after all too insipid, and a religious fanatic whether he can really be sincere, such is his moderation. It is remarkable how often in these essays a writer will turn aside from argument with the incantation, ‘Let us quote the Communist Manifesto again’ or, ‘As Marx himself says.’ Mr Bernal’s essays might have been written by Engels himself; his exposition is not even fresh in parts, it is uniformly stale. Indeed, the reader is left with the impression that Marx is the only thinker who has ever handled this philosophy of Dialectical Materialism; the rest are humble servants of the message of this often ambiguous oracle. In the hands of its expositors Dialectical Materialism is like a theology turned into a gospel, and a gospel turned into a dogma. It appears to be more necessary that we should believe than that we should understand, and more necessary that we should accept than that we should believe. And this, perhaps, is comprehensible; if one really believed that one was in possession of the truth, it might be difficult to avoid fanaticism. But a philosophy, at once official and fanatical! Is there no refuge from the preacher? Besides these, Dialectical Materialism, has, I think, three other remarkable characteristics which, if they are not unique, are at least noticeably peculiar. First, it is a philosophy constructed, with the aid of certain borrowed philosophical ideas, by men who were as nearly devoid of the anima naturaliter philosophica as otherwise thoughtful and intelligent men could be. Mr Page Arnot, it is true, tells us that ‘Marx was the greatest thinker of all time,’ and Mr Bernal, that Marx ‘was not, in contrast to the founders of most philosophical systems, an ignorant man’; but whatever his greatness and however profound his information, there is nothing
in his writings to suggest that he possessed that peculiar, and in some ways lamentable, turn of mind which makes a philosopher. And he certainly never inspired genuine philosophical thought in anyone else. Some of the authors of this book are, indeed, professional philosophers, but even these (with the exception of Mr Carritt) appear anxious to discard some of the most elementary principles of rational argument. In the main, however, these expositors are amateurs in this difficult and dangerous enterprise of managing philosophical ideas. Secondly, Dialectical Materialism is an esoteric philosophy. I suppose the tendency to make the rules of the game in the course of play is not uncommon in philosophy, and in so far as it prevails in any philosophy that philosophy becomes esoteric. And this tendency is present to a remarkable extent in Dialectical Materialism. It is difficult, moreover, for the detached reader of this, or any exposition of the principles of Dialectical Materialism not to become conscious of the existence of some hidden source of knowledge or inspiration which, if only he were privileged to share it, might make plain much that must otherwise remain obscure. He is, in fact, told that unless he is ‘actively participating in the class struggle to-day,’ he will certainly fail to understand. This philosophy is one for initiates only. And further, in the actual doctrine of Dialectical Materialism there is a remarkable esoteric flavour; like the ‘philosophical’ theologians of the seventeenth century, the expositors of this philosophy seem to move in a world composed of an unbroken system of subtle correspondences. The same rhythmic motion or ‘dialectic’ governs the history of man, the chemical composition and changes of the world, the properties of numbers and everything else. These writers pass from one region of existence to another to find everywhere the transition of Quantity into Quality, Opposites Interpenetrating, and the Negative being Negated. What happens in one place has its analogue in another; in Dialectical Materialism the primitive passion for analogy is almost unchecked, and the result is a
mystical and esoteric philosophy which can be paralleled perhaps only in the writings of the alchemists. And thirdly, what must already be apparent, Dialectical Materialism is a philosophy more hindered and obscured by jargon than any other in the whole history of misplaced human ingenuity. One of the more critical writers in this book, Mr Levy, remarks upon the ‘almost mediaeval language’ in which the laws of the Dialectic are described. And it is difficult to avoid the feeling, as one reads these expositions, that, whatever there is to be said for this philosophy, the language in which it is described and defended is hopelessly stilted and archaic. The quaint jargon of Dialectical Materialism is, of all the defects of this philosophy, the one which might most easily be remedied, and is the defect from the remedy of which it would, at the present time, derive the greatest possible benefit. But to relieve a philosophy of the incubus of a jargon and to make it live requires a thinker, and such is nowhere to be seen. Unlike many expositions of Dialectical Materialism, this book contains two essays in which this philosophy is subjected to something like a critical examination; both Mr Levy and Mr Carritt possess something of the detachment of mind necessary in philosophical argument. But Mr Carritt, at least, does not remain unanswered; for the volume ends with some Notes in Reply to Mr Carritt’s Paper, in which Mr Bernal reasserts the pure Marxian principles in the old, decayed jargon and with the old, heroic violence. It seems that it is impossible for an intelligent man to take exception to any of the principles of Dialectical Materialism, because, unavoidably, he will find that what he has been objecting to is not the true doctrine, but merely one of the numerous ‘distortions’ which the authentic philosophy has suffered at the hands of bourgeois writers who have strayed into the Communist camp. The Marxian principle appears to be not merely that he who is not for us is against us, but also that most of the writers who think they are orthodox have, through malice, inadvertence or ignorance, promulgated a false (that is heterodox) doctrine.
Intelligent objection is impossible. It is not difficult to understand that a critical attitude to a religion or a political creed is something which may have to be discouraged or even forbidden, but that this attitude towards what represents itself as a philosophy should be discouraged is at once ridiculous and pathetic. And a philosophy, the followers of which spend most of their time and energy merely quarrelling about the meaning of what Marx wrote and said, is one which is difficult to take seriously. For Heaven’s sake, the reader gasps, let us have a little more argument and a little less oracular assertion. Dialectical Materialism is already notorious for the generalisations about the course of history which are imbedded in its doctrines. And more than one of these essays illustrates both the importance of these generalisations to his philosophy and the extreme danger of such an alliance between philosophy and history. The doctrine that every philosophy is conditioned by the general social and economic circumstances in which it is conceived and elaborated, and the doctrine that a ‘true’ philosophy is that which is most closely tied and tied most consciously to the circumstances of its generation, and consequently that Dialectical Materialism is the only ‘true’ philosophy to-day, naturally lead those who hold them to issue statements about the course of history. And indeed, this philosophy may be said to be actually based upon certain historical judgments and to stand or fall with this truth or falsehood of these judgments. We are told, for example, that ‘the modern European problem is a material problem. At least from the time of the Renaissance, European humanity, as distinct from most other societies at other times in history and in other parts of the world, has had forced upon it for its special task for humanity the solution of the problem of economic production’; and that consequently ‘materialism’ is the ‘proper starting place for philosophy under modern conditions’. And yet, setting aside the confusion of thought which stands behind this notion of philosophy conditioned by economic and social circumstances, how vague and flimsy is this sort of
historical judgment. Certainly some of Marx’s most profound ideas are concerned with history, but none of these writers show either any considerable knowledge of the history of Western Europe or any grasp of how an historical problem should be tackled. A statement such as, ‘if we consider the development of science we shall find that it falls into three successive stages,’ if it is intended for an historical judgment, shows all the ineptitude and misconception which might be expected from a philosophaster when he turns to history. The analysis of an idea is substituted for a patient and detailed exploration of a period, and history in any true sense disappears. It is possible, of course, to analyse any considerable historical change into the three steps which the Dialectic presupposes, and perhaps it is possible also to find Quantity turning into Quality, and the Negative being Negated, but if you think that in such an analysis you are providing a history, or a substitute for a history, of this change, you must be more than ordinarily foolish. The dialectical materialist would appear to know so much about history and the world in general without recourse to any real study of the facts of the case that it is not, perhaps, surprising that he should treat these facts with some contempt. After all, his business is merely to illustrate his general theory by finding it everywhere exemplified in the world, and in that he can scarcely fail. This reiteration of the principles of dialectical materialism, then, leaves us with the impression that it is impossible to say anything about them which is at once new and true; it is neither possible nor necessary to do anything but repeat what Marx and Engels wrote. The philosophy is full of ingenious ideas, and imbedded in it are some profound and illuminating aperçus; but the whole temper and attitude of its followers is so unphilosophical, so rigid, certain, and insensitive, and its doctrines are so full of halfconsidered information and so devoid of thought, that it must be supposed that the best there is to be said for it remains yet unsaid. Unless it can escape from this temper, from the tendency to descend from argument to authority, from the antiquated
jargon in which it is expressed, from the inclination to indulge in the wildest exaggerations, and from certain obvious but disabling errors in its most flourished doctrines, it will never become a philosophical system worth considering. It will remain the creed of a body of men who, not content with doing what they believe will bring the greatest possible benefit to mankind, and regardless of their incapacity, are moved by a fatal urge to construct a theory to explain and justify their activities.
Adventures of Ideas Review of Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 35 (1934), 73–5. This book may be regarded as a fresh attempt to restate the main outlines of Prof. Whitehead’s position. It is a companion to Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality. Besides some new ideas and some fresh approaches, it contains an amplification and extension of much to be found in the earlier of these books, and a résumé of the doctrine expounded in the later. It is divided into four parts—Sociological, Cosmological, Philosophical, and Civilization: and, in general, it is ‘a study of the concept of civilization, and an endeavour to understand how it is that civilized beings arise’. It is impossible to describe the contents in detail, partly on account of what appears to me the obscurity of many of the ideas themselves, and partly because of the obscurity of the connexions between the ideas; the reader is hurried from one idea to another, dazzled by flashes of brilliance, distracted by obscurity, or put out of patience by verbiage, and the connexions are left to look after themselves. But I propose to make a few remarks upon each of these sections. (i) Sociological. This seems to be included as a kind of sketch of history of the ‘European races’ from the standpoint of the concept of civilization. But Prof. Whitehead’s method of writing history is peculiar. He begins by selecting some general characteristic of Western European civilization, and he proceeds to trace back the evolution of this characteristic. History consists in the realization of ideas, the translation of ideas into customs, the issuing of ‘general ideas into practical consequences’. One such idea is that of freedom: the ‘abolition of Slavery’ in 1833 is seen as the ‘practical consequence’ of Socrates’s discovery of the human soul. ‘Two thousand years had elapsed since the foundation of
Plato’s academy, since the reforms of the Stoic lawyers, since the composition of the Gospels. The great programme of reform bequeathed by the classical civilization was achieving another triumph.’ And this general view of history is consistently adhered to: history consists of the ‘adventures’ of abstract general ideas. But it is one thing to analyse an epoch, or a civilization such as ours into general ideas and to analyse the ideas themselves, and it is another to present these abstract ideas as if they were separate and operative (implicitly or explicitly) in the epoch itself or in the growth of the civilization. And the second of these projects is certainly misconceived. If we are to have a history of the growth of freedom, we shall want something more than the mere reference of each positive achievement of freedom to the working of an abstract and general idea. We shall want a detailed account of the course of events. And this is what we are never given. And in spite of much brilliant analysis, Prof. Whitehead’s history (if that is what it is intended to be) appears to me to be unsound in conception. To the ordinary historian, the exploits and adventures of these ideas will appear little more than fabulous. (ii) Cosmological. In this section the ideas whose adventures are described are of a different character; they are not sociological, but scientific ideas. The subject here is ‘the influence of scientific ideas upon European culture’. It opens with a brilliant chapter called ‘Laws of Nature’. But readers of Prof. Whitehead must be prepared not only for these flashes of brilliance, but also for what is obscure and even for what is commonplace. And the chapters on ‘Science and Philosophy’ and on the ‘New Reformation’ which follow, do not sustain the brilliant opening. It is, I think, impossible to discover what he thinks about the relation of science to philosophy; and in spite of some good remarks on the importance of theology, his reflexions on Christianity are not very striking. But what is more disappointing is that the main subject of the section—the influence of scientific ideas upon European civilization—seems to have been conceived with peculiar narrowness. The final question—what is the relevance of a scientific view of the world
to practical living?—not only is not answered, but is not even considered. The influence of various scientific ideas is discussed but never the influence of the idea of science itself. (iii) Philosophical. This section is, in the main, a résumé of Prof. Whitehead’s philosophical doctrine. It is brief and concise; but since I do not understand it, there is nothing I can usefully say about it. It appears, however, to contain little that is not more fully discussed in Process and Reality: and it is relevant in this place mainly because this book is intended to be equally a record of the author’s own adventures in ideas and of the adventures of ideas in the history of European civilization. (iv) Civilization. The main ideas which here come in for analysis—qualities which go to form civilization—are Truth, Beauty, Art, Adventure, and Peace. The chapters on Truth and Beauty are to me obscure and I cannot be certain of their meaning. They are ‘philosophical’ chapters. But the chapter on Adventure, while it is devoted to an exposition of the rather common-place theme that ‘no static maintenance of perfection is possible … Advance or Decadence are the only choices offered to mankind’, contains, as usual, some penetrating observations. In the last chapter, however, entitled ‘Peace,’ Prof. Whitehead discusses the quality which, above all others, he takes to be characteristic of civilization. And here, in spite of obscurity, there is what appears to be a profound idea. Peace ‘is not the negative conception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling which crowns the life and motion of the soul … It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details’. So far as I understand it, it is a kind of reconciliation to mortality, a feeling of permanence in transience, either reached after frustration and pain or seized intuitively in youth. Such a notion is not, of course, new; something corresponding to it is to be found in the doctrine of every profound moralist. But certainly there is here a brilliant analysis of the idea. What may be said of most of Prof. Whitehead’s books may, I think, be said of this one. It is an attempt to work out something
in the way of a world-view; i t i s m arred b y m uch o bscurity, v agueness, a nd disconnectedness, sometimes quite simple and commonplace ideas are put into rather pretentious language and (in the language at least) there is a tendency to a kind of American (or Anglo-Saxon) sentimentality; but it contains some profoundly thought-out ideas and many brilliant aperçus.
The Horizon of Experience Review of Cecil Delisle Burns, The Horizon of Experience. A Study of the Modern Mind (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 35 (1934), 75–6. The venturesome project of this book is a study of the ‘modern mind’. The idea is that ‘the “modern” attitude towards the world is mainly a sense that on the horizon of our present experience are new forms of truth and beauty’; and in this respect the twentieth century is said to resemble the sixth and the sixteenth. ‘We stand between a traditional formulation which is inadequate to express our new experience and the possibility of some other formulation whose character is unknown to us … The modern mind is fundamentally an impulse towards new values.’ With this general (and perhaps a little worn) thesis in view, Mr Delisle Burns proceeds to an account of modern tendencies in science, art, literature, morality, religion, and philosophy. His reflections are, however, often tiresome and never profound. We are told that there is ‘a deep sense of unrest, dissatisfaction’ in modern literature; that the new experiments in music ‘may have come too soon’; and that the poetry of T.S. Eliot ‘is certainly not like Tennyson’s’. But whatI think isa more serious defect is that, while professing to be genuinely up to date, Mr Burns seems to be thirty (or more) years behind the times. This faith in progress, the belief that we are at the fresh dawn of a new era, this sense of horizon, and these philosophies of process and evolution, which are here taken to represent the ‘modern’ attitude, are not in fact modern at all. They may be better than anything we have today, but they belong, nevertheless, to the last century. What has taken their place is difficult to say, and it is unfortunate that there is nothing in this book to help us to identify it.
Richard Hooker als politischer Denker Review of Gottfried Michaelis, Richard Hooker als politischer Denker. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der naturrechtlichen Staatstheorien in England im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Verlag Dr Emil Ebering, 1933). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 35 (1934), 76. This short but thorough study of Hooker’s political thought is an attempt to answer two questions. First, what is the character of Hooker’s political theory, and how far was it original? And secondly, what influence had Hooker, as a political thinker, upon seventeenth-century English writers? About two-thirds of the book is devoted to the first question. A full and excellent account is given of Hooker’s general conception of Law, his theory of society and of Church and State; and his relationship with earlier writers, especially Machiavelli and Bodin, is discussed. In the second part Hooker’s influence upon Milton, Hobbes, Sidney, Locke, and various less well-known writers is examined and found to be considerable, even where (as in the case of Hobbes) there is little in common between the conclusions of the two thinkers. Altogether it is an admirable piece of work. The author keeps severely to the matter in hand, he is not concerned with Hooker’s theology, and writes with brevity, precision, and lucidity.
Thomas Hobbes First published in Scrutiny, 4 (1935), 263–77. The story of the fortunes of Hobbes and his writings is not remarkable. He was attacked by his contemporaries with a ferocity which reflects not only their sense of outrage but also their sense of danger; his writings were rejected, not because they were bad philosophy, but because they were thought to have dangerous tendencies; his doctrines, or many of them, were then appropriated by other writers, their authorship first unacknowledged and then forgotten; his name began to appear in the works which passed for histories of philosophy, but only his name; towards the end of the nineteenth century there was a revival of interest in the man and his philosophy, a scholar’s revival and part of a general revival of interest in the past of English philosophy, bringing with it, not only some of the best studies of Hobbes’s writings (e.g. those of Tönnies and Robertson), discoveries of unpublished MSS, and a collected edition of his works, but also the beginning of what is called ‘Hobbes research’; and then, quite recently, there was the discovery that Hobbes had a message for to-day, and with this discovery came a flood of fresh literature and the foundation, in 1929 after an international congress in Oxford, of a Hobbes Society. It is a common, if slightly sordid, history; and perhaps it is difficult to determine which part of it is the more sordid, the death or the exhumation. Side by side with the story, however, must be put another, not so long, but less inglorious: the story of his actual influence upon philosophical speculation, for it would be safe to say that he was never without readers. Leibniz admired his profundity; in spite of the dominating figure of Locke, Diderot, at least among the Encylopédistes, recognized his master, and Rousseau his creditor; Hegel, in a few brilliant pages in his Geschichte der Philosophie, appreciated his genius: he was the acknowledged father, in modern times, of English and German
materialism; and his place in the Saints’ Calendar of Rationalism was never disputed, though there is little or no evidence to support the view that Hobbes was a pioneer of Natural Religion and Rational Theology. As is so often the case, Hobbes was more profoundly appreciated by those who were content to read his writings than by those whose attention was directed to raising a public memorial to him. The purpose of this article, however, is not to review the fortunes of Hobbes’s philosophy, but to consider this contemporary interest in Hobbes and to consider the quality and effect of some of the more recent studies of his work. And in what I have to say I shall confine myself to the publications of the last ten years.3 The questions I want to ask are, What have we learnt? and, What have we still to learn? [3] I have selected the following books, pamphlets, and articles: Ferdinand Tönnies, Thomas Hobbes, Leben and Lehre, 3rd edition (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1925); Frithiof Brandt, Thomas Hobbes’ Mechanical Conception of Nature (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1928); Adolfo Levi, La Filosofia di Tommaso Hobbes (Milan: Società editirice Dante Alighieri, 1929); Zbigniew Lubienski, Die Grundlagen des ethisch-politischen Systems von Hobbes (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1932); Heinrich Schreihager, Thomas Hobbes’ Sozialtheorie (Leipzig: Institut für Politik, auständisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht, 1933); John Laird, Hobbes (London: Benn, 1934); Karl Schmitt, Politische Theologie (Munich and Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1934); Otto von Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, tr. Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934); Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (London: Chatto and Windus, 1934); Edgar Frederick Carritt, Morals and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935); Phyllis Doyle, ‘The Contemporary Background of Hobbes’ State of Nature’, Economica, 21 (1927), 336–55; Zbigniew Lubienski, ‘Hobbes’ Philosophy and its Historical Background’, Journal of Philosophical Studies, 5 (1930), 175–90; Leo Strauss, ‘Quelques Remarques sur la Science Politique de Hobbes’, Recherches Philosophique, 2 (1932), 609– 22.
There are certain elements in the contemporary interest in Hobbes’s writings which, since Hobbes is a philosopher, I should regard as unhealthy. In the first place, we are met with the suggestion that Hobbes is a writer whose work is peculiarly apposite to the post-war world. ‘Hobbes’s philosophy,’ we are told, ‘possessed precisely that character of balance and common sense that made him foresee the Great War, and, furthermore, the subsequent striving for peace resulting from a comprehension of the disastrous consequences of hate and murder. A number of scholars emphasized the fact that the present pacifist movement fulfils the dreams of this great enemy of war.’ Now, this attitude towards the writings of such a man as Hobbes is, to say the least, both dangerous and unprofitable, because it directs our attention towards all that is most superficial and least significant in those writings. Every man, I suppose, has his political opinions, and sometimes they are opinions which will interest and inspire ages other than his own. But a political philosopher has something more, and more significant, than political opinions: he has an analysis of political activity, a comprehensive view of the nature of political life, and it is this, and not his political opinions, which it is profitable for a later and different age to study. And if it is contended that these political opinions belong themselves to that analysis, it must, nevertheless, remain a mistake to lift a few of them out of the system of his thought and give them an independent existence just because when regarded in this way they seem to meet present needs. And were we content to go back to Hobbes’s writings and enquire what he means by ‘war’ (for example), we could scarcely avoid the conclusion that from this (in any case superficial) standpoint his views are no more significant at the present time than at any other moment in the history of mankind. I mean, briefly, that, in general, the only healthy attitude towards the writings of a philosopher is a philosophical attitude. Of course it is possible to take snippets from the writings of any man and use them as texts for a sermon; but do not let us confuse this with
a study of his works or even with a genuine attempt to discover the present significance of those works. But this attitude towards philosophical writing is to be found in a more radical form in some of the recent treatments of Hobbes’s philosophy. There is not merely the suggestion that the significant meaning of his work lies in a few of his less impressive remarks, but the suggestion that, in the ordinary sense, his writing has no meaning at all. ‘Metaphysical utterances which appear to be statements of “fact” are disguised imperatives, or at least disguised optatives; our studies of the philosophers would be more remunerative if we went to them, not for “truth”, but in order to discern what particular fiat or utinam their teaching implies’, writes Mr Basil Willey. And he follows it up with the remark that ‘very nearly every statement of Hobbes can be reduced either to hatred and contempt of schoolmen and clerics, or to fear of civil war and love of ordered living in a stable commonwealth.’ Now, that words have an emotive as well as a referential use has, of course, been known long enough; it was recognized by Hobbes himself, for example (Leviathan, p. 525). But it appears to have been reserved for more modern times to resolve all language into emotive symbols; and this resolution, involving a self-contradiction and carrying with it a philosophy of misology (if the phrase may pass), makes, I think, an unsatisfactory foundation upon which to base our study of a philosophic writer. And when we pass from the general view to the particular illustration, the unprofitableness of this view no longer remains in any doubt: it is difficult to understand how anyone who had considered Hobbes’s writings could consent to (much less suggest) this absurd ‘reduction’; it is not even plausible. All the complexity of Hobbes’s thought is swept aside as irrelevant; what cannot be reduced to hate or fear is not Hobbes. I suppose it is impossible to prevent a misological critic from exercising his wits upon the writings of Hobbes, and something interesting may come of it in the end; but what comes of it will never be a satisfactory interpretation of Hobbes’s meaning. And from anyone who undertakes a tour de force of this
kind we may perhaps ask for something more brilliant. Certainly ‘it is salutary to remind ourselves that in the Leviathan Hobbes has a “suasive” purpose’, but to find nothing but this in the Leviathan, and to conclude from our reading that ‘almost in Chinese fashion, he is bringing doctrines to a pragmatic test. Do they or do they not make for the maintenance of lawful authority? he is asking,’ suggests that a closer attention might be given to the text. That philosophers often entertain ambitions extraneous to philosophy is known well enough, and that some of them appear to be unable to prevent these ambitions from contaminating their writings is a sad fact; but to select one of these extraneous purposes—that of the preacher—as the significant characteristic of a piece of philosophic writing appears to me to indicate a misconceived approach to the study of philosophy, and the result is likely to be anything but remunerative. Now, if the philosophical study of a philosophy excludes this kind of attitude, it does not exclude what may be called a genuinely historical attitude. The detailed consideration of the actual meaning of a philosophical text, regardless of its present significance or of any view we may hold about the truth or error it contains, is certainly valuable; and, as we shall see, some of the best recent work on Hobbes is of this character. Hobbes, in the past, has suffered from a deficiency rather than an excess of this kind of study. There are now plenty of excellent biographies, not a few good expositions of the general outline of his system, and some interesting studies of his connexion with earlier and later thought; what we need is more of those detailed, and at least partly historical, studies and interpretations of his work. But the philosophical study of philosophy does, I think, exclude what may be called a merely historical study. There is, probably, less place for a merely antiquarian interest in philosophy than elsewhere; for what elsewhere is merely harmless and at worst an eccentricity, in philosophy becomes dangerous and positively misleading. There will always be new philosophy, and what is new may be valuable even if it is inferior to what we have already. It is the business
of philosophy continuously to renew itself. And such new philosophy may arise from the study of what belongs to an earlier time; and the study of what belongs to an earlier time is profitable, in the end, only when it is related to a genuine renaissance. But the study, if it is to result in anything valuable, must be close: it is only by this detailed study of a philosophical text that it can become, not merely an inheritance, but an inspiration for fresh thought. Whether Hobbes’s writings, when studied in this way, can ever yield the philosophical inspiration which has come from (for example) either Plato or Spinoza, is a question which admits of considerable doubt; but, in any case, it cannot be answered in advance, and the attempt (if it attracts us) is worth making.4 Setting on one side, then, these wilder and more wilful treatments of the philosophy of Hobbes, let us consider what we have got from our less speculative investments. Perhaps the most remarkable of our acquisitions—remarkable because it now appears odd that we should have had to wait so long for it—is a surer grasp of the connexion between Hobbes and the philosophy, particularly the political philosophy, of the Middle Ages. And perhaps this may be regarded as just one more detail in the mass of evidence that has now been accumulated to support the view that the revolution in politics, religion, and philosophy which was believed to have taken place during the seventeenth century has (at any rate as regards its speed and comprehensiveness) been grossly exaggerated. It is surprising now to turn back to those older studies of Hobbes and find him coupled with Bacon; and to have got rid of this misunderstanding puts us on the high road to a truer interpretation of his system as a whole. Perhaps [4] In at least one respect Professor Laird appears to incline to the opinion that Hobbes can never be a source of philosophical inspiration of this kind. He writes, ‘we should probably be wiser if we regarded him, not as a living influence, but as voice from the past whose clarity and incisiveness in a host of particular questions is a perpetual refreshment and a persistent incitement to the unthinking of many prejudices and to the rethinking of moral theory.’ (op. cit. p. 289.)
we were misled by Hobbes’s polemics against the schoolmen and by his personal connexion with Bacon into this belief that he was a writer who owed little or nothing to the Middle Ages and that he might be placed among the forerunners of modern science. But, whatever the cause of the error, it may now be said to have perished finally. And Professor Laird’s recent book does more than record the death of this misconception; it has the great merit of providing an interpretation of Hobbes’s work which recognizes the implications of this change of view. In an age when philosophy was giving way at every point to science, Hobbes stood firm: he had probably less patience or sympathy for experimental science than for anything else in the world—not excluding the Pope. In detail he rejected the whole of the scholastic view, and he was among the first to subject that view to a thoroughgoing criticism. And of all his contemporaries Galileo seems to have had greatest influence upon him. But his conception of the nature of philosophy and of philosophical argument was much more nearly related to that of Scholasticism than to the view of Bacon and his successors. Indeed, Hobbes was much too shrewd a thinker to reject as completely as he pretended to reject, without discrimination or consideration, the whole legacy of the scholastic philosophy. He was acutely aware of its weakness, but he knew it to be, in part at least, a genuine philosophy; and the expressions of hostility towards it which he allows himself arise, mainly, from an extraneous, non-philosophical interest and, if anything is to be neglected, must be neglected by a true interpretation of his work. Writing of Hobbes’s immediate predecessors, Professor Laird remarks that ‘every one of these authors would have admitted that Hobbes had played his hand without revoking. And the game that they all played had also been played by Hildebrand, Aquinas, Gerson, Occam and Calvin—old-fashioned players, no doubt, but players who always knew how many trumps were out.’ And he concludes that however startling Hobbian novelties may be, they are nevertheless ‘the moves of a master player who knew and kept to the medieval rules.’ And how great a revolution this view
constitutes in an interpretation of Hobbes’s philosophy is known to those who have been brought up on earlier expositions. Something of the same kind of revolution has taken place, also, in our ideas about the relation of Hobbes and Aristotle. Like Bacon, Hobbes regarded Aristotle as a dead hand in philosophy, paralysing thought and inhibiting further advance; and nobody was more fierce than Hobbes in his belief that, wherever else authority had place, mere authority had no place at all in philosophy. But here, again, we may easily be misled by Hobbes’s truculence; the ‘Vain Philosophy of Aristotle’ taught him more than he ever admitted. The doctrines of the Metaphysics, the Ethics and the Politics, it is true, influenced him little; but I think a closer study would show that he took more than he ever cared to acknowledge from the Rhetoric. Of all the writings of Aristotle, the Rhetoric was the one which Hobbes had studied most profoundly, and many of its doctrines entered deeply into his philosophy. The recent studies of Hobbes’s writings, then, return a more discriminating answer than hitherto to the question, What is new in Hobbes? Our knowledge is greater, and our prejudice is less than that which earlier writers enjoyed and suffered from. We are no longer pledged to find in these writings nothing but the gospel of modern materialism; and we know that even if that is still to be found, the philosophy of Hobbes is in the nature of a palimpsest. And, if there is danger ahead, it lies in the exaggeration of the, at least, semi-medieval portrait with which this recent work presents us. For there can be no doubt that Hobbes’s writings do represent a profound revolution in European thought, there can be no doubt that he was one of the most original of philosophers; and our task now is to determine the relevance of the new setting into which his writings have been put. When we turn to consider, not merely what we have learnt during the last ten years from these general treatments of Hobbes’s philosophy, but whether these years have produced any significant addition to our detailed knowledge of his writings,
we have to record Professor Brandt’s Thomas Hobbes’ Mechanical Conception of Nature, perhaps the most important study of these writings which has yet appeared. Originally published in Danish in 1921, and translated into English in 1928, this volume is one of those detailed examinations of philosophical texts which are more valuable than all the handbooks and general expositions of Hobbes’s philosophy that have ever been written. The programme of the work is set in its preface: ‘This book proposes to show how the mechanical view of nature shaped itself to Thomas Hobbes. Strange as it may appear, this problem has never been treated in detail. As soon as we leave the province of more general considerations and seek detailed information, we are as a rule left in the lurch by the Hobbes literature which, as it is, is not very abundant. It is not only that a really critical account of Hobbes’s natural philosophical main work De Corpore is still lacking, though some few points have been elucidated, but Hobbes’s natural philosophical process of development is as yet nebulous. Enquirers have chiefly studied the main work which Hobbes published in his sixty-seventh year, but have almost entirely ignored the long process of development that must have preceded it.’ We have here, then, an elaborate and detailed study of the development of a man’s ideas. The questions asked are, ‘What did Hobbes actually mean when he said that everything must be explained mechanically? Why did he think so? And, How did he arrive at this mechanical point of view?’ And in answering them many subsidiary points have to be decided. The chronology of Hobbes’s early writings presents difficulties; and in a writer apparently so independent as Hobbes, his relation to, and obligation to, Descartes, Mersenne, and Galileo is not easy to determine. Having settled these and other preliminary questions, Professor Brandt goes on to distinguish two periods in the development of Hobbes’s natural philosophy; the earlier, 1630 to 1641, in which doctrines (many of them recognizably Aristotelian) were propounded which were later to be rejected; and the later, 1641 to 1655, in which the view of the De Corpore
(published in 1655) was matured. And the work concludes with an elaborate examination of the De Corpore itself. It will be thought, perhaps, that an enquiry of this sort into the minutiae of a dead philosophy is a profitless undertaking, or that it must compare unfavourably with more imaginative and less meticulous experiments in philosophical interpretation. Indeed, this may be expected to be the view of those intent upon the construction of a philosophy for themselves. But even they, if such were their view, would be wrong. If we are to read philosophy at all, we must read it with care and take the pains necessary for its understanding; and the exceptional value of Professor Brandt’s work lies in the thoroughness with which it covers his subject. It may be remarked also that his formulation of the questions to be answered, and his whole conception of the business in hand, give a very fair guarantee of the usefulness of his conclusions. For what we must know about a philosopher, if we are to understand his philosophy, is not merely what he thought, but also why he thought it. Indeed, in philosophy, this what and this why are inseparable; taken apart each loses its meaning. In politics, in religion, in practical life it is not always necessary to enquire into a man’s reasons for thinking as he does; but in philosophy these reasons are what give meaning to his conclusions; and it is, perhaps, on account of this that mankind in general must be so little interested in philosophy, and so little understand it, as always to wish to assimilate it to what can more easily be appreciated by neglecting this characteristic. Agreement between two men, in some fields, may be significant even if it be merely agreement about what is to be done, agreement about a conclusion; but in philosophy such agreement has no significance whatever; no two philosophers can be said to agree unless their conclusions and their reasons for those conclusions alike coincide. And it is particularly necessary in the case of Hobbes to enquire into the reasons he gives for his views, because he has, in the past, suffered greatly at the hands of expositors who are content to press the similarity of some of his views with those (for example) of Bodin,
or even Machiavelli, and neglect altogether the dissimilarity of reason which lies behind it. And even the much advertised similarity between Hobbes and Spinoza almost disappears when their doctrines are closely examined. Hobbes’s originality consists almost wholly in the reasons he gives for his conclusions, and a true interpretation of his work is impossible unless these are considered with the greatest care. Now, if these are the most outstanding results of the study to which, during the last ten years, the writings of Hobbes have been subjected, there are also some important acquisitions of a more detailed character. Ten years ago it was possible for Vaughan5 to write as if Hobbes was something other than the most profoundly philosophical individualist in the history of political theory, to write as if he were to be classed among those whose views must be rejected by the liberal tradition, as if his philosophy were a reaction against the individualism of his time, to assert even that Hobbes is ‘the deadliest enemy of individualism.’ And this false interpretation is no longer possible: Hobbes, we can now see, had more of the ground of liberalism in him than even Locke. I think that the true nature of Hobbes’s individualism has yet to find its expositor, we have still to wait for the interpreter who will show us that this individualism is based, not upon any foundation in moral opinion at all, but upon a theory of knowledge, upon a thorough-going nominalism and an almost as extreme solipsism. But the progress which has been made in this direction is already enough to indicate the extent of the error involved in these earlier views. And again, it was long customary to expound Hobbes’s political philosophy as a philosophy of Fear; this for example is what it is represented to be by Vaughan. But a closer study of the writings has shown that Pride, and not Fear, is the masterconception of this political philosophy. But here, also, we have still to ascertain the full implication of this revised view. And lastly, although it is (unfortunately) still possible for writers to simulate the grotesque moral indignation to which both Vaughan [5] In Studies in the History of Political Philosophy, 1 (1925).
and Figgis are apt to abandon themselves, we may fairly be said, during the past ten years, to have outgrown this kind of absurdity. Hobbes, it has been said, ‘put truth under the heel of policy’ and ‘dragged religion under the Juggernaut car of reason of state’; and his theory has been described as ‘one of unadulterated despotism or nothing.’ But these misconceptions, arising from a failure to make elementary distinctions and from a fatal ignorance with regard to the foundations upon which Hobbes’s views are based, are fast becoming errors of the past. And we may now find even an otherwise not profoundly instructed writer willing to distinguish between absolutism and sovereignty, and thus remove from the exposition of Hobbes’s political philosophy a longstanding misrepresentation paralleled only in its foolishness by the confusion of absolutism and the Absolute which used to disfigure the interpretations of Hegel. The misunderstandings of the philosophy of Hobbes which the work of the last ten years has removed are, in the main, misunderstandings due to ignorance. And if we turn to inquire, What remains to be done? the answer must be that we have yet to remove many misunderstandings due to lack of insight. ‘Research’ will never take the place of thought; and what Hobbes’s philosophy stands in need of is a more profound consideration. The student of Hobbes’s philosophy is faced with an initial difficulty which requires to be met, not merely with patience, but with faith—I mean the difficulty of believing that Hobbes really means what he appears to say. For what he says is so unlike what is commonly said, and appears at first sight to be so extravagant, that the reader is inclined to exclaim, what Hobbes himself is said to have exclaimed on being presented with the proof of the fortyseventh theorem in Euclid’s Elements—‘By God, this is impossible.’ And some readers, so impressed with the impossibility of what Hobbes says, conclude that he meant something other than what he appears to mean, and make of his philosophy something more commonplace than it in fact is. Hobbes, we have to remember, is, of English philosophers, the one possessed of the greatest measure
of philosophical imagination; and so comparatively rare is this in English philosophical writing, that we may almost be forgiven for failing to appreciate it in Hobbes. English philosophical writers are not, generally speaking, given to the construction of systems; and this abstinence is both the strength and the weakness of English philosophy. But Hobbes did construct a system, a complete and comprehensive view of the universe; and he conceived this system with such imaginative power that, in spite of its relatively simple character, it stands comparison with even the grand and imposing creation of Hegel. And further, he had the capacity, the patience, and the opportunity to elaborate the details of this system so thoroughly that, whatever its imperfections, it cannot be said to have been imperfectly imagined or imperfectly elaborated. But if the power of philosophical imagination, a power possessed by only the greatest philosophers, is one Hobbes’s most remarkable qualities, it is also the source of some of the more obvious defects of his philosophical writing. For his imaginative propensities are not confined to the conception of a comprehensive theory, they penetrate also the form of his exposition and his diction. To think in metaphors and not to restrain one’s fancy must always be defects in a philosopher; and Hobbes, while complaining of these faults in others, suffered from them himself. In Hobbes’s writing is exemplified both the virtue and the danger of philosophical imagination; he is an imaginative thinker, but also an imaginative writer. And it is not only the imaginative grasp of Hobbes’s philosophical thinking which make it remarkable in the history of English philosophy: it has another equally unexpected quality. Radicalism, extravagance, the intrepid following out of a theory conceived in the grand manner and the absence of any sign of alarm, dismay, or compromise, are not qualities often to be found in English thinkers; but they flourish in Hobbes almost unchecked. As a nation we are more easily alarmed at the creations of our intellectual than at those of our practical activity; and we do not require to be persuaded that truth and moderation live in the
same street, we believe it on instinct. But Hobbes appears never to have been even tempted to make his conclusions more moderate than he found them; and compromise and fear had no place in his intellectual character. And on account of this, also, Hobbes’s writings are sometimes as difficult to credit as they are to believe. But it is as foolish to doubt that a writer means what he writes as it is insulting to doubt that a companion means what he says. And if we are to interpret Hobbes correctly, we must avoid this mistake. There are, of course, writers who do not know what they mean, but Hobbes certainly is not among these. Now, if our insight into the meaning of Hobbes’s philosophy is hindered by this initial difficulty of crediting its doctrines, it is apt to be restricted by a failure to appreciate the fact that this system is a philosophy. We are content to take its doctrines separately and are reluctant to follow Hobbes back to the foundation of his thought: we find embedded in its superstructure ideas with which we think ourselves familiar and, ignorant of what lies underneath, we do not question that familiarity. And bringing with us a somewhat different notion of what philosophy is from that which Hobbes himself entertained, we fail to adjust our expectations to what is offered us and consequently end by misinterpreting it. Let us consider briefly three examples of the restricted insight into Hobbes’s philosophy which arises from this failure to appreciate its philosophical character. It is often said that in Hobbes’s view human nature is essentially selfish; and this doctrine of the selfishness of man is represented as the foundation upon which he builds his social and political philosophy, as the premiss of his reasoning. And it is suggested also that it is in his premisses, and not in his reasoning, that his error lies. But when we turn to what Hobbes actually wrote, and treat it as a systematic whole, we find that the essential selfishness of man is not, in Hobbes, a premiss, but (if the doctrine is to be found anywhere) is a conclusion, the result of a long and complicated argument. His premiss is a doctrine of solipsism, a belief in the essential isolation of men from one another, and expounded as
a theory of knowledge. This isolation, it is true, is modified by ‘the most noble and profitable invention of all other’, speech; but it remains a merely artificial modification. And when this genuine premiss of Hobbes’s argument is appreciated, the attribution to him of the doctrine of the essential selfishness of man is seen at once to be mistaken. Others have held an egoistic view of human nature, and have based that view upon their observation of human behaviour; but no such argument is to be found in Hobbes. His doctrine is that each man is unavoidably shut up within the world of his own sensations; and there is no more meaning in speaking of him as ‘selfish’ than there is in speaking of anything else that is monadically conceived as selfish—the universe as a whole, or an electron. Here also the reason for belief conditions the character of what is believed. Again, Hobbes’s doctrine of authority has suffered from its being isolated from the system of his thought. But here also Hobbes’s argument begins not from a view of the moral character of man as so many theories of authority begin, or from insight into contemporary political needs, but from a view of the nature of man merely as an experiencing being. Hobbes’s theory of law and government has, indeed, no ethical foundation, in the ordinary sense; but it is conceived throughout in purely naturalistic terms, and begins in the theory of language. The creation of language and the establishment of the state are, for Hobbes, inventions of the same character and serve the same end. The necessity of an absolute sovereign in the community arises not from any such subsidiary observation as the misery of mankind without it, but is a necessity exactly paralleled by the necessity of fixing the meanings of names if language is to serve any useful purpose at all. Hobbes’s belief in the necessity of a single decisive authority does not arise from his political fears, and he does not think of this authority as a practical expedient; it is conceived and presented by Hobbes as a logical necessity. Pascal said, ‘Lorsqu’on ne sait pas la vérité d’une chose, il est bon qu’il y ait une erreur commune qui fixe l’esprit des hommes’; Hobbes asserts that there is never anything
but a common error, that truth itself is a common error, and that since what is important is that it should be genuinely common, it must be fixed by authority. A language which is understood by only a single person and a way of behaviour which is pursued by one man independently of all other men are, for Hobbes, examples of the same kind of anarchy. And as authority alone can put an end to anarchy in the one case, authority alone can put an end to it in the other. For what is remarkable in Hobbes’s doctrine of authority, and what on any other interpretation appears as a mere contradiction, is that it finds no place whatever for authority except in the control of men’s actions. Both the intellect and the conscience are excluded from its control, and they are excluded because when a man is by himself, when he is speaking to himself, it is not necessary that the language he uses should be understood by others. Nobody was a more determined opponent than Hobbes of anything like authority in philosophy, in belief, in opinion; and his stand against the authority of Aristotle in philosophy is not merely not inconsistent with his view of the necessity of an absolute authority in matters of social conduct, but, when we consider upon what that view is based, is seen to be involved in it. And thirdly, Hobbes’s so-called Erastianism is different from the Erastianism of Erastus and different from the Erastianism of any other writer whatever, because it is based upon different reasons. His view of the place of religion and a Church in a community is a philosophical view; that of Erastus and of those who follow him is not more than an opinion about what is most convenient. Hobbes’s view is based upon, not moral principles, but the principles of his theory of knowledge, upon his doctrines of nominalism and solipsism; theirs is based upon expediency and an observation of the world. And consequently they have, at bottom, little or nothing in common. Hobbes, it has been said, ‘was an Erastian without limitations,’ and it is this absence of limitations which makes it misleading to speak of him as an Erastian at all.
It appears, then, that Hobbes has come again; surprisingly, there seems even to be a prejudice in his favour at the present time. But our business must be to see that in this appearance he is neither applauded nor abused for views he never held. In point of knowledge we are in a better position with regard to Hobbes than our predecessors; our business is to improve our insight. And I think our insight will become deeper when we are more prepared to credit what he says, when we are more firmly persuaded of the error of taking his doctrines separately, and when we have grasped more surely that what we are offered by Hobbes is a philosophical system and not a mere collection of opinions. And someday, perhaps, Hobbes’s writings will suffer the fate which has already overtaken the works of some of the more notable philosophers— they will be understood by others better than by the man who composed them.
Christianity and the Nature of History and Religion and History Review of Herbert George Wood, Christianity and the Nature of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934); and James Clark McKerrow, Religion and History (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1934). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 36 (1935), 323–4. Oakeshott also reviewed Christianity and the Nature of History in Cambridge Review, 56 (1935), 248. These two books, concerned to a large extent with the same subject, are as different as they could well be in style and treatment. Mr Wood is a systematic, lucid, precise, and acute thinker, whose argument is easy to follow and whose conclusions are mainly orthodox; Mr McKerrow is often obscure, his writing lacks coherence, his thesis is never very clearly laid before the reader, and his conclusions, though to some extent familiar, are not recognizably orthodox. Christianity and The Nature of History is the Hulsean Lectures for 1933–1934, and its subject is the connexion of Christianity and history, a theme which is interpreted in a somewhat disconcertingly heterogeneous manner; the fundamental question of Christianity and the nature of history being disposed of in the first lecture. Christianity is a ‘historic faith’; what is the significance, and what are the implications of this ‘fact’? We are given, first, an interpretation of the nature of history, which follows to a large extent the views of Troeltsch and Croce. The historian ‘is concerned with those elements of individuality, uniqueness, once-for-all-ness, the irreversible and the nonrepeatable, which escape the net of scientific generalization and make the central interest of the human story’. But in history there are certain events which change the human situation in such a way that it can truly be said that ‘things can never be the same again’.
These are the historically important events; the rest is relatively insignificant. And the business of the historian is to distinguish these events and to indicate their eternal significance. This view of history and the business of the historian is familiar enough, and it is represented here as the view of the ‘modern historian’. Mr Wood makes it the foundation of his argument, for he moves on, easily and appropriately, to shew how it supports the Christian view of the significance of the life of Jesus. But I do not think he has considered sufficiently its defects; and what he claims for it— the concurrence of the ‘modern historian’—is certainly doubtful. However, it is a brilliantly argued lecture, and contains probably the best short statement of the view it recommends. The rest of the book is taken up with other, but not less interesting, matter. We are given in Lecture III an excellent account of what may be called the Christian interpretation of the course of events; in Lecture II, an acute examination of the Marxist interpretation of history as it appears in Kautsky’s Foundations of Christianity: and finally, a discussion of the contribution of Christianity to the civilization of Western Europe. This variety, perhaps, makes the book less coherent than it might have been, but it enables Mr Wood to make many acute and enlightening observations and to indulge (moderately) his lively and brilliant powers as a controversialist. Religion and History consists of two essays, not very closely connected in subject. The first, on the Principles of Sociology, is a thoroughgoing application of the concept of evolution to human society. The analogy between biology and human history appears sometimes a little forced—social organization before the Greek city-state is said ‘to correspond to invertebrate forms, while polities correspond to vertebrate’—but the main thesis, that the process of human development is towards democracy, peace, and a world economy, is fairly clearly presented. The second essay, however, entitled ‘Evolution in the light of Religion’ is devoted to a consideration of the connexion between Christianity and history, between religious belief and historical event. Here the thesis is by no means clear, but I understand Mr McKerrow’s suggestion
to be that pre-Christian religions were naturally ‘historical’ (the gods were thought of as historical personages), that in Christian Gnosticism this historical element in religious belief was regarded as relatively insignificant, and that ‘Catholic Christianity’ reintroduced (for obvious and unexceptionable reasons) this historical element. Genuine Christianity, the Christianity of ‘fullgrown men’, is Gnostic Christianity with its relative disregard of historical event; but such a religion could not, in the first years of our era, be widely appreciated, and ‘Catholic Christianity’ is a compromise for the benefit of ‘babes’. This thesis is expounded in a detailed history of the early centuries of Christianity, but it becomes clear to the reader only in the final chapter.
Morals and Politics Review of Edgar Frederick Carritt, Morals and Politics: Theories of their Relation from Hobbes and Spinoza to Marx and Bosanquet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935). First published in Cambridge Review, 56 (1935), 449. Books which deal in a fundamental way with the theoretical problems of the rights and obligations implied in civil society are rare in these days when interest is concentrated upon practical questions, and Morals and Politics will be welcomed by those whose business or pleasure it is to think about the philosophical problems presented in political life. But it is certainly not a book for beginners. About two-thirds of it consists of brief summaries of theories of political obligation from Plato to Bosanquet, summaries which would be misleading or even meaningless to those not already acquainted with the writers discussed; and the remaining third is devoted to a brief exposition of Mr Carritt’s own views. His main thesis is that obligation is not another and less exact way of expressing something else, e.g., interest; and he separates the writers with whom he deals into two main classes, those who, in different ways, wish to reduce obligation to something else, and those who, holding something like his own view, deny the possibility of such a reduction; and he reaches the remarkable conclusion that in all the long line of political philosophers, Locke alone (and possibly Kant) is on his side in holding that obligation is not a less exact way of thinking about some other fact, such as interest. This classification of theories is not, of course, novel; but it is carried out here better than elsewhere, and is certainly illuminating. Another of Mr Carritt’s beliefs, which he elaborates here, is that political obligation is not a special kind of obligation, but merely a form of our general obligation to other individuals, and he ends the book with a sentence from Kant: ‘A true theory of politics must begin by doing homage to moral obligation’. It
would appear, however, that moral obligation, in whatever way it is conceived, is rather a datum of a theory of politics, and the attitude of a theorist towards his data should be critical and not one of merely reverential acceptance. Mr Carritt, like some other writers, appears to me to accept too easily the principle that obligation is sui generis, that an imperative can never be reduced to an indicative. But his remarks, brief as they are, on Rights, the General Will, and the Contract, are acute and interesting, displaying a critical faculty from the lack of which political philosophy has suffered much in recent years. With regard to his summaries of the views of other writers, I find them uneven. On Kant and T.H. Green he is excellent; but some other chapters suffer from the extreme compression of their theme, and that on Hegel, with all its emphasis upon Hegel’s philosophy of history and its neglect of Hegel’s fundamental concepts of consciousness, will, right, and moral personality is seriously inadequate. However, Mr Carritt has tried to do for political philosophy what other writers, like Moore, Broad, Prichard, and Ross, have been doing in a more elaborate way for ethics in general, and the result must be of the greatest interest to those who think about these matters.
The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel Review of Michael Beresford Foster, The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935). First published in Cambridge Review, 57 (1935), 74. It is impossible in a short review to do full justice to this book, which I take to be one of the most profound and illuminating contributions to the literature of political philosophy which has appeared in recent years. It is admirable, in the first place, because it is a scholarly and inspired analysis of two great documents in the history of political philosophy—Plato’s Republic, and Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts. It is refreshing to find an author determined to keep close to his texts and to enquire into their exact meaning; and it is impossible here not to admire both this strict adherence to the matter in hand—the interpretation of two documents—and the subtlety of the interpretations. But the book is more than a mere exposition of two texts; it is a critical analysis. And if the criticism is primarily internal, concerned with the selfconsistency of the main ideas of the Republic and the Philosophie des Rechts, it is also based upon a profound appreciation both of the idea and of the history of political philosophy. This is apparent, first, in the choice of texts, at once so similar and so different in their handling of the problems of political philosophy; and secondly, in the way in which Mr Foster expounds these similarities and differences, making them (among much else) an illustration of the fundamental similarities and differences which join and divide the ancient and the modern way of thinking about political problems. It is the differences, of course, which are more important and more difficult to apprehend than the similarities; and here the resources of a subtle and original mind are concentrated upon the interpretation, not of vague outlines, but of all that is most intricate and most characteristic in the texts
concerned. There are, no doubt, readers who will find it difficult to agree with, perhaps, even the main thesis which informs the book—that ‘to philosophize is to study the history of philosophy philosophically’. But none can fail to admire the accomplished way in which Mr Foster has said so much and said it so clearly and unpretentiously, in 200 pages, to illuminate the writings of Plato and Hegel, and the whole history of political philosophy.
Right: a Study in Physical and Moral Order Review of Alexander Wyatt Tilby, Right: a Study in Physical and Moral Order (London: Williams and Norgate Ltd, 1933). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 36 (1935), 322–3. The author of this book admits that it has no real unity of design, but must be regarded as a series of loosely connected essays. And its title certainly gives a very imperfect notion of its contents. The first subject discussed is the origin of Right, which is entertainingly treated as a piece of natural history, moral right being connected (though it is difficult to see upon what grounds) with physical right-handedness in men and in animals, with the right-handed twist of many of the shells of fish and with other manifestations of right-handedness in nature. Mr Tilby then goes on to consider, in his rather sketchy and haphazard manner, the relation of rightness and goodness, which leads him on to a discussion of the nature of beauty and truth. The conclusion reached is that goodness, beauty, and truth are a trinity of ascending, not co-equal, values: goodness is loyalty to the permanent interests of the clan; beauty carries us beyond these local conditions, being an idea of perfect harmony and unity of form, design, and purpose, but it is still exclusive— excluding ugliness; and truth, unlike goodness and beauty, is genuinely universal, it includes everything and excludes nothing. The last essay deals with the concept of the Will of God, and is represented as an attempt to supply, what Christian theology has hitherto lacked, ‘a consistent scheme which could be regarded as a definite or formulated doctrine’ with regard to the Will of God. The book is breezily and boldly written; but the argument is often too slight to be convincing and the author’s wandering style too frequently leads him away from the point.
History and the Social Sciences First published in J.E. Dugdale (ed.), The Social Sciences: Their Relations in Theory and Teaching; Being a Report of a Conference Held Under the Joint Auspices of the Institute of Sociology and the International Student Service (British Committee), London, 1935 (London: Le Play House Press, 1936), 71–81. When I was asked to take a part in this discussion it was suggested to me that, since it was improbable that I could make any serious contribution to the debate, I might as well provide the comic relief: I might, for example, consider my predecessor as an opponent and knock him down. But, having heard what he has to say, I fear the fun won’t be so fast and furious as I had hoped. It is always more amusing (and also it is less trouble) to give the lie direct to an opponent than to fiddle about with fine distinctions and partial agreements; but it is rare to find two views so genuinely antithetical that they can be set at one another without more ado. And, since I cannot merely and altogether oppose what has already been said, I find myself in the invidious position of having to choose the less amusing part. I have no knock-out blow to deliver. The best I can manage is a feint with the right followed by a glancing left. It is difficult to forecast the effect of this somewhat oblique onslaught, but I can scarcely expect it to bring my opponent to the floor. I want first to understand what we are to mean when we speak of history. I think some confusion exists in the minds of many who use this word; and I believe that we shall not achieve a satisfactory view of the relationship of history and the social sciences until that confusion is dispelled. My feint, you see, consists in suggesting to my opponent that there is something important which he has not yet thought about; and just as he is beginning to give us his opinion, I shall jump in and tell him what his conclusions ought to be. It is so familiar a subterfuge that perhaps it will fail altogether to deceive.
History, as I understand it, is a certain way of thinking and of writing about the past. There are many ways of thinking and writing about the past, but history is separated from all others by certain distinguishing characteristics. This, I know, is a clumsy and inaccurate way of speaking. The past is not ‘there,’ formless, meaningless material, waiting to be given shape and significance, if not by the historian, then by the philosopher or the sociologist. There is a past for every way of thinking: there is neither one preeminent past, nor is there any past at all except for some way of thinking. That, of course, is philosophy, and therefore introduces unnecessary complications; it is better, perhaps, to keep to the falsity of common sense and say that history is a certain way of thinking about the past. Yet, the word history is frequently used indifferently to mean a certain way of thinking about the past, to mean any and every way of thinking and writing about the past, and to mean what those who believe in its existence would call the past course of events itself, what actually happened, what was. And sometimes, even, the word is made to bear more than one of these meanings in a single sentence. But I think we must decide which of these meanings the word is to have, for otherwise we shall not escape ambiguity and confusion. For myself I should like to dismiss at once the notion that history is the past course of events itself separated from every and anybody’s ideas about it, that history is what actually happened. I should like to dismiss this notion because I find it altogether meaningless. It depends upon the separation of ‘what has come to us’ and ‘our interpretation of it,’ and it introduces nothing but chaos into our intellectual world. History is not made by statesmen, by soldiers, or by men in the street, any more than entomology is made by insects; the one is made by historians, the other by entomologists. Of ‘what actually happened’ we know and can know nothing at all; if history were that it would be at once nothing and unknowable. No event, no past is historical unless it has survived in record; and further, not even all recorded events are historical events. History is not ‘what actually happened’; it is ‘what the evidence obliges us to believe.’
And if history is ‘what the evidence obliges us to believe,’ then it is a way of thinking about the past, governed and controlled by rules of evidence, and is not the past itself separated from our knowledge of it. And further, I should like also to dismiss the notion of history as any and every way of thinking about the past; to dismiss the notion that every past is an historical past. There are, obviously, some pasts, or some ways of thinking about the past, which are distinct from the past in history. The remembered past, for example, is not, as such, an historical past; for memory is essentially personal. And again, the imagined or fancied past is a past different from the past in history. An imagined past, a past of myth or tradition, may, for some purposes, be valuable and significant; it may, for example, have an immense and beneficial control over belief and activity; but it is a past alien from that of history. And once more, there is what may be called a practical past, which, though it may not be a merely mythical or traditional past, must nevertheless be distinguished from the historical past. Here the past is thought of as merely that which preceded the present, that from which the present has grown or developed, and the significance of the past is taken to lie in the fact that it has been influential in deciding the present or future fortunes of men. The past, that is to say, is thought of in terms of the present and as explanatory of the present: it becomes a store-house of political wisdom, an authority for religious belief, the raw material for literature, or even a way of expressing a philosophical system. But this way of thinking of the past is, also, a distinct and different way of thinking of it from that which belongs to history. There are, then, ways of thinking and writing about the past which differ from the way in which the historian thinks and writes of it, there are pasts other than the past for history, and consequently history must be taken to mean something more definite and confined than merely any and every way of thinking about the past. History is a certain, specific way of thinking about the past; and we are left with the question, what distinguishes the historian’s way of thinking about the past? a question calling for a careful
and detailed answer, in place of which, however, I can offer here only two observations. First, the past in history is a dead past, and it is a past essentially unlike the present. The historian is interested in the deadness of the past, and in its dissimilarity from the present. What attracts his eye and fires his enthusiasm is diversity. He has a preternatural sensibility for the minute and detailed differences which distinguish one situation from another, one plan from another, one age from another. The modern instance does not attract him, for he knows that similarities appear only when details are neglected. The historical past is, thus, the product of the imagination; history is the perpetual recreation of lost worlds. No doubt there have been writers about the past so preoccupied with the condition and the problems of their present world that they were unable to distinguish past from present, but this failure of imagination is a measure of their failure to write history. Now, the engagement of the historian with diversity and with dissimilarity does not imply that for him the past is merely a succession of unique events and situations; it does not imply that, in any philosophical sense, events for the historian are singular. An historical event is never a mere point-instant; it is something with a meaning, something that can maintain itself relatively intact and self-complete. Things in history are not bare particulars, they are changing identities; but the point at which change creates a new identity is, for history, determined, without entering into any ultimate question, by an imaginative judgment based in each case upon the available evidence. In short, there may be similarities (and certainly because the historian chooses to neglect them does not mean that they do not exist and cannot be elucidated), but the historical past is essentially a world of relative dissimilarities and diversities. Nor does this neglect of similarities imply (as is sometimes supposed) that the historical past is not a generalised past, that generalisation is foreign to historical thinking, or that the historian is merely an archivist or a collector of information which he is powerless to coordinate. That, though a common,
is an absurd notion. An historical person, situation or event is itself unavoidably a generalisation; and history, no less than every other form of knowledge, consists of nothing but generalisations. But it implies that generalisation in history is limited, limited by the presuppositions in terms of which the historical past is constructed. And it implies that generalisation which conflicts with the historical concepts of person, situation, event, etc., is and must always remain, foreign to history. My second observation is that history is thinking about the past for the sake of the past; it is a way of thinking about the past free from all extraneous interests. For many people the past has interest only in so far as the knowledge of it can be used for some ulterior purpose, just as there are people whose interest in horseracing is confined to the money they can make by it. But of the one class it must be said that those who compose it are without the genuine historical sense, and of the other that they are not true racing enthusiasts but merely business men. For the historian the enjoyment of his pursuit depends upon no extraneous purpose or result; the attempt to imagine and elucidate a past, lost and different world from that in which he lives is, taken by itself, completely satisfying. And the introduction of an extraneous purpose, because it involves a totally different way of thinking about the past, is not merely the perversion of history, but its destruction. This, again, does not mean that the study of the past can yield nothing over and above all historical knowledge of the past; it means that the historical study of the past can yield nothing more. Now, what I have attempted is to suggest a definite meaning for the word history, because I believe that until we know exactly what we mean by it we cannot determine its relations with the social sciences or with anything else. My view is that history is this particular (and no other) way of thinking about the past. And if it be this, then the absolute impossibility of deriving from history any generalisations of the kind which belong to a social science will, I think, follow. And I believe that only those who
attach no particular meaning to the word history (taking it to be any and every way of thinking about the past), or those who think that history is ‘what actually happened,’ a course of events altogether independent of experience, can reasonably hold that history itself can supply either material or evidence for a social science. I believe, in short, that history and social science can be brought together only by those who are ignorant of the nature of either and careless of the interests of both - the professional matchmakers of the intellectual world. This view of the matter depends, of course, as much upon a conception of science and social science as upon a conception of history; and consequently I must at least indicate what I take to be the nature of scientific knowledge. But here again a few observations only can be made. Science is the attempt to conceive the world in what may perhaps be called the most abstractly universal manner possible; it is the attempt to conceive and to generalise the world under the category of quantity, the type of generalisation aimed at being a statistical generalisation in some form or other. And a social science which conforms to this general character may, at least, be imagined. And if it is objected that there are at present few sciences which closely approximate to this character, we may somewhat reduce our requirements without surrendering our principle, and say that scientific knowledge is always in the form of universal generalisations. And again, a social science of this character may easily be imagined. It would be an attempt to discover and establish generalisations about the life and conduct, or some particular aspects of the life and conduct, of societies; and the observations with which such a science or sciences would be concerned would, no doubt, be taken partly from the present and partly from the records of the past. With the observations which might be made in the contemporary world we are not here concerned: what we have to consider are those derived from the past, for it is at this point that social science and history are said to come together in a common undertaking, it
is at this point that history is said to contribute to, or even to be transformed into, a science of society. Now, in order to make scientific use of the records of the past each event or situation must be transformed into an instance of a general rule; facts of the past must be regarded as ephemeral instances of the stable generalisations which a science of society seeks to propound. At first sight it would appear to be difficult to discover a means by which this can be achieved. If the facts of the past could somehow be reduced to figures, the difficulty would disappear; stable statistical generalisations would at once become possible. But to reduce the life and conduct of social life to the category of quantity, except in the case of such things as population and wealth, has been found so difficult an undertaking that sociologists have had to resort to less scientific methods. Recorded facts, they say, even when they cannot be reduced to figures, may be related and compared with one another in such a way as to give generalisations of value and significance. With the serious logical defects of the comparative method we are not concerned; all we need observe is that directly the facts of the past become instances of a general rule they cease to be historical facts. The scientific way of thinking about the past at this point, as at some others, begins where the historical way ends: where comparison begins, as a method of generalisation, history ends. But there is another obvious way in which the scientific use of the records of the past is different from the historical use—a difference which, I believe, establishes a genuine cleavage. For the historical way of thinking, the position of an event or situation in the past, and its pastness, are both essential aspects: whereas the scientific use of the facts of the past is based upon a neglect of these aspects. The world of scientific generalisations is a world ignorant alike of past and future as such; it knows nothing of historical time, and recognises time only within its own world as a method of relating its concepts. To regard a fact as an instance of a general rule lifts it at once out of the domain of history by depriving it of its pastness.
My conclusion, then, which I have been able to support only with a few random observations, is that in spite of the use a social science may be able to make of the facts of the recorded past, it can make no use whatever of historical facts. Social science and history must think about the past in different ways and with different presuppositions. What history says is not denied by science, it is simply irrelevant to science. And only when history is misconceived and science is misunderstood is it possible to think of them concerned in a common undertaking.
An Introduction to Contemporary German Philosophy Review of Werner Brock, An Introduction to Contemporary German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935). First published in Cambridge Review, 57 (1936), 195. ‘The general reader’ in philosophy—if such a person can be imagined in England—must be supposed to tire easily of the works which are turned out for his benefit; they are for the most part tedious and uninspired; at best they are dully informative, at worst merely confusing and misleading. But if he were to turn to some of the great classics of philosophy he would find himself in another and brighter world in which it is a pleasure even to be bewildered. In this world of philosophical thought he may require some direction; and the sort of guide he looks for is one who speaks from an abundance of well-considered knowledge, one who is himself a philosopher, and one whose attention is not to be diverted from what is central to what is merely quaint and amusing. Dr Werner Brock is a guide of this kind to the world of contemporary German philosophy; and his book has just that proportion of information to suggestion which distinguishes a good from a useless introduction to a subject. The topic he has set himself to discuss is the position of philosophy in Germany since the reaction set in, soon after the middle of the last century, against the last great orthodoxy—Hegelianism. The central problem presented to philosophy during this period he takes to be the question ‘What, in this age of science, is the task of philosophy, if any task still remains for it beyond the preservation and development of logic and the study of its own history?’ And he considers the work of the seven most influential German philosophers of the last fifty years in relation to this question, thus giving the period and the book a significant unity. Husserl, Dilthey, and Max Weber are selected from the older writers who,
inspired by ‘the collapse of Hegel’s philosophy and the emergence of the separate sciences,’ gave philosophy in Germany a new life. In the second chapter the work and influence of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is discussed with great insight. And the third and last chapter is devoted to the work of Jaspers and Heidegger, with briefer remarks about some of the less-known contemporary writers. The book as a whole is admirably conceived, so far as is possible it avoids technicalities, and it is written in a clear and agreeable style. And the bibliography with which it concludes adds considerably to its value. As an introduction to this period of German philosophy it is difficult to see where it could be improved; and as an interpretation it must be of great interest to English readers. For the road which German philosophy has taken during these years is, in many respects, different from that of English philosophy. But there are striking similarities. The question, ‘What, in this age of science, is the real task of philosophy?’ has been presented to the philosophical thinkers of both traditions, but more explicitly and expressly to those of the German tradition. The two traditions have reacted to the question in similar ways; the philosophical thought of both traditions has turned its attention to devising new methods: in both, philosophy has maintained itself, in an unusually hostile and preoccupied world, by renewing itself. But the German tradition is distinguished by the presence of two writers—Nietzsche and Kierkegaard—who have no counterpart in English thought; profound philosophical thinkers, yet writers whose influence springs from the force of their personality and whose natural voice is that of the prophet rather than that of the philosopher.
The Meaning of History Review of Nicholas Berdyaev, The Meaning of History, tr. G. Reavey (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1935). First published in Cambridge Review, 57 (1936), 195. History here is the course of events; and this book is an interpretation of the course of events which we speak of roughly as the history of Europe. That history is divided into three main epochs: the first, ‘the pre-Christian pagan period, whose feature is the immersion of the human spirit in nature and its direct organic blending with it’; the second, ‘the Christian stage comprising the whole of the Middle Ages and marked by the heroic struggle of the human spirit against the natural elements and forces’; the third, the period of the Renaissance (now coming to an end), the period of ‘man’s self-affirmation,’ marked by his control over nature. These three epochs are to be followed by a fourth, the character of which is yet unknown but which will be conditioned by the fact that ‘European man to-day is emerging from modern history exhausted and with all his creative forces spent’—whereas he had ‘emerged from the Middle Ages with accumulated and virgin forces, disciplined in the school of asceticism.’ This schematic view of the history of Europe has as a background a set of moral judgments which determine the relative value of human ideals and activities, moral judgments which conflict directly with the secularism (intellectual and material) of the modern age. There is, I think, among English readers an understandable prejudice against these attempts (which are associated particularly with Teutonic writers) to interpret in general terms the history of the world or of Europe; and those in whom this prejudice is strong will find little to attract them here. And even among those who are, in general, sympathetically disposed to these attempts to rationalise the total course of events, there will be many who find this scheme of epochs unconvincing, who will wonder (in
particular) where Professor Berdyaev learnt his mediaeval history, and who will be dismayed by his extraordinarily restricted view of the nature of Christianity. But setting aside these difficulties, there remains for those who are interested a diagnosis of the present condition of European civilization and an assertion of a scale of values; the one intelligent and original, and the other eloquent and profoundly religious.
The Historical Element in Religion Review of Clement Charles Julian Webb, The Historical Element in Religion (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935). First published in Journal of Theological Studies, 37 (1936), 96–8. Professor Webb has chosen for the subject of the four lectures he delivered in Bristol last year on the Lewis Fry foundation, which appear here together with an epilogue, a topic of the greatest interest. His treatment of it is, I think, more profound and illuminating and more strictly relevant than any of the more recently published discussions; and though with greater space at his command he might have developed more fully some aspects of his argument, what he has given us is an admirably concise and lucid statement, which could not easily be improved upon, of the conclusions he has reached. The first lecture is devoted to the definition of the nature of the historical element in religion, and this definition determines (as it should) the view presented in subsequent lectures of the place and significance of this element. Religion is ‘a mode of behaviour and activity carried on by men as members of a community’ (p. 20), and it is unavoidably connected with the history and traditions of a community. In all religions whatever, there is a sense of ‘oneself as belonging to a past’. The historical element in religion is, then, not ‘the past as such’, the past of the historian (p. 75); but neither is it a merely mythological past, ‘tales told in explanation of a traditional ritual’ (p. 34): it is the actual past life of the community felt and thought of by the individual as his own past. This may appear to be reducing the historical element in religion to smaller proportions and a less significance than it has often been credited with; and certainly, I think, there must be a grave doubt whether it should not rather be called the element of past in religion than the historical element. But there can be little doubt that, by starting from this position, Professor Webb is on firm ground. And his conclusion that the
historical element in religion is ‘closely bound up with the nature of religion as a form of experience’ (p. 94), that all religions are unavoidably and essentially, in one degree or another, historical religions, is a reasonable conclusion. In a lecture devoted to the ‘Depreciation of the Historical Element in Religion’, the writers discussed are, with one exception, those who hold, in one form or another, the view that all historical religions are, at best, only the one, true, natural religion in disguise, and that in so far as they are connected with a specific past they are certainly limited and possibly false. And Professor Webb shews that those who hold such a view as this—e.g. Spinoza and Lessing—are, in fact, misinterpreting the unavoidable character of religion itself. But he believes too readily that if this particular and extreme form of depreciation is disposed of, all others go with it. It would, for example, be interesting to know what he would say to the view which, not denying the unavoidable presence of this past element in all religion, asserted nevertheless that religion is essentially a matter of present and actual belief about the world— the view that although there is certainly a past which influences, and perhaps controls, present belief, it cannot itself be made a foundation or a ground of present belief. The epilogue to these lectures is an attempt to indicate the kind of attitude which the previously explained view of the nature and significance of the historical element in religion implies towards some of the historical beliefs belonging to Christianity. And here the treatment is less adequate. The question which inevitably occurs to the reader of the earlier part of the book is, how on this slender but firm foundation can a defence be built of the importance which traditional Christianity has attributed to past events? And his conclusion at the end must, I think, be that the disconcerting thing about Christianity is that the historical element which (rightly or wrongly) belongs to it is something very much more than ‘a consciousness of personal continuity with an actual life reaching back into the past, and shared with other members of a community’ (p. 93). It may be that what
Christianity asserts in excess of this is indefensible: certainly the only adequate defence of it would be in terms of a philosophical view of the nature of time and its relation with eternity, and a philosophical theory of belief, and these unhappily lie beyond the scope of this course of lectures.
Collected Essays Review of Francis Herbert Bradley, Collected Essays, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935). First published in Philosophy, 11 (1936), 114–16. The appearance of these two volumes, which complete the publication in book form of Bradley’s writings, is a welcome occasion; for, although they contain little that has not before been printed, they make accessible for the first time some of his most characteristic essays. Here are reprinted, first, Bradley’s two early pamphlets (now long out of print), The Presuppositions of Critical History (1874), and Mr Sidgwick’s Hedonism (1877); secondly, twenty-seven essays from Mind, the International Journal of Ethics, and the Fortnightly Review; and thirdly, six short ‘Replies to Criticisms and Notes’ which (with one exception) appeared originally in the pages of Mind. To these are added two hitherto unpublished essays, On the Treatment of Sexual Detail in Literature, and on Relations; and a complete bibliography of his work. The editors, who appear under the initials M. de G. and H. H. J., have performed their work admirably. The decision to arrange the essays in mainly chronological order was a wise choice; and the reader will be grateful for the care they have taken to provide all the necessary references and bibliographical details. The editing of the essay on Relations, which, left unfinished by Bradley, had to be pieced together from various MSS and notebooks, called particularly for care and patience, and has been performed with the greatest skill. Everything, in short, that the reader could look for from the editors has been supplied. Considered from the standpoint of subject, these essays fall into four main classes. There are, first, two essays, appealing to a more general and less technical interest than the rest—The Evidences of Spiritualism (1885), reprinted from the Fortnightly Review; and
On the Treatment of Sexual Detail in Literature (1912), hitherto unpublished—which are admirable examples of the handling of important and interesting questions by an acute and liberal intelligence. Secondly, there are the writings which deal with (in a general sense) logical questions—the pamphlet on The Presuppositions of Critical History, and the unfinished essay on Relations, on which Bradley was working at the time of his death in 1924. The pamphlet is interesting as the earliest of Bradley’s published work and because it is one of the earliest discussions in English of the logical and epistemological connections connected with history. He was right, I think, when in later years he became dissatisfied with its conclusions, but it remains for us one of the most original and acute discussions of these questions. The essay on Relations was intended to be a rehandling of a subject on which Bradley had already written much; and as it appears here it is more like elaborate notes for a treatise than an essay. No fresh doctrine, so far as I can see, is propounded, but the discussion is fuller than any to be found in the Principles of Logic or elsewhere in Bradley’s writings. He was right in believing that ‘the question of relations, their ultimate nature and place in the world of reality and knowledge’ is ‘central’; and this treatment of it shows undimmed Bradley’s intellectual vitality, his characteristic appreciation of difficulties, and his candid consideration of views which, in the end, he felt obliged to reject. What he has to say here and elsewhere on the problem of relations has yet, I think, to receive the critical consideration it deserves. Thirdly, there are the seven essays which deal with ethical subjects, ranging from the elaborate criticism of the Methods of Ethics contained in Mr Sidgwick’s Hedonism, to the brilliant four pages which consider the question, Is Self-sacrifice An Enigma? And there are, fourthly, the twenty essays which comprise the main bulk of Bradley’s writing on psychology. It will be seen, then, that these volumes are valuable chiefly (though not exclusively) for collecting together Bradley’s contribution to psychology. Bradley had a clear notion of what
he thought ought to be the subject-matter of psychology and of the general character of psychological, as distinct from logical or metaphysical, questions. A sterile purism in thought is, of course, the last thing of which he may justly be accused; but he knew that there is a difference between theory and practice, between psychology and metaphysics, between ethics and moral sensibility, between religion and philosophy, and he knew that distinctions of this kind are essential to clear thinking. In one section of Mr Sidgwick’s Hedonism he gives us again (he had already given them in Ethical Studies) his views about the general character of ethical thought, and in more than one of those psychological essays he indicates his notion of the general character of psychology. A Defence of Phenomenalism in Psychology, originally published in 1900 in Mind, states his view most comprehensively; and, while it is a view which, I think, must come to be accepted more and more as psychology assumes a genuinely scientific character, it is one of which we require still to be reminded. Bradley began the publication of these essays on psychological subjects after the appearance of the Principles of Logic in 1883, and they continued to appear at intervals in Mind until 1904; but they came mostly from the period subsequent to the publication of Appearance and Reality in 1893. His writing on psychology is characteristic of Bradley in two respects. It is concerned entirely ‘with the analysis of the main constitutive concepts—e.g., s ensation, t hought, a ssociation, attention, memory, will—which form the framework within which ‘experimental psychology’ (with which he confesses himself ‘scarcely at all acquainted’) works. His task, he conceived, was to make some contribution towards the further determination of this framework of concepts, and so towards the creation of a more settled terminology in psychology (ii. 377). And he was certainly right in believing that ‘in analysis there is still much to be done’ (i. 180). In this respect he takes his place within the general purpose of the traditional ‘English analytical school.’ But further, besides the superior subtlety and acuteness of Bradley’s analysis when compared with such earlier representatives of this
school as Bentham or James Mill, his writings on psychology are characteristic in respect of the attention they pay to, and the inspiration they draw from, the great mass of Continental work on the subject which belongs to the second half of the nineteenth century. Bradley’s independence of judgment, in metaphysics no less than in psychology, is, perhaps, apt to obscure the remarkably wide acquaintance he had with the work of others, both in England and on the Continent. To the end of his life he remained, not only an independent thinker, but also a reader (cf. ii. 653), and a reader always more interested in the work of his contemporaries than in that of earlier writers. Nevertheless, in spite of this foreign strain in his reading, Bradley takes his stand, as a psychologist, among his contemporary English writers—Bain, Sully, James, Ward, and Stout—and differs from them, not so much in outlook as in opinion, and because he never produced a systematic treatise on the subject. It may be remarked also that Bradley was a man admirably equipped for making a notable contribution in the analysis of psychological concepts. Added to a clear perception of the general character of psychology and the nature of its problems and presuppositions, he had a remarkable power of self-analysis, an acute and imaginative appreciation of difficulties, and great common sense. His contribution is, of course, fragmentary in that his writings do not contain a discussion of all even of the most important problems of psychology; but whenever he takes up a topic his treatment of it is thorough and masterly. The essays on Association and Thought, on What do We Mean by the Intensity of Psychical States?, and on Active Attention, perhaps stand out from the others by reason of their comprehensiveness. And the three elaborate essays on The Definition of Will remain his most notable single treatment of a psychological problem. The contents of the volumes are, I think, unlikely ever to turn out to be Bradley’s most important work; but it does not require any perspective of time to make these writings on psychology appear, within their limits, some of the best in the English language.
Bernard Bosanquet’s Philosophy of the State Review of Bertil Pfannenstill, Bernard Bosanquet’s Philosophy of the State. A Historical and Systematical Study (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1936). First published in Philosophy, 11 (1936), 482– 3. This is a sympathetic exposition and defence of Bosanquet’s philosophy of the State. It is a useful piece of work, competently and thoroughly carried out. Its usefulness lies, I think, in the fact that this so-called Idealist theory of the State is the only theory which has paid thoroughgoing attention to all the problems which must be considered by a theory of the State, and at the same time is a theory which has yet to receive a satisfactory statement. And any attempt to understand The Philosophical Theory of the State, which still remains (with all its defects) the most comprehensive account of this theory, is a useful preliminary to restatement. Preachers, journalists, politicians, and moralists have all had their whack at this theory, and they are satisfied that they have discredited it. But it still retains some vitality, and when, if ever, a philosopher turns his attention to it again, he will find what this book has to say both relevant and valuable. It consists of 300 pages, and is divided into four chapters; and it is only in the last chapter, the last hundred pages, that the author comes to grips with Bosanquet’s philosophy of the State itself. The earlier chapters are devoted to discussions of the object and method of political philosophy, the historical basis of Bosanquet’s theory, and Bosanquet’s general philosophical position. And this proportion seems to me, on the whole, to be right. It is impossible to understand this theory of the State apart from the general philosophy to which it belongs, and when that is understood the obscurities of the political philosophy are few and relatively unimportant.
Mr Pfannenstill takes Bosanquet’s theory to be an example of what he calls a ‘universalistic’ theory, and contrasts it with what he calls an ‘individualistic’ theory. These theories are alike in being ‘ethico-normative’ theories; but the main difference between them lies in their different concepts of freedom. There is, however, a point of importance which he does not consider. What he speaks of as the ‘individualistic’ theory, in all the examples of it that we have, has always been distinguished by a hedonistic ethical foundation; and the ‘universalistic’ theories differ from it in their rejection of hedonism. And again, while Bosanquet’s philosophy of the will is thoroughly and intelligently discussed, not much is said expressly about his philosophy of the self. Yet it is its thorough consideration of the self which distinguishes this theory from the so-called ‘individualistic’ theories, which are inclined to treat the self as something too important to be examined. Throughout the book, Bosanquet’s theory of the State is taken together with that of Hegel, Green, and Bradley, and the criticisms of Hobhouse and others are considered with care. The author never attempts to go beyond Bosanquet, or to point out how the defects of Bosanquet’s exposition might be remedied; indeed, he recognizes few defects. He is concerned almost entirely with removing the more obvious misunderstandings of that theory, which (though some of them are obvious enough) are sufficiently widespread to be worth while considering, and with giving a systematic exposition of Bosanquet’s thought. And, within these limits, and in spite of its rather uncritical attitude, it is as complete a guide to Bosanquet’s theory of the State as one could wish.
The Political Philosophy of Hobbes Review of Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes; its basis and genesis, tr. E. M. Sinclair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). First published in Cambridge Review, 58 (1937), 150. This is an excellent and timely piece of work. It has the great merit of not wasting time by going over all the old ground; it is a work of genuine scholarship based upon a thorough reconsideration of all the relevant writings of Hobbes; and its interpretation of Hobbes is subtle and original. And further, it comes at a time when what is required in the study of Hobbes is just the fresh insight into Hobbes’s writings which it provides. Mr Strauss has a number of new or hitherto incompletely emphasised views with regard to the basis and genesis of Hobbes’s political philosophy to defend and explain. Hobbes is presented, first, as an opponent of the natural law theory of society; his theory of the State is shown to be based upon, neither the moral principles of the traditional natural law theory, nor (like Spinoza’s) upon purely naturalistic principles, but stands midway between the two. In one of the most original chapters in the book Mr Strauss distinguishes three main periods in the history of Hobbes’s thought; first, the period when he was under the influence of the traditional theory, secondly, the period in which he turned away from philosophy to history and particularly to a study of Thucydides, and thirdly, when he returned to the study of philosophy and constructed his own theory of the State, based upon a new moral outlook. And the distinctive innovation of Hobbes is taken to be his rejection of law and his substitution of right or claim as the principle from which the State is to be deduced, a substitution which has since dominated political theory in Western Europe. Many and powerful arguments are produced in defence of these and the other theses maintained in this book; and Mr Strauss is very rarely guilty of exaggeration, trying to make the evidence
prove more than it does. But I think he exaggerates slightly Hobbes’s originality. Certainly Hobbes broke away from one tradition, the tradition which had for many centuries dominated political theory, but he did not free himself from it entirely, and he did not found an entirely fresh tradition. His theory, particularly in its substitution of will for law as the basis of the State, belongs to a tradition already established long before the sixteenth century; though it is true that never before had that tradition found so masterly an exponent. It is impossible here to deal fully with the whole of the extraordinarily subtle and suggestive interpretation of Hobbes which this book contains; it must suffice to recommend it to all who are interested in the history of political theory as a first-class piece of work.
Ideology and Utopia Review of Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, tr. L. Wirth and E. Shils (London: Routledge, 1936). First published in Cambridge Review, 58 (1937), 257. It would be a pity if the somewhat turgid and involved style in which this book is written, its at first sight alarming terminology, and its rather miscellaneous character which it derives from its origin in three different German publications, should stand in the way of its being widely read. For it is an acute and valuable contribution to its subject, and is inspired at once by a genuinely scientific spirit and a desire to give some practical help towards understanding and coping with the present situation—political and social—in Western Europe. What Dr Mannheim calls the sociology of knowledge is an examination of the political and social ideas of an epoch or a community from the standpoint of their genesis and context in the culture of the community in which they find place. In his discussion of the history of the sociology of knowledge it is stated that the point of view which made such a study possible ‘actually emerged with Marx, whose profoundly suggestive aperçus went to the heart of the matter.’ But Dr Mannheim’s view is at once wider and more accurate than anything to be found in Marx’s writings, for he conceives the ‘situation,’ in terms of which the political and social ideas of an epoch are to be examined, not in terms of production or ‘class,’ but in terms of a more profound conception of the nature of a society. All thought is a social product, and we must go back to the social situation in order to understand the real meaning of the ideas of an age or a community. These ideas Dr Mannheim classifies into two groups—ideologies and Utopias. Ideologies are, roughly, mental fictions which are accepted by those who are anxious to stabilize the social order in which they
find themselves and which are developed in order to explain and defend that order. Utopias are the ideas which are ‘incongruous with the state of reality in which they occur’ and which represent a desire to replace our existing social order by another. Ideology and Utopia, then, stand for two fundamental states of mind or kinds of thinking about social and political matters; and the intellectual history of a community can be seen always as a conflict between them. And Dr Mannheim goes on to illustrate this thesis from the history of modern Europe, and to show how a genuine science of politics might be built upon this analysis. The book belongs to what is now an established tradition of great vitality in the recent history of social investigation, a tradition which owes more to Marx and Nietzsche and Max Weber than to any other writers. Its strength and interest lies in the systematic and profound way in which the thesis is worked out and illustrated; its weakness lies, I think, in the rather unsatisfactory attempt, which goes along with the thesis, to prove the inadequacy of so-called ‘classical logic’ and all non-sociological approaches to human knowledge. Marx’s theory of ‘absolute relativism’ obviously left something to be desired, and I cannot say that Dr Mannheim’s observations on the subject leave me satisfied. But, whatever its defects in detail, it is an extremely suggestive work which deserves all the care that its reading demands.
This Freedom of Ours Review of Frank Birch, This Freedom of Ours. The Book of the Broadcast Talks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937). First published in Cambridge Review, 59 (1937), 55. This volume of eleven brief lectures is an attempt to state what the freedom of an Englishman consists of, how it came to be, how it is protected, and how it should be further guarded and increased. It is a defence of British liberal democracy. It may be considered from two standpoints—as a book of talks written and delivered for the B.B.C., and as an account of the nature and genesis of the British Constitution. As a book of talks it is excellent; it has all the merits and avoids some of the defects of B.B.C. lectures. Its tone is critical without being revolutionary; its thought is clear and simple without being condescending; its style is breezy without being silly; its information is reasonably accurate without being pedantic. All this we should expect from Mr Frank Birch; his wit, learning, intelligence, and modesty are seen to excellent effect; he has succeeded in a difficult task. As an account of the nature and genesis of the British Constitution the defects of the book are, perhaps, only those inherent in its origin and purpose. It has behind it a considerable knowledge of English constitutional history, it is based to a fair extent on Dicey but goes beyond Dicey at the points where it is now generally admitted that Dicey was wrong, or is now out of date. But the necessity of brevity has made its history at many points very superficial; not only are we never taken behind the elaborately set scene in which appear successively the men who won us our freedom, but it is never suggested that there is anything behind it. And what, perhaps, is more serious, Mr Birch’s thought tends to stop just where the ordinary man’s thinking stops; he doesn’t help us to overcome our intellectual limitations, he only states them clearly. He is content with a bald contrast between force and persuasion (the latter
being the essence of liberal democracy); he is content to describe democracy as ‘government by the people’, he anchors himself to an undefined ‘Equality of opportunity’ as the principle of democratic society, he thinks that now we have got Adult Suffrage only our laziness or stupidity can stop us putting that principle into practice, and his account and criticism of Communism and Fascism is too brief and superficial to be worth while. In short, the talks no doubt served a useful purpose, of their kind they are first class, and no one could be better suited than Mr Birch to give them; but as a book it is less easy to see its value, and its price is certainly excessive.
The Modern Mind Review of Michael Roberts, The Modern Mind (London: Faber and Faber, 1937). First published in Scrutiny, 6 (1937), 208–10. The first sentence of this book proposes an interesting thesis for examination. ‘This is a study of some changes in the use of the English language; in particular, it traces the influence of material science on common speech, and it shows in turn the effects of these changes on our attitude to religion, poetry and science itself.’ Our attention is attracted; for the difficulties and dangers are enough to inspire at least an ingenious argument, and the subject is connected with much that is in the minds of the not negligible body of people to whom the principles and products of science are by no means the last word in human wisdom. But, alas, the reader is quickly disappointed, for three good reasons. First, the ‘changes in the use of the English language’ are studied very sketchily; there is nothing profound in the treatment. Secondly, the diagnosis of those changes is far from convincing; their attribution to the influence of ‘material science’ is supported by nothing very compelling by way of argument or evidence. And thirdly, almost from the first page the author shows an alarming and disconcerting tendency to wander from his thesis; it is one of the most undisciplined philosophical books it has been my fortune to read. It may seem ungracious to consider first the disappointment that the book arouses, but since it is great and comes, not from expecting something which is not promised, but from the author’s own treatment of his own subject, it tends to overshadow the incidental acuteness and interest of much of what he has to say. ‘Between 1640 and 1680, the language became a more exact logical instrument, the change was the result of conscious and deliberate effort.’ ‘People became more literal-minded, seeing in words only one unique unemotive reference.’ ‘Our capacity
to hear and understand the overtone of meaning has slowly but continuously declined.’ ‘That which cannot be said in the language of mechanics is thought to be false.’ In short, during the last three centuries or so the English people (and perhaps others) have suffered a loss of poetic sensibility similar to that described in the famous passage in Darwin’s Autobiography—‘an atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which higher tastes depend’; poetry, and religion whose language is poetic, have lost at the expense of a logical and matter-of-fact attitude of mind and use of language. This is ‘the modern mind’ in Mr Roberts’ diagnosis, and no doubt there is truth as well as exaggeration in the view; and only those who are intellectually callous or have to thank their education for a perverted sense of what is valuable can regard the situation as satisfactory. I think the case is overstated, but there is enough truth in it to make it worth while to examine. But Mr Roberts goes further. He attributes this decline in sensibility to the fact that the English language as well as the English mind during those three centuries got into the hands of the scientists, who, for their own purposes, manufactured not only a kind of ‘basic’ language, but a language which, because it was merely basic, was debased. And this language, and the mentality which goes with it (defined here as ‘materialistic’), has, by the operation of a kind of Gresham’s law, driven out the genuine poetic language. Sense has destroyed sensibility, we are the inheritors of a bankrupt language, and it is science which is to blame. Here too, no doubt, there is truth, but also gross exaggeration. That the scientific writers alone are to blame is certainly doubtful, and the view would have to be supported by some much more profound analysis than is given us here if it were to be made convincing. On the face of it, it would appear difficult, if not impossible, to prove that this one element in the history of these three centuries is responsible for this alleged decline in language; and to set about such a proof argues a lack of historical sense. Unless we are to make ‘science’ responsible for all the anti-religious forces of modern civilization, the view cannot be maintained; and we can
make it responsible only by an exaggerated view of its influence. No doubt science, and the kind of language it requires for its purposes, has influenced our use of and sensibility to language, but to ask us to believe that science alone is responsible for the alleged ‘literal-mindedness’ of the modern world is asking, not only too much, but also more than the evidence produced goes to show. Very little attempt is made to study systematically the result of scientific interests upon the English language and literature; and the historical examination of English style and diction, which a proper exposition of Mr Roberts’ thesis would suggest, is altogether to seek. The third ground of my disappointment in this book is that again and again, just when we seemed to be about to follow up some promising and relevant line of argument, we are headed off to pursue something, in itself often interesting, but only vaguely connected with the matter in hand. And this lack of discipline makes the book unsatisfactory both as history and as analysis; it detracts from the value of Mr Roberts’ undoubted learning, and it has the effect of suggesting a much less acute mind than some of his observations show him to possess. But if this book as a whole is disappointing, and if it shows a certain amateurishness in its treatment of philosophical ideas, some of its chapters, and many incidental passages, contain matter for thought, admirably presented. Chapter V, for example, on Reason and Imagination in the Eighteenth Century, traces the history of the ‘gradual restriction of the concept of reason’ during the century. A large part of the book is taken up with scattered discussions of the relations of science and religion, and many of the views seem to me worth stating—indeed, some of them are worth more attention than they get, for Mr Roberts sees clearly enough that the relationship of science and religion is not one of direct antagonism (the one never denies what the other asserts), but he never gets as far as a comprehensive view of the relationship. What he gives us tends always to degenerate from an analysis of a relation to a defence of one side against the other.
And his view that the peculiar danger of the modern mind is to conceive religion in terms of science, to ‘turn a personal God into a celestial mechanic’ is somewhat one-sided; the danger from political and business analogies I should have thought was just as great. The ‘tricks of language and unconscious analogies’ by which, for example, the Book of Common Prayer often makes out the universe to be a political arena and God a political figure, may have been replaced in the modern mind by scientific analogies, but this is not the only malady which that mind suffers, nor, I think, is it now the malady most pressing for a cure.
The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence First published in Politica, 3 (1938), 203–22, 345–60. The object of this essay is to consider the meaning and possibility of a philosophy of law and civil society. The present position of enquiry in this subject is characterised by confusion and ambiguity, and it must be supposed that a critical discussion which did no more than make clearer the nature and causes of the chaos would be valuable. I hope to do more than this, to reach some positive conclusions and to suggest the direction which enquiry must take if it is to throw off its inheritance of confusion. But my first business must be to examine the present position of enquiry and to consider the character of its defects.
I There are certain elementary ambiguities, promoted by the current use of the word ‘jurisprudence’, which we shall do well to avoid. This word I shall take to denote the ‘theory of law’; and by the ‘theory of law’ I mean the rational explanation or interpretation of the nature of law. We shall have to return to these expressions in a moment; but for the present they serve to make clear that what I want to discuss is not ‘case-law’ or ‘judge-made law’, or the practice of a court, or judicial explanation or interpretation, or any of the other subjects which are or have been designated by the word ‘jurisprudence’, or its equivalent in other European languages, except the ‘theory of law’. Jurisprudence, for me, stands for a theory and not the materials out of which a theory springs, for an explanation itself and not for what is given and requires explanation, for an interpretation of the nature of law and not an interpretation (such as a judge may give) of a law or a body of laws. And precaution is necessary in this matter of initial designation not only on account of the number of essentially different subjects which the word ‘jurisprudence’ is now used to indicate, but also because the expression ‘philosophical jurisprudence’ can have a prima facie meaning only when ‘jurisprudence’ stands for an explanation or a theory of the nature of law. I propose, then, to use the word ‘jurisprudence’ in the only way which does not make the expression ‘philosophical jurisprudence’ immediately nonsensical. And this is not a new or exotic use of the word; it is one of its current meanings, and I wish to do no more than, for the present enquiry, confine it to this meaning. Now, the expressions ‘theory’, ‘explanation’ and ‘interpretation’, even when it is clear that they are to be applied to ‘the nature of law ‘and not to any particular law, body of laws, or system of laws, are liable to be misleading. They are apt to suggest, as my use of them in the preceding paragraph shows, that we have two things to deal with, (i) law, and (ii) the theory, explanation or
interpretation of law; whereas, in truth, there is only one thing: law. The ‘nature of law’, and a theory, explanation or interpretation of the nature of law are the same thing. Any reading of law is an explanation of law; the difference between explanations is one of degree and relative comprehensiveness. What is true of the interpretation of a text is true universally of interpretation; the text and interpretation are one and inseparable. It is true that we appear to begin with one thing, the text, and proceed to a second thing, the interpretation; but what we call ‘the text’ is itself an interpretation, a meaning, for which (in interpretation) we substitute another, different or more extended, interpretation or meaning. Theory, explanation, interpretation are attempts to find and expound the meaning in what is given, and what is given and its meaning are not two things (as they appear to be when we use the misleading expression, ‘the meaning of …’), but one. To state, then, more accurately, the position I wish to maintain: anything we may say about the nature of law is, within its limits, a theory, explanation or interpretation of the nature of law; and we can say nothing about the nature of law which does not imply and involve a theory of law. No absolute division can be maintained between statements about the nature of law by which some may be considered to be ‘theories of law’ and others something less; but jurisprudence appears when our statements about the nature of law reach the degree of comprehensiveness that permits them to present themselves as, at least prima facie, satisfactory and complete explanations of the nature of law. Jurisprudence is the exposition, in more or less detail, of the nature of law; it is the attempt to reduce the phenomena of legally organised society as such to order and coherence; and it is a theory, explanation or interpretation of law in this sense only. When we turn to our writers on jurisprudence, that is to writers who undertake not merely to comment on the nature of law, but to give us more or less extended and thought-out explanation of law, we find (as is not surprising) not only a number of different explanations, but also a variety of kinds of explanation. And it is
these different kinds of explanation that I wish to consider, for among them is to be found (variously defined) what is called a ‘philosophical’ explanation or interpretation. I do not propose to consider all of them or any of them in great detail; what I am primarily concerned with is philosophical jurisprudence, and these other kinds of explanation are merely the setting in which writers on the general nature of jurisprudence are accustomed to place it. It is convenient, first, to notice what may be called analytical jurisprudence. Various attempts have been made to define the character of the explanation of law which goes under this name, but I have seen none that is altogether satisfactory. It is admitted that the adjective is unfortunate and even misleading; but it is admitted, also, that the expression ‘analytical jurisprudence’ may stand for an explanation or interpretation of law which does not defy definition and which can be seen to be distinct from other kinds of explanation. It is not necessary for us to enquire whether any writer is to be found who has adhered strictly to this conception of jurisprudence, much less to enquire whether there is or has been a school of writers which has professed an exclusively analytical jurisprudence. We are concerned solely with the essential character of a certain kind of theory of the nature of law. How are we to think of it? ‘The purpose of analytical jurisprudence,’ writes Salmond, ‘is to analyse, without reference either to their historical origin or to their ethical significance or validity, the first principles of law’.6 And Allen suggests that what is being insisted upon by the ‘equivocal epithet’ ‘analytical’ is ‘the examination of legal rules “without reference to their goodness or badness”’.7 Now, I take it that negative accounts of this kind cannot [6] Jurisprudence, p. 5. [Presumably John William Salmond, Jurisprudence, which had reached a ninth edition by 1937.] [7] Carleton Kemp Allen, Legal Duties and Other Essays in Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), p. 15. The expression, of course, comes from Austin. But neither author makes clear whether by ‘without reference to their goodness or badness’ he means, ‘without
be regarded as satisfactory; if we are to have a coherent view of the character of this kind of jurisprudence we shall require something more than a list (which could, of course, be extended indefinitely) of the views of the nature of law which it neglects to pursue or rejects. We must look further; and when we do so we are met, by Allen, with the view that what is really meant by ‘analytical jurisprudence’ is the science of law, and that its character is determined by its method of enquiry which is ‘inductive and not deductive’. But when we have considered what this can mean we shall not, I think, find ourselves much better off. The expression ‘the science of law’ belongs to an age which used the word ‘science’ less precisely than we have come to use it; and if (which is doubtful) the expression was once illuminating, it is certainly not so now. And when it is coupled with a theory of knowledge which makes an absolute distinction between an inductive and a deductive enquiry, the obscurity is only increased. There is, of course, no such thing as a ‘purely inductive enquiry’; and least of all is such an enquiry characteristic of ‘science’. Induction, I suppose, means keeping your eye on the facts; but it does not tell you what facts, and until we have some means of identifying our facts there is no such thing as an enquiry: ‘pure induction’ is pure nonsense. Once more we are baulked. What we are looking for, and what we are not given, by this (or so far as I know any other) writer is a positive and coherent view of the character and presuppositions of analytical jurisprudence. There are, I think, two fundamental presuppositions which lie at the root of an explanation of law which may be called analytical, and which determine its character. First, there is the belief that there are certain basic elements in law qua law, that law as such has a skeleton of principles. And secondly, there is the belief that these are the essential principles of law, that in them making a judgment about their goodness or badness’ (i.e. a moral judgment), or, ‘without relating them to ethical conceptions’ (i.e. considering them in relation to the ideas of good and bad). And to exclude the one is not to exclude the other.
lies the nature of law and that an exposition or interpretation of the nature of law is the exposition or synthesis of these principles. And it appears to me that what is required for a definition of analytical jurisprudence is nothing more than the recognition of these presuppositions. Its character does not lie in what it excludes, but in what it asserts; not in what it denies, but in what it affirms and presupposes. It, like every other intellectual enquiry, begins with certain presuppositions. And these which I have suggested are genuine presuppositions. The second is obviously so; and it implies a philosophy of identity which the analytical jurist, as a rule, does not examine but merely assumes. And if the first appears to be the product of an inductive examination of legal systems, the appearance is misleading; for any such inductive examination depends itself upon a definition of law, depends, that is, upon a presupposition, and ‘induction and not deduction’ is nowhere even in sight.8 Here, then, is a precise and self-contained kind of theory or explanation of the nature of law, based upon its own presuppositions and different from every other kind of explanation; here is a genuine attempt, working with a recognisable hypothesis, to reduce legal phenomena to order and coherence. It is, of course, to be pursued in detail; and it remains for its professors to show us where it will lead. But what distinguishes it from all other explanations is not the exclusion of both ethical and historical considerations (indeed, it does not belong to its character to exclude these altogether and absolutely), but its presupposition that law is a body of interrelated principles. It is distinguished, that is, by the philosophy of identity which it assumes. Now, it must be supposed that Allen, for example, sees, though darkly, that this type of jurisprudence depends upon the presuppositions I have stated. He admits, in the essay from [8] The obvious defects of Salmond’s definition quoted above are (i) it does not tell us what sort of analysis it is to be, it merely tells us some of the things it is not to be; and (ii) it assumes the existence of ‘first principles of law’ without recognizing that this is an assumption.
which I have already quoted, that the belief that there are certain ‘basic elements on which law qua law is built’, that there are ‘certain elements which are inherent in the very conception of law, considered as a phenomenon of social life, whatever the disparities may be in detail’ in different legal systems, belongs to this kind of theory of law. And he writes of these basic elements as the ‘essential principles of law’; and of jurisprudence as ‘the systematic synthesis of them’. But he fails to recognise that these beliefs are presuppositions and that it is these presuppositions which define this type of jurisprudence. The first belief he attempts to justify by an argument from the inductive examination of legal systems, and the second he takes as a matter of course, assuming no possible alternative. And for his definition he falls back upon what this kind of explanation appears to exclude and upon the blessed word ‘science’. I will consider next the character of historical jurisprudence.9 There are writers who, misled by the fact that the professor of an analytical jurisprudence may, without deserting the principles of explanation which govern his activity, have recourse to history, have reached the conclusion that there is no such thing as historical jurisprudence. There is legal history, and there is the use made of legal history by those who desire to reduce legal phenomena to order and coherence; but ‘historical jurisprudence’ is an expression with no distinctive meaning. I think, however, that this scepticism is misplaced. ‘Historical’ may not be the most appropriate adjective by which to distinguish a certain kind of explanation of the nature of law, but there is, nevertheless, a kind of explanation, different from all others, which the use of this adjective is intended to distinguish. An analytical jurisprudence may make use of history; but what, at least, we shall expect from [9] It should be understood throughout that I am not considering schools of thought in jurisprudence, but types of explanation of the nature of law. That is, ‘historical jurisprudence’ does not stand for the jurisprudence of the ‘historical’ school of jurists, but for a theory of law which this school only partially apprehended and developed.
an historical jurisprudence is that it will itself be conceived in the terms of history. And these terms are precisely what the analytical explanation is not conceived in. The fundamental principle and presupposition of an historical jurisprudence is the belief that the meaning of law lies not in certain abstract and abstracted ‘essential principles of law’, but in the history of the society or civilisation which is governed by and lives under a system of law. The essential character of law lies in its being a product of time. That is, historical jurisprudence is based upon a specific rejection of the philosophy of identity which leads to the view that law is a body of interrelated principles. Analytical jurisprudence may, perhaps must, go to the history of law in order to find and distinguish the ‘essential principles’ which it conceives it to be its business to expound; but its aim is always to extract and abstract principles from that history. Historical jurisprudence, on the other hand, rejects the entire notion of essential principles, for historical explanation is, necessarily, not in terms of essences but in terms of historical individuals. It goes not only to legal history, but also to the history of a civilisation; and its results are not the abstract generalisations of analytical jurisprudence, but historical generalisations presented as such. Not only is its method historical, but its conclusions also are historical. There is, then, no difficulty in distinguishing historical from analytical jurisprudence; they are explanations of the nature of law based upon different and opposed presuppositions; they are distinct from one another not merely incidentally and in a matter of emphasis, but in principle. The expression ‘historical jurisprudence’ does not, like the expression ‘comparative jurisprudence’,10 represent merely a [10] Comparative jurisprudence, when it means something to do with theory of law and not merely the laudable (but for our purpose irrelevant) attempt to consider the differences in national laws with a view to abolishing some of them, is a method of enquiry and not a type of explanation. Nevertheless, it is possible to see how it might be interpreted to represent a type of explanation. The principle, the presupposition which would determine its character would be the belief
method of research available to any jurisprudential enquiry; it represents a specific kind of theory or interpretation of the nature of law. To distinguish historical jurisprudence from legal history is, however, a matter of greater difficulty, and, in the end, it is, I think, a matter of degree. It is possible to conceive the history of law so widely that it includes the history of the civilisation expressed (in part) in a system of law; and when legal history is conceived in this way it may not differ greatly from what I should call historical jurisprudence. Nevertheless, differences remain, and they are important to the understanding of the character of the attempt to explain the nature of law which is denoted by the expression ‘historical jurisprudence’. First, legal history must always be the history of a specific body of legal rules and legal ideas; a history, perhaps, that relates them to their context of social and political ideas and institutions, but nevertheless a history of a particular society and its self-expression in law. Whereas historical jurisprudence involves an attempt to go beyond this and achieve, if possible, generalisations about the relation of law and civilisation of a wider character. And secondly, while legal history does not involve the presupposition that in writing the history of a body of legal rules and ideas we are presenting the fullest possible explanation of the nature of law (that is, legal history pretends to be nothing more than a history of law), historical jurisprudence is expressly an explanation, an interpretation, a theory of law based that the nature of law lies in what is common to all developed systems of law, that the essential principles of law are essential merely in virtue of their appearance in all systems of law. This presupposition, it should be observed, is different from the presupposition I have attributed to analytical jurisprudence, though it is one often to be found in the writings of those who profess an analytical enquiry. However, the view that what is common is, as such, what is essential invokes so indefensible a philosophy that it is a matter of congratulation that comparative jurisprudence has never been developed as a distinctive type of theory of law.
upon the presupposition that law is its history, that the nature of law itself lies not in certain abstract essential principles of law, but in the history of law. Historical jurisprudence is not an attempt to unearth and exhibit what are (equivocally) called the ‘origins’ of legal rules and ideas, but to explain the nature of law in terms of the history of law. It involves not only an historical study of law, but a presupposition about the ultimate value of such a study. Within this broad but definite conception of historical jurisprudence a variety of treatments are possible. But it is a limited variety, the differences depending always upon the conception of the historical context to which law is related in order to be explained and interpreted. And, in the end, the variety is, I think, arbitrary and logically unjustifiable. If we begin with the presupposition that the nature of law lies in the history of law, if we begin (for example) by referring law to the Rechtsbewusstsein of a society, there is no point in the exploration of the historical context at which we can justifiably stop. We may begin with a strictly conceived juridical historical context, but the logic of our presupposition will drive us to the political, institutional, economic, religious and social history which lies behind a body of legal rules, doctrines and ideas; we cannot stop short of the history of a civilisation. Nothing like a thoroughgoing psychological interpretation of the nature of law is, I think, to be found in the literature of jurisprudence, but it is obviously a possible kind of interpretation and one which must be considered. And even if its value turned out to be small, it is not difficult to determine the general principles of its character. Law would be referred to the context of the ‘psychology’ of the makers of law, of the individual members of a community living under a system of law, or of the community as a group; and the explanation of the character of law would consist in this reference to this context. Law, perhaps, would be seen as the outcome of the activity of the human will ; but the ‘will’, for this kind of explanation, would be a psychological, not a metaphysical entity. This type of explanation would, no doubt,
explore the emotional context of law, and take note of the socalled irrational sources and tendencies of human desire and human action. And again, it might find in law the expression of moral ideas, but these moral ideas would themselves be explained in psychological terms. But whatever the actual contents might be of a psychological jurisprudence, the general character of this type of explanation would be determined by the presupposition that law is the expression of human personality, and that only an examination of the working and mechanism of human personality can afford an adequate explanation of the nature of law. Having discussed analytical, historical, and psychological jurisprudence I have considered the three most clearly defined types of legal theory; but there are others, less precisely defined, which ought to be noticed. In particular there is what may be called the economic interpretation of the nature of law, and there is the sociological interpretation of the nature of law. Both these interpretations share, in part, the presuppositions which determine the character of historical jurisprudence, and therefore cannot be distinguished from it absolutely. But the one is an attempt to limit the historical context of law to what is believed to be the essential character (as distinct from its total character) of a civilisation and its history; and the other is an attempt to extend the context of law beyond a specifically historical context to what is spoken of as a sociological context. It is not necessary to consider the details of the economic interpretation of law as they appear in the work of those who profess it. Many of these details are extraneous to the principle of explanation which belongs to and distinguishes this theory of law; and in the hands of some of these interpreters this economic jurisprudence degenerates into a theory, not of law but of legislation, a series of (mostly) historical generalisations about the making of law. But, in spite of much errant speculation, the principle which informs this kind of interpretation remains secure and distinct: it is the belief that the essential character of a civilisation lies in the prevailing conditions of the production of the
material means of subsistence and in the economic organisation which springs immediately from these conditions,11 the belief that law is part of a social superstructure which is built upon and determined by this foundation of economic organisation, and the belief that, in the last analysis, the final explanation of the nature of law (as of any specific system of laws) can consist solely in the reference of law to the foundation from which it springs. The nature of law lies neither in certain essential principles of law, nor in the history of law, nor in the comprehensive history of a civilisation, but in the essential foundation of a civilisation; and a theory of law is the relation of law to this, and not to any other, context. That an interpretation of the nature of law based upon these presuppositions will be distinct from all other kinds of interpretation (that is, from interpretations based upon other presuppositions) is, I think, clear enough; necessarily it presents itself as the only true and comprehensive interpretation, and since it is not either inherently absurd or so ambiguous as to be indistinguishable from other kinds of interpretation, it may take its place in the variety of kinds of theory of law which compose what is called jurisprudence. Sociological jurisprudence12 I have said is distinguished by its conception of the context to which law must be related in order to be explained fully. It is not a purely historical context; that is, a sociological jurisprudence will look not only to the past. It is not a purely material or economic context; that is, it will not attempt to reduce the social context of law to the conditions of production [11] Cp. ‘The first presupposition of all human history is naturally the existence of living human individuals, the first historical act of these individuals whereby they distinguish themselves from animals is not that they think but that they begin to produce the means of living.’ Otto Neurath, Empirische Soziologie: der wissenschaftliche gehalt der geschichte und nationalökonomie (Vienna: J. Springer, 1931), p. 41. [12] As an example of this type of jurisprudence I have in mind Eugen Ehrlich, Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechts (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1913).
characteristic of a civilisation. What distinguishes it is its refusal to treat as irrelevant any element in the physical and social context of law; in the last analysis the meaning of law lies in the total physical and social environment of law. Law is the product of a civilisation, it is a means of maintaining a civilisation; it is a means of furthering a civilisation: and jurisprudence, the theory of law, is the exposition in detail of this general conception of the nature of law. Here again, is, I think, a kind of interpretation of the nature of law distinguishable from all others in virtue of its presuppositions. Certainly it has elements in common with the historical and with the economic interpretation of the nature of law, but its specific rejection of the essential presuppositions of both these interpretations constitutes it an independent theory. It has its place in the chaos of modern jurisprudence. The purpose of this brief sketch of the world of jurisprudence is to indicate the world in which philosophical jurisprudence finds itself. No doubt there are other interpretations of the nature of law than these; and certainly we are offered a variety of conceptions of philosophical jurisprudence, which we shall have to examine later. But, whether or not a comprehensive survey of the world of jurisprudence would increase the variety of interpretations competing for recognition, and whichever of the various conceptions of philosophical jurisprudence we prefer, it remains true that the outstanding characteristic of this world of jurisprudence is its chaos. Jurisprudence is the name given to an unresolved variety of explanations of the nature of law; and an unresolved variety is a chaos. The first, and I believe greatest, defect common to all the current conceptions of philosophical jurisprudence is that it is conceived as one kind of explanation of the nature of law among others in a variety which it is not even considered necessary to attempt to resolve. By a wide tolerance it is allowed to exist; but such tolerance is only an excuse for a failure to recognise that unresolved variety is the same thing as confusion and that until a relationship, or a series of relationships, have been
established between these different kinds of interpretation the confusion will remain. Now, it is true that certain attempts have been made to relieve this situation in the world of jurisprudence, but since all of them are based upon a neglect of the fundamental character of the variety to be resolved they cannot be regarded as satisfactory. Two, perhaps, deserve notice. First, there is the view that each of these kinds of interpretation is true and valuable for particular aspects of law. No one of them can be said to supersede any other, to be more comprehensive than any other or to offer a relevant criticism of any other: the variety of kinds of explanation merely reflects the irreducible variety of aspects of law. ‘We cannot examine nineteenth century legislation,’ writes Pound, ‘without perceiving that organised pressure from groups having a common economic interest is the sole explanation of many things upon the statute book’.13 That is to say, the economic interpretation of the nature of law is, at some points, though not at all, the only true and relevant interpretation; at other points, and for other elements in law, we may have recourse to other kinds of interpretation. And secondly there is the view for which jurisprudence is confined to one type of explanation of law and the others are regarded not as competing kinds of explanation, not, indeed, as kinds of explanation at all, but as methods of enquiry to be made use of when necessary in the pursuit of a theory of law. Thus, for example, there is no such thing as an historical jurisprudence, or a sociological jurisprudence; history and sociology are merely enquiries which provide some of the material for the construction [13] Roscoe Pound, Interpretations of Legal History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), p. 113 (my italics). Similarly, James Bryce, Studies in History of Jurisprudence, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clafendon Press, 1901), ii. 184, writes of the historical explanation of law: ‘It explains many conceptions, doctrines and rules which no abstract theory can explain, because they issue not from general human reason and the nature of things, but from special conditions in the country or people when the law in question arose.’
of an analytical jurisprudence, and philosophical jurisprudence is dismissed as a work of supererogation—the philosophical contemplation (whatever that may mean) of the conclusions of analytical jurisprudence. But the radical defect of these and all similar attempts to relieve the chaos of an unrelated variety of kinds of explanation is that they neglect the actual character of the variety to be resolved. What we are faced with is a variety of kinds of explanation each of which, necessarily, asserts itself to be, in principle, final and complete. These are not differences of emphasis; they are differences of principle. What we have to do with is not a set of complementary methods of enquiry, but a set of mutually exclusive types of explanation. If, for example, the economic interpretation of law is the true interpretation, if, that is, it is true that the nature of law is to be satisfactorily explained only by relating law to the context of the conditions of production in a civilisation and that this is all that is necessary for its satisfactory explanation, then analytical jurisprudence (the explanation of the nature of law in terms of the essential principles of law) must be inadequate, at best a partial explanation and as false as it is partial.14 And further, the conception of explanation implied in the sentence I have quoted from Pound is one which altogether destroys the basis of jurisprudence as the attempt to reduce legal phenomena to order and coherence. If we are allowed to improvise a fresh principle of explanation for each observed phenomenon our last state will not fail to be worse than our first. The first conclusion, then, that I have to offer with regard to the world of jurisprudence as it is commonly presented to us is that it is distinguished by confusion and ambiguity. What is lacking is a coherent philosophy of explanation, and until this is supplied the confusion will continue. Philosophical jurisprudence is merely one among a variety of unrelated kinds of interpretation of the nature of law, and while it is merely this, it is necessarily impossible to determine its validity, or, indeed, to determine [14] ‘The jurist imagines that he operates with a priori propositions, but they are only economic reflexions.’ Engels.
its character. If philosophical jurisprudence were presented to us as a member of a scale or hierarchy of explanations of the nature of law, a scale which exhibited all kinds of explanation in terms of a single standard of validity, or if it appeared as an explanation related in some other way to other explanations, then there would be less reason for us to be ashamed of the present position of enquiry in jurisprudence. But, in fact, it is either rejected altogether, or invited to join a chaos of unrelated types of explanation. ‘Englishmen seem to have assumed as a fact a philosophy of law, but they have not been at pains to indicate its nature’, wrote Professor Buckland nearly fifty years ago; and the only difference in the present situation is that the rot has spread to the continent. It is time now to consider more closely the conceptions of a philosophy of law which the present position of enquiry offers us. There are, I think, five different conceptions to be found in the modern literature of the subject. Each of them assumes that a philosophical interpretation of law is merely one interpretation among others, to be pursued if we feel inclined, to be tolerated or to be dismissed as ineffectual. But apart from agreement to regard a philosophy of law as one of an unrelated variety of explanations of the nature of law, these five conceptions of its character are sufficiently distinct to merit separate consideration. In the first place, a philosophy of law is conceived as the application of certain previously thought-out philosophical ideas, or some previously thought-out general philosophical doctrine, to law and the legal organisation of civil society. The business of a philosophy of law, it is assumed, is to conceive of law in sucha way as to make it appear to illustrate some philosophical doctrine. The philosophy of law is itself nothing more than a special instance or application of a general philosophical theory; it merely exemplifies or illustrates. This, of all the conceptions of a philosophical jurisprudence that we are offered, is the least adequate; it displays in an extreme form what I believe the other four conceptions we are to examine display in one degree or
another, an ignorance of the nature of philosophy, and it carries us directly to the contradictory conclusion that a philosophy of law is not itself philosophical. According to this view the only genuinely philosophical part of a philosophy of law is something prior to and independent of the consideration of legal concepts which the philosophy of law itself comprises. Philosophy is related to a philosophy of law merely as a presupposition, and the consideration of legal concepts, which is taken to be the actual business of a philosophical jurisprudence, is never itself a philosophical consideration, it is merely a consideration which presupposes some philosophical doctrine or other. In short, philosophical jurisprudence is philosophical in only a derivative sense, and if it became itself genuinely philosophical it would defeat its own ends, it would return into the general philosophical theory of which it was an illustration and cease to have any evident connection with law. And as an explanation of the nature of law it would clearly leave much to be desired. The second view of the nature of philosophical jurisprudence which calls for notice is that for which the philosophy of law is what results from the employment of ‘the metaphysical or a priori method’ of enquiry. I cannot say that I fully understand what is intended by this description, but I take my account of this view from Bryce’s essay on ‘The Methods of Legal Science’.15 Bryce claims to be describing the method which such writers as Kant and Hegel use in investigating the nature of law. The philosophy of law, it appears, consists in the examination of certain abstract ideas such as Right, Duty, Obligation ‘in relation to Morality, Freedom and the human Will generally’, and the construction, by way of deduction from these ideas, of a coherent system of law and legal relations. In virtue of this it is called an a priori investigation, and what distinguishes it from all other kinds of enquiry is its a priori method. Now, it is not clear to me why, or in what sense, a metaphysical enquiry is thought to be necessarily a priori in method, nor why an attempt to devise a perfect system of law and [15]
Studies in History and Jurisprudence, ii, 172.
legal relationships should be thought to have anything at all to do with a philosophy of law. Let us consider these difficulties in turn. What, I take it, is suggested here by calling this method of enquiry an a priori method is that it begins from general principles and not from observed facts ; the general principles being these abstract ideas of Right, Duty etc., and the facts being actual legal rules and doctrines. And if any enquiry into the nature of law is to be called a priori which refuses to accept as complete and not to be questioned or revised the interpretations of the nature of legal entities as they appear in a text book of law, then, I suppose, this enquiry is a priori. But then so are all other enquiries which are in the least degree illuminating. Neither analytical nor historical jurisprudence accept law in the character in which it first appears to them; both are attempts to expound the nature of law by relating law as it first appears to some general principle and in this way transforming and making fuller our view of the nature of law.16 In short, this attempt to define philosophical jurisprudence as an enquiry into the nature of law which is ‘deductive and not inductive’ is as misconceived as the attempt we noticed earlier to define analytical jurisprudence as an enquiry which is ‘inductive and not deductive’. If a priori here means ‘not from experience’, then, since no knowledge is or could be a priori, the term is a piece of meaningless jargon; in this sense an a priori method is not a possible method of enquiry. The absolutely a priori is the nearest thing to the absolutely absurd. And if it means, ‘from some experience, but not merely from what is given directly in a first and superficial knowledge of law’, then the expression a priori applies equally to all thorough-going attempts to explain the nature of law, and affords no means of differentiating a philosophical explanation from an explanation of another kind: in this sense both analytical and historical jurisprudence are a priori. The second difficulty raises questions which will appear again [16] Cp. Allen, op cit., p. 16. ‘[T]he essential principles of law do not lie on the surface; they can be discovered only by penetrating through a multitude of distracting appearances.’
in connection with the third of the conceptions of the nature of philosophical jurisprudence which I have chosen to consider, and I will postpone what I have to say about it. But even if it could be met satisfactorily, this view of the nature of a philosophy of law would remain ambiguous and ill-defined, and it does not appear to me to be a recognisable description of the work, for example, of Hegel. I pass now to the third, and perhaps most common, conception of the nature of a philosophy of law. According to this, philosophical jurisprudence is the consideration of the rules and doctrines of law from the standpoint of their goodness and badness, and the determination of the end that ought to be pursued in making and administering the law.17 Such a consideration may, of course, take a variety of forms ; the goodness and badness of a law may be taken to mean its fitness or unfitness to meet what are conceived as the needs of the society or they may be taken to mean the agreement or disagreement of a law with some ideal and absolute standard of justice. Such differences are, however, secondary; what all such explanations have in common is their attempt to judge law itself from the standpoint of its goodness and badness and their attempt to determine the general nature of the end which the law itself should be designed to produce. And this is called an ethical or philosophical interpretation of the nature of law. Questions of fact are separated from questions of right, and a philosophical jurisprudence is taken to be concerned with questions of right, not to define the nature of ‘right’, but to determine the rightness or wrongness of the legal arrangements of a society; not to define a criterion, but to deliver precepts, and to construct an ideal system of legal relationships. Now, in the view of many writers [17] Cp. ‘The task of the theory of law is not definition. It is to find out the means by which certain specified rules of law operate; and if one believes that there is no distinction between the theory and the philosophy of law, this means to discuss the end which a system of rules ought to serve.’ Ivor Jennings (ed.), in Modern Theories of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 83.
this conception of the philosophy of law will not brand it at once as essentially non-philosophical. But in my view it does so. The notion that the business of a philosophy of any sort is actually to determine ends is, I think, false. The philosophy of law may plausibly be supposed to undertake the task of representing the legal arrangements of a society as means to the achievement of some end, and even the task of analysing the general concepts of means and end (though this should be regarded as a particular philosophical doctrine requiring substantiation, rather than as the universal form of philosophical theories of law); but this is something quite different from the determination of which among many suggested ends the legislator and the law ought to pursue. Even so muddled a philosopher as Bentham recognised, in his lucid moments, that ‘happiness’ in his theory of legislation stood, not for an end which ought to be preferred to any other that might suggest itself as an alternative, but for a brief analysis of the nature of what alone is an end in itself, of what alone is desirable for its own sake. To investigate the nature of a moral criterion is an ethical and a philosophical enquiry; but to determine the goodness and badness of a law involves a moral judgment which the philosopher as such is in no better position to give than any other member of society. In short, this view of the nature of philosophical jurisprudence is less than satisfactory because it attributes to the theory of law a character which really belongs to a theory of legislation, and to the philosophy of law a character which is essentially non-philosophical. An attempt to interpret sociologically theories of the nature of law which are presented as philosophies of law provides a fourth view of their character. Such an attempt is to be found in the writings of Dean Pound18 and elsewhere. A philosophy of law is conceived as an explanation or interpretation of the nature of law in terms of what is sociologically useful at a particular stage in [18] Roscoe Pound, Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (New Have; London: Yale University Press; Humphrey Milford, 1922), pp. 15–83. Interpretations of Legal History, pp. 30–32.
the life of a civilisation or a society. The function of philosophical jurisprudence is to provide a view of the nature of law appropriate to the needs of a society. Thus the Natural Law theory is regarded as ‘a philosophical theory for a period of growth’; it was elaborated in order to retain stability in a time of rapid change. And the Natural Right theory is a philosophy of law appropriate to ‘an era of discovery and colonisation and trade’. If this view were presented to us as merely a description of a function which what might for other reasons be called philosophical theories of law have performed or may be expected to perform, there would be no reason to quarrel with it. No doubt a period of rapid growth in the legal organisation of a society would find useful a Natural Law philosophy and would give its adherence and blessing to such a philosophy. But it is presented as something more; it appears as a conception of the nature of the philosophy of law. And considered in this character it leaves much to be desired. Merely to relate a philosophical doctrine to some social purpose which it might conceivably be made to subserve is to do something much less than to define the nature of philosophical enquiry. If no more than this could be said of a philosophical doctrine, then the only relevant criterion for judging its adequacy as an interpretation of the nature of law would be the efficiency with which it performed what was assumed to be a useful social purpose, and the only relevant criticism would be the demonstration of its failure to serve such a purpose. Each philosophy would be true in its own place—if ‘true’ could still be said to have any meaning. But the adjective ‘philosophical’, to have any significance worth considering, must mean the same thing whether it is attached to a theory of law or (for example) to a theory of belief. It must not be made to mean, ‘subserving some temporary social need by providing a useful myth’ when it is attached to a theory of law unless we are prepared to accept this meaning universally. And to accept this meaning universally implies (among much else that is disconcerting) a theory of knowledge which refuses to be judged by its own standards. And this contradiction appears wherever (as
here) a sociology of knowledge is substituted for a philosophy of knowledge. And further, in order to establish this view it would be necessary to show that the different ‘philosophies’ of law appeared in different and only in appropriate circumstances ; and this, I believe, is impossible. Both the Natural Law theory and the Natural Right theory of the nature of law come to us from the ancient world and flourish together in the modern world, and as philosophies of law are entirely independent of any use that may have been made of them by judges, legislators or statesmen. Lastly we come to the view that philosophical jurisprudence consists of relating what are conceived as ‘the conclusions of jurisprudence’ to general philosophical principles. It accepts the results of, say, an analytical jurisprudence and considers them in conjunction with some philosophical doctrine. This, we are told, ‘is really what the great works of “philosophy of law”, such as Kant’s and Hegel’s, seek to do.’19 And it is suggested that philosophical jurisprudence is really the ‘philosophy of jurisprudence’. I do not propose to examine this conception of philosophical jurisprudence in detail; its ambiguities and errors are on the surface and themselves cry out for its rejection. As a description of the work of Kant and Hegel it is difficult to recognise, and different from the description we have noticed in Bryce, which is itself equally difficult to recognise. But further, the notion that it is the business of philosophy to accept the conclusions of special enquiries—history, jurisprudence, physics, etc.—and relate them, unchanged, to ‘general philosophical principles’, though once popular, is now on all hands seen to be the nonsense that it always was. For philosophy these ‘conclusions’ are never, and never could be, mere data to be accepted; to consider them as such involves a misconception of the nature of knowledge, of philosophical enquiry and of the character of the so-called ‘conclusions’. Any genuine synthesis of ‘results’ must be a reinterpretation; and in interpretation what is given is accepted, not categorically as something already established, but hypothetically as a useful [19]
Allen, op. cit., p. 17.
starting-place for thought. If ‘general philosophical principles’ come in anywhere it is at the beginning and not at the end, in an examination of the presuppositions upon which these ‘conclusions’ rest and not in a kind of harmless and ineffectual synthesis of the ‘conclusions’ themselves. The best, perhaps, that can be said of this view of the character of philosophical jurisprudence is that no more ingenious way could be found for at once extending to it an apparent tolerance and depriving it of any coherent meaning whatever. So far I have been considering the ideas about the character of philosophical jurisprudence that the modern literature of the subject offers us. And the general concept of a philosophy of law which they appear to imply seems to me exceedingly incoherent and unconvincing. A philosophy of law, according to these views, is really nothing better than a contradiction; it is a philosophy which, for one reason or another, is not philosophical and one which if it became genuinely philosophical would cease to have any close connection with law. It is said to be built upon a philosophy but when it is examined there is nothing at all philosophical about the superstructure itself. It is said to imply a philosophy; but the philosophical doctrine is never taken to imply the theory of law. It appeals to criteria which are anything but philosophical. It is tolerated in the world of jurisprudence mainly because it has been deprived of any recognisable philosophical character. And the world of jurisprudence into which it is patronisingly admitted is itself nothing better than a chaos of unrelated kinds of explanation of the nature of law. Now, I do not suggest that the views I have considered are the only views which a wider study of the literature of the theory of law would supply. What I have been considering is the views which seem to satisfy writers at the present time, and to have satisfied them for some considerable time past. But I believe that the confusion and ambiguity which distinguishes these views would to a large extent be resolved if we returned, without our prejudices, to a study of some of the great philosophical theories
of law which our civilisation has produced. Neither Aquinas, nor Hobbes, nor Hegel, nor even Green was guilty of these follies. Whatever lack of success may have attended their attempts to construct a philosophical theory of law, they knew quite well what a philosophy of law is and they knew that it could not be any of the things which we are now told that it is. Anyone, then, who attempts to think out afresh a conception of philosophical jurisprudence, while he will find little help in the present position of enquiry, is certainly not without guidance. And with the help that there is to be had from the great traditions of philosophical thinking about law, I propose now to attempt the construction of a view of the character of philosophical jurisprudence which shall, at least, avoid the errors and difficulties which discredit the current views.
II I take it that, whatever else is required of a philosophical jurisprudence, it must at least be philosophical: the main defect of the concepts I have examined is that they attribute to philosophical jurisprudence a character which is non-philosophical. And in order to avoid the confusion which has resulted from this error we must, in the first place, be clear about the character and attributes of a philosophical enquiry. A philosophical enquiry, as I understand it, is not a kind of enquiry different from all others, and philosophical knowledge is not a special kind of knowledge derived from some special source of information. It has its differentia; but what is primarily important is to see it in its place in the common world of intellectual enquiry. Philosophical thought and knowledge is simply thought and knowledge without reservation or presupposition. The aim in philosophy is to arrive at concepts which, because they presuppose nothing, are complete in themselves; the aim is to define and establish concepts so fully and so completely that nothing remains to be added. Definition is a matter of degree. All thinking is the attempt to define concepts, and philosophy is merely what occurs when thought is allowed to follow its own bent with unqualified freedom. Thought, the character of which is exemplified in every attempt at intellectual comprehension, is perfectly exemplified in philosophical comprehension. A philosophical doctrine, therefore, should not be understood as a kind of solid basis upon which things like science and the conduct of practical life ultimately rest; science and practical life, as such, have no philosophical foundations. It should be thought of as something which happens at the end, when the concepts of science, or common-sense, or practical life are subjected to the revolutionary and dissolving criticism of being related to a universal context. Thus, any complete following out of the demands of thought has a constant tendency to overbalance into
philosophical thought; for until it has become philosophical it must remain relatively unstable. Now, all this requires fuller explanation; each of the statements in the preceding paragraph must be examined, extended, made clear if we are to have a philosophical definition of the concept of philosophy. The starting place in philosophy is not some remote region of experience known only to the philosopher, it is not with selfevident ideas or axioms, it is not with the conclusions as such of special enquiries. Philosophy begins with the concepts of ordinary, every-day knowledge; and it consists in an extended, detailed and complete exposition of those concepts, an exposition which is itself a definition. A philosophy of law, for example, does not begin with already defined and accepted abstract ideas such as the ideas of Right, Duty, Obligation; it begins with the ideas about law which anyone who has not considered the question may be supposed to have; it begins with any concept of law a man, however uninstructed, may happen to find in his head. In philosophy, therefore, there is no such thing as a transition from mere ignorance to complete knowledge; the process is always one of coming to know more fully and more clearly what is in some sense already known. And there is no such thing as a mere addition to philosophical knowledge; the process is always one of radical reformulation of the whole of what is already known. It is not the extension and elaboration of the meaning of a concept, but the establishment of a new and more comprehensive meaning. The philosophical concept, that is, at once comprehends and supersedes the concept given to philosophical enquiry. The process in philosophical enquiry may be regarded, from one point of view, as a process of getting rid of, or of resolving, the presuppositions and reservations contained in whatever concepts are presented for examination. This is sometimes thought of as a process of laying, or discovering, foundations; but it is misleading to think of it in this way. For when these presuppositions have been revealed, and a fortiori when they have been resolved, the
originally presented concept has been entirely transformed and superseded. And, moreover, the aim in philosophical enquiry is not merely to achieve concepts with no unexamined or unjustified presuppositions, but to achieve concrete concepts from which the division between presupposition and conclusion has vanished. Presuppositions and conclusions are alike abstractions to be got rid of; and the only way of getting rid of them (without merely denying them) is by establishing concepts in which the two elements are, not equally well-known, not merely held together in agreement, but actually unified. The philosophical concept is not a collection of abstracts, it is not, for example, a scientific or a common-sense concept plus the presuppositions which lie behind it, but is itself a concrete unity. And it is this because this is what a fully defined concept must be. In philosophical enquiry, then, the task is one of definition, not the definition of words, but of concepts. And definition is the making clearer of something which is already to some extent apprehended and therefore to some extent clear; it is essentially the removal of ambiguities in a concept which is presented and is, therefore, not merely ambiguous; it is making more definite what is already to some extent defined. Philosophical definition is, in this sense, a matter of degree: we never move from what we are entirely ignorant of to complete knowledge, but from what we know to what we know more fully and more clearly apprehend: we never move from an accepted axiom (a fixed and finished definition) to the theorems implied in the axiom, but from an imperfectly defined concept to that concept more perfectly defined. That is, at each step we redefine what is already in some degree defined, and our aim is the establishment of a concrete concept, devoid of ambiguity and partiality. Now, that this is the starting place and this is the process in philosophical enquiry will be clear, I think, to anyone who has studied the history of philosophical thought. The so-called Socratic method is an example, though an imperfect example, of the process I have been trying to describe; so also is the method
of enquiry pursued by Kant and Hegel; so also, though more obscurely, is the method characteristic of Scholastic philosophy. In what I have said, and in what I shall say about the nature of a philosophical enquiry I have not been drawing upon merely my own personal convictions; I have been describing what I have learnt from the history of philosophy. But the truth of this view of the nature of philosophical enquiry does not rest merely upon the fact that it is the view implied in the work of celebrated philosophers, but upon the fact that no other starting point and no other process are available. Of everything that philosophical enquiry discusses we have learnt something in the nursery; even the most unreflective of mankind will find in his head concepts of truth and error, right or wrong, reality and appearance, and the philosopher must begin with these if he is to begin at all. The one thing there is no difficulty about in philosophy is knowing where to begin. And the process of redefinition is the process involved in all intellectual enquiry whatever. Knowledge is always the getting to know more fully something that is already known. Philosophical enquiry is peculiar merely because, in the pursuit of this process it is governed by a radical scepticism with regard to every stopping place that is suggested; it is suspicious of every attempt to limit the enquiry. This, then, is the starting point, and this is the process in philosophical enquiry; but a word must be said of the conclusion. So far I have said that the aim in philosophical thought is the achievement, by means of a continuous process of redefinition, of concrete concepts; and this requires to be amplified. There are four characteristics or attributes of the philosophical concept to which I wish to draw attention. It is (i) New, (ii) Categorical, (iii) Affirmative, and (iv) Indicative. These characteristics do not, of course, exhaust its character. (i) New. A philosophical concept is essentially the redefinition of an already formulated concept. Philosophy is the attempt to redefine its given concepts concretely, that is in relation to a universal context, the context of the totality of experience.
And, consequently, a philosophical concept (e.g. of law) must be different from the given concept with which philosophical enquiry starts. There must be disagreement between a concept as it is for, say, common-sense, and as it is for philosophy. Now this, for many people, is a stumbling-block; for them it is proof, or at least a symptom, of the unreality and falsehood inseparable from philosophy. But the principle involved seems to me clear and simple. If what is undertaken is a transformation, you must not reject the result because it is different from what you began with. And, of course, the important implication in this principle is that ‘verification’ in philosophy cannot be by mere ‘reference to the facts’. ‘The facts’ are merely ‘our ordinary way of regarding the facts’, or, ‘the concept as it is for common-sense’, and these, though they are the starting place of a philosophical enquiry, are necessarily irrelevant as a criterion for the result of philosophical enquiry. It is ex hypothesi impossible for the philosophical concept of, say, justice, to agree with (in the sense of being the same as) the concept as it is for common-sense; and consequently it must be false to suppose that agreement with the common-sense concept is the criterion by which the philosophical concept is to be judged. ‘Verification’ in philosophical enquiry lies always ahead in what the concept is to become, and never behind in what it was when we first began work upon it. Nevertheless, although it is an error to suppose that a philosophical definition can be verified by referring it to these so-called ‘facts’, it is incumbent upon the philosopher to show as fully as he can how his redefinition is connected with and arises out of the less comprehensive definition with which he began. That is, his definition must be presented as a conclusion from a continuous argument. A philosopher can establish his definition only by showing in detail the process of definition and by showing that his conclusion is itself concrete. (ii) Categorical. A philosophical concept must always be in the form of a categorical judgment. By this, I do not, of course, mean that it may not be tentative; I mean that it may not be hypothetical. Hypotheses are reservations, presuppositions; and
the whole business of philosophy is to get rid of reservations and presuppositions. But to say that a philosophical concept must be categorical means more than this; it means that definition in philosophical enquiry aims at comprehending the whole character of its subject and its character as a single whole. Of course it is not possible or desirable that every aspect of a concept should be indicated explicitly in a philosophical definition; but if the definition is to be philosophically satisfactory it must be possible to show how it has implicitly included or superseded all other views. A philosophical concept is categorical because it is complete. And compromise, concepts defined in the form of ‘a little of this and a little of that’, is always unsatisfactory in philosophical enquiry; for compromise is the sign of lack of completeness in definition, the sign of makeshift. (iii) Affirmative. A philosophical concept must always be an affirmative or positive concept, never merely a negative concept. Negativity is merely a sign of an imperfect definition. And where the given concept is negative, one part at least of the business of a philosophical enquiry is to transform this negative into a positive. This, perhaps, is only another way of saying that a philosophical concept must be categorical; hypotheses are always a negative element. And this transformation of a negative into a positive is a typical example of the process in philosophical enquiry—a process which involves the examination of the implications in what is given. A negative always and unavoidably implies a positive, and until this positive is brought to the surface what we have must remain only partly coherent. Salmond’s definition of analytical jurisprudence quoted above is an example of a negative concept calling out to be transformed into something positive.20 (iv) Indicative. This again is not a separate characteristic of the philosophical concept, but one implied in its categorical and affirmative character. And it means that wherever an imperative is presented, philosophy must transform it into an indicative; wherever ‘ought’ presents itself the business of philosophy is to [20]
See Part I of this article, p. 156.
uncover the implied ‘is’. A mere imperative is an abstraction, a conclusion based upon a presupposition but which has become separated from its presupposition; and philosophical enquiry exists to create concrete concepts in which neither the separation nor the distinction between presupposition and conclusion any longer exist. Let us bring together what we have learned about philosophical enquiry by considering briefly its nature from a fresh standpoint. All explanation, all interpretation may be seen as a matter of deciding upon and examining the appropriate setting for what is to be explained and of exhibiting it in its place in that setting. Given a ‘text’, something partially disconnected, obscure, imperfectly conceived, explanation is the attempt to find the ‘context’ and to relate text and context so that they become a single whole. But each context which presents itself as prima facie appropriate is seen itself to require explanation, to belong to a setting and to lack significance so long as it is not seen in that setting. Consequently, the process becomes the search for a context which does not require a further setting in order to be understood, a universal, self-complete context. And the task in philosophical enquiry is, precisely, to find and elucidate such a context and the special subject of its enquiry in that context. For what the text is depends upon the context; it has a fresh meaning for each context to which it is related; and it has its full and comprehensive meaning only in a universal, self-complete context. There are, then, two main stages in the process of philosophical enquiry; distinguishable, but inseparable. First, there is the identification, the mere designation of the subject of enquiry. If we are to determine the meaning of the concept ‘law’, we must first know how to apply the word ‘law’. And this is to be learnt only by a critical examination of the ways in which the word is ordinarily used. But such an examination leaves us with merely the definition of a word, leaves us with merely the identification of a thing. We have that one thing clearly before us, but we have nothing else; we have the text, but its full meaning is still to seek. We must, then, proceed, secondly, to the
definition of the concept. And this involves not merely having the one thing (in this case of a philosophical jurisprudence the one thing is ‘law’) clearly before us, and being able to recognise it every time it appears, but also knowing its relationship to other things, knowing it in a world of related things, knowing it in its context. And our task becomes a double task—discovery of a context which is self-complete and the elucidation of the subject of our enquiry in the terms of this context. Many contexts will present themselves, and each, in so far as it is prima facie separable and significant, will claim to be the universal context we are looking for. But in so far as it is unable to maintain such a claim, it will suffer rejection in favour of a more complete context. Thus, every explanation whatever is, from one point of view, the relation of a text to a context; and a philosophical explanation is one which, in principle, is the relation of its subject to what I have called the totality of experience because this alone is a self-complete context, a context which criticism cannot turn into a text itself requiring a context. Nobody, I hope, will mistake these remarks about the nature of philosophical enquiry for an exhaustive treatment of the subject; but that, when related to the matter in hand (the concept of a philosophical jurisprudence), they introduce us to a view somewhat different from the current views is, I think, obvious. They attribute to philosophical jurisprudence a character at once less ambiguous and less pretentious than it is accustomed to bear. And when the implications of this view of philosophy are examined it will be found to give us a principle by means of which the prevailing chaos in the world of jurisprudence may be resolved; instead of a chaos of unrelated kinds of explanation of law, jurisprudence becomes, what it must be if it is to be anything at all, a world of related explanations. Let us consider the matter more fully. If philosophical enquiry is what I have suggested it is, what will be the character of a philosophical jurisprudence? It is unnecessary for me to apply in detail my view of the nature of philosophy to the study of the nature of law; I have
given the principle, and the reader, if he cares, can easily apply it for himself. It is clear where a philosophical jurisprudence will begin; it is clear what course a philosophical enquiry into the nature of law will pursue, and it is clear also what, in general, may be expected by way of result from such an enquiry. But, in case they may be overlooked,I will point out what I take to be the two most important characteristics of a philosophical jurisprudence. First, it will cease to be merely one among a number of unrelated explanations of law; it will be one explanation of the nature of law in a hierarchy of explanations. It has the authority to create this hierarchy by supplying a universal criterion by which the adequacy, the relative completeness of all explanations may be determined; and the exercise of this authority transforms the chaos of jurisprudence into a world. And secondly, it will have a definite place in this hierarchy of explanations—at the end. And it is by virtue of this place in the hierarchy that it possesses the authority I have attributed to it. Philosophical jurisprudence, in short, has a two-sided character: it is one explanation of the nature of law among others, and it has the authority inherent in its character to judge the relative completeness of all explanations and so make of all explanations a related whole or world. How can this be? A philosophical enquiry, I have suggested, has for its purpose the concrete definition of its subject, it aims at relating its subject to a context which is universal, a context which I have called the totality of experience. And a philosophical enquiry into the nature of law is the attempt to reduce the phenomena of legally organised society to order and coherence by relating them to the totality of experience. But philosophical thought, we have seen, is not a peculiar kind of thought with special sources of information at its disposal; it is simply thought which has been allowed to follow its own bent with unqualified freedom—freedom from reservation and presupposition. And it follows from this that a philosophical jurisprudence, in so far as it achieves what it is its purpose to achieve, is at once the most complete kind of
explanation of the nature of law (for ex hypothesi the context to which it relates law is complete) and the criterion by means of which the relative incompleteness of other explanations can be determined and established. Consider how a philosophical enquiry into the nature of law would proceed. It might, perhaps, begin with the definition of the concept of law supplied by what we have called an analytical jurisprudence, an analytical jurisprudence which attempted to explain the nature of law not by relating law to something outside itself but by deducing its nature from a study of what were presupposed to be legal systems. This concept of law, under the pressure of criticism, would prove itself to be abstract, for the context it appealed to and relied upon would quickly reveal itself to be narrow and incomplete. A wider, less inadequate context would be sought, and found, perhaps, in the politics of the community which lived under a system of law. But, again, the political context would be seen to have a setting to which it must be related if it is to make itself immune from supersession. And from politics the enquiry might turn to history, to economic organisation, to social structure, to individual and social psychology, to moral ideas, each suggested stopping place proving itself in turn insecure. But at some point the pursuit would stop, not in an artificial arrest, not in a state of disequilibrium, but because a point had been reached beyond which it was not possible to go because there was no beyond. And the detailed elaboration of that point would be a philosophy of law. There would be no necessity in this pursuit for the enquiry to pass through every one of these stages, and there are others which I have not mentioned;21 it might take a different course, and reach its end not by a process of allowing each of these stages to prove its inadequacy, but by a critical examination of more elementary concepts of law than were to be found in these suggested explanations. But whatever course it took it would retain its double character; it would be, in so far as it was successful, a complete explanation and in virtue of [21] E.g. the context of law which is implied in the so-called ‘institutional’ theory of law.
this it would supply the criterion by means of which the relative completeness of all other explanations could be determined and by means of which a world of explanations could be created. But one thing further must be noticed. It is clear, I think, that a philosophical enquiry into the nature of law would very soon apprehend the incompleteness of the explanation of the nature of law offered in an analytical jurisprudence and would make the best of its way to something less abstract. And so with other relatively incomplete explanations, other relatively incoherent concepts of law. But its judgment would not be, ‘Analytical or historical or sociological jurisprudence has proved itself an incomplete explanation of the nature of law; henceforth let no one pursue such an explanation,’ but, ‘These explanations are incomplete, some more so than others; henceforth let no one who pursues them believe that they are other than what they are.’ Its principle, in short, is, ‘Everything is true so long as you do not take it for more than it is’. And its business would not be to meet each kind of explanation upon its own ground and do for each what each is attempting to do for itself, but to examine the ground of each kind of explanation, and to examine it from the standpoint of its ability to provide the principle of a complete explanation. The situation, then, which a philosophical enquiry into the nature of law has to meet is, in effect, the claim on the part of a variety of different and mutually exclusive explanations of the nature of law to be the explanation, to provide, that is, a complete explanation which comprehends and supersedes all others. For what is asserted implicitly in every explanation is that it explains; and to explain must mean to explain fully. And the first task of a philosophical enquiry is to examine these claims. ‘A legal system,’ we are told, ‘can best be understood in the light of the conditions under which it has grown up’.22 And again, ‘Dean Pound in his book Interpretations of Legal History has shown in his analysis of the legal philosophies of the past that each of them is primarily an attempt to formulate in general terms the ideals and purposes [22]
Wortley, in Modern Theories of Law, p. 141.
of law at a particular period’.23 What is asserted here if it is not the ‘primacy’ of what may be called sociological interpretation of the nature of law? It is suggested that this is the ‘best’ or most complete kind of explanation. But what are the grounds of this assertion? To substantiate it would mean, among other things, the conviction of analytical or psychological jurisprudence of radical defect, of partiality. The explicit suggestion is that this sociological context is at once an appropriate and a self-complete context by reference to which the nature of law is fully revealed; and the implicit suggestion is that all other contexts will reveal in law a nature that is less than its full nature. And so on, with each of these kinds of explanation; each makes a similar claim. And the first business of a philosophical enquiry is to adjudicate these claims. And it can do this only by a critical examination of their grounds. In short, the unavoidable situation is one in which every kind of explanation of the nature of law claims to be what I have called a philosophical explanation; and until this situation is cleared up jurisprudence remains a chaos of conflicting claims. And it can be cleared up only by the establishment of a hierarchy of explanations the principle of which is, ‘one explanation is better than another if the context to which it refers law for explanation is a more complete context’. And if, for example, the sociological explanation of law is to maintain the primacy claimed for it, what must be shown is that the sociological context is a context which criticism cannot turn into a text itself requiring a context. And it is just this which Dean Pound and the other champions of this type of explanation have never attempted.24 [23]
Goodhart, in Modern Theories of Law, p. 1.
[24] The representative set of writers who examined, in the volume Modern Theories of Law (1933), some contemporary theories of law did not, so far as I can see, produce between them a single radical criticism of the types of theory involved in the theories they discussed. No better indication could be found of what I have called the chaos of modern jurisprudence than this volume. It should be remembered that the chaos I have remarked upon is not the result of the existence of a number of
Now, it is not difficult to imagine a reader who will say to himself—‘I can understand that jurisprudence must remain a chaos of unrelated kinds of explanation of the nature of law until some connection has been established between them. And I can understand that nothing short of a universal criterion of adequacy will turn this chaos into a world. Briefly, I can understand that a great service to jurisprudence would be performed if a kind of explanation of law could be found which had, inherent in its nature, the authority to be the operative criticism of all explanations; and a philosophical explanation is not a bad name for this kind of explanation. But, beyond this service of criticism, what would be the actual contents of a philosophical jurisprudence?’ And scepticism of this kind is certainly in place. It can be met, however, by the following considerations. First, no kind of explanation of the nature of law could have, inherent in its character, this critical authority unless it were a complete explanation. If in this sense there is no such thing as a philosophical jurisprudence, then there is no such thing as a world or whole of jurisprudence; all we would have, and all we could have, is this chaos of unrelated kinds of explanation. But we cannot have this, because it conflicts with the very nature of explanation. A kind of explanation which is abstract and incomplete is only another name for a kind of explanation that does not explain, a kind of theory which does not reduce to order and coherence the phenomena of legally organised society, a kind of interpretation which fails to interpret. And if two or more conflicting kinds of explanation offer themselves (as we have seen in the current view of the matter they do) the one supposition that is intolerable is that they are all equally adequate. Some or all must be abstract and incomplete and consequently must fail to explain. They may each serve a special purpose, and the pursuit of each may always retain its usefulness, but judged as explanations of the nature of law they cannot be all equally complete. And if different theories (these there will always be, and since they are critical of one another they are not unrelated to one another), but of a number of different, mutually exclusive and unrelated types of theory.
they are not equally complete, then there is, hidden in this chaos, the principle of a world; and the principle of a world is a kind of explanation which comprehends and supersedes all others. In short, if a philosophical jurisprudence had no actual contents it could not perform the service of criticism which jurisprudence cannot do without. And secondly, a philosophical jurisprudence of the kind I have suggested is not something which exists merely in my imagination, it is not something I have invented because it is intolerable that it should not exist; it is to be found, living and active, in the work, for example, of Aquinas, of Hobbes and of Hegel. The Natural Law theory of civil society, in any of its forms, is, for example, precisely a philosophical jurisprudence of this character, and nothing but an ignorant scepticism could doubt that this theory has a positive content. I am not suggesting that this particular philosophical theory of law has the monopoly of the truth; I am suggesting merely that it has a positive content which enables it, for better or for worse, to exercise the kind of critical authority which belongs to a philosophical theory. We have come, it seems, a long way from anything that what I have called the present position of enquiry has to offer. To the best of my ability I have done what I made it my first business to do, to make clearer the nature and causes of the chaos which prevails in what goes by the name of jurisprudence. And I have tried to show also how, in principle, a philosophical jurisprudence might be conceived; I have tried to show the kind of service that such a jurisprudence could perform in the study of the nature of law. This is a positive conclusion, and the concept of a philosophical jurisprudence I have suggested, whether or not it is entirely satisfactory, is certainly free from the main contradictions and ambiguities which make nonsense of the current views of the matter. And further, it is the concept which an examination of the great texts in the history of the philosophical enquiry into the nature of law suggests. But the second part of my undertaking remains to be considered; if this concept of a philosophical jurisprudence enables us to make a fresh start, unencumbered
with the absurdities of the present position, we need to know the direction which enquiry may most profitably take, we need a programme of study, we need (what is singularly lacking to-day in philosophical jurisprudence) an agenda. And I will conclude this essay by offering some brief remarks on this topic.
III The greatest hindrances which stand in the way of a fresh and profitable start with the philosophical enquiry into the nature of law are the prevailing ignorance about what has already been accomplished in this enquiry, and the prejudice, that springs from this ignorance, that little or nothing has been accomplished. But we have seen that philosophical jurisprudence need not be of the confused and anomalous character which is at present attributed to it. And I have suggested that a consideration of the history of philosophical enquiry into the nature of law confirms us in this conclusion. The first item on our agenda, then, is a thorough reconsideration of the history of the philosophy of law, and in particular of the great texts which belong to that history. And the reason for this is not obscure. The philosophical enquiry into the nature of law is not something that we can begin to-day de novo, and spin out of our heads and out of our present experience, without reference to what has gone before. It is true that if we construct a philosophical theory of law it must stand absolutely on its own feet, it must not be based upon some authority outside itself. But that does not mean that it must be, or can be, without relation to what has gone before. A poem must carry with it the immediate conviction that it is the expression of emotion, but that does not mean that it must, or indeed can, put itself outside the poetic tradition of the language in which it is written. If, then, a fresh start is to be made, it must be made with as profound a knowledge as we can acquire of what I shall call the tradition of Western European philosophical jurisprudence. And a brief consideration of the general character of this tradition will not be out of place. Every philosophical doctrine, and consequently every philosophy of law, may conveniently be seen to consist of three main elements. First, it is the attempt to answera certain kind of question with regard to the nature of law, it is the attempt to
relate law to what I have called the totality of experience. That is to say, a man is properly called a philosopher not primarily in virtue of holding a particular doctrine, but in virtue of having submitted himself to a particular kind of curiosity. Secondly, a philosophical doctrine is an ordered system of answers to the questions which a philosophical curiosity brings to the surface; it is a body of opinions, of conclusions reached. And thirdly, it is a system of reasons given for conclusions reached; it provides a ratio decidendi for every obiter dictum. But it is important to observe that, although for certain purposes, such an analysis may be legitimate and useful, the elements into which it breaks up a philosophical doctrine are in fact quite inseparable from one another and must be held together firmly if the philosophy is to be understood. We need to know, if we are to understand a philosophical doctrine, not only the questions considered and the answers given, but also the reasons provided for the answers. And we need to know the reasons not merely in order to be able to judge whether the conclusions are well-founded, but in order to know what the conclusions themselves are. In a philosophical doctrine the what and the why are genuinely inseparable, and this is one of the peculiarities of philosophy. Now, the character of a philosophical doctrine is important because it determines the character of what I have called the tradition of philosophical jurisprudence. And I have preferred to speak of the tradition, rather than the history of philosophical jurisprudence because (besides its natural preoccupation with questions of who and where and when, and with the attribution of ideas and doctrines) this history has, generally speaking, concerned itself not so much with concrete philosophical doctrines, as with the conclusions or opinions separated from the questions and the reasons, and with the supposed effects or influence of those conclusions. Of course there are histories not altogether vitiated by this defect, but they are rare; and the general disrepute into which the history of philosophy (and the history of philosophical jurisprudence) has fallen may be attributed to this concern with
dead and meaningless abstractions instead of with actual and concrete doctrines. The common classification of philosophical doctrines is a classification which recognises only the obiter dicta of the philosophical tradition and ignores the rationes decidendi. By the tradition of philosophical jurisprudence I mean, then, the history of philosophical jurisprudence philosophically conceived, seen as a living, extemporary whole in which past and present are comparatively insignificant. The pursuit of this tradition will not be concerned with the discovery of the source or origin of the doctrines, or with the attempt to separate the old from the new, but with the understanding of the entire world of philosophical ideas which belongs to the great texts of philosophical jurisprudence, to understand these texts in terms of their total philosophical content, and that total content in its place in a tradition of enquiry. Our apparent satisfaction with the examination and juxtaposition of the conclusions of philosophical jurisprudence has perverted our sensibility to this tradition and has deprived it of its power to inspire fresh thought. But, it will be said, the history of Western European philosophical jurisprudence shows us not a single tradition, but a number of traditions; and this is certainly true if our attention is concentrated upon doctrines, and even more true if our attention is directed solely to conclusions. But the tradition I am concerned with is, primarily, a tradition of philosophical enquiry; and this, I believe, is a single tradition in the sense that it is the universal context of every text in the history of philosophical jurisprudence. It is true, of course, that many philosophical writers are unconscious of their place in this tradition, unconscious even of the existence of this tradition, but none are outside it. Just as there are English poets (Blake, perhaps) who appear to stand on the edge of the English poetic tradition, so there are philosophers (Hobbes, for example) who appear anxious to detach themselves from the philosophic tradition; but Blake is as impossible without Shakespeare and Milton and much that he himself had never read, as Hobbes without Aristotle, Epicurus and Aquinas. However novel the
views of a philosophical writer, whatever fresh turn he may give to the study of these questions, to the pursuit of the satisfaction of this curiosity, anyone acquainted with the philosophical tradition will at once recognise something familiar in his work. This unity survives whatever disrupting force there may be contained in the variety of doctrines which find place in the tradition. And just as it would require a social revolution more radical than any we have evidence of if the poetic tradition of a society and a language is to be destroyed, so Western European philosophical jurisprudence would have to find something other than merely new doctrines if its tradition is to come to an end. And part at least of the chaos of modern jurisprudence arises from the fact that we have lost the sense of this tradition. Our first business, then, if we are to make the fresh beginning which the present position of enquiry calls for is to regain a sense of this tradition of enquiry. But we need to know what we are to look for in it, what we are going to do with it, how we are to use this sensibility when we have reacquired it. And the answers to these questions are given in the nature of the tradition itself. A tradition is not something which is merely conformed to, nor is it anything fixed and finished. Nevertheless it is something which has stability and continuity even in those elements which change and vary. It is not something to which we must adhere; it is something which provides the starting point and the initiative for fresh enquiry. It is no use looking to it for finished conclusions, for settled answers to fixed questions, because it is not a tradition of conclusions or even of questions, but of enquiry. It can give us nothing finished. What it gives us, and it is something that we cannot do without, is a firmer consciousness of what we are trying to do. Not only does it give us a sense of the unity of past enquiry, the sense that A’s questions and A’s answers cannot be understood without understanding the, perhaps, quite different questions and answers of B, but it gives us the knowledge that we cannot understand our own questions and answers without understanding the questions and answers of others. It may suggest
to us the direction which enquiry must take by bringing to light the questions which have never been fully considered: for long enough, for example, philosophical jurisprudence has played with ideas which involve a far more radical consideration of the nature of knowledge and the nature of will than these problems have ever received at the hands of, at least English, writers on the philosophy of law. But even if a fuller knowledge, a philosophical knowledge, of the tradition of philosophical jurisprudence, provided us with no such specific suggestions for lines of enquiry, it would, I think, give us the consciousness of what we are trying to do which, at the moment, is our chief lack. And it is for this reason that I put a renewed study of this tradition in the front of the programme of enquiry which is to lead us out of the confusions and ambiguities of the present position.
The Principles of Art Review of Robin George Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938). First published in Cambridge Review, 59 (1938), 487. Reprinted in The Cambridge Mind: Ninety Years of the Cambridge Review 1879–1969, ed. E. Homberger and others (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 139– 41, as ‘Collingwood’s Philosophy of Art’. Since I doubt my capacity to give in this review any adequate and convincing impression of the value and importance of this book, I can do no better than state at once that it is the most profound and stimulating discussion I have ever read of the question, What is art? The field of aesthetic enquiry has not, indeed, been barren up till now, but this book gives us so much that it is difficult for us to persuade ourselves of the value of what we had before. It is the work of an artist and a philosopher; it is written with a charm and a vigour which matches the subtlety and sanity of its doctrine; and it leaves the reader with the impression that he has been in touch with a mind of altogether exceptional learning, tact, and penetration. All these are qualities that we have learned to expect from the work of Professor Collingwood; anyone who had read Speculum Mentis or An Essay on Philosophical Method would open this book anticipating a brilliant performance, but here is something even better than he could have expected. It is a delight to witness the masterly unfolding of its argument; it is equally a delight to follow the author when he steps aside from the exposition of his main thesis to reinterpret Plato’s remarks on art, to expose the ‘quibbles and sophistries’ of Freud’s views on magic, or to give us his reflections on the condition of art yesterday and to-day. ‘The business of this book is to answer the question: What is art?’ It is not, however, an attempt ‘to investigate and expound eternal verities concerning the nature of an eternal object called Art,’
but an attempt to deal with the problems which force themselves upon anyone ‘who looks round at the present condition of the arts in our own civilization.’ It is the attempt of an artist and an historian, fortified by the critical mind of a philosopher, to make clear to himself the nature of art and the conditions of its life in the world to-day. Anyone who begins to cultivate this field will find in it a luxuriant growth of weeds, and there is plenty of hard hitting in this book; but of carping criticism the reader will find nothing. The method of exposition, which is also a method of thought, which Professor Collingwood pursues, may be called a Socratic method. First, without any suggestion of a theory, he tries to disentangle what, as a matter of fact, we all know about art, in the belief that the truth is to be found in what we all know about it, though often that truth is not exactly what we at first take it to be. This leaves us with a number of philosophical questions to be investigated, because in stating what we all know about art we make use of words and expressions—sensation, thought, emotion, language—which call for analysis. Lastly, there comes the construction of a Theory of Art, a synthesis of the truths which have emerged and established themselves in the earlier discussions. And it may be said that not the least of the delights of this book is its masterly handling of this method. The argument begins, then, with an attempt to distinguish Art from not Art, to make certain that we know how to apply the word ‘art’ where it ought to be applied and refuse it where it ought to be refused. And it leads to the rejection of certain things which, though they are often confused with art, have a character different from that of art. These are craft or skill, magic, and amusement. The confusion of these things with art is dangerous because it has led, in each case, to a false aesthetic theory and to the perversion of art itself. These opening chapters admirably display Professor Collingwood’s acute critical mind and are among the best in the book. But destruction is followed by construction, and art proper is shown to have two characteristics: expression of emotion and
imagination. And the conclusion of this first inspection of the subject is that ‘by creating for ourselves an imaginary experience or activity we express our emotions; and this is what we call art.’ But ‘what this formula means, we do not yet know.’ And in order to find out we must penetrate a world of philosophical analysis, consider the nature of sensation, feeling, thought, and emotion, and the nature of language. This, for the ordinary reader, will be the most difficult part of the book; but he need not be afraid of it, for the doctrines are expounded so lucidly that all but the absolutely unavoidable difficulties are absent. The last part of the book, consisting of three chapters—Art as Language, Art and Truth, and The Artist and the Community— contains the final expression of his theory of art. It would be stupid here to attempt any exposition of the doctrine, and worse to offer any criticism of matters of detail. The value of the book does not depend upon our being convinced by the doctrine (though I myself find it singularly convincing); it lies in the experience it offers of following a masterly discussion of all the fundamental questions which any doctrine must consider. And Professor Collingwood’s concluding reflections on the condition and future of art in England are of exceptional interest. This is not the sort of book that has to be recommended with the qualification that the hard labour entailed in reading it will be rewarded in the end; the reader is rewarded on every page. If there is anyone who, because of the nonsense he has been obliged to read, doubts whether a philosopher can talk sense about art, let him read this book. It has something to offer anyone interested in literature or art; it is a book in which, for example, anyone engaged in the study of literature in a University will find illumination. And it is a book which anyone who can take pleasure in a profound and critical piece of philosophical thinking will find a delight.
Swords and Symbols Review of James Marshall, Swords and Symbols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). First published in Philosophy, 14 (1939), 493–4. Attractively written, in a terse and lucid style, this book is an acute analysis of what the author (an American lawyer) calls the ‘technique of sovereignty.’ The history of all political units, cities, states, nations, alliances, and federations has been, in his view, the story of the battle for the achievement and retention of sovereign power. But this sovereign power is essentially a limited, local, and unstable superiority, never an absolute supremacy. And the reason for this is that the weapons by which sovereign power can be achieved and maintained are never exclusively in the hands of the sovereign power itself. ‘Governments are limited by their impotence to absorb all interests in the community, and, therefore, to control all political weapons.’ These weapons are law (which is essentially based upon force and is of value to the sovereign ‘because it serves notice on the subjects upon what occasions and in what circumstance the sovereign will use force’), economic power, propaganda, and education. None of these weapons is exclusively in the hands of the sovereign power, and the very use of power by the sovereign is apt to create opposing forces which must be satisfied or destroyed if the sovereign is to survive. The political process, consequently, is this complex and uncertain business of maintaining power, and the ‘art of sovereignty’ lies in the satisfaction of adverse interests without surrendering superiority. Mr Marshall expounds this thesis with a wealth of varied and apt historical examples, and his publishers without undue exaggeration compare the book to The Prince of Machiavelli. But the philosopher will not find in it much to interest him. The analysis is carried out consistently and acutely at a level of thought which precludes any philosophical consideration of
the subjects touched upon. Sovereignty is considered solely in terms of power, law is mere force, liberty, popular sovereignty, right and wrong are mere symbols, propaganda weapons in the struggle for sovereignty. It would be absurd to quarrel with so vigorous and acute a book for being what it is and not something else, but it is unavoidable that so narrowly limited an analysis of the political process should, in the end, be unsatisfactory because of its abstractness.
Reason in Politics Review of Kingsley Bryce Smellie, Reason in Politics (London: Duckworth, 1939). First published in Politica, 4 (1939), 167–8. Mr Smellie has a most attractive way of writing which makes his book a pleasure to read: to a lucid style he adds an easy turn of phrase and an excellent judgment in what he quotes from other writers. It is a style, too, which accords with the character of the book—a character which is, at first, a little difficult to assess. Essentially, I think, it is a book of acute reflections upon the history and present condition of thought about the first principles of politics. I say ‘a book of reflections’ in order to indicate its somewhat miscellaneous character; the reflections are by no means random, but their unity lies rather in the fact that they spring from a single, well-ordered mind ranging over the problems of political theory rather than from any more superficial orderliness. It is a bold thing for a young man to write in this way, because it is a way of writing that more quickly reveals the quality of his mind than any other—just as the quality of a man’s mind is unmistakably revealed in an attempt to write fiction, where all the concealments at the disposal of the historian, the scientist or the essay-writer are discarded and the mind is thrown back upon its essential self and stands or falls by what it can create. And it may be said at once that Mr Smellie comes out of this self-imposed ordeal a clear winner. He does not, like so many others, scrape home on a store of acquired information; he rides easily and has plenty in hand at the finish. One does not know quite what to expect in a book called Reason in Politics; it is an excellent title, but it opens up a very wide range of expectation. But the relevance of the title to the contents of this book is, I think, that it is a book about man’s reasoning about political activity and political arrangements; a book which considers what men have thought about these things
and then applies itself to a fresh and reasoned consideration of political activity today. It is divided into three parts, the first of which consists of five chapters on the history of political thought. The earlier history is treated in two excellent reviews, one covering the period to 1600 AD and the other the period from 1600 to about 1800. To sketch the history of two thousand years of Western European political thought in eighty pages is a hazardous undertaking, but Mr Smellie has succeeded in saying something worthwhile because he has been content to select boldly and give us his own reflections on that history. He does not attempt to establish any main lines of thought or traditions in Western European political thought, and this, perhaps, is a disappointment; but it is amply made up for by the quality of what he does give us. The later history is treated in three chapters of a more analytical kind, on Utilitarianism, Hegel, and Marx. I miss from the chapter on Utilitarianism any mention of Paley, who is a writer who does not deserve the neglect into which he has fallen and whose work affords the clearest example of the way in which the hedonistic foundation of Utilitarianism was developed from the Natural Law theory by positing the happiness of mankind as the evident will of God. Chapters on Hegel are apt to be maddeningly disappointing, for they are usually written by those who have never closely studied the Philosophie des Rechts, but Mr Smellie’s chapter is an exception, partly because he is too wise to reject the best English guides—Bradley and McTaggart. The second part of the book consists of four chapters, Metaphysics and Politics, History and Politics, Economics and Politics, and Ethics and Politics. These discussions never lack interest, and Mr Smellie is always well on top of the point which he is considering, but I think they reveal what I feel to be the main disappointment of the book. Each of them lacks a certain conclusiveness. I do not mean that they fail to provide a comprehensive treatment of their subjects (that, obviously, is not part of their intention); but each of them begins so well, with so much vitality and insight, that to find them in turn tailing
off and stopping short of any definite conclusion rather from a sort of tiredness than because the writer has come to an end of his reflections, is unavoidably disappointing. In each of them the thread of argument is easily lost, and they seem to lack an argument to knit them together. Nevertheless, they succeed in being what, perhaps, they were intended to be—reflections on a theme rather than passages in an argument. The third part, two chapters on the Nature of the State and the Future of the State, concludes this book of reflections. The author ranges over a great many of the problems presented by the contemporary condition of Western European civilization, making his acute observations and leading the reader to consider again the foundations of civil society. Mr Smellie has read widely and deeply, and writes out of a full and cultivated mind. And he has succeeded in imparting to his writing a tone of genuine reflectiveness which is as attractive and stimulating as it is rare. Thank God for someone who still believes in reason and is content to be intelligent.
The Politics of Democratic Socialism Review of Evan Frank Mottram Durbin, The Politics of Democratic Socialism (London: Routledge, 1940). First published in Cambridge Review, 61 (1940), 347–8, 350. This book is the work of one who calls himself a Social Democrat, and its theme is ‘the theory and practice of democratic socialism.’ Mr Durbin’s position, therefore, involves a rejection of the views both of those who seek social and political salvation in a return to a more fully operative ‘capitalist’ system, and of those who, embracing the creed of Marx, propose a revolutionary method (involving the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat) of achieving a socialist society. The first set of views he rejects because it is nonsocialist and incidentally (he thinks) undemocratic; the second because it is based upon a false view of history and because it is destructive of democracy. Sorel said that what he wanted to do was to moralise Marxism a little: Mr Durbin wants to democratise socialism and socialize democracy. There can be little doubt that anyone prepared to argue the social democratic position rationally is assured in advance of a sympathetic hearing: the position has not always been fortunate in its defenders, but it is one which must have great inherent attraction for many people (at least in England) at the present time. Briefly, the line of Mr Durbin’s argument is as follows. Capitalism (which means a rational technique in industry, unlimited acquisitiveness as a motive in individual life, and a steady expansion of output) is at the present time in a period of transition: ‘a sub-type of capitalism is coming into existence under our eyes. We live in a period in which the basic institutions of the recent past have been so greatly modified that a new system is emerging.’ These changes are, for example, the destruction of the mobility of labour by organisations such as Trade Unions
designed to remove the insecurity belonging to a genuinely laisser-faire economy, the growth of social services financed out of taxation which has ‘struck heavily at the funds available for capital accumulation’ and has consequently reduced the power of industry to expand, and the immense extension of the central control of industry by means of public boards, corporations, authorities, marketing schemes, etc., which amounts to a ‘frontal attack upon the institution of laisser-faire itself.’ This emergent type of capitalism (which is here called ‘State organised private monopoly capitalism’) is not yet in a state of collapse; it is far from unstable, it still possesses powers of expansion, and it has ‘much to recommend it to a short-sighted democracy.’ Nevertheless, it is ossified, restrictionist and unjust, and the contemporary problem is how to combine ‘the virtues of capitalism—rationalism and mobility—with democratic needs—security and equality—by the extension of the activity of the State upon an ever-widening and consistent basis’. The contemporary world has before it a detailed suggestion— that of Communism—about how this is to be achieved, and Mr Durbin turns to examine this suggestion. For a variety of reasons (some of them sound) he rejects it, and the way is open to consider, first the nature of democracy and secondly the ‘strategy of democratic socialism.’ His conclusions, briefly, are those which the British Labour Party has sponsored in its publications (though Mr Durbin tells us he reached them by an independent consideration of the situation), and which Dr Dalton has expounded in Practical Socialism for Britain (1935). And the principle that underlies all his thought is that democracy and socialism are parts of a single whole; either without the other is impossible. This brief summary does less than justice to the detail and comprehensiveness of Mr Durbin’s argument. The conception of the book is, in most respects, admirable; and a glance at the list of contents is likely to make more than one reader think that here at last is what he has been looking for—a work which, holding together economics and politics, provides a thorough
consideration of the whole complex problem. Surmounting with courage the difficulty that he is dealing with a variety of subjects each of which is a specialised field of study, Mr Durbin aims at considering the whole ‘complex reality of human society.’ And though, as he admits, he has often nothing novel to say, the reader will go far before he finds, for example, a more lucid and intelligent analysis of the present position and tendencies of capitalism. Moderate without abating any of his desire for a radical reform of the present social and economic system, full of common-sense without being commonplace, acute without degenerating into mere cleverness, there is much to admire in Mr Durbin’s presentation of his case. It is a book which one does not regret having read with care. Nevertheless, the book in many respects (and not all of them mere matters of detail) fails to fulfil its promise; social democracy to-day still awaits a really coherent exposition. We ask for bread and we are given, not indeed a stone, but a lump of imperfectly mixed and a trifle underdone dough. The style of the book, though vigorous and sometimes eloquent, and its construction, with its constant cross-references and references to Mr Durbin’s projected Economics of Democratic Socialism, is frequently a source of annoyance to the reader; and repetition too often takes the place of a more careful formulation of the argument. But it is Mr Durbin’s blind spots, rather than any actual defect in knowledge, which hinder him as an expositor of social democracy. Nobody can write on this subject without involving himself in a few philosophical statements; and philosophy, unfortunately, is one of Mr Durbin’s blind spots. If one thing is certain it is that the main doctrinal weakness of the social democratic creed is its inability to divest itself of the philosophical enormities of nineteenth-century individualism, and no exposition of social democracy can be considered successful which does not attack this problem. And yet the reader will find Mr Durbin accepting all these enormities as a matter of course without even indicating any sense of their unsatisfactoriness. He writes as if his philosophical
education had been confined to a superficial study of Bentham and J. S. Mill—admirable writers (or at least one of them), but, taken alone, unsafe guides. And the result is that the most rickety part of the social democratic creed is left as ramshackle as it was before: a philosophy of crude and uncritical individualism is in fact inconsistent with social democracy. Beside this major fault, Mr Durbin’s other philosophical ineptitudes—e.g., the equation of judgments of value to ‘feelings,’ of ‘irrational’ and ‘subjective,’ and his half-hearted and imperfectly defended excursions into what he calls ‘analytical psychology’—are scarcely worth mentioning. And it is this philosophical blind spot which leads him astray in his criticism of the Marxist doctrine of the so-called economic interpretation of history. There is often excuse enough for misunderstanding the cloudy and dogmatic teaching of Karl Marx, but there is little excuse for believing that the economic interpretation of history is a theory about the motives of human action, and none at all for taking it to mean that the sole human motive is rational acquisitiveness. But this is Mr Durbin’s view. And his main argument against the doctrine—that it must be wrong because men act from a variety of motives—implies not only a misunderstanding of the doctrine itself, but also a bold rejection of the possibility of ethics and indeed of the whole of philosophy which, no doubt, he would have defended in detail if he had appreciated it. Moreover, it is disappointing to find so determined an opponent of Marx infected with the Marxist disease of quibbling about inconclusive historical examples. There is some sound argument in Mr Durbin’s rejection of the Communist strategy, but it is hopelessly obscured by irrelevance and error—which is a pity because the Marxist is apt to take any misunderstanding of his doctrine as a confirmation of its truth. The analysis of democracy which forms a necessary part of the thesis of this book is conducted under the inspiration of Reginald Bassett’s Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy, and reproduces both the merits and the defects of that work. Democracy, it is asserted, is not a particular kind of civilisation, but a method
of taking political decisions. But when this method is examined it turns out to imply a certain scale of values, in short, a certain kind of civilisation, yet its characteristics cannot be considered because of the original assumption that democracy is merely a political method. Mr Durbin makes all the mistakes of those who insist upon identifying democracy with what is peculiar to it and consequently turning it into an abstraction. It may pass the time agreeably to consider democracy as the expression of ‘a certain type of emotional character’ and to talk about frustration and ‘the animism of the primitive mind,’ but no degree of psychological insight will make up for a failure to consider the historical mediations which have given us, both in fact and in idea, all we have and all we know of democracy. And once again the reader, looking for a sound analysis of democracy, will be disappointed by having all the old clap-trap about government by consent and the greatest happiness of the greatest number, thrown at him. In dealing with the programme and strategy of reform it is not so much Mr Durbin’s optimism which causes us to hesitate in our approval, but the failure to show unequivocally how these changes, brought about by this democratic method, will achieve the desired end. This most important point, the relationship between the analysis of the present predicament of capitalism and the programme of reform, is disposed of hastily in a single page. The defects of the present condition of capitalist economy may be all that they are said to be, but it does not follow at once that ‘the case for a planned economy, centrally controlled, in order to pursue expansionist and equalitarian policies, is urgent and overwhelming’. The ignorant and the sceptical will be glad to be more fully instructed on the questions of how precisely this form of state socialism will, of itself, solve the problems which need solution and whether it will do so without any sacrifice of the values it is designed to conserve. It is not enough merely to meet some of the views (as Mr Durbin does in an Appendix) of those who are not overwhelmed by the case for ‘the extension of the activity of the State upon an ever widening basis’; the case
itself must be connected more closely with the analysis of present conditions. But perhaps the instruction we await is on the way in Mr Durbin’s Economics of Democratic Socialism.
Men and Ideas Review of Graham Wallas, Men and Ideas: Essays etc., ed. M. Wallas (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1940). First published in Philosophy, 16 (1941), 95. To those who never knew Graham Wallas it has sometimes been difficult to reconcile the great impression he seems to have made upon those with whom he was in immediate contact and the actual quality and content of his published work. His friends and his pupils appear to have been impressed primarily by the freshness and freedom of his thought; Gilbert Murray in the brief but interesting biographical introduction to this volume says, ‘I never knew anyone so completely free from fixed orthodoxies, prejudices, and partisan feelings.’ But in his published work this freedom and freshness appears often as a kind of erraticism and lack of centrality. It was almost as if what was a great moral virtue in him became an intellectual defect. His admirable readiness to learn from every occasion was reproduced in an unfortunate anecdotal method of argument; his constant alertness of mind seemed to impose upon his thought a miscellaneous character. Being without the temptation to over-organize his ideas and observations (a neat theory having no inherent attraction for him), he lacked at the same time the urge and the power to pass beyond a mere empiricism. This is a collection of some of his essays and addresses, selected and edited by his daughter, and covering a period of about thirty years, 1901 to 1930. It includes biographical essays on Robert Owen, Ruskin, William Johnson Fox, and his favourite and greatly admired Bentham, essays on political and social subjects (Socialism and the Fabian Society, the British Civil Service, etc.), and essays on the theory and practice of secondary and higher education. These essays illustrate both the wide-ranging and the essentially suggestive character of his thought. His observation is
always acute, his advice wise, and his inspiration clear. But this, like Graham Wallas’s other books, leaves the impression that future generations will require not only his published work, but also a biography in order to appreciate the full quality of the man.
Politics and Morals Review of Benedetto Croce, Politics and Morals, tr. Salvatore J. Castiglione (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1945). First published in Philosophy, 21 (1946), 184. Nothing that Croce wrote can fail to give the reader an experience of intellectual refreshment; with age he has lost none of his remarkable vigour of mind, and his profound study of the modern Western world has given his thought something of the quality of a vision. It is not easy at this stage to say something fresh and revealing about the relation of politics and morals, but although the doctrine expounded in this book is not new, it is much more than a repetition of what others have tried to teach us. Starting from the view that political action is ‘action guided by the sense of what is useful and directed towards a utilitarian goal’ (a view such as is to be found in Machiavelli) and its corollary that ‘political action per se cannot be qualified as either moral or immoral,’ Croce goes on to show that political action is never self-sufficient but exists always in the wider world of the moral consciousness and consequently policy is always unavoidably related to some moral ideas—the ‘cynical political man’ is a mere abstraction. And ‘in this continuous transformation of morals into politics, which still remain politics, lies the real ethic progress of mankind.’ This theme is developed in what are, in effect, a number of essays rather than chapters in a continuous argument; and in the course of the exposition there are some brilliant pages on the modern history of the philosophy of politics. The other great theme of the book is Liberalism. Anyone already familiar with Croce’s writings will not find here much that is not more fully set out in larger works; but the discussion is always vigorous and profound. There are interesting chapters on the Contrasting Political Ideals since 1870 (in which the debt to Liberalism of all anti-Liberal thinking is shown), on the relation
of Liberalism and free enterprise, and on The Bourgeoisie; an illdefined historical concept, in which the ideas of Sombart and Groethuisen are examined.
The Idea of History Review of Robin George Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). First published in English Historical Review, 62 (1947), 84–6. No small part of the native genius of a philosopher lies in the perception of where in the world of contemporary speculation is the point from which advance may best be made; for such a perception (coming as it must early in life) springs less from a profound study of the history of philosophy than from an intuitive apprehension of what is opportune. Collingwood’s genius led him to perceive that, while for three centuries philosophy had concerned itself primarily with the logical and epistemological problems thrown up by natural science, little discussion had been given to the no less difficult problem of the character and possibility of historical knowledge. And it may be said that, with the single exception of Croce, he is the only philosopher of firstclass ability to give prolonged and concentrated attention to this problem. The Idea of History contains all that is recoverable of his achievement in this direction. But, unfinished and scrappy though it is, it is enough to show that if he had been unhindered by ill-health and early death he could have done for historical knowledge something like what Kant did for natural science. Collingwood died before he was able to put into final form his reflections on historical knowledge. What we have here has been selected and edited by Professor T.M. Knox from the considerable body of manuscripts which Collingwood left behind. The only previously published writing reprinted here is his Inaugural Lecture as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy On Human Nature and Human History (1935) and the British Academy lecture on The Historical Imagination (1936). The editor’s admirable preface explains the character of the manuscripts with which he has had to deal and the circumstances
in which they were written, and contains besides an appreciation, at once moving and critical, of Collingwood as a man and as a philosopher, for which all friends and students of Collingwood will be grateful. About two-thirds of the book is based upon lectures on the philosophy of history, originally composed in 1936, which trace the changing character of the conception of the historian’s subjectmatter, method, and aim from the emergence of historical thinking in Greco-Roman civilization to the present time. Much of this account, particularly the early part, is written with Collingwood’s accustomed subtlety and brilliance; all of it exemplifies his remarkable powers of critical sympathy. As an historian of ideas his outstanding quality was imaginative appreciation of the mind and purposes of the writers whom he considers. The peculiar generosity of his appreciation sprang, not from any lack of ideas on his own account, but from an ability to detect the conditions and difficulties that produce the limitations of a writer’s achievement; it sprang from the conviction that everything which comes to the historian has value and meaning if only the imagination can detect it and the intellect grasp it. The task of the historian of ideas, as he saw it, was precisely to understand a writer more profoundly than the writer understood himself, just as the task of the historian of feudal society (for example) is to understand that society more profoundly than anyone who merely enjoyed it could understand it. But I think the reader of this account of the history of historical thinking will suffer some disappointment as he proceeds. For, while the earlier part consists of an examination of how the historical writers of the ancient world went about their business and the presuppositions that lie behind their achievement, the later part comes to consist more and more of an examination of the ideas of philosophical writers about the nature of historical knowledge, and the historian himself is less and less called upon for evidence. And the final chapter on scientific history contains scarcely any examination of modern historical writing, though it does call upon the philosophical reflections of such historians
as had any to offer. No doubt Collingwood saw that a study of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the same kind as his study of Greek historiography was impossible, and indeed less necessary, on account of the growth of what may be called the self-consciousness of historical thought. There are, of course, gaps in this account of historical thinking, caused mainly by the scale on which it is conceived, and often the treatment of important periods is very slight, but the only serious gap is the absence of a discussion of the importance of the study of Christian origins in raising the problems of the nature and possibility of historical knowledge during the last two hundred years, an importance that makes, for example, Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede a classic in the history of historiography. The last hundred pages of The Idea of History is all that remains of Collingwood’s projected work on the principles of historical knowledge, but it is enough to put him ahead of every other writer on the subject. He discerned that history had come to take its place beside natural science asa presumptive form of knowledge, and conceiving it one of the tasks of philosophy to reflect the dominant interest of a time, he concluded that the contemporary philosopher had a special obligation to examine the nature of historical knowledge. His first concern was to distinguish historical from scientific knowledge, and establishing its autonomy in its own field, he enquired into its character and possibility. History is knowledge of the actions of human beings that have been done in the past, acquired by the interpretation of evidence. Since it is concerned with human actions it is always a history of thoughts and ideas, and, in the end, it consists in an imaginative entry into the minds of people now dead. Its purpose is self-knowledge: historical knowledge is knowledge of what man has done and thus of what man is. It is impossible to follow Collingwood into all the subtle detail of his conception, but brief (and owing to the occasions of its exposition, somewhat disconnected and repetitive) though the argument is, it is profoundly thought out and brilliantly expounded. But it must be
observed that, almost imperceptibly, Collingwood’s philosophy of history turned into a philosophy in which all knowledge is assimilated to historical knowledge, and consequently into a radically skeptical philosophy. In which direction he would have gone from this position, for it is not likely that he could have stayed there, it is impossible to guess. The important thing is that he had made a notable contribution to the philosophy of history before he sheered off on this fresh tack. The question that the historian as such no doubt will ask is, what is the bearing of this or any analysis of the epistemological problems involved in historical knowledge upon the task of writing history? At every point in his philosophy of history Collingwood drew upon his actual experience as an historian, and there is no doubt that he considered himself to be a better historian for having thought out an answer to the question: How is historical knowledge possible? But what he says of natural science he knew to be no less true of history: ‘Long before Bacon and Descartes revolutionized natural science by expounding publicly the principles on which its method was based, people here and there had been using these same methods, some more often, some more rarely. As Bacon and Descartes so justly pointed out, the effect of their work was to put these same methods within the grasp of quite ordinary intellects.’ The true historian is not necessarily a self-conscious historical thinker. Historical imagination belongs to his genius, and he uses it as a native faculty which is as much a natural gift as an aptitude for mathematics or music, escaping the errors of the positivists and others, not by a reflective knowledge of the philosophical principles of historical thought, but by means of his intuitive grasp of his own subject, and without knowing in detail what he is escaping. The problems of the philosopher, though real, are of his own making, arising from the questions he, but not the historian, must ask himself. Collingwood happened to possess in large measure the genius both of the historian and the philosopher.
The Liberal Tradition Review of William Aylott Orton, The Liberal Tradition: a Study of the Social and Spiritual Conditions of Freedom (London: Cumberlege for Yale University Press, 1945). First published in English Historical Review, 62 (1947), 262. Professor William Aylott Orton’s The Liberal Tradition is a restatement of the faith of liberalism, ‘the oldest and richest tradition in political history’, now in danger of being destroyed. Because liberalism is not an abstract idea or a rationalist plan for society, but an attitude to social and personal life, coeval with our civilization, this restatement takes the form of a history of the liberal tradition. The core of the tradition is taken to be Acton’s— ‘liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end’. And, though he recognizes the place they occupy in the history of this tradition, Professor Orton will have nothing to do with a purely secularist or rationalist liberalism. The tradition is traced from ancient Athens, through the middle ages, to its modern avatars. About half the book deals with the last hundred and fifty years, and it ends with three chapters on the contemporary situation of the liberal ideal. He has too great a faith in liberalism to be merely nervous about its future, but he sees it [as] very much a stranger in the present world. This is a book for the ‘general reader’. But not because its scholarship is hazy; quite the reverse, it is a book of sound scholarship, full of acute judgments and flashes of originality. Indeed, it may be said that it is one of those books the excellence of which springs from a halfconcealed foundation of great and well-considered knowledge. But, covering the ground it does, there is no space to show at any point all the workings of criticism. It is written with great vitality and often brilliance, there is hard hitting at well-chosen enemies, and at the back of it all is an acute and cultured mind. It is a book for the general reader because it can be given to him with the certainty that he will be neither bored nor misled.
Western Political Thought Review of John Bowle, Western Political Thought (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947). First published in Spectator, 179 (1947), 626. The author of this book suggests that it should be regarded, not primarily as a work of scholarship, but as a guide-book through the history of Western European political thought for the uninitiated, and that his distinctive character as a guide is that he has his eye on ‘the social background which conditions thought.’ There is, of course, no one kind of guide whose merits are so great that he should be taken as the model of all guides. The instructive, the reflective, the imaginative, the formal and the chatty, the brisk and the unhurried—each of these types will acquire and hold his following. Mr Bowle is an informative guide, who goes for the big things first—for Plato, for Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes—and he clearly has some appreciation of them. But often he is at a loss to express that appreciation effectively, and is capable of filling in time with the most commonplace observations. He is not the sort of guide who loses his own way (that requires genius), and he does not often allow himself to dart off down an obscure alley. He can instruct, but he does not infect either with enthusiasm or with doubt. He sometimes shocks his audience, but never surprises them. What he plants in the mind is too often something ready-made, not a seed capable of growth. Indeed, if the truth is told, he is not a guide likely to charm or inspire his following into forgetting that it is lunch-time, or even to prevent some of them slipping out of the party for a quick drink. In his broad idea of the course of European political thought, Mr Bowle seems to give in without much of a struggle to all the old, crude periods and categories into which it has been cut up and parcelled out. No book which covers the ground from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution can be expected to give much
of an impression of the subtle mediation of the changes which compose the story, but to have had a less naïve acceptance of the crudities of the outline of history would have been a refreshment, which indeed is rather more easily provided in a history of ideas than in a history of institutions. But while it is disappointing to find oneself back again with nothing more subtle than Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, etc., in a book on the history of ideas, it is also disconcerting to be offered, in detail, a history whose categories are so little touched with criticism and so little representative of the real quality of ideas. This history seems to be constructed round a sort of fixed skeleton of constants, themselves immune from change. The ‘European mind’ is something to which this history happens. ‘Hellenic objectivity’ makes its periodic appearances. Something called ‘science’ or ‘the scientific attitude’ emerges, disappears, and re-emerges at irregular intervals, but itself suffers no detectable change; the immense differences between Greek and modern science are passed on unrecognised. These, however, are defects of detail, most of them merely missed opportunities; a more serious fault in the book is its curiously ‘unhistorical’ attitude. In a work of this sort it is, perhaps, permissible to write of ‘the main stream of European civilization,’ but not, I think, to write of it as being turned on and off as if by a celestial controller. And the point of view from which the Greek city and the Middle Ages appear as ‘failures,’ from which the seventeenth century may be seen as (in some respects) a ‘retrogression’, from which Montesquieu and Rousseau can be regarded as ‘lucky to be born’ at the time when they were born, is more of a political or a moral than an historical point of view. And it is unfortunate that so much of what Mr Bowle says of the writings of the political thinkers is overshadowed by this unhistorical attitude.
Contemporary British Politics Review of John Parker, Labour Marches on (London: Penguin Books, 1947); and Quintin Hogg, The Case for Conservatism (London: Penguin Books, 1947). First published in Cambridge Journal, 1 (1948), 474–90. The appearance last year of two books, one on contemporary British Socialism and the other on contemporary British Conservatism, gives an opportunity to take stock of the politics of our time. The books are not equally helpful in this enterprise: Mr Hogg’s, for all its brisk controversy, is a work of some profundity of thought and offers an interpretation of one of the great traditions of British politics, but Mr Parker, buoyed up with the sense of being on top of the world, provides only a complacent situation report of the achievements of the Labour Party. But one way or another, in what they say or in what they assume, the books at least offer a starting-place for reflection. Each of these political parties, it appears, is inspired by what may perhaps be called a philosophy. That of Socialism is the philosophy of the Mandate; that of Conservatism is the philosophy of natural law. The philosophy of the Mandate is a philosophy of will. The will of the majority of the electorate at the time of a general election is the supreme authority; the actions of a government based upon this title are unquestionable. Periodic application must be made to the electorate to discern its desires, but the clearly expressed desire of a majority requires no other authority to establish its validity. As a constitutional doctrine this has no great antiquity in British parliamentary history, although it raised its ugly head in the seventeenth century and has from time to time been appealed to by those who should have known better. Indeed, the circumstances in which the practice of representation grew up in British government did not call for, or suggest, any particular theory; the constitutional doctrine of the Mandate
made its appearance at a later stage, when a simplified explanation was being looked for. Its merit is its simplicity; its defect is its remoteness from political reality. It is conceivable as the basis of the government of a voluntary society which drew up its articles of association at its inception, and Mr Parker believes it to be the operative principle of the Labour Party. But does he really think that Socialism is merely what the majority of the Annual Conference of the Labour Party from time to time votes for? And if not, how can a Socialist Party base itself solely upon the will of that majority? And when the theory is offered as the ground of the authority of the government of a community that never had a beginning, a community whose arrangements are unavoidably a partnership between past and present, a community that has a long established way of living and of conducting its business, the difficulties are increased. ‘Rank majorities may give a nation law’, said Grattan in 1790, ‘but rank majorities cannot give law authority.’ The difficulties become insuperable when the Mandate is represented, not only as a constitutional doctrine, but as a philosophy of just government. This, however, is what Mr Parker seems to believe; and he is willing to go so far as to identify democracy with the unhindered operation of the mandating activity of the temporary majority of the electorate. But his confidence is not so great that he allows himself to leave the matter there: he wishes to make certain that the majority is on his side by arranging that its livelihood will depend upon the maintenance in power of his party. One of the mistakes of the Conservative Party in the present parliament has been to repudiate some of the actions of the government on the ground that a mandate for them was lacking; Mr Hogg, however, does not fall into this error. Rightly, he will have nothing to do with so half-baked, so equivocal a theory, and puts in its place a doctrine of natural law. That there is a limit to what a temporary majority may do appears to him obvious, and ‘the limit is set by a body of doctrine which we may call the natural law, which is the same for all sovereign bodies, and
limits the number of claims upon the individual which the group may make’. ‘The essence of democracy’, he continues, ‘is not bare majority rule; the right to reform the law may be legally and in certain directions morally and politically unlimited in scope, but here and there a wall is fixed beyond which it is not lawful to go. On the wall is inscribed the words ‘Natural Law’, and if rulers overleap it even majority rule becomes the tyranny of a mob, the more irresponsible because it is anonymous.’ This is well said. At least it rescues us from the absurdity of attributing absolute authority to the will of a temporary majority. And if it were a limitation based upon constitutional custom there would not be much to criticize. But as a philosophy it leaves much to be desired. So simple a doctrine of natural law cannot be held to survive the criticism (not of Bentham, which is negligible) but of Burke and of Hegel. And not only is it too abstract to offer much practical guidance, but also the notion of a criterion which is merely an external limit is scarcely good enough. If he had followed the lead of Burke in this matter, Mr Hogg would have found himself upon firmer ground, and ground not less habitable by the Conservative. The field of contemporary British politics seems, then, to be occupied by two parties, each inspired by a philosophy of some sort, but neither by a sound or even coherent philosophy. This is a misfortune, but not a crippling misfortune. Reputable political behaviour is not dependent upon sound philosophy, although error so profound and complicated as that which the Labour Party seems to have embraced is apt to be a hindrance. In general, constitutional tradition is a good substitute for philosophy (indeed, philosophy is of little practical value until it has found expression in a constitutional tradition), and British politics is, above all, rich in this respect. Setting aside philosophy, the projects and methods of contemporary British politics seem to spring from two main sources: a legend of mass unemployment and a legend of war. I say ‘a legend’, because although mass unemployment and war are the two dominating experiences of our time, our politics spring
not so much from the experiences themselves as from something that has been made of them. ‘At the back of the minds of all those who have been through the twenty years between the two wars is the fear of a fresh slump and widespread unemployment’, says Mr Parker. This is the experience. The legend begins when he asserts that ‘in the past full employment has never been secured in a “free” economy’, that a slump is inevitable in the United States of America, and that Keynes demonstrated that the only way to avoid mass unemployment was by the institution of a centrally planned economy. And, while the legend is the spring of Labour policy, a preoccupation with the problem is common to both parties. Obsession with a single problem, however important, is always dangerous in politics; except in time of war, no society has so simple a life that one element in it can, without loss, be made the centre and circumference of all political activity. There is, further, a widespread belief that the problem of mass unemployment is capable of solution. Some writers (Conservatives among them) appear to believe that the problem can readily be solved by a little trick of administrative technique which, if it is performed at the right moment, is without danger of miscarriage and will itself produce no other problem. Socialists, however, basing themselves on the legend rather than the experience, have come to believe that no price is too high to pay for a solution—indeed, the solution appears to them to be worthy of some great price: to achieve it without establishing a centrally planned economy; seems to them disrespectful to the exaggerated magnitude of the problem. Now, even if the experience upon which these politics are based were the most relevant experience at the present moment of our history, and even if the legend had much more truth in it than in fact it has, all this would be hampering. But the full defect of this inspiration of policy at the present time lies, of course, in the fact that the malady from which we are least likely to suffer (except as the result of some of the remedies put into operation to present it) is mass unemployment. Our first great misfortune, then, was that
the mainspring of British politics in 1945 was an experience and a legend which were not immediately relevant to our situation. The second spring of policy and method is a legend of war. And here, I think, the two parties divide more precisely. To the Conservative, war appeared to have produced a perversion of our society which it should be the aim of contemporary politics to cure: here was an identifiable mischief to be removed. Every change that had been brought about by the condition of war was suspect. The conversion of our society from a state of war to a state of peace might be slow and difficult, but it was a real and necessary conversion. The Socialist, on the other hand, took the opposite view. He embraced the legend of war without reserve. In its simple and emotional form this legend found expression in the view that ‘the people wanted a purpose in peace as cogent as that given them in war’. And Karl Mannheim (among others) gave it a more intellectual expression: ‘By making the necessary adaptations to the needs of war one does not always realize that very often they contain also the principles of adaptation to the needs of a New Age.’ ‘The war’, says Mr Parker, ‘led to a vast extension of State intervention in the economic field. Thinking elements within the Labour Party hoped that many of these wartime experiments would continue.’ And ‘the Labour Government was fortunate in taking office at the end of the war’. In short, the condition of a society at war seemed by no means a perversion, and consequently there was no intention whatever of changing that condition; propaganda demanded talk of a ‘smooth change-over from a war economy to a peace one’, but the real belief was in the positive value of the effect of war upon society. What is the ground of this belief? First, of course, it is based upon the perception that the politics of Socialism are the politics of crisis, a perception which leads Mr Parker to doubt the possibility of any large scale growth of Socialism in the United States without a catastrophic slump first taking place. Crisis must be preserved and promoted if Socialism is to have a chance. But secondly, and more immediately, it was based upon the naïve confidence that the
planned economy of wartime was a huge success, that it eliminated waste and simplified production and consequently could be taken as the model of all business enterprise. And erroneous as this belief is, it is not half so damaging as the willingness to accept also the effect of war upon society as beneficial—the deprivation of liberty and the conversion of the consumer into someone who is not permitted to demand but who must take what he is given with a glad heart. But if the project of a centrally planned economy (and with it, unavoidably, a centrally planned society) owes much to the legend of war, it is a mistake to suppose that it is the project of only one party in contemporary British politics: one party may have gone further than another, but Mr Morrison’s claim that ‘the idea of planning is now over and above party politics’ has some substance, and not only because the word is used in half a dozen different senses. Even Mr Hogg says that ‘one of the biggest swindles ever put across the people by a political party is the Labour claim to be the only party which believes in planning’. It is a mistake also to think of it as a political novelty which will disappear with a decade of peace (if we are allowed it) and a decade of full employment (if the present planners permit it). This is a piece of shortsightedness which infects even Professor Jewkes’s admirable Ordeal by Planning. For the truth is that central planning is the product of an academic ignorance of how the business world works, and a common ignorance of how society lives, which have been growing on us for many years. It may be true, as Professor Jewkes says, that central economic planning ‘originated, as many evil ideas originated, in Germany in the war of 1914–18 when it was conceived as a technique for war administration’. But what has to be accounted for is the enthusiasm it generated, not only in Lenin, but also in less eccentric and less egoistic politicians. A centrally planned society is, of course, the simplest of all societies, and offers the greatest prizes of power to those who can get in on the ground floor. It appeals not only to the ambitious politician, but also to the ignorant politician. Economically it is based
upon a simplified, mechanistic conception of production and distribution; quantitative, physical controls can be understood by those who could never reach a proper understanding of the kind of control the English common law and the law merchant for centuries exercised over some departments of activity, and for many years over all. Politically it is based upon the naïve idea that power can be controlled only by setting up some greater and uncontrolled power to do the controlling. And socially it is based upon a simplified view of human life, a mental horizon which includes ‘the individual’ and ‘the government’ of the day and nothing else. But the ignorance which makes central planning seem desirable may be either that of the politician or that of the electorate. The politician may know very well that a regime of this sort leads only to slavery and wretchedness, but pushed forward and supported by the mandate of an ignorant electorate bemused with the illusory promises of security and prosperity which it is believed central planning has to offer, his ambition will prompt him to say what is expected and to offer what is desired. A centrally planned society is the ideal of all rationalistic politics, and rationalistic politics have been with us long enough for them to be unlikely to disappear in a decade, even in the most promising circumstances: an excessive desire and hope of security is an emotion which has long since invaded and overrun European life and politics.25 Conservatism, as Mr Hogg expounds it, is opposed to rationalistic politics, and its opposition is firmly based upon a belief in the virtues of a society which has not succumbed to the servility of central planning. But still, there is hesitation. Of course he has no use for a laissez-faire economy or society, but he writes often as if such a society and such an economy had existed at some time in the past. It is not firmly and clearly enough stated that a genuine laissez-faire society has never existed anywhere on earth at any time, and that what through all the centuries has prevented its existence is not central planning, but a rule of law which has emphasized duties at least as much as rights between [25]
Cf. Burckhardt, Weltgeschichliche Betrachtungen, 1906.
private individuals, and that no conceivable extension of these rights and duties will ever produce a centrally planned society, which is something of an altogether different quality. (A writer like Mr Parker who sees in the Factory Acts the forecast of a centrally planned society is a trifle too muddled in the head to make a reliable secretary for a tennis club, much less a guide for a nation.) It is the great merit of Conservatism that it has resisted the pressure of circumstances and a misled electorate to embrace the project of a centrally planned society; its present weakness is that it has not resisted that pressure with the absolute conviction with which it should be resisted. If there ever comes a time when two parties compete for power on the basis of rival plans, an even larger lunacy than that from which we at present suffer will have established itself. It might be expected that what may be called the traditions of British politics would retain some hold on the projects and methods of contemporary policy, and it is relevant to inquire how far this is so. The chief departures from these traditions appear to be three: the current idea of the categories of British politics, the appearance of not only a new party but of a new kind of party, and the current misconception of the nature and function of the Opposition. The categories of British politics, according to both these writers, are Left and Right. If this were really so it would imply a closer approximation of British to Continental politics than I had supposed to be the case, and it would deprive British politics of much of their individuality. But, of course, it is not so; this isa piece, and perhaps the most corrupting piece, of current nonsense. There may be some faint approximation between the Labour Party and the continental parties of both the Left and the Right (in the politics of rationalism, that is in continental politics, extremes are apt to meet); its roots are not as firmly fixed in the traditions of British politics as one would like. But there is nothing whatever in common between British Conservatism and any of the categories of continental politics. Loose talk of this sort about
British politics merely liberates a fog of unreality, and lost in this fog British politics may become detached from their real root in British society and its history; and it is to be regretted that the guilty men in this respect belong to all political parties. And when these categories of Left and Right are transplanted into the past, the writers who perform the operation merely make themselves ridiculous. ‘From the time of the Civil War in the middle of the seventeenth century’, says Mr Parker, ‘political opinions in Britain have tended to divide between two main Parties, one of the Right and one of the Left.’ And it is to be feared that he is only copying the fantasy of English history current in Socialist circles. But then, it is the sort of statement one expects from a man who believes that ‘an adequate study of civics’ is the best education for a politician. And when these writers go on to a cant identification of Conservatism with Fascism and both with reaction, the fantasy is complete. Fascism, at least, has nothing to do with reaction; it has both wind and tide in its favour. But if it is too much to expect the Socialist to awake from his dream and cease to think of himself as Left and his opponent as Right, it is not too much to ask the Conservative (who, if he follows Mr Hogg, does not think of himself as Right) not to encourage the Labour Party to dramatize itself as Left. The novelty of the Labour Party has not, I think, been sufficiently explored, but it is a subject that can only be touched upon here. Two points are of note. The first is the relation of a Labour Administration to the Annual Conference of the Labour Party. As Mr Parker says, ‘the supreme authority of the Labour Party is the Annual Party Conference … It consists of delegates of all affiliated organizations with voting rights in accordance with the strength of affiliated membership’. The Conference is ‘a remarkably democratic institution’. And the motion tabled by the Lewisham (East) Divisional Labour Party for the Conference this year, a motion which is commonly believed to be somewhat eccentric and since withdrawn, is only a precise elaboration of the prevailing doctrine with regard to the authority of the Conference:
‘When the Labour Party is the governing party in the country, conference decisions shall be binding upon the Government and shall be acted upon within the programme of the Parliamentary Labour Party.’ It means that, under a Labour Administration, Parliament is demoted to the position of an executive body for carrying out the items of a programme determined each year by an irresponsible body. Needless to say, the government of this country has not yet acquired this character without reservation, but it is the character of British government implicit in the structure of the Labour Party. And were it ever established without qualification a constitutional revolution would have taken place beside which the revolution invoked in central planning would be insignificant. We may perhaps remind ourselves that it was one of the requests of the Nineteen Propositions (1642) ‘that the great affairs of the kingdom may not be concluded or transacted by the advice of private men, or by any unknown or unsworn councillors’. But secondly, a Labour Administration owes another allegiance, springing from the sources of its power. The Trades Union Congress is a constitutionally irresponsible body which appears to exercise a powerful influence over the decisions of a Labour Administration. But more important, since the repeal of the Trade Disputes Act (1927), the political funds of the various trade unions have become the major source of the Labour Party’s income, and through them the Trade Unions may gain a control over a larger number of parliamentary candidates and seats. But Mr Parker continues: ‘the permission given, as a result of the repeal of the Trade Disputes Act, to the Civil Service Trade Unions to link up with the T.U.C. and to create political funds will almost certainly lead to more direct representation of the Civil Service Trade Unions in the House in future.’ And he does not appear to recognize anything remarkable in writing like this. It used commonly to be supposed that a Member of Parliament represented his constituency, but the structure of the Labour Party evidently has a tendency, not only to make a Labour
Administration subservient to irresponsible advisors, but also to turn the House of Commons, so far as Labour representatives are concerned, into a sort of syndicalist assembly. Every schoolboy knows that the Opposition in the British parliamentary tradition has a positive function to perform: it is to be regretted that there are so many politicians who do not properly understand what that function is. And this is a matter of some importance, because as soon as real knowledge of the function of opposition disappears, the Opposition will come to be thought of as an expensive luxury, a piece of wastefulness, and therefore to be planned out of existence. The truth is that parliamentary government as we know it depends for its continued existence more upon the Opposition than upon the party in power. Mr Parker’s ignorance is profound, and consequently dangerous. He patronizingly suggests that when the Conservative Party has been a little longer in opposition it may perhaps learn how to behave as an Opposition should—which, it appears, is to keep quiet in the face of the might of the majority. There is a vague suggestion— it is a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand—that to oppose is to commit lese majesté. His chief specific criticisms of the present Opposition are, however, that it offers too few ‘constructive suggestions’, that it is without an alternative plan, and that it is disunited. Now, Mr Hogg (and anyone else who knows anything about British parliamentary government) knows very well how foolish these criticisms are. It is, and always has been, the business of the Opposition to oppose, to criticize, to expose foolishness, corruption and mismanagement wherever they lie hidden. It is required neither to make constructive suggestions (though the present Opposition has made many) nor to have an alternative plan. And, in general, it may be said that a disunited Opposition is as necessary as a united government. The present Opposition has not, perhaps, made the most of its opportunities, opportunities greater than have ever before been offered to an Opposition. It is true that the administration of departments and (it would appear) the instructions given to the drafters of Bills have often been so
incompetent that it has been difficult for criticism to know where to begin; but the delay and folly of the government’s foreign policy, and the grand stupidity of its finance, have been too easily passed over. A more resolute, relentless, tireless, extempore criticism of administrative blunders, a criticism that let nothing pass, that was constantly on the tail of ineptitude, would have served the country better than the careful construction of an alternative policy, though, of course, it is the business of an Opposition while pursuing the first to be thinking about the second. However, if it is less efficient than it might be, the present Opposition has at least kept alive the true principles of opposition and has resisted the temptation to abandon opposition for the plugging of an alternative plan. Whatever the obscurity which surrounds the spring and circumstances of contemporary British politics, these writers leave us in little doubt about their aims. And the most probable method of discovering what the two great parties have to offer is to inquire into the sort of society each thinks desirable. Let us consider this question first in respect of the Labour Party. The purpose of its present activities, we are told, is to bring into being ‘a really vital social democracy’. This, of course, is equivocal. What does it mean? And how is it to be achieved? It means, first, the ‘reconstruction of British economy on a planned basis’; a centrally planned economy operated by physical controls. Mr Parker, on an early page, allows himself the use of the expression, ‘a planned economy on democratic lines’, but later on, in one of his rare moments of ingenuousness, he admits to a doubt about the validity of ‘the distinction between totalitarian and democratic planning’; a government committed to central planning must not hesitate to exert the necessary pressure on the economy to achieve its ends, a pressure which includes the direction of labour. But, of, course, like the abolition of the right to buy and sell a medical practice, this must be thought of as an acquisition of freedom rather than a deprivation. What, in practice, the reconstruction of British economy on a planned
basis involves is known already to most people in England, and those few who are still without direct experience of it can learn from Professor Jewkes’s Ordeal by Planning. That a planned economy means, also, a planned society, Mr Parker is in no doubt. The ‘very wide powers over the whole industrial life of the nation’ which planning entails, are powers also over every individual in the society. Their exercise involves the destruction of the consumer, who is replaced by the mere recipient of what is given to him, consumer goods becoming allowances to keep the human machine efficient and to provide incentives to work. Individuality, however, is not totally destroyed; it is maintained by a minimum allowance of ‘personal property’, which is distinguished from non-permissible private property by the usual sophistical Socialist argument. The shining vision of the future (how unlike that of William Morris whom Mr Parker has the temerity to mention) is that of a society in which everyone is an employee of the government, a society upon which has been fixed and riveted the deadly grip of the corporation employee mentality, a society in which everyone has a ‘post’ given him by ‘the community’ (Edward VIII is described as having ‘shown himself unsuitable for his post’), which will ‘choose the best individuals to occupy all the most important posts whether in industry, the universities, the arts or government’. And Mr Parker estimates (by the perhaps injudicious inclusion of the employees of the Co-operative Movement) that by 1950, a trifle over six million persons will be employed in what he calls ‘public concerns’. Socialism will have arrived when ‘the majority of the working population are employed by public concerns of one kind or another’. This society will derive its peace and stability from its monopolistic structure, and the world (in its turn) will be at peace either when ‘all the major powers have economies that are primarily socialistic in character’ or (at least) when a ‘power to plan world resources as a whole’ has been set up. And further, the dominance of the Labour Party in England will at the same time, and by the same means, be assured. ‘There is a widespread
desire in the lower middle class and in the upper sections of the working class to secure posts in the Civil Service’, says Mr Parker. And the Labour Government is desperately anxious to draw into its direct or indirect employment as many people as possible. For whoever owes his employment to the planners will keep the planners in power by his vote. Patronage is the basis of political power. So runs Mr Parker’s surprising doctrine. It is a simple plot to establish, not by force but by subterfuge, a single-party system and the slavery from which it is inseparable. The best that can be said for the method by which this ‘really vital social democracy’ is to be achieved is that it is appropriate to its purpose. It consists in the concentration in the hands of the Government of much of the power which is at present widely distributed throughout our society. The power that derives from monopoly is not to be wastefully dissipated, it is to be appropriated by the Government; and along with it, into the same maw, are to go many of the small powers (the rights) exercised by countless individual men and women. The public ownership— nationalization—of ‘the main resources of the community’ is merely a means to the end; it is necessary, not because private enterprise is inefficient or monopolistic, not for any of the reasons daily given in Parliament, but because ‘the creation of a planned economy would be quite impossible without a substantial part of the industrial structure being in national hands’. Now, the interesting question is, Why is not all this recognized by its promoters as despotism and by those who suffer under it as tyranny? There are, I think, three main reasons. First, it is not recognized as tyranny because of the vast emotional and intellectual confusion there is with regard to the nature and conditions of freedom. A man who, before the Truck Act, was defrauded of his wages, knew himself to be, to that extent, a slave. He might be well-fed, secure in his job and enjoying a rising standard of living; nevertheless, he was not to be gulled into thinking that he was as free as he would be if his wages were paid him in cash. The Truck Act set him free. It did not say to
him, ‘The price of this freedom is a bit off the other end of your freedom’: it was a gratuitous addition to his freedom made by a civilized society, and if it had not been this it would not have been freedom at all. And this is the truth that has been lost in the confusion: if you are required to pay with freedom for an offered freedom, you can be certain that what you are offered is not freedom at all, but something else. It may be something you value, it may be something for which you are willing to pay freedom in order to acquire, but it is not itself freedom. Now, the situation under a centrally planned economy is that everybody (with the partial exception of the planners themselves) is deprived of so much freedom that the regime would at once be recognized as a tyranny were we not deluded into thinking that what we were being offered in place of the lost freedom was freedom of another sort or in another direction. A centrally planned society is not an example of one of those apparently simple situations (beloved of the Socialist) in which, by a sophistical argument, it can be pretended that freedom is taken from one but given to another: everyone is deprived. It offers us neither a gross nor a net addition to our freedom. And when it comes to be seen that what it offers (pretending that it is the same, or just as good, as freedom)— security, prosperity, etc.—it cannot in fact supply, the bargain will seem an ill bargain even to the man who values these things more than his freedom. Secondly, the tyrannical character of our planned society is not recognized because the regime was not introduced by a coup d’état or its equivalent. Sensitiveness to tyranny is always apt to lag behind the inventiveness of tyrants, and our political perceptions, in the absence of a lively political imagination, are very much at the mercy of our political experience. Mr. Parker claims no more for his party than that the changes it has set on foot are ‘on a par with the Reform Act of 1832 or the big social changes carried through by the Liberal Government of 1906’. It is a judicious understatement of the facts which by this time will delude no one. But the absence of a coup d’état, though important at first,
must be counted among the wasting assets of the Labour Party. Established tyranny cannot for ever conceal its character except from willing slaves. Thirdly, this is not recognized as a despotism because of the mediocrity of the planners. We have been taught to look for the spring of great achievements and great catastrophes in great and strong personalities. And we have learned to beware of extraordinary ambition. But the lesson is out of date. All our traditional resources of resistance have been trained upon outstanding genius or over-mighty power, but they have been turned in the wrong direction. Our political observation has been educated to detect only the despot who, in Lincoln’s words, belongs to ‘the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle’. Suspecting a tyranny, we look for a Strafford and find only a Cripps, we look for a Cromwell and find only Clem Attlee—and we are reassured. But if the experience of our time has any unmistakable message for us, it is that tyranny can spring from mediocrity and despotism from inferiority. The ambition we should beware of is the petty ambition to keep on the crest of the wave, the ambition which is satisfied with the illusion of affairs. Gisevius has shown us that the real tyrant in Germany was not Hitler, but the German people. Les esclaves volontaires font plus de tyrans que les tyrans ne font d’esclaves forcés, and the tyrants they make are distinguished by their mediocrity. The conclusion that the reader is encouraged to draw from Mr Parker’s book (a conclusion reinforced by many of the actions of the present Administration) is that the Labour Party has an incentive to become despotic (it is moved by the ‘pitiless fanaticism of an idea’), that it has the means to become despotic, and that it has the intention of becoming despotic. ‘Democracy in this country’, the Home Secretary has told us, ‘is very much on trial.’ The conclusion, on the other hand, from Mr Hogg’s book is that Conservatism has no incentive to promote despotism and that the aim of Conservative politics is to guard society against all those concentrations of power which are liable to result in despotism.
The Conservative has no shining vision of a New Age—partly because he is sceptical about the value of such visions and partly because, whatever their value, he does not think they should be the stock-in-trade of the politician. ‘While others extol the virtues of the particular brand of Utopia they propose to create, the Conservative disbelieves them all, and, despite all temptations, offers in their place no Utopia at all but something quite modestly better than the present. He may, and should, have a programme. He certainly has a policy. But of catchwords, slogans, visions, ideal states of society, classless societies, new orders, of all the tinsel and finery with which the modern political charlatans charm their jewels from the modern political savage, the Conservative has nothing to offer. He would rather die than sell such trash, and consequently it is said wrongly by those who have something of this sort on their trays that he has no policy, and still more wrongly by those who value success above honour that he ought to find one.’ Politics are a limited activity, a necessary but secondrate affair. ‘The Conservative contends that the most a politician can do is to ensure that some, and these by no means the most important, conditions in which the good life can exist are present, and, more important still, to prevent fools and knaves from setting up conditions which make any approach to the good life impossible except for solitaries and anchorites.’ This has the merit of according with human experience. At least it is a form of politics which does not expect improbable changes in human nature, either for the worse or for the better, and which, further, does not assume that such changes have already taken place. Within these limits, what is the business of the politician— whether he is in office or out of office? Of the two main functions he exists to perform, the first and most important is to prevent the concentration of power in a society and to break up all concentrations of power which have the appearance of becoming dangerous. The general name for all forms of political disease is the concentration of power in the hands of a part, whether that part is a private individual, a corporation, a union, a party, a majority, a
minority or a government. And consequently those charged with the guardianship of a society (that is, the Adminstration and the Opposition) have a first duty to preserve a diffusion of power. As circumstances change power will tend to become concentrated in new centres, and the politician must be wary in discovery and courageous in action. To perform his beneficent function he does not require, when in office, to wield a supreme and crushing power; he requires only to wield a power greater than that which is concentrated in any one centre of power. Nor does he need to act arbitrarily or extravagantly, except to repair some dereliction of his own duty. Any experienced society, and above all our society with its long tradition of resistance to tyranny, has at its disposal an armoury of laws and methods amply sufficient to defend itself against the overmighty ruler or subject. Nor, on this view of his function, will a politician expect, or think it good, that he and his party should be permanently in office, much less will he think it good that the Opposition should be silenced or abolished. If the task of the Administration is to disperse dangerous concentrations of power in the society, the equally important task of the Opposition is to guard the society against a secret and insidious concentration of power in the Administration. The reason for all this is not obscure. It is based first upon the observation (confirmed in the history of every society) of the corrupting tendency of the exercise of power. ‘Power means the exercise of force; it corrupts by undermining a man’s will and reducing him to the level of his own slaves. A slave-driver, getting out of the habit of explaining to his slaves what he means them to do, gets out of the habit of formulating his intentions even to himself … The lack of free will, the inability to resist the pressure of emotional forces, which makes the slave a slave, is also what makes the tyrant a tyrant.’26 But secondly, the politics of the diffusion of power are recommended because they are the only guarantee of the most valuable and substantial freedom known to human beings. This freedom is, in fact, the product of the exercise [26] Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p. 156.
of the politician’s function of preventing concentrations of power. Political freedom is inseparable from the diffusion, the sharing of political power. And economic freedom, Mr Hogg says, can spring only from ‘the diffusion of economic power, that is property, as widely as possible throughout the community’. The politician in office may be said to have a second function to perform. It is to take the initiative in seeking out the current mischiefs and maladjustments in a society and to set them right, not arbitrarily but by bringing to bear upon them the legal principles which constitute the recognized method of adjustment in any experienced and civilized society. And in order to perform this function he must have in his mind not only ‘the individual’ (who may be either the beneficiary or the sufferer of the mischief) and ‘the government’, but also the vast mass of healthy relations between the members of a society (some established by law and others by custom) which, from any point of view except that of revolutionary jusqu’aboutisme, are more important than the few which are morbid. Now, how are these functions to be carried out? I think it is in answering this question that Mr Hogg is unhappily led to write in a manner inconsistent with the general view he is advocating. He sees clearly enough that the main integration of our society (or of any civilized society) lies in the fact that a man has the assurance that, if he takes a certain line of action, consequences will ensue which he can forsee with reasonable certainty. This certainty is the result of the predominance of the law—a law based originally on the common law, but in the past hundred years or so gradually developed by legislation so as to emphasize the element of obligation as well as that of right. Maladjustment appears when the enjoyment of these rights and duties leads to dangerous concentrations of power. He sees also that the necessary readjustments must be in pari materia with the integration itself—that is, an adjustment which, at any point, replaces rights and duties of individual men by an overhead plan, is destructive of an integration based upon rights and duties. But,
as a relic of an old intellectual error, he thinks of these rights and duties as ‘limitations’ and of their adjustment as ‘interference’. It is an unfortunate way of thinking which is inherent in the simpler forms of a natural law conception of society. The truth is, however, that we do not begin by being free; the structure of our freedom is the rights and duties which, by long and painful human, effort, have been established in our society. Individuality is not natural; it is a great human achievement. The conditions of individuality are not limitations; there is nothing to limit. And the adjustment of those conditions are not interference (unless they are overhead adjustments); they are the continuation of the achievement. But the intellectual error involved in Mr Hogg’s way of thinking would not be so damaging were it not for the fact that the step from these ideas of limitation and interference to the idea of adjustment by means of overhead planning, with physical controls, is as short as it is disastrous. And it isa step which Mr Hogg, perhaps inadvertently, takes when he writes with approval of social adjustment by means of ‘the rearrangement of incentives’ in industry. The bug of rationalistic politics has bitten the Conservative. To have hoped that he might be immune from the universal infection was, perhaps, excessive optimism. But his powers of resistance are great, and when he has recovered from it, the policy he should pursue at home will be clear. It is a policy of diffusing all those morbid concentrations of power which have grown up in our society during the last fifty years, not by means of an overhead plan (which itself involves a morbid concentration of power), but by means of small adjustments in the rights and duties of individuals. Are industrial monopolies a danger to freedom? Is the exercise of certain rights restrictive upon production? Does the legal framework, within which the social and business activities of the society take place, encourage injustice, cruelty, fraud, frustration, bad workmanship, fear of unemployment, ignorance, apathy, disease? Do our present rights and duties check the springs of human enterprise, the exercise of which in all its forms is the only source of happiness? To answer
these and similar questions as best we can, avoiding dangerous obsessions with any one problem, and to remove the mischiefs revealed, is the beginning and end of policy. This, perhaps, is an exaggeration. The conduct of the foreign affairs of the society must be added to the duty of the politician in office. This, indeed, may at times appear his most important duty, and at such times the danger is that the methods employed in it may be reflected back upon the governance of the society itself. For the conduct of foreign affairs is recognized as the exercise of the Prerogative, and demands an extraordinary concentration of authority. Hegel was right when he identified the abstract individuality of the state with its conduct of foreign affairs. But, further, it is not to be supposed that politics at home can, any less than any other human activity, be conducted without love and hate, generosity and resentment. The contingencies of human life and the wilfulness of human character are reflected in politics as clearly as elsewhere. But the main points are, that politics are a limited activity, that they consist in the gradual readjustment of human relationships (and not in the administration of things) by fallible men, that there is no end to the process, and that their method should be one which does not neglect the fundamental structure of those relationships. No doubt politicians will always be gamblers, but they should back the field and leave private enterprise to bet on the favourite. This is a difficult policy to pursue in an age which has so long preferred the reign of rationalist planners to the reign of freedom. It is unspectacular, and unimpressive to the mass of men and women brought up on melodramatic politics. Its positive demands are reasonableness, sincerity, patience, self-restraint, moderate foresight and a knowledge of the principles of integration and adjustment imbedded in the history of our society. But they are human qualities, qualities which a Member of Parliament might be expected to possess or to be capable of acquiring, common qualities in comparison with the godlike vision and superhuman mental grasp which the successful planner must have and which
our planners certainly have not got. Such a policy is, indeed, a kind of perennial politics, the form of all politics which make use of the past achievements of our society in enterprise and organization and which endeavours to add to those achievements. But there is still room for differences of programme, for differences of opinion about what to do next and for differences of judgment about where the current dangers lie. And these will be the differentiae of political parties. What there is no room for is a party whose leaders seek to establish a despotism and to fix upon society an external order. British democracy is not an abstract idea. It is a way of living and a manner of politics which first began to emerge in the Middle Ages. In those distant times almost the whole outline of this way of life and manner of politics was adumbrated, an outline which has since been enlarged by experience and invention and defended against attack from without and treason from within. So convincing was this subtle manner of integrating a society that it became the model for peoples whose powers of social and political invention were unequal to their needs. The common law rights and duties of Englishmen were transplanted throughout the civilized world, the pride of those who possessed them and the envy of those who did not; a gift far more important than our gift of parliamentary institutions. In this process some of their flexibility was lost; the rights and duties were exported, the genius that made them remained at home. Peoples, desirous of freedom, but dissatisfied with anything less than the imagination of an eternal and immutable law, gave to these rights and duties the false title of Nature. Because they were not the fruit of their own experience, it was forgotten that they were the fruit of the experience of the British people. For many years now, these children of our own flesh have been returning to us, disguised in a foreign dress, the outline blurred by false theory and the detail fixed with an uncharacteristic precision. What went abroad as the concrete rights of an Englishman have returned home as the abstract Rights of Man, and they have returned to confound our
politics and corrupt our minds. Our need now is to recover the lost sense of a society whose freedom and organization spring, not from a superimposed plan, but from the integrating power of a vast and subtle body of rights and duties enjoyed between individuals (whose individuality, in fact, comes into being by their enjoyment), not the gift of nature but the product of our own experience and inventiveness; and to recover also the perception of our law, not merely as an achieved body of rights and duties, the body of a freedom in which mere political rights have a comparatively insignificant place, but as a living method of social integration, the most civilized and the most effective method ever invented by mankind.
The Analysis of Political Behaviour Review of Harold Dwight Lasswell, The Analysis of Political Behaviour: an Empirical Approach (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1947). First published in Cambridge Journal, 1 (1948), 326, 328. If you want to be frightened, read this book; as a portent of the end of civilised life it is far more unnerving than the atomic bomb. After forty, one naturally prefers a holocaust to the ignominy of being buried alive under the indiscriminating volcanic ash of ‘social reconstruction’. Professor Lasswell, distinguished as a lawyer as well as a sociologist, is a ‘friend of Democracy’, but he is a friend from whose attentions ordinary democracies (with a small ‘d’) should pray to be delivered. He is the professor of an empirical ‘science of democracy’, which is the workshop where the implements necessary for the achievement of democratic ideals are forged and the arsenal where they are stored. It is a science which is to political science in general what medicine is to biology. ‘People need to be equipped with knowledge of how democratic doctrines can be justified. They cannot be expected to remain loyal to democratic ideals through all the disappointments and disillusionments of life without a deep and enduring factual knowledge of the potentialities of human beings for congenial and productive interpersonal relations.’ And the survival of democracy now depends upon ‘the timing of special research’ into the technique of democratic life. The truth is, of course, that what we need is not a technique of moral progress, but to be made aware of the values we are in danger of losing. And as we wade through his laboured analysis of childish examples of the problems of behaviour (the efforts of a short-tempered administrator to ‘set a praiseworthy pattern of administrative conduct’) and listen to his reiterated theme—‘The democratic ideal includes a decent regard for the opinions and sensibilities
of our fellows. The moralists who have championed this ideal in the past have made no progress towards the discovery of methods appropriate to the understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others. The instrumentation of morals has had to await reliable methods of observation’—we wonder why he does not, just for a moment, forget these obscuring abstractions and consider the realities of moral endeavour: why do I not get on with my neighbour? The conceptual difficulties which make hay of some of the more general essays in his book—difficulties about the meaning of ‘Democracy’ and a ‘free society’—are not, of course, so evident in the essays which deal with narrower subjects, and whatever value this book may have lies in these. Lawyers, also, may be interested in the long essay on Legal Education and Public Policy.
The English Festivals Review of Laurence Whistler, The English Festivals (London: Heinemann, 1947). First published in Cambridge Journal, 1 (1948), 382, 384. Mr Whistler has written a charming and profound book on an important and fascinating subject. His theme is the festivals, the ‘holidays’, in which the English people have recognised and appreciated the rhythm of the natural and the civilised year, making of it a microcosm of the wheel of life: Christmas, New Year, Twelfth Night, Easter, May Day, Whitsun, Midsummer, Harvest, and sixteen other celebrations which fill out the spaces between. Few of these festivals have lost all trace of their spring in the pagan religion of our distant ancestors, but few also have held out against Christian conversion. They are the most ancient customs of our society, more ancient than any of our beliefs, and in their recovery from the Puritan attack in the seventeenth century (which was as much an attack upon leisure as upon the way in which it was used), they have shown their power to survive even the pitiless fanaticism of an idea. To the contemplation of these festivals Mr Whistler brings a fine perception of significance, an acute eye for detail, a strong sense of the enveloping emotional life which they focus and interpret, so that his insight does not dispel the inherent charm and mystery and his explanations do not cheapen. But his object is not merely antiquarian—to recover some of the lost lore of these festivals; it is to offer ‘a guide to the festivals of England as they are and as they might be’. He knows well enough that deliberate ‘revivals’, with their ostentation and self-consciousness, have little power to prevail against time. But he knows, also, that each of these festivals has always been flexible and adaptable. He observes that within living memory the customs of Christmas have changed, the tree replacing the Kissing Bough; that festivals, such as Plough Monday and St George’s Day, have been given a
new life: and that such innovations as fireworks have made a place for themselves in the ritual of already established celebrations. He observes, also, that the genius of the English people created (not ex nihilo, but probably out of the dim reminiscence of the ritual of All Hallows) a new festival, Guy Fawkes Day, the one surviving Festival of Fire in our country. And he concludes that each of these traditional festivals is capable of improvement and adaptation by those who, aware of the range of human emotion which they focus, think they are worthwhile improving and adapting. But the question proposed by the circumstances of our time, when the enemy of these observances is lack of leisure and means to practice them rather than an opposing idea, is, How long can a custom starve and live? And if the answer which Mr Whistler gives is not very hopeful—‘Ten years perhaps; hardly more. If in their total austerity modern wars were to last as long as ancient ones, memory would cease to inspire action; there would emerge a way of life stripped clean of gestures and unfurnished; hollow as an empty room’—his book is neither anxious nor apologetic.
Nietzsche Review of Janko Lavrin, Nietzsche: an Approach (London: Methuen, 1948). First published in Cambridge Journal, 1 (1948), 450, 452. The queue which, in the early years of this century, lined up in front of Nietzsche is now, fortunately, thinning out. And with this hindrance removed, we are beginning to have an opportunity to observe the man and his work unembarrassed by the exaggerated reverence of his injudicious admirers, the mistaken enthusiasm of the culture-philistines up from the suburbs, and the protests of the injured. The Nietzscheans and the anti-Nietzscheans, who made of him the purveyor of a doctrine to be embraced or rejected, a Master to be followed or foresworn (who made him, what he never was, a Nietzschean), have done their worst, and have left behind them a trail of misconceived expositions and commentaries—De Kant à Nietzsche, Von Darwin bis Nietzsche, and the rest. But now that the din is somewhat subsided, there is a chance that a more intelligent sort of interpreter will have a hearing—those who got what they could from Nietzsche, whose imagination he fired, and who were aware of him as an artist whom either to abridge or to systematize was to destroy. The mistake of the Nietzscheans and their opponents was a preoccupation with what was least significant in Nietzsche’s work, the remedies he proposed for the ills of European society. They saw in him the apostle of a New Aristocracy, the defender of the strong against the insidious mediocrity of the weak, the preacher of salvation through the pursuit of ‘more robust ideals’. It was a quack Nietzsche (largely of their own making) whom they hailed as Master or Enemy: for anyone who proposes a cure for so radical a disease in mankind is pretty well self-convicted of quackery. But those who are now beginning to make themselves heard recognized in his writings, not remedies, but a profound and
imaginative diagnosis of a crisis in European culture. He sounded an alarm: for the world in which Nietzsche detected the crisis was as insensible of its predicament as we are of the speed at which the earth is whirling through space. Nor did he merely reveal the crisis at the heart of the trance and diagnose its character in the general terms of ‘nihilism’, ‘irreligion’, and ‘weakness’; he elaborated his diagnosis in detail with untiring insight in every field of human activity and in phrases which (when rescued from the interpretations of commonplace minds) have the power of opening up vistas of reflection and setting the imagination on fire. In art, insight (diagnosis) is an end in itself. The remedy is not something that follows: if it is anywhere it lies in the diagnosis itself, in the removal of the corrupt consciousness, and if we are to understand Nietzsche, we must understand him as, in this sense, an artist. Professor Janko Lavrin calls his book ‘an Approach’. His aim is ‘to point out the bond between Nietzsche’s personal fate on the one hand, and the trend of his thought on the other’, to show the spring of Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the crisis of European culture in the circumstances of his own life. In the hands of a less intelligent writer, his project might have degenerated into the application of a formula to Nietzsche’s work. But if ‘to approach Nietzsche the philosopher through Nietzsche the man’ is a formula, it is one which is derived from Nietzsche’s own writings; and, in any case, Professor Lavrin has a mastery over it which saves it from degeneration. Of the relation between Nietzsche and his time, he writes: ‘the personal element in Nietzsche’s philosophy may have at times deflected or even distorted the trend of his thought, yet it never undermined his interest in mankind and its future. Nor were the analogies he drew between his own dilemma and that of modern decadence entirely arbitrary, since in both cases the problem of averting the menace of disintegration was of primary importance. The vigilance with which he followed the various phases of his own ailments undoubtedly sharpened his eyes also with regard to the evils of his epoch, some of which he saw more
clearly, one is tempted to say—more clairvoyantly—than any of his contemporaries’. On the character of Nietzsche’s malady he accepts, with some reserve, the conclusion of Dr Vorberg that it was syphilis. But, instead of seeing in Nietzsche’s writings merely the reflection of his disease (whatever it was), he explores the hypothesis that ‘the scrutiny with which Nietzsche followed up the phases of his malady helped him to diagnose certain ailments of Europe probably better than a healthier individual could have done … Whatever one may think of his remedies, we cannot deny that his sharp perception unerringly detected many a cause of these modern evils which were to be more fully tasted only by the generations which came after him’. In short, whatever may be said against Professor Lavrin’s approach, it at least enables him to avoid the worst errors of the Nietzscheans and their opponents. And if it is true (as I believe it is) that the most valuable sort of book on Nietzsche is, not one about Nietzsche, but one which passes on what has been fired by Nietzsche in the writer’s imagination, then this unpretentious book is certainly worth while. Indeed, I believe it to be the most enlightening brief treatment of its subject in English.
Masters of Political Thought Review of Masters of Political Thought, vol. 2: Machiavelli to Bentham, ed. W.T. Jones (London: Harrap, 1947). First published in Cambridge Journal, 1 (1947–8), 636–7. The Masters of Political Thought is a project to expound the history of political thought, for the benefit of university students, by means of substantial extracts from the writings of the better known political theorists interspersed with comment and interpretation. It aims to combine the merits of a text-book and a source book. This volume is the second of three, and the writers it represents are Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Burke, and Bentham. One is left to guess why Spinoza has not been included. Such a book is not, and does not pretend to be, a history of political thought. Not only does it move from peak to peak with little indication of the ground between, but also it gives little opportunity to explore a tradition of thought should one make its appearance. In order, however, to make up for these potential shortcomings, Professor Jones introduces his selections of masters with a short essay designed to indicate the general nature and importance of political thought and the ‘defining characteristics’ of the period he covers. It is a disappointing essay, vague and scrappy. It over-emphasises the ‘breaks’ (the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution) with which he contends his period begins and ends, and it finds the unity of the period in its speculations about sovereignty and ‘the conception of the State as a natural organism’. It is a difficult period to deal with, but a more convincing principle of unity might have been discovered. The chief value of the book, however, must lie in the interpretation it offers of each of the writers represented. In general, these interpretations err on the side of the commonplace: they steam-roller all the subtleties and make everything a trifle
easier than it really is. When all the simple errors of Hobbes and Locke and Burke have been pointed out to us, one begins to wonder why anyone should think of them as ‘masters’. And were the Contrat Social nothing more than it is here made out to be, it would certainly not have kept Kant from his afternoon walk. If one follows Nietzsche’s precept of interpretation—to understand an author better than he understood himself—one needs to be more rather than less subtle. But, though none of these chapters can be called a masterpiece of interpretation, three of them (on Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau) are substantial and leave us in no doubt of Professor Jones’s views. In respect of Hobbes, no defects are uncovered which have not already and often been remarked upon: though many of them are, I think, beside the mark. His ethics are taken to be a simple form of Naturalism, his work is distinguished as ‘the first scientific social theory’, and by a tour de force the Leviathan is fully explained as though it came to an end at chapter thirty. And there is a sort of misapplied ingenuity in finding difficulty where Hobbes found none—in sovereignty by institution—and in seeing no difficulty where Hobbes was clearly in a quandary—in sovereignty by acquisition. Locke’s theory is removed almost entirely from its historical context and made to appear the simplest and least ambiguous of contract theories. How political obligation can rest both on consent and on the Law of Nature, is a question which any reader of Locke is bound to ask, but it is one which Professor Jones does not tackle. And there is no discussion of Locke’s idea of trusteeship. In dealing with Rousseau, Professor Jones always is safe where he can detect a ‘core of plain common sense’, but at sea when paradox makes its appearance. The passage of time is, perhaps, making some improvement in our interpretation of the writings of political theorists, and this book is certainly superior to the sort of thing that was being written fifty years ago. Nevertheless, it is disappointing; and one would doubt the value of the enterprise if the first volume of the series, by Michael Foster, were not greatly superior to the second.
Why We Read History Review of Kingsley Bryce Smellie, Why We Read History (London: Paul Elek, 1947). First published in Cambridge Journal, 1 (1948), 766–7. No publisher, it seems, is satisfied with his list unless he is running one of these horrifying series of little books designed to offer the sort of education which may be acquired standing on one leg, or, to translate the Roman poets’ phrase, travelling on the top deck of a bus. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically harmful in the little book on the great subject. It is the series that is horrifying; it approximates beekeeping (a profound and subtle art) to shorthand, and science to technology, and does little but add to the illusions with which we are surrounded. However, a series is, now and again, redeemed by one of the individuals which comprise it, and it is a pleasure to come across a little book written, as this is, with such urbanity and sense of style (though ‘old Vico’ is difficult to swallow) and with so great a freedom from pretentious nonsense. We live in an intellectually corrupt age, and the writing of history has not escaped the general corruption. The reading public, it is supposed, has a clear idea of the sort of illusion it desires; it wants something short, simplified, and informative. And the writer (with, of course, the great exceptions) either supplies it or shies off obliquely into the dim world of pseudo-research. The contemporary interest in history is centered upon the use to be made of it, upon the dogma it can be made to prove; concerned only with the future, we pervert history to our purposes. Ours is not the first generation to turn history into a formula for teaching the conduct of life, but knowing rather less than our ancestors about how to behave, we clutch at the project rather more crudely. There is room, then, for a fresh discussion of why we read history.
Mr Smellie has written an engaging essay on this subject. He discusses the meaning of history (on two different levels), the use of history, the history of history, and ends by giving some advice on what to read about history. He is clear-headed, wide-ranging, and informative. But the charm of the essay springs from the informal, reflective mood in which it is written; its real theme is ‘why I read history’. In general it may be said that what he has got out of it is pleasure and instruction, and he values both. He is precise and analytical about the instruction, and he manages to convey some sense of the pleasure without exactly examining its character. It is only in the last chapter that he shows some sign of degenerating into the true style of the ‘little book’. He makes many excellent recommendations about what to read, but here and there his list contains some pretty boring and some pretty tendentious reading matter; the student perched on the top deck of the bus will take his Smith or his Jones from his pocket, but he will soon find himself looking out of the window, and he will be well advised to continue doing so. The conception of history which informs Mr Smellie’s recommendations is that which earlier in his essay he points out as having emerged in the nineteenth century—‘history as a continuous genetical causal process’. And in consequence his main emphasis is upon books which are informative about a great variety of aspects of the past and present of Western Europe. It would have been a welcome relief if he had slipped in the recommendation of some historical masterpiece— like Rose bery’s Napoleon: The Last Phase—which arouses no extraneous passions and releases us from the burden of history as the intellectual and moral preface to the contemporary world, and if he had relented so far as to recognize the legitimacy of sitting up in bed on a Sunday morning to read the history of the Popes, not because it is important but because it is fascinating. But there is one point of serious criticism which must be made. Mr Smellie quotes with approval Acton’s ‘shining precepts’ for the student of history. Many of them are, no doubt, excellent; a critical study of them would, by itself, make an excellent essay on reading
history. But the enormity hidden in the middle of them should not have been passed by without comment: ‘Judge … character at its worst.’ Here is a precept so preposterous, so myopic, so sadly corrupting that without the aid of any other error it has the power of transforming history into a gallery, not of rogues, but of moral abstractions.
Father, a Portrait of G.G. Coulton at Home Review of Sarah Campion, Father, a Portrait of G.G. Coulton at Home (London: Michael Joseph, 1948). First published in Cambridge Journal, 2 (1948), 116, 118. This is a brilliant book. Like any other portrait, it is an artist’s vision; it springs from the meeting of two personalities, both strong, aggressive, and uncompromising, and not from any enterprise of passive observation. His daughter’s intention is to set down the plain truth of the domestic personality of her father. This, as she remarks, is a ‘task not likely to please sentimentalists, friend and foe alike, who would prefer anything but the plain truth; but it will be great fun and Father would certainly have enjoyed seeing me at it. It would remind him of that grim little story he used to tell of the siege of Paris: two old hungry folk sitting down to eat the carcass of their little pet dog, and the old woman saying, as she swallowed a morsel: “How poor Fifi would have enjoyed these bones.”’ (This I am sure is true; at any rate it is ruled by that strangely positivist conception of historical truth that governed all Coulton’s work; the belief that evidence consists of a number of independent ‘facts’ and that a proposition can be established by a catena of evidence.) To the generation to which Coulton belonged it might have seemed a little shocking that a daughter should write thus of her father, but it is all done with so much affection that we never for a moment doubt that, whatever the difficulties of living with him, the author of this book would not have had him any different. The reader, never involved in the difficulties, is altogether convinced that a difference would have been a change for the worse. This is not the work of an enfant terrible letting off steam, nor of a scientist botanizing on her parent’s grave; it is a portrait done with great skill, sureness of touch and tenderness.
To the world Coulton was known as a distinguished medieval historian, as the author of books (such as Christ, St Francis and To-day) which discussed some of the questions of the time, and as a brilliant controversialist. But the theme here is Life with Father—and it is a story which makes the best of Clarence Day seem forced and exaggerated. The book overflows with anecdotes, some of them set down with perhaps a tinge of bitterness, most (when recollected in tranquillity) with delight, all with affection. To live with so intractable a man as Father was no picnic, but it is clear that the family was never bored—except perhaps with the endless flow of advice and instruction which was poured out for the benefit of the children. Every side of his turbulent domestic life is illustrated in these pages—travelling abroad, the real and the imaginary financial crises, Father’s oddities with regard to food and clothing, and what the author calls ‘the family shindies’ some of which must have been shattering. There are brilliant pages in which are described Coulson’s rooms in St John’s College, the ‘carnival’ of getting him off from home for a day in college in his old age, the special brew of cocoa he insisted upon having, his contraptions and inventions, his unpractical practicalness, the bath chair, and (perhaps best of all) the ceremony of gathering the harvest of the pear tree, which is better than any of the exploits of Uncle Podger. And if one asks oneself why it is better, I think the answer is that Father in this incident is not, like Uncle Podger, merely an impersonal epitome of endearing human folly, but an individual eccentric in the great academic tradition. Mercifully in these pages we are spared psychological analysis. But the author finds in what she calls his ‘Puritanism’ her father’s deepest obsession. It appears at many levels, some trivial, others important, and it was something that made the life of his family difficult. Speaking of travel abroad, she says: ‘Looking back on it all later, I see that my memories of one of the loveliest tracts on earth are blistered and spotted by memories of Father’s Puritan raising his ugly head from alp or meadow or stream, and forbidding us to enjoy without earning, and causing some family row or other
to make sure we should have nothing so pagan and simple as an uncomplicated love of Switzerland.’ It was something, also, which made his own life difficult: but while he could more easily throw it off in moments of enjoyment, it hung over the children as a cloud. Men who, replete with every sort of crotchet and obsession, make every day of domestic life potentially a stormy day and who are yet not intolerable husbands and fathers, will usually be found not only to possess some compensating charm or greatness which removes the sting, but also to have characters remarkably free from those major domestic vices—such as secretiveness or an unappeasable unhappiness or restlessness— which really do make life with them impossible. This is certainly true of Coulton. The picture we are given is of a warm, untidy life—the one obsession from which Father was wholly free was the commonplace obsession of tidiness—and it is pointless to speculate on how different it might all have been if it had revolved round a less self-willed man, or if instead of these two rebellious daughters he had had ‘a gentle little girl in a white frock who came to him to be read to, and sweetly educated’. Everybody’s life from the domestic point of view is something of a hash, and a man who can survive so severe an inquisition into his character and come out of it a most lovable man, in whom every oddity served only to endear, clearly has a touch of greatness. Those who knew him should be delighted with everything in this book (except the silly Introduction by Kingsley Martin), and those who never knew him will be delighted with his portrait as a work of art in which insight has made exaggeration unnecessary.
Bulwer-Lytton Review of Victor Alexander George Robert Bulwer, BulwerLytton (London: Home and Van Thal Ltd, 1948). First published in Cambridge Journal, 2 (1948), 188. This little book seems to have sprung mainly from the natural interest that a grandson has in his grandfather: it does not succeed in persuading the reader that, apart from the tie of blood, the author would ever have been inspired to write on this subject. Its theme is Bulwer-Lytton as a novelist. It does not lack discrimination, the Earl of Lytton prefers some of his grandfather’s books to others and can explain the grounds of his preferences; but it cannot be said to be a study of the novelist and his work. It is a plain, unpretentious, colourless, and severely external account of Bulwer-Lytton’s literary activities, enlivened by a single shaft of wit—Constance Vernon (the heroine of Godolphin) being said to leave on the reader ‘the impression of being a typical BulwerLytton heroine in an inadequate disguise’. There is nothing reflective or analytical in the way it is written; it attempts nothing that can properly be called literary criticism. But the task of giving an account of the contents of the more important novels and plays and of the circumstances in which they were written, has been efficiently performed. We are given the impression of a serious, sincere, incredibly industrious writer of remarkable fluency, very considerable learning, and a highly developed visual imagination. But of the literary world which Bulwer-Lytton inhabited, and of his place in it, we are given no reliable impression at all: of the fever and the fret nothing remains. Biographical details, apart from those concerned with the literary career, are here necessarily reduced to a minimum, but it is regrettable that no room has been found for anything like a study of Bulwer-Lytton’s exceedingly complex and elusive character. We are given scarcely a hint of the high spirits, the flamboyance, the shyness, the self-pity, the
vanity, the kindness and generosity of his character, of which only the duller, more staid and balanced side is revealed. The dandy never appears. The chapter on Bulwer-Lytton’s political activities is interesting, but unnecessarily defensive: there is nothing either discreditable or even remarkable in his change of party in 1850.
Man and Society Review of Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: the Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (London: G. Cumberlege, for Princeton University Press, 1946). First published in English Historical Review, 63 (1948), 272–3. Miss Gladys Bryson’s Man and Society is a useful and scholarly piece of work, in which enthusiasm makes up for a certain lack of inspiration in style and treatment. It modestly claims to be a summary of some of the ideas about man and society that belonged to the eighteenth-century school of Scottish philosophers, of whom the most important were Hume, Adam Smith, Ferguson, Hutcheson, Dugald Stewart, Reid, Kames, and Monboddo, and as such to be a chapter in the intellectual history of the century. But in fact it succeeds in being something more thana summary. The ambitious project that united these writers was the exploration of a science of man and society based upon the newly elaborated empirical methods of physical science; and such fascination as this study has, lies in the impression it gives of the genesis in British thought of a science of morals and politics, the rise of a new science out of modes of thought that were not scientific. Miss Bryson shows these writers to be dominated by the idea that society is natural, in a modern and not merely an Aristotelian sense, and that all social relations and institutions may be traced back to their spring in the nature of man. In this she sees them as the progenitors of modern sociology. But she is more successful in analyzing their ideas and in connecting them with the ideas of their contemporaries on the continent and with what was to come, than in depicting the slowly mediated changes which produced this remarkable school of Scottish thought.
Reason and Unreason in Society Review of Morris Ginsberg, Reason and Unreason in Society (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1947). First published in English Historical Review, 63 (1948), 414. Professor Morris Ginsberg’s Reason and Unreason in Society is a collection of essays and lectures each of which is a variation upon the theme of the part played by reason and unreason in human affairs. This general theme is elaborated philosophically, psychologically, historically, and sociologically; it is illustrated in studies of national character, the causes of war and anti-semitism; and it is pursued in sympathetic and critical reviews of the work of Hobhouse, Westermarck, and Pareto. Rational behaviour is, briefly, behaviour controlled by reflective thought and determined by the consciousness of its purpose. And in the history of morals the gradual rationalization of moral judgments is taken to be one of the surer signs of moral progress. Of course, any study of human behaviour reveals large tracts of unredeemed irrationality, the defects of which are the interest of the sociologist, the opportunity of the demagogue and the despair of the moralist; but the faith that inspires these essays is that reason cannot, in the end, be helpless in the face of problems of value. Both on this practical question, and in the scientific questions relating to sociology, the general impression left by this book is one of optimism with regard to method and of critical scepticism with regard to the results so far achieved. Again and again, in examining the work of sociologists, Professor Ginsberg recurs to the theme, ‘more knowledge’, ‘more evidence’, ‘better technique’. There is an impressive quality of care and unhurried deliberateness about his arguments and of humility about his conclusions. Everywhere he sees difficulties, which make him readier to show how an enquiry should be conducted than to pursue it himself. But, though he is convinced that the enquiry is worthwhile and that the time has now passed for the sociologist
to apologise for his presuppositions and method, there are many readers who will find this book richer in casual perceptions of a controlled and sceptical mind than in results assured by a method whose validity has been decisively demonstrated.
Puritanism and Democracy Review of Ralph Barton Perry, Puritanism and Democracy (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1944). First published in Philosophy, 23 (1948), 86–7. The theme of this book is the religious and intellectual foundation of the civilization of the United States of America. It is, and is intended to be, a book for the times. It was written during the war; its background is the scepticism which since the beginning of this century has been corroding American ideals; and, in effect, it is a reasoned reassertion of the creed of America. But its genuine learning and the quality of its reflectiveness make it something more than a mere livre de circonstance. Indeed, there can have been few occasions when a philosopher of high repute has more profitably turned his mind to the needs of his generation and has produced a book so illuminating and so much to the point. Puritanism and Democracy are, for Professor Perry, the two systems of ideas which united to determine, not the whole, but a large part of ‘the distinctively American tradition, culture, institutions, and nationality.’ The first is ‘the creed of certain Englishmen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries;’ the second is ‘the creed of certain colonial Americans who waged a war of liberation, and created a new political constitution, at the close of the eighteenth century.’ Both have their roots in European culture. The plan of the book is straightforward. The first of the three parts into which it is divided is mainly historical. Puritanism and Democracy as historic systems of ideas are examined and their contribution towards the ‘making of the American mind’ traced in detail. The Puritanism with which Professor Perry is concerned is not merely the doctrines which are peculiar to the Puritans, it is the whole complex system of ideas which had its roots in mediaeval Christianity. And the Democracy with which he is
concerned is ‘the political and social creed which was the professed ground of the American Revolution of the eighteenth century,’ a creed which derived from the philosophy of the Enlightenment. But the first part is only an introduction to the real theme of the book, which is a long and elaborate analysis and appraisal of both Puritanism and Democracy in the American tradition. The spirit in which this is undertaken is indicated in the following passage: ‘Puritanism and Democracy, under these or other names, form a substantial part of the heritage of Americans. The chief source of spiritual nourishment for any nation must be its own past, perpetually rediscovered and renewed. A nation which negates its tradition loses its historical identity and wantonly destroys its chief source of spiritual vitality; a nation which merely reaffirms its tradition grows stagnant and corrupt. But it is not necessary to choose between revolution and reaction. There is a third way— the way, namely, of discriminating and forward-looking fidelity.’ Here Professor Perry appears not merely as the historian of a tradition, but as a critic with a keen eye for its shortcomings. Yet, as he expounds it, the tradition itself is seen to have a certain power of self-criticism; while Puritanism and Democracy often re-enforce one another’s errors, they also correct and complement one another’s limitations. There is in these pages, which compose the bulk of the book, much to admire and little to regret. Their outstanding merit is that, whatever one may think of the conclusions, one becomes certain as one reads that Professor Perry will waste no time before getting to the essential topics to be considered and will argue his point of view with lucidity and enthusiasm. One matter of some importance may perhaps be remarked upon. In his analysis of what may be called the philosophy of American democracy (the central argument of which is contained in a chapter called ‘The Supremacy of Reason and Conscience’) the whole emphasis is placed upon its generation from the optimism of the philosophy of the Enlightenment—the confidence that from tolerant discussion ‘the truth would emerge
and prevail on its own merits’, the confidence in human reason. Historically, no doubt, there is considerable evidence for this view of the generation of democratic theory. Nevertheless I think it is a mistake to identify democratic theory with optimism of this sort, and even historically it is a view that needs to be corrected by a recognition that much that is characteristic of democracy is a reflection of scepticism (doubt not only concerning the power of human intelligence to arrange a satisfactory state of society, but also concerning the whole idea of a permanently good society) rather than of intellectual optimism.
Decadence Review of Cyril Edwin Mitchison Joad, Decadence: a Philosophical Enquiry (London: Faber and Faber, 1948). First published in Spectator, 180 (1948), 290, 292. A reviewer of a book by Dr Joad is now in the position of a juryman at the Assizes who is already familiar with the defendant and thinks he knows the case from having read about it in the local paper when it came before the magistrates. There is no one so unfortunate as not to know something about this writer. So we open the book with the expectation of all we have been led to expect—a virgin clarity of mind, readiness of phrase, pert (possibly perverse) comment, wit, wisdom, intellectual entertainment. But as we read we perceive that this is not the man we thought we knew. It is not the work of the enfant terrible we had heard so much about; it is the work of an enfant terrible who has grown up (as, alas, so often happens) into sober and prosy maturity. The brisk attack has given place to long-winded exposition; the man who once waited to speak until he was certain that it was not his turn now loses his effect in a continuous monotone; where there was once sustained argument, there is now only the muddled and hasty glancing at ideas as they fly past. It is a book about philosophy, and the first fifty pages are given to a defence of the philosophical populariser; but for a book about philosophy it is remarkably repetitious and disorderly. Subjects are begun, dropped, taken up again with a grand inconsequence, and the author is constantly waking up with a guilty start to direct the reader to the relevance of the last twenty pages. The innumerable cross-headings are a tribute to the inattention of the reader, and the extraordinary typography (in which subheadings appear in type twice as large as the main headings) adds to the general confusion.
The ostensible theme is decadence. And Dr Joad suggests that decadence may be ‘identified as the valuing of experience for its own sake, irrespective of the quality of the experience, the object of the experience, that upon which experience is, as it were, directed, being left out of account. Decadence, then, is defined as the “dropping of the object.”’ Now this is a bright idea, but how he arrives at it is difficult to discern. It appears that he knows already that vitality, vigour, exuberance, youthfulness, the Roman Republic, the Elizabethan Age, Chaucer, Rabelais, etc., are nondecadent, and that the eighteenth century, selfishness, the present day, Debussy (‘because he produces on me a lowering effect’) and Virginia Woolf are decadent. And what he pretends to offer in his definition is ‘the common core of the notion of decadence in most of the many senses in which it is used.’ But I believe the reader would be well advised not to pay too much attention to this; the state of mind Dr Joad is describing is never convincingly connected with decadence, and the real theme of the book is this state of mind and its consequences, and it is only at many removes related to so-called decadence. Experience for its own sake: this, for Dr Joad, means activity not determined by an ulterior object to be achieved or realised, activity whose satisfaction is internal. It involves scepticism in belief, conduct divorced from values, thought immersed in subjectivism; it involves philosophical error, worthless art and moral distraction. It is a condition particularly at home in large urban centres of civilisation, it is encouraged by the natural sciences when they offer themselves as a guide to life, and it ends in accidie. It is illustrated in the conclusion of Pater’s Renaissance, in the precept that ‘to travel hopefully is better than to arrive,’ in the craze for speed, in ‘assaulting mountains by means of mountain railways’ instead of on foot, in art as self-expression instead of the pursuit of beauty, but not, it appears, in rock-climbing, dancing, going for a walk, or knowledge for its own sake. Having analysed and explored this state of mind, Dr Joad proceeds in the second part of the book to lay about him more
in the manner we are accustomed to expect. His theme is the reflection of this state of mind in contemporary society, its art, literature, criticism, music, drama, politics, education, taste and general behaviour. He is a little nervous about committing himself on the subject of poetry, but on every other topic he has decided opinions. He has no very high opinion of the average human being or of the prospects of the race. The bomb, of course, is given its page. Taken altogether, I am more impressed by Dr Joad’s emotions than by the powers of argument displayed in this book. He is a civilised man, with an unpretentious love of music. He thinks that the douceur de vivre disappeared in 1914 (I should have put it at 1906), and he is a passionate defender of the countryside against spoliation. But he appears in this book as a man of erratic and somewhat restricted sympathy: one of the things he doesn’t understand is the charm of fashion, and any man who has no sympathy for this is likely to find the human race both puzzling and more stupid than it really is.
Science and Society Review of Cyril Dean Darlington, The Conflict of Science and Society, Conway Memorial Lecture (London: Watts and Co., 1948); and Arthur David Ritchie, Science and Politics, Riddell Memorial Lecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947). First published in Cambridge Journal, 1 (1948), 689–97. These two essays on the pursuit of scientific knowledge in relation to the arrangements of society, one by a geneticist and the other by a philosopher, should be read by everyone interested in the subject. Both are brief: neither can be said to touch the bottom of the theme, but neither is merely superficial. The enterprise of Dr Darlington is to investigate the conflict between science and society, which he sees as ‘the conflict between Discovery, which I take to be the active principle of science, and Continuity, which is in some measure the necessary condition of society’. This is not a necessary conflict, inherent in the nature of the opposing elements; rather, it is psychological, and consequently understood to be capable of resolution. At the present time, however, it is acute and a grave hindrance both to science and to society. The conflict appears first within the world of scientific research and even within the mind of the scientist himself. Every notable discovery involves the destruction of hitherto accepted knowledge, and has to overcome the inertia of what is already established. This is the conflict in its purest form—the obstacle to the acceptance of new discovery being the continuity of scientific knowledge embodied in the doubts of the discoverer and the interests of institutions engaged in teaching science. But a more serious conflict appears when economic interest, official and professional laziness, or the general aversion from change common to all organized societies opposes the application of scientific discoveries which have won the acceptance of scientists. That the new knowledge should offend some interest, institution or
individual is unavoidable. But the offence may be overcome (and the conflict resolved) by the maintenance of an absolute freedom of scientific inquiry and by the education of the society, and those who hold the initiative in making its arrangements, to a more ready understanding and acceptance of what scientific research has from time to time to offer. Dr Darlington expounds this simple thesis lucidly and illustrates it with apt examples. Perhaps he makes the contrast too rigid; science appears as all discovery and society as concentrated resistance, whereas, of course, all sciences have sprung from practical social arts which continue to have sources of change and improvement independent of science. And many readers will find Dr Darlington’s views on education a trifle crude. But, so far, few will disagree with the main thesis. He has, however, a second theme, not so well considered. He is understandably convinced that science is good for men and that all good men will want to avoid the wastefulness of failing to apply scientific discoveries rapidly and effectively to human affairs. And he is convinced, also, that nothing but evil can come from the subordination of scientific research to political interest or doctrine—a subordination he observes not only in Russia. But these convictions lead him to some strange conclusions. Most of his readers will be moved by his indignation at the neglect of the Forestry Commission to make use of the accumulated results of plant genetics and its indifference to research in plant breeding; he convinces us at once that here is a shocking enormity. And the long reign of superstition in cattle breeding is made to appear, what no doubt it is, a major event in the modern history of human folly. But there is nothing in what Dr Darlington says to show that he would not expect to carry our sympathy with him if, instead of choosing these examples of the failure to apply scientific knowledge to human affairs, he had expressed his horror and contempt for the poisoner who, neglecting the latest knowledge which would have provided him with an undetectable poison, disposes of his victim so ham-handedly as to be discovered in his crime. Or rather, it appears that Dr Darlington might recognize
the distinction, but would insist that it is a distinction which itself springs from scientific knowledge and can be reduced to the terms of genetics. How deep a confusion of mind is involved here is difficult to say; it is possible that Dr Darlington belongs to the strict sect which believes that the theory of evolution, besides putting ‘man in his place in the universe’, is also the only reliable source of moral judgments. At all events, it is in exploring some such line of thought that he reaches the conclusion that the political arrangements of a society, its policy, should be based wholly upon the discoveries of scientific research whenever discoveries relevant to the situation exist. He thinks that scientific discoveries may, and often do, oblige the acceptance of ‘fundamental political doctrines’, and that this is not recognized by the politician only on account of his ‘genuine and habitual effortless ignorance’, and by the scientist only because his mind is still conditioned by an out-of-date effort to shelter science from the corruption of politics. For example, he asserts that ‘modern statistical methods … have transformed our knowledge of how to extract information from numbers. They have become in recent years one of our most powerful and most general instruments of discovery. Our great Governmental departments are busy collecting numbers, so-called statistics, on a vast scale every day. On the understanding of these numbers policy should be based’. And that it is not so based is due only to the politicians’ failure properly to appreciate the method. He appears to mean that the use of modern statistical methods itself, without any previous or intervening judgment about the ends believed to be desirable, is a sufficient guide to political enterprise. Again, he finds himself able to reject the whole ‘notion of equality’ as a worthless superstition on the ground that it conflicts with genetic truth. He does not say that what he really means is that a politics based on belief in genetic equality will come to no good because it is based upon an illusion—a conclusion consonant with his premisses. He goes the whole hog. And the only indication that he does not intend to do so is the weight he gives to Acton’s opinion that a belief in
equality is the foundation of tyranny, though he does not reveal to us what genetic discoveries enable him to judge that tyranny is undesirable. And further, he ventures to assert that ‘the fundamental problem of government is one that can be treated by exact biological methods. It is the problem of the character and causation of the differences that exist among men, among the races, classes, and individuals which compose mankind’. In all this Dr Darlington might appear to be allying himself with the muddle-headed school of scientific politicians whose eccentricity has long been recognized. But I think, rather, that it springs in his mind from an unduly restricted view of the nature of politics than from a gross misconception of the value of scientific discovery. No doubt it is true that a society which ‘had sound plant breeding would have more wheat’, but this can scarcely be said to involve a ‘fundamental political doctrine’ or to be the model of all political problems and enterprises. No statistics, however wellhandled, will by themselves tell a man what to do, much less what he ought to do. It is safe to say that politics which did not embody a genuine love for erring human beings and even a delight in their endearing stupidities (as well as a desire to relieve society, with the aid of scientific and other knowledge, from some of the consequences of error and stupidity) would be evil. And politics which considered only the results of scientific investigation would not be evil; they would merely be impossible. Professor Ritchie is not so lively a writer as Dr Darlington, but he is a more careful thinker. He has also the advantage of more space in which to develop his argument and to observe the necessary distinctions. He investigates two important questions. (1) Whether the pursuit of scientific knowledge has social and political implications that justify its control in some manner by society, and (2) whether, if it is decided that the pursuit of scientific knowledge (or of activities closely connected with it) should be controlled, the method of control can itself be scientific—that is, whether there can, properly speaking, be a science of politics.
In discussing the first of these questions Professor Ritchie distinguishes at once between the pursuit of scientific knowledge (which he calls ‘science in the strict sense’) and the application of scientific (and other) discoveries to human affairs, which he calls ‘technology’. Science in the strict sense differs from technology, not necessarily in inspiration, but in respect of its internal coherence. ‘The theories of pure science form a systematic whole capable of indefinite expansion.’ Whereas ‘there is no system or internal coherence about technology; its development is determined by outside causes—by varying social needs, varying economic conditions, the state of scientific knowledge the idiosyncrasies of inventors, who hit on this dodge and not on that’. Now, Professor Ritchie believes that the pursuit of scientific knowledge should be completely free from external control by society, that it should be autonomous. This is a view that many will share. But I do not think his supporting argument is altogether satisfactory. He asserts the fact that if the pursuit of scientific knowledge is externally controlled it will perish; ‘if it is forbidden its independence it will not be deflected from its course; it will die out’. This is a view of the nature of scientific research with which I do not wish to disagree. I think it is exaggerated. Certainly some sorts of limitation on scientific research would be fatal to it; if, for example, the scientist were allowed to pursue only those lines of research and to publish only those results which seemed to agree with a prevailing political prejudice.27 But it is not so certain that every kind of social control is destructive of scientific research. However, what is more important is that Professor Ritchie does not make it clear that this is not in itself a satisfactory kind of reason for insisting upon this independence. If the freedom of scientific research is to be properly grounded it must be on the [27] An interesting discussion of this topic will be found in Professor M. Polanyi’s article on ‘Freedom in Science’ (Nineteenth Century, April 1947). Attention should also be called to his brilliant Riddell Memorial Lecture on Science, Faith, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946)
basis of its value to society, and not merely upon the crude fact (if it is a fact) that its freedom and its existence are inseparable. The questions which have to be considered are, What is the precise value to society (apart from any technological applications) of the pursuit of scientific knowledge? And can this value be enjoyed only when scientific research is autonomous? Professor Ritchie, it is true, does consider these questions, but not in a way that convinces us that he knows them to be the heart of the argument. His answer appears to be that its value lies in the respect for truth that it engenders. This, at least, is the right kind of answer; a respect for truth can be imagined to be desirable for its own sake. But is it a convincing answer? There is no doubt that in the past respect for truth and the unimpeded pursuit of scientific knowledge were closely bound up with one another, but it is not so clear that this is now as true as it once was. And further, even if we accept this answer, it cannot be said to lead us unavoidably to the conclusion that the pursuit of scientific knowledge ought to be autonomous. The society is yet to exist which permitted genuine autonomy to any human activity whatsoever; to claim genuine autonomy is to claim to be free of all the framework of civil and criminal law which constitutes the shape of a society. And among the limitations our society puts upon the pursuit of scientific knowledge is that it should not involve unnecessary cruelty to animals. However, in general, it may be agreed that it is in the interests of society not to qualify the independence of the pursuit of scientific knowledge, though further consideration of the grounds of this conclusion is, I think, required. ‘Technology’, on the other hand, the application of scientific discoveries to human affairs, clearly requires social control of some sort, and in no hitherto existing society has it ever been suffered to operate uncontrolled. Its value to society depends not upon the state of mind it promotes but upon performing specific services in society which are judged to be individually beneficial. A society may be foolish and refuse to avail itself of a scientific discovery which would be beneficial to it, but this sort
of foolishness is defective judgment about something concerning which society is obliged to make a judgment of some sort; it cannot be supposed that every application of scientific knowledge to human affairs is always good merely because it is what it is. So far, I think, Professor Ritchie’s argument is unassailable. Its only defect is that he confines his notion of control in respect of technology to only one kind of control, to restriction. A well-ordered society may be supposed on occasion to use its customary or legal authority of control, not merely by way of limitation but also by way of the promotion of the application of scientific discovery to human affairs. This, however, is a small point. The more important question is, In what manner can and does society control technology? And in answering this question Professor Ritchie embarks upon an illuminating investigation of the way in which one of the most ancient branches of technology has been controlled in Western European societies—the branch of technology called Medicine. That medicine is a technology is clear; it is the application of scientific knowledge to human affairs. The knowledge itself is, of course, morally neutral; it is capable of being used for the benefit or to the detriment of mankind. By what means has society sought to ensure that its use shall be good? By the Hippocratic Oath. This oath constitutes the intervening judgment (which Dr Darlington believes to be either unnecessary or to be itself based upon scientific evidence) between science and society. No doubt the oath has been no more than a rough and ready control, and I think Professor Ritchie makes too much of it in isolation. It was never, in fact, the oath alone as a formula, which constituted the control, but always the oath in its place in the whole moral habit of the society, and the oath supported by certain legal obligations. However, although this is a relevant example of the kind of control society may exercise over technology, it does not, for Professor Ritchie, provide the model for all that is required on every occasion, and it certainly does not include all that has been projected in the way of social control.
‘It will be granted’, he continues, ‘that where there is a contact between politics and science or technology, the problems that result are problems of morals. It may be said, however, that morality itself is properly a branch of science; that there is a science of society or of social conduct to provide a scientific basis for morals.’ This is his second theme. And it is here that the argument is not as clear to me as I should like it to be. He appears to me to be attempting to establish two propositions, which are imperfectly distinguished, not equally profitable and perhaps even mutually exclusive. The first proposition is that no social or political science can ever be a science in the strict sense, and consequently no ‘technology’ springing from a social science can ever constitute a strictly speaking scientific means of controlling human activity in general, and in particular human activity when engaged upon exploiting genuine technologies derived from the physical sciences. The argument runs somewhat as follows. What is required is a social science and an appropriate technology which would do for this human activity what a physical science and its appropriate technology does for, say, plant breeding. But when we consider both the materials and the methods of physical sciences we discover at once that they are fundamentally different from those with which the projected social science would have to work. And if, further, we consider the manner of the application of discoveries of physical sciences, we find that this too is something that, ex hypothesi, a social technology cannot emulate. The sort of knowledge which constitutes discovery in a physical science is a knowledge either of abstractions or of simplified objects which can be observed experimentally and expressed mathematically, while the social science would require a knowledge of concrete human beings. And while the technology which springs from a physical science involves only the control of physical objects, the control which would be required of the social technology would be the control of human beings. In other words, the technology which is the fruit of a physical science is always the administration of things, an activity which involves only knowledge of things and the
use of force, while the only technology which can be supposed to spring from the social science is the control of persons, an activity which involves knowledge of concrete human beings and the use of, not force, but persuasion; for to force individual behaviour is not to control it, but merely to disallow it. The conclusion of the argument is, of course that a social technology devised to control the use by man of technologies derived from the physical sciences is, in the strict sense, impossible; its defect in this respect is that it never achieves a fully scientific character. This is a familiar proposition and a familiar argument, though Professor Ritchie has made something of it for himself. It is often thought to be a sophistical argument, a mere quibble about the word ‘science’, but although it is certainly more substantial than that, I cannot say that I have ever been convinced by it. It appears to me to contain a truth which nevertheless lies hidden. However, Professor Ritchie’s conclusion is that ‘there is no science of statesmanship or politics or persuasion, if by science we mean the results of a systematic inquiry comparable to that of the physical sciences’. The second, and more profitable, proposition is that, if a social or political science could be found which was a science in the full sense, then the very qualities in respect of which it was scientific would disable the technology which sprang from it from controlling human activity and especially from controlling human activity when engaged upon the exploitation of the technologies derived from the physical sciences. Or, in other words, the project of the technological control of technology is self-contradictory. Now, the advantage of this proposition is that in order to demonstrate its truth it is not necessary to show that a social or political science in the full sense either can or cannot exist. All that needs to be shown here, in order to show the impossibility of the strictly scientific control of human affairs, is that the more strictly scientific the means the less they are able by themselves to control human affairs. I do not think that Professor Ritchie ever exactly formulates or tries to demonstrate this proposition; it seems to be something he has at the back of his mind while
he is arguing about the first proposition. And this is unfortunate, because, if this proposition could be established, it would establish conclusively what the demonstration of the first proposition could establish only inconclusively. The only positive notice Professor Ritchie takes of it is when he is dealing with the suggestion that Law is a social technology capable of controlling human activity. He thinks it profitable to pursue this suggestion because if a true social technology is to be found anywhere it is surely to be found in law. Now, law is concerned with certain limited human ends: the maintenance of peace and civil order, the just settlement of disputes, and the preservation of civil liberties’. But it is clear at once that it is a technology incapable, by itself, of controlling human affairs in general, and in particular of controlling human activity when it is engaged in exploiting the technologies derived from the physical sciences, because it is incapable of controlling itself. And, what is more important, the more closely it approaches to the condition of a genuine technology the more certainly it lacks control over itself, and lacks authority to control what lies beyond itself. Indeed, the defects of law as a scientific means of controlling human affairs are a function, not of its scientific imperfection, but of its scientific virtues. A rule of law as such is as unprotected against injustice as a scientific discovery as such is unprotected against evil results when applied to human affairs; they share the same defects, the lack of an inherent principle of self-control. A society always looks outside its positive law for a criterion of justice by means of which to control that law (precisely as it looks outside the technology of medicine to the Hippocratic Oath in order to control the practice of medicine); and normally, says Professor Ritchie, it has found that criterion of justice in an ideal or natural law. I doubt whether this is either a satisfactory account of the direction in which the criterion of justice has been sought or of the direction in which a genuine criterion is likely to be found; this notion of a natural law is perhaps the least convincing of the current formulae of moral criteria. But, whether or not this is so, the substance of the argument remains: law requires to look
outside itself in some direction, and the more strictly scientific it became the more certainly would this be so. Professor Ritchie does not investigate the claims of other socalled social sciences (economics, for example) to provide a technology capable of controlling human affairs. Nor does he consider the possibility of a science (and a technology) of justice itself. But, then, he does not require to do so. As I understand it, he has been trying to establish a proposition which, if established, would fix upon the character of any social science an inability to provide a technology to control human affairs proportionate to its scientific character. It is a bold attempt; I wish it had been undertaken more directly. There is, however, another point which should be considered: the oblique effect of what we call ‘science’ in the minds of those who have been subject to its influence. It may be demonstrable that there cannot be a science, in the strict sense, of human affairs, and it may be demonstrable that if there were such a science and if a genuine technology followed, it would not itself provide the sort of control of human affairs which every society needs and has always practised; but it does not follow that the scientific enterprise and the approximation to a social science that has been achieved and may be extended are wholly without legitimate influence upon the way in which we think about the ends to be pursued in human affairs. The fact of the matter is, it is impossible to separate absolutely in the mind that sort of learning from experience we call ‘science’ and that sort of learning from experience which is involved in judgments of value. And one of the important oblique effects of the scientific enterprise has been to make necessary a reform in the way in which the ends pursued in society are stated, and consequently the way in which they are thought about. But to trace these positive, though indirect, relations between ‘science’ and society is a project for another occasion.
The State and the Citizen Review of John David Mabbott, The State and the Citizen (London: Hutchinson’s, 1948). First published in Mind, 58 (1949), 378–89. Oakeshott also reviewed Mabbott, The State and the Citizen, in Cambridge Journal, 2 (1949), 316, 318. Since the publication in 1899 of Bosanquet’s The Philosophical Theory of the State no general work on political philosophy by an English writer has impressed those interested in the subject as being of first-class importance. What has been written in the last fifty years is great in bulk, but small in philosophical content. This is remarkable because Bosanquet’s work did not leave the subject in so firm a state of equilibrium that it was difficult to know in what direction advance could be made: the book was recognised to have grave defects, though its most important shortcomings were not those which its contemporary critics fastened upon. But from another point of view it is not so surprising. The febrile political activity of the period was not the most inspiring background for philosophical reflection; intense concern with the practical and the transitory, where it does not produce pseudophilosophy, is apt to inhibit philosophy altogether. At any rate, for one reason or another, the vigour and originality which marked the ethical thought of the period found little reflection in political philosophy. The best work has been historical and interpretive; but even here—when one considers much of what has been written recently about Plato—the perverting tendency of current politics has had an unfortunate effect. Mr Mabbott’s book is perhaps too slight to be taken as convincing evidence that the tide, in this respect, has already turned; but it has qualities which raise it above anything else of its kind that has appeared during this period. It is described modestly as an Introduction to Political Philosophy, but the fact that it is designed for a popular audience appears only in the ease
and lucidity with which it is written; there is no covering up of difficulties and no attempt to make things easier than they are. No doubt there are intricacies which, in the interests of balance and economy, are not pursued. Mr Mabbott makes allowances for the weakness of his readers, but he never condescends, and he wastes no time at all on what is attractive but irrelevant. In short, it is a book which deserves to be taken seriously. In writing such a book the greatest difficulty to be overcome is the first—to know where or how to begin. Only the boldest will begin, like Hobbes, in the centre of the subject and without reference to predecessors in the enterprise; the less venturesome or those, like Mr Mabbott, whose audience requires to be led into the subject gradually, will look for some mediating device which nevertheless will not hamper or prejudice the subsequent argument. What is required is something imperfect but familiar, in the criticism of which the writer can make the advances he desires to make—not a foundation, but a mere beginning. Others have found such a device in an appeal to political experience, in the statement of a ‘theory of the first look’ or in the idea of a ‘minimum city’ such as Plato and Aristotle take as their starting place. Mr Mabbott finds what he needs in a consideration of some of the ideas of four writers—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Hegel. The chapters in which he considers what these writers have to say are not intended as studies in the history of political philosophy, but as opportunities to harvest what is relevant in them for political philosophy to-day; hence the refusal to go behind Hobbes, the first great theorist of the political world in which we live. And from this point of view they are exceedingly skilful chapters. From Hobbes we learn the root principle that the first business of government is to provide security; from Locke, a confused doctrine of individualism, popular sovereignty and the common good; and from Rousseau, a similar, but more advanced, vindication of government in terms of the freedom it promotes, the will it expresses, and the good it establishes. By the end of the chapter on Hegel and the Hegelians (an excellent chapter)
all the major problems of political philosophy have been elicited from the solutions which these writers have proposed, and on the way Green has been subjected to a sympathetic but relentless criticism. The position reached so far is that ‘every act which is right and satisfying to a human agent is so because it serves to bring about a social or common good’ (p. 48), that the obligation to obey law and government is part of ‘a wider obligation which may constrain a citizen in his whole moral life as well as in his abstentions from crime or rebellion’ (p. 49), but that the State is ‘the real liberator of man’s moral nature, … the supreme and unique focus of his loyalty and affection’ (p. 55). If, says Mr Mabbott, ‘we were content to remain within the four corners of this vigorous creed, political authority would require no further defence. Any law which furthered the good of the State would be evidently right … a citizen could never evade the claim of the State to his obedience, nor could he even rightly pursue any object other than the good of his community’ (p. 55). Our starting place in short, is with what may be called a doctrine of the ‘maximum’ city. And the political philosophy which Mr Mabbott elaborates in the rest of the book is presented as what remains of this doctrine when it has been whittled down by criticism, when it has been purged of its exaggerations. The first object of criticism is to determine the principle of the limits of State activity. The view that there are no such limits and therefore no such principle (this doctrine of the ‘maximum city’) is found to withstand without much difficulty two forms of attack. Neither the doctrine that ‘there are certain sacrosanct departments of human life where the interference of the State is illegitimate’ (the doctrine of Natural Rights), nor the doctrine that since compulsion is destructive of morality (the moral value of an action lying solely in the freedom of its motive), the activity of the State is limited (in Green’s words) ‘to those actions which are better done from a bad motive than not done at all’, can survive serious consideration. A substantial and defensible limit is, however, to be found in the existence of ‘non-social values in moral action’.
The motives of an action and the amount of effort directed to doing right are morally valuable (though they are not the only things morally valuable), and they lie beyond the control of any association. And further, when action is aimed at consequences which are intrinsically good, these goods are sometimes ‘nonsocial and therefore a fortiori non-political’, and consequently are not controllable by the State. Truth, beauty, religious worship are examples of such non-social values; so also is freedom, which is defined as ‘the ability to choose action A without pressure or threats by others aimed at preventing me from doing A or getting me to do B through fear of the consequences, which they will bring about if I do A or omit B’ (p. 75). The common good then, which is not ‘the good of a society’ (a meaningless expression) but ‘a state of affairs involving relations between individuals, a state of affairs intrinsically social’ (p. 91), is not the only good. ‘Productive of the common good’ is not an exhaustive definition of right action. Moreover, there are duties, such as fidelity to promises, payment of debts and the saving of life, which are not the service of any association; they are owed to men as men. And these duties constitute a further limit to the claims of the ‘maximum city’. The State, then, is an association, and this (properly understood) provides the principle of the limit to its capacity to promote the moral ideal; there are goods beyond the reach of any association to procure. But further, the State is not the only association. It is ‘distinguished by (a) territorial limits, (b) inclusiveness within these limits, (c) the power in its officers to exercise force and the fear of force as instruments of policy, and (d) the possession by its officers of ultimate legal authority’. And on account of its particular character it is limited in its capacity to procure even those goods which, in general, depend upon association for their achievement. Consequently, the second and final object of criticism is to determine which among the social goods the State, as this particular kind of association, is capable of procuring. This involves a consideration of the desirable ends for which political
organisation is necessary or desirable, the relation of States to other associations, relation of States to other States. ‘What ends require for their achievement the organisation of men by reason of their domicile rather than on any other basis? What ends are attainable only, or most effectively, by law supported ultimately, if need be by force?’ (p. 101). These questions reveal at once one social good which cannot be effectively procured by the State. ‘Sympathy and willing co-operation, wherever they are found, are intrinsically good’ (p. 95). But a State is too large an association, and one too ready to resort to compulsion, for it to be a successful vehicle of solidarity of feeling of this kind. And further, a comprehensive unity of feeling in a State (though it is valuable when it appears as loyalty and is particularly valuable in war) demands the surrender of so many other goods that it must be regarded as ‘too expensive to be justified.’ Other associations, such as the family, are much more capable of promoting this good. There are, however, social goods—such as security, the maintenance of a certain standard of social conduct and the orderly settlement of disputes—which can only be enjoyed by means of the State. And there are other social goods which, though they may be obtained up to a certain level by means of a great variety of different forms of association, are now to be enjoyed most effectively when the form of association involved is the State. About these Mr Mabbott refuses to dogmatise, but he considers that health (because the establishment of the germ theory of disease involves a recognition that no man can maintain his health in an unhealthy community), communications, education and certain economic ends fall into this class. Nevertheless, the freedom of members of a State to enter into a great variety of associations, some of which extend beyond the borders of the State, is a prima facie good which should be interfered with only when it conflicts with those goods which it is the express purpose of the State to secure. No association may properly claim autonomy, but ‘so far as the purposes of any association include any spiritual interest, its complete freedom from State interference
is essential in respect of that interest’ (p. 123). In Mr Mabbott’s view a State is not a moral agent, and consequently, he is able to reduce the problem of the relations of States to one another to the question, What is the duty of the citizen of one State to the citizen of another? and the question, What are the duties of governments to one another? The first he answers without difficulty ‘as between citizens of different States, in their direct relations with each other, there are no moral principles differing from those holding between citizens of the same state, save that membership of the same State (like common membership of any other association) gives priority to the claims of fellow members’ (p. 139). The second raises some ticklish points, but is answered, in the main, on the lines laid down by current international law. But just as some associations are too large to be effective means for pursuing certain social goods, so the State may be considered too small for the achievement of some of our most sought-after ends, though there are substantial reasons for believing that the erection of a World-State at the present time would be undesirable. In the last part of the book Mr Mabbott returns to reconsider the basis of State unity. He rejects the idea that this unity springs from a general will or a corporate self; this is dangerous mythology. The State is an association of individual men; it has no collective mind, and can have no interests beyond the interests of its members. In thought we shall avoid, wherever we can, all expressions which by hypostatising abstractions, encourage us to believe in the existence of a collectivity, for such expressions are merely misleading. And in practice we should avoid the identification of our State with any non-political purpose or ideal, because such an identification is destructive of internal peace and security and the heightened sense of unity it furnishes is merely an illusion. ‘The State is no ultimate or genuine unit and has no ultimate or absolute value’ (p. 161). In order to provide what is within its power to provide—a means of securing certain social goods—it must win loyalty as well as mere obedience: but it is
only a corrupt loyalty which knows no service but the service of the State. The major part of this book consists of a single, close-knit argument of which I have tried to give the gist. There are moments where I am unable to follow Mr Mabbott, and moments in the argument which I find unconvincing; but there is no great benefit to be had from an examination of them. Many are small; some are without consequence to the main doctrine. But there are two or three large questions which it may be profitable to consider. The first of these is the question, What is political philosophy? Mr Mabbott devotes an appendix to it. His method is characteristic: the questions for him are, Has political philosophy (or political theory) a place of its own, a ‘field’ of which it is the exclusive occupant? And if so, what distinguishes it from all other intellectual enterprises? He admits to a difficulty in separating political philosophy from ‘social psychology, from economic organisation and from the historical study of political institutions’. But he resolves it by means of a system of classification: ‘social theory’ is the general study of the whole field of social phenomena, a field which may be parcelled out into exclusive areas, many of which are now cultivated by means of ‘empirical enquiry by scientific methods’—anthropology, social psychology, jurisprudence, economics, and political science. Political philosophy occupies an area of its own within the general field, the frontiers of which are determined by two considerations: first, the phenomena it contains are ‘political’ (i.e., political philosophy is concerned with one particular form of human association), and secondly, the method of cultivation is ‘philosophical’ and not scientific (the discovery of ‘new facts’), or practical (the establishment or approval of a particular kind of political organisation). The positive enterprise in political philosophy is to elicit certain ‘general principles of politics’. These principles are ‘permanent’ and not merely the ‘local prejudices’ of a particular civilisation. Nevertheless, they are capable of ‘application’ of being ‘followed’. The philosopher is pictured as ascending a cathedral
tower. At each level the view changes, new things come into range and the old things (conscience, duty, law, liberty) change their appearance. He may tire and stop half way, he may suffer from vertigo, and he has no means of knowing when he has got to the top—but he does his best. Now, I hope it will not be considered either disrespectful or pedantic to say that there is a certain amount of confusion here. It is remarkable how easily writers on the genres of knowledge gravitate towards some form of positivism. First, this notion of exclusive areas is unfortunate. The divisions it suggests are both arbitrary and of the wrong sort, and they presume similarities which cannot be defended: whatever is the relationship between anthropology and economics, it cannot (on Mr Mabbott’s own showing elsewhere) be the same as the relationship of either to political philosophy. Whatever else it is, political philosophy cannot be what is left over when the social sciences have staked their claims. Secondly, general principles which can be ‘followed’ and whose value lies in their applicability must have practical consequences implicit in them, and yet we are warned against expecting any but the most abstract conclusions from a political philosophy. And thirdly, the distinction, explicit in the otherwise most attractive simile of the ascent of the tower, between what ‘things’ are and how they look, is, I think, wholly misleading: if they look different, they are different, and if one ‘thing’ looks different the entire scene is different. And when one reaches the ground again, in what sense can we ‘apply’ the view we had from the top of the tower? However, Mr Mabbott offers another and better method of understanding what he means by political philosophy; he directs us to the chapters of his book, observing that ‘whatever the merits of the arguments advanced in them, these arguments are no part of social psychology, anthropology, jurisprudence, or any other empirical science’. This I think is true. And if philosophy is (what I take it to be) saying something such that, if true, things would be as they are, much of the argument of these chapters is genuinely
philosophical. But there are lapses which seriously disfigure it, lapses into an irrelevant practical attitude. What I have called the doctrine of the ‘maximum city’ (which Mr Mabbott attributes to Hegel) is designated as ‘political absolutism’ or ‘totalitarianism’, and its professors are said ‘to make the State … the supreme and unique focus of man’s loyalty and affection’ and to advocate complete government control of all activities. The theory of Natural Rights is discussed as if it were, not an attempt to say something such that, if true, things would be as they are, but an attempt to set a limit to the activity of the State. The ‘problem of the relations between different associations’ is presented as the problem of what relations ought to be made to prevail between them and the proper occasions of State intervention. The whole section on the place of the State is described as a discussion of ‘what any government can do and ought to do’. Hobbes is said to have ‘a low and cynical view of human nature’—epithets scarcely applicable to a philosophy of individualism. And Hegel is represented as preaching a doctrine about the ‘proper powers of government’. In short, I think there is confusion between the point of view from which one might assert that ‘the State is an association of a certain character, therefore its place in our lives is such and such, and if we observe it to be taking a place which ex hypothesi it cannot take, then there is something wrong with our observation’, and the point of view from which one might assert that ‘the State is an association of a certain character, but since the exercise of that character is not necessarily beneficial, we need to consider what it should be permitted to do and for this we require some information beyond our information about its character’. The first of these points of view I believe to be philosophical, and it is the point of view of Plato, of Hobbes, of Spinoza, and of Hegel. The second is merely a view of the proper functions of government, and if we adopt it we may hope to be able to say whether a law is good or bad but we cannot prevent ourselves being led into all sorts of circumstantial considerations, and our conclusions will depend upon the kind of relationships we desire
to cultivate (or are in the habit of cultivating) with other men and will be far from permanent. One further point may be mentioned here. Mr Mabbott conceives a political philosophy as, necessarily, a ‘theory of political obligation’; political obligation is regarded as a datum which the philosopher must analyse and of which he may hope to find a ground and limits. Now, an obligation is something we owe; it is a practical relationship between two or more men. In the simile of the ascent of the tower, it is something visible at the ground level. No doubt it, or propositions in which it is expressed, stand in need of analysis; but we cannot be certain, until we have made the ascent, that it is not one of the ‘things’ which will be invisible from half way up let alone from the top. And if it is invisible, it can form no part of a political philosophy. Consequently, I think it is a mistake (unless we know in advance that it will appear, and appear unchanged at all levels) to assume that a political philosophy must be cast in the form of a theory of political obligation. Of course, every political philosophy must show what has become of political obligation—just as it must show what has become of everything else visible at ground level—but this is different from treating political obligation as an irreducible concept. If one asks oneself what is the root presupposition which governs Mr Mabbott’s manner of considering the problems of political philosophy and the conclusions he reaches, I think the answer will be—‘everything is what it is, and not another thing’. Everywhere there is the attempt, to circumscribe, to determine limits; and the relations between things are always taken to be external to the things themselves. This attitude certainly provides a great and valuable discipline to thought. It enables Mr Mabbott to write some excellent pages in criticism of the notion of a collectivity, and on the current jargon—’society’, ‘community’, ‘group’, ‘State’—of contemporary political philosophy. But it does not always serve him so well. It gives to his world a strangely atomistic appearance: external and internal, self and others,
social and non-social are assigned to separate compartments; no activity is permitted to have any relevant consequences beyond its intended consequences; what the State cannot ‘directly produce or control’ is outside the area of the State; we are urged ‘to think concretely about the law’, but the law is never allowed to be anything but a number of separate, independent laws, each made by a legislature and each prescribing and compelling a specific action; and human behaviour is never allowed to be anything but a number of separate and independent actions. This attitude is, of course, a handicap when Mr Mabbott is making historical judgments or considering things from a practical standpoint. To say that ‘the political and economic theory of laissez faire’ was ‘developed by Adam Smith from the individualism of Locke’, and that ‘the results of laissez faire in the industrial field are well-known and only a few instances need be cited’ (the instances being confined to the conditions of child employment), is, surely, too gross an abridgment to be allowed to stand. And it is one thing to hold that there are ‘no a priori grounds for State action’ in many departments of industry, but it is an unfortunate abridgment to conclude that, on this account, a claim to interfere ‘must be determined in each case by empirical enquiry’ into the probable ‘success’ of State action, if ‘success’ means (as it appears to mean ) ‘economic success’ in each case taken separately. But this atomistic presupposition comes most powerfully into play when Mr Mabbott is dealing philosophically with ‘the individual’ and with that association of individuals which he calls ‘the State’. ‘Individuals’, ‘private selves’, are Mr Mabbott’s starting place. Each self is what it is, and not another thing. Its relations with other selves may determine what it does, but not what it is. Now that this ‘individual’ is something observable at ground level no one will doubt. And we may be grateful for Mr Mabbott’s vigorous and convincing disposal of the notion of a ‘collective mind’. But that does not absolve us from considering who this ‘private individual’ is, where he came from and what are the
necessary conditions of his existence. The ‘private individual’ as I understand him is an institution, a social, indeed for the most part a legal, creation, whose desires, emotions, ideas, intelligence, are social in their constitution. Nothing, I take it, is more certain than that this individual would collapse, like a body placed in a vacuum, if he were removed from the ‘external’ social world which is the condition of his existence. This does not mean that he is part ofa collective mind; but it does mean that the last word has not been said by calling him ‘private’. Perhaps the greatest disservice the whole enterprise of establishing a collective mind or a corporate personality as a respectable philosophical conception has done in political philosophy is to stand in the way of a proper consideration of the nature of the individual, of the citizen himself. And further, the ‘individual’ who is visible at ground level may have a different appearance when we have ascended the tower, and in Bosanquet’s words, ‘the whole notion of man as one among others’ may dissolve. But even if this were to happen, it would be a disaster if on our return to ground level we should attempt to ‘apply’ what we had seen from the top; that leads only to the current confusion of ‘social service’ with activity the motive of which is self-abnegation. The ‘private individual’ is an institution of the greatest value; the philosopher’s business is to discern the nature of his individuality. A political philosophy, may, I think, spring either from reflection upon the individual or from reflection upon the State; both roads lead to the same destination. Much of what Mr Mabbott has to say about the State is the result of genuine philosophical reflection. But here again, the discussion is too often arrested just as it appeared to be coming to grips with the concrete situation. The chapter on the ends for which political organisation is necessary begins excellently, but ought not some consideration to have been given to all that unavoidably follows in the train of an organisation to procure security, a standard of public behaviour and the orderly settlement of disputes? Is it saying something such that, if true, things would be as they are,
to recognise in the law of marriage or of property only what this law commands or expressly permits? Moreover, in spite of the admirably precise distinctions which abound in this discussion, I think we are given, in the main, a theory of legislation in place of a theory of law, and the consideration of the nature of the State is too often crowded out by a theory of the proper functions of government. The heart of Mr Mabbott’s political philosophy is his distinction between social and non-social goods, and his belief that there are duties which men owe to men as men and not as members of a common association, ideal or actual. But I do not think that all who share his conviction that the ‘service of the common good’ does not exhaust the moral ideal, will find these distinctions satisfactory. We are agreed that we are considering only the activities of men who are associated with other men, who are, in fact, citizens. And it would appear that for men in this condition there can be no such thing as a non-social action or activity in the sense of a concrete action performed or activity pursued which is devoid of social consequences and which owes nothing to society. So long as a man is a member of an association, his actions and pursuits cannot avoid having social repercussions, if only because they modify or confirm his character and consequently his relation with those who are associated with him and hence the rules and customs of the association. It is, for example, impossible to isolate (as Mr Mabbott tries to isolate) artistic activity (activity in pursuit of the beautiful) from social consequences merely on the ground that its social consequences depend upon ‘publication or practical application’ neither of which are ‘essential conditions of the activity’. The fact that an activity has ‘no practical end to serve’ does not deprive it of social consequences. And further, the spring of the actions and pursuits of such men cannot be insulated from the conditions of living in association with other men; it will always be a misdirection of enterprise to attempt to separate what a man owes to himself, in this respect, and what he owes to himself as a member of an association. Neither the
language of the poet nor the idiom of worship (even though it be private worship) is private, and both poetry and worship would, without them, be other than they are. Nevertheless, it may be that, even if there can be no such thing as non-social activity, there is a non-social good. And Mr Mabbott suggests that actions performed solely because they are believed to be right (conscientious actions) and activity in pursuit of truth, beauty, holiness or freedom involve goods of this sort. By calling these goods ‘non-social’ he means that their goodness is independent of the good or bad social consequences which spring from these activities, and that these goods cannot be procured or controlled by social activity. In short, there is a value in the motive from which an activity springs, and where the motive is not procurable or controllable by society, a non-social good may be said to exist. Occasionally Mr Mabbott slips into a way of writing which looks as if he believed that there are concrete actions and activities which are non-social, but this, I think, is clearly impossible: ‘acting from a certain motive’ is not a concrete situation unless the action were devoid of consequences, which is inconceivable. He is on firmer ground when he insists that there may be a value in some actions, in respect of their motives, which is non-social because it is ‘irrelevant’ to, independent of the value that lies in their social consequences and because it is not procurable or controllable by society. Now the questions to be considered are, (1) Is the value that belongs, for example, to the conscientiousness of an action independent of the value of the consequences of the action? and (2) Is it true that the conscientiousness of an action is, in its spring, insulated from society? I cannot see that either of these questions can be answered in the affirmative. In the first place, no association and certainly not the State, is indifferent to the motives of its members. The State to which we happen to belong is one which on many occasions approves of conscientious actions as such, which considers conscientiousness itself to be a social good and is prepared to protect it and to forgo certain
other goods (or conveniences) in favour of the good which belongs to conscientiousness. Conscientiousness here belongs to the common good. And where it does so it must be considered good on account of its place in the common good and it cannot, without further qualification, be a means of escape from the common good. The good that arises from conscientiousness or disinterestedness is not convincingly separated from the good which belongs to the consequences of actions. And in a society which gives no recognition whatever to conscientiousness as part of its common good, conscientiousness itself will have no significant value. I cannot follow the view which finds an ‘absolute value’ in conscientiousness: indeed, this talk of ‘absolute values’ and ‘intrinsic goods’ seems to me defenceless against the sort of criticism which Mr Mabbott brings to bear upon the idea of ‘natural rights’. In the second place, though it is true that ex hypothesi the State cannot compel the disinterestedness of disinterested activity, it would be a mistake to think that, on this account, the motives of actions are insulated from the State. Indeed, living as a member of an association is always an education in motive, and what cannot be compelled may yet be procured and can certainly be controlled. In the end, it is impossible to insulate actions themselves or even the motives of actions from their ‘external conditions’. Of course, a government which sets about the direct legal control of artistic, scientific or religious activity (beyond the control, often very material and going very deep, inherent in the civil and criminal law) would find that it had destroyed these activities; but it should be recognised that wherever these activities are ‘free’, their freedom is the gift of the State: they are not ‘naturally’ free in Mr Mabbott’s sense of freedom. The last point to be noticed concerns the duties said to be owed to men as men. And here again, I am not convinced that Mr Mabbott has found an escape from the ‘service of the common good’. Why do I ‘believe that I ought to pay my German bookseller’? If we say, ‘Because I am a man and he is a man’, are we saying something such that, if true, things would be as they
are? I think not. This is a duty put upon me by the service of the common good, not of an ideal society, but of my own State. And when, as in time of war, this ceases to be my duty as an Englishman and it becomes wrong even to attempt to pay him, it ceases, for the time being, to be a duty at all. There was a time when throughout the civilised world the ‘word of an Englishman’ was the common expression for a promise which would certainly be honoured—not because Englishmen had a high sense of duty towards men as men, but because they were educated in a high sense of duty, in this matter, to one another. To break one’s word to a Chinese was to let down, not the Chinese, but ‘the old school’. My view is, then, that I believe that the ‘service to the common good’ is an inadequate expression for the whole of a man’s duty, but that, in spite of a vigorous and illuminating attempt, I do not think Mr Mabbott has succeeded in detecting the principle of its inadequacy.
The Triple Challenge Review of Edward Francis Williams, The Triple Challenge. The Future of Socialist Britain (London: Heinemann, 1948). First published in Cambridge Journal, 2 (1949), 313–14. The sub-title of this book is ‘The Future of Socialist Britain’. It is written in a kind of ‘politics told to the children’ style— patronizing, enthusiastic, and complacent—with a liberal use of the device of stating a problem (in oversimplified terms) and letting the statement stand for the solution. Politics, it appears, consist in having a theory, putting it to a practical test, and hoping for the best; the politician is the administrator of political ideas. British Socialist politics are represented as putting to a practical test ‘two vast and so far unproved assumptions’—‘that a planned socialist system is economically more efficient than a private-enterprise capitalist system’, and ‘that within democratic socialist planning the individual can be given a larger social justice, a greater security and a more complete freedom than under capitalism’. The hero of the adventure is Mr Attlee, ‘one of the most considerable and formidable figures in British political history’. The test, on the whole, is going well; at least, when the larger miscalculations are attributed to circumstances, the minor miscarriages can be admitted with unctuous humility. But what makes one blush is not the complacency about achievement (even in respect of Burma): it is the more radical complacency which is prepared to risk the happiness and liberty of fifty millions on a single experiment. Socialism in Australia or Scandinavia is small beer for Mr Williams: ‘the stakes are not high enough. But in Britain they are as high as they could conceivably be. If the experiment succeeds the rewards will be enormous in terms of human wellbeing and national power. If it fails the consequences may be measureless.’ And he calls this politics.
The triple challenge is the project of changing (in response to an assumed necessity) the social and economic face of England, of transforming British Imperial policy and of finding a foreign policy appropriate to the new Britain. The doctrine propounded in these pages is that of a Socialism which is a via media between ‘capitalism’ and the totalitarian planning which belongs to communism, and that of a Socialist Britain as the tertium quid between the U.S.A. and Russia. Socialism—this ‘challenge to the assumptions of capitalism and communism alike’—consists in ‘democratic planning’, ‘securing an integrated pattern of development’ and at the same time leaving a ‘maximum possible freedom of choice to the individual’. This sort of thing will do very well as a party gag on an election platform. That is its proper place; its ambiguity is attractive if not convincing. But we may not unreasonably ask for something more from a serious political writer. However, Mr Williams’s case is that planning is inevitable in our present circumstances. The impoverishment of Britain after the war has produced a ‘revolutionary situation’, and this, coming on top of the inherent inefficiency of capitalism, brought to power the only party which properly appreciated the necessity of planning. It is not to be expected that Mr Williams should consider the defects of a planned society from the point of view of efficiency; his uncritical eye sees what he calls the ‘new pattern of government’, the pyramidal structure of the Labour Administration (with the Prime Minister sitting at the apex), as something merely to be admired. The only danger he recognizes is that which a planned society offers to freedom as we know it. But he reassures himself with the thought that after all Socialism belongs to the age-old attempt to tame power and that the monopolies it creates are ‘public’ and not ‘private’ and are controlled by the ‘community’. Mr Williams will not, I think, succeed (where others have already failed) in convincing his readers that ‘democratic planning’ is anything better than a verbal reassurance acceptable only to those who really care about planning more than anything else; the doctrine is collectivist, the rhetoric only is liberal. And
now that the politicians are beginning to take some note of the criticism which facts offer of their theories, it is time political writers began to show signs of having considered the large body of serious criticism to which this idea of central planning has been subjected since the Fabian Society first formulated it for the English people. The faithful, no doubt, will be edified by the contribution to socialist hagiography which Mr Williams offers in his character studies of Attlee, Bevin, Cripps, and Morrison. It cannot, however, be commended for its insight. He has taken most trouble with Mr Attlee, but here as elsewhere he is carried away with his own nicesounding phrases and the portrait is at once vague and wooden; and the line between appreciation and sycophancy is not always securely observed. A socialist desiring to know something of his leaders will find more insight in Mr Colm Brogan’s Our New Masters, in spite of its lack of sympathy, than in these pages of Mr Williams.
How to Stop the Russians without War Review of Fritz Sternberg, How to Stop the Russians without War, tr. R. Mannheim (London: Boardman and Co., 1948). First published in Cambridge Journal, 2 (1949), 425–7. Without some degree of simple-mindedness I suppose one would never get as far as opening a book with this title—not because the project is inherently impossible, but because it is too much to expect that it might be simple enough to go into a hundred and fifty pages. But when one is in a proper fix (as I suppose we are) one is apt to be credulous: nobody who really cared about the salvation of the world could suppress an itch to open Joanna Southcott’s box: and there comes a point when one is prepared to pay money for a recipe for making omelettes without eggs or for a painless means of mastering the tobacco habit. Of course, there is a snag somewhere; but only the strong-minded can refuse the offer without a feeling that he might be missing something. And, indeed, you will be missing something if you do not open this book. For under its Hyde Park orator title there is some sense mixed in with the usual nonsense. Mr Sternberg gained fame in 1938 as the author of Germany and a Lightning War; he began what the wrapper of this work calls his ‘unbroken record of accurate prediction of great events and world trends’. As a prophet he may have enjoyed remarkable success, and the prophetic parts of this book are pretty convincing and not unnecessarily ambiguous. But unfortunately one has to be more than a prophet to write a successful book on this subject. Mr Sternberg writes for an American public: he is anxious to instruct the government of the U.S.A. in the matter of its foreign policy. Beyond doubt an intelligent man of European experience might have something to say which it would be worth the while of the U.S.A. to listen to, and it is disappointing that Mr Sternberg never gets beyond the generalities which now pass for political
wisdom. However, he is a man of considerable information, his words are often precise and always forceful, and his attitude is agreeably matter-of-fact. But he reveals a sadly muddled mind at the critical point. He assumes that neither the U.S.A. nor Russia wishes seriously to interfere with the affairs or the territory of the other—at present a fairly safe assumption. He is concerned with the policy of each of these great powers with respect to Asia and to Western Europe. It is agreed that the policy of Russia, both in Asia and in Europe, is a policy designed to extend its control if not its frontiers. And it is agreed that both Asia (or at least China) and Europe are pretty well helpless, if left to themselves, to prevent this extension. If the Russians are to be stopped, it is the Americans who must do it: how? Mr Sternberg considers the obvious solution that they should be stopped by force, by a ‘shooting war’. And it is here that his reputation as a prophet adds weight to his words. On the assumption that, at the outbreak of such a war, the Russians were not in possession of an efficient atomic bomb, he is prepared to forecast that the U.S.A. would win, and would win without suffering any damage. But on the outbreak of such a war the Russian armies would rapidly occupy the whole of Europe and much of Asia, and ‘a war against the Soviet Union would have to be won not only in Soviet territory but in Europe and Asia as well’. It would not be a ‘lightning war’: and in order to win it, not only Russia, but large parts of Europe and Asia would have to suffer atomic bombardment. And in victory ‘the United States would no longer be a great State among other States. The United States would then be an island in a sea of barbarism’. ‘A war with the Soviet Union, though bound to end in a victory for the United States, would be fraught with the most terrible consequences not only for the Soviet Union, whose cities and industrial centres would be pulverized by atomic warfare, but also for Europe and Asia, which would be turned into deserts. In a United States surrounded by
a world of barbarism, all democratic and progressive institutions would be destroyed.’ So far (for about a hundred pages) the information has been convincing and the argument cogent. No doubt there are persons in the U.S.A. who need to be told these things. And even when the conclusion—that a shooting war is no solution—began to be obvious, the argument held our attention, and the desire to turn at once to the end of the book (the answers section) could be suppressed. As in the old-time serial, at the end of chapter four the hero is left hanging over the precipice by his bootlace: ‘if war against the Soviet Union is no way out, if it offers no solution, what then is the solution? … There is a way’. The rescuers are audible; will they be in time and have the proper tackle? We turn the page to find a chapter headed: WE HAVE TO BE MORE PROGRESSIVE THAN THE RUSSIANS. Can it be true that when the box is opened there is nothing inside but this mouldy recipe for salvation? Such is the darkness, it is difficult to say. There may be something else that I have mislaid. But the confusion of thought in this last chapter would be hard to beat. Its first line of argument seems to run like this. A helpless Europe and Asia are ready to accept help from either Russia or the U.S.A., and will choose for their helper whichever of these powers ‘they feel to be the more progressive’. In this respect Russia has stolen a march on the U.S.A.; it stands out as a great ‘progressive’ power, which has captured the hearts of Asiatics and Europeans alike with the offer of ‘a higher standard of living’. Meanwhile the U.S.A. has pursued a policy—e.g. in China, Germany, and Greece—of alliance with the ‘strong reactionary, more or less anti-democratic, Fascist or semi-Fascist groups’. The influence of the great progressive power, Russia, will go on increasing, at the expense of the U.S.A., until there is ‘a basic change in American foreign policy’, and the U.S.A. comes forward with encouragement and assistance for ‘democratic socialist planning’ (that is, a higher standard of living and personal and political liberty) in Europe and in Asia. But just as we are getting used to this simple view, in
which the world is divided between progressives and reactionaries, with Russia as a ‘progressive power’, winning allegiance to itself by the offer and even the gift of a higher standard of living, and the U.S.A. as a reactionary power which has lost its way in China, Germany, Greece and elsewhere, the scene changes. Indeed, it must change because, on this reading, the enterprise of ‘stopping Russia’ is itself ‘reactionary’ and pointless. A new Russia makes its appearance. ‘Because with present emphasis on military production a significant improvement in the living standards of the masses is impossible; because millions of Russians have seen that not only the middle classes, but also the workers and peasants in central and eastern Europe live much better than they do—for all these reasons the Soviet regime is very eager to produce new successes, new conquests, in order to show its superiority over all other systems.’ ‘The goal of Russian policy’, we are told, ‘is clear and unmistakable: to dominate all Europe in the same way that Russia already dominates the countries between Russia and Germany’. In short, Russia appears (e.g. in China), not as the enemy of ‘parasitic landlords’, but as the enemy of the Chinese. And it would appear that to be ‘more progressive’ than the already progressive Russians would involve the U.S.A. merely in the expense of giving two stones instead of one to Asiatics and Europeans who asked for bread. The net result of the whole argument is to deprive the word ‘progressive’ of any meaning at all, and to make it appear that in order to stop the Russians the Americans must become so like the Russians that the bewildered Pole or Malayan could scarcely be expected to detect the difference. If Russia is ‘progressive’, God help us all if the U.S.A. were to become ‘more progressive’. The picture of Russia as a kind of benevolent commercial traveller who knocks at the door and offers the housewife a good line in genuine prosperity at the absurdly small price of loss of personal and political liberty is, of course, an agreeable fantasy when compared with the real position—a Russia who acquires a skeleton key to the back-door and is found in the morning with his feet on the mantelpiece ordering breakfast. And it is not surprising that the
pious talk, with which the book ends, about a united, democratic, prosperous, progressive, socialized, socialist Europe and Asia, falls a trifle flat. Indeed, the whole chapter—the answer to the question—is a peculiarly muddled and unconvincing form of the utterly unconvincing thesis that if you want to stop a Russian you must become a Socialist.
Principles and Ideals in Politics Review of Guy Cromwell Field, Principles and Ideals in Politics, L.T. Hobhouse Memorial Trust Lecture No. 18 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948). First published in Cambridge Journal, 2 (1949), 444, 446. The opportunity offered by a single lecture is unavoidably restricted, and if it is to be seized, a boldness in assumption and a sparingness of qualification (neither very congenial to the philosopher) are necessary. But when these limitations are accepted by the author without complaint, the audience is not likely to grumble, and something good may come of it. In addition, perhaps, especially when the subject is philosophical and the audience not one of professional philosophers, success will depend upon the choice of a not too recondite topic, upon the avoidance of excessive subtlety, and upon the generation of a feeling of intellectual excitement: the lecture must have the character of an intellectual entertainment. Judged by these standards, Professor Field’s lecture is a great success. His subject is the moral assumptions which can be detected at the back of political conduct, his thoughts are subtle without being excessively so and he manages to impart an atmosphere of intellectual excitement. ‘The special function of the philosopher’, he suggests, ‘is to try to extract from the way in which people talk and act the assumptions that in fact they are working on. He has then to develop them, to show their implications, their relations of compatibility and incompatibility with other views, their consequences, and so on. Then the philosopher can help to make clear the nature of the possible alternatives’. But it is beyond his modest purpose to suggest to people what is right or wrong in motive or conduct. Political conduct is apt to spring from one or other of two general motives. These are not always exclusive of one another,
and on occasion they may desiderate the same line of conduct. Nevertheless they are distinct and can be opposed. The first is the belief that there are certain principles, laws or rules of behaviour, compliance with which is the form of all laudable conduct. This assumption may appear in a narrowly legalistic form, or, if the principles are of a more general character, it may give great freedom as well as guidance to conduct. But, one way or another, the view is that there are certain sacrosanct principles. On the whole, Professor Field thinks, ‘the tendency in modern times is to approve of this point of view’, though frequently with some reservation: fiat justitia ruat caelum as a general point of view, but we hope not to suffer the final consequence. But even with this reservation, it is a point of view not without its dangers to society. The second, and alternative belief, is that laudable political conduct is conduct springing from the pursuit of an ideal, conduct which is judged not by its conformity to a principle, but in respect of its achievement of an end. A common form of political conduct springing from this motive is devotion to a cause. And perhaps the best of Professor Field’s pages are given to reflection upon the nature and characteristic excesses and defects of this sort of political conduct. Professor Field finds neither of these points of view entirely satisfactory; both are capable of supporting conduct which no one would hold to be laudable, and neither is easy to establish to the exclusion of the other. ‘We seem to need’, he says, ‘some general scheme or point of view which will recognize, on the one hand, that at any rate some actions have a positive or negative moral quality of their own, and cannot be judged entirely by their relations to an end or result beyond themselves. And, on the other, it must be recognized that no action can ever be judged entirely in isolation apart from its accompaniments or results or relations to anything outside itself.’ Such a point of view, he suggests, is to be found in the claim ‘that the only things morally good in themselves, and therefore properly to be regarded as ends in themselves, are certain states of mind of individual human beings’. But time did not permit the exploration of this theme.
The Modern Approach to Descartes’ Problem, Notes on Descartes’ Règles and Descartes Review of Sir Edmund Whittaker, The Modern Approach to Descartes’ Problem. The Relation of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences to Philosophy, Herbert Spencer Lecture (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1948); Sydney Montague Jacob, Notes on Descartes’ Règles pour la direction de l’esprit (London: International Book Club, 1948); and Paul Valéry, The Living Thoughts of Descartes (London: Cassell, 1948). First published in Cambridge Journal, 2 (1949), 629–30. None of these is a great work, but each in its own way is interesting and all are lively and vigorous. The project of Sir Edmund Whittaker is to consider how far the intervening centuries have brought nearer the achievement of a philosophy (such as Descartes sought at the beginning of the seventeenth century) reformed ‘by a new method framed in the likeness of mathematics’. In some respects, he regrets, the enterprise is no nearer to fulfilment. Descartes’ hope ‘was to create a universal science or general philosophy which, like mathematics, should be accepted by everyone without question; in this he failed. His successors to the present time have to their credit a long tradition of brilliant work in philosophical criticism, but common consent has not been secured for any one definite constructive system; and the situation today is not dissimilar from that which confronted Descartes’. But ‘since the sixteenth century the initiative in intellectual progress has lain pre-eminently with the men of science; and the intervention of philosophers has been in general unfortunate.’ And it is to the natural scientists and mathematicians that we owe whatever success we have achieved in the direction in which Descartes pointed. For not only have these enlarged the boundaries of our knowledge and transformed the
science of logic, but they have kept alive what Sir Edmund takes to be the central principle of Cartesianism—the notion that ‘the true aim of metaphysics is to complete the direct scrutiny of nature by reflecting on, and laying bare, its presuppositions, concepts and principles; so that philosophy follows mathematical and physical science, and does not precede it’, a principle which ‘entails the consequence that philosophy, like physics, must be a progressive subject, the conceptions of one generation being transcended by those of the next’. From this has sprung up in our own day the beginnings, and more than the beginnings, of a philosophy ‘based upon physicomathematical science’ which is able to provide not only a rational account of ‘reality’ but also to ‘incorporate the notion of value’ and hence to set both ethics and aesthetics on a more profitable road. The result is that the ‘promised land’ which ‘Descartes saw from afar is now open to be entered’. How far all this has survived the criticism to which it has been subjected (how far, indeed, a metaphysics which ‘laid bare the presuppositions’ of natural science can be expected also to accept them as unquestionably valid) Sir Edmund does not inquire. But if this picture of Descartes as the father of positivism is not executed without doing some violence to history, and if his estimate of the achievements of positivism errs on the side of optimism, they have at least been accomplished with the skill and lucidity we should expect from such a writer. Mr Jacob is a mathematician—he describes himself, modestly, as, not a high priest, but a lay-brother of the Order—interested and learned in mathematical logic, but concerned here principally with the method of education implied in Descartes’ Règles. And he has written an exceedingly interesting set of notes on the subject, which deserves a place in the literature of Cartesianism. The revolution in education which was implicit in Descartes is, in his view, not yet fully accomplished. Descartes pleaded for ‘our recognition of the unity of all knowledge, a recognition which present-day educational authority might be disposed to grant, as a pure formality; but which, in practice, seems to be
totally denied. For is not the multitude of subjects taught in the schools and universities by a system of water-tight compartments, without any attempt to weld them into a philosophical whole, a virtual denial of that unity? And if the philosophical unity is lost sight of, so also is the moral unity which should underlie every step in the pursuit of learning’. Descartes wanted ‘learning to be acquired by direct personal thinking’, and we have still far to go on this road, particularly (in Mr Jacob’s opinion) in the teaching of mathematics. But he is aware of the elements in Descartes’ thought which point in the other direction, and can appreciate why it was that Pascal found himself unable to ‘forgive’ Descartes. M. Valéry has written a brief and brilliant introduction to the latest volume of Cassell’s Living Thoughts Library. He describes it as a sketch of Descartes’ ‘intellectual personality’, and in effect it is a masterly account of the mind and method of this great philosopher. M. Valéry disclaims the ability to discuss the technicalities of Descartes’ philosophy, and writes instead ‘in terms of altogether elementary impressions’. But they are the impressions of an exceedingly acute and lively mind, and the result could hardly be bettered for its purpose. Perhaps the two great moments in Descartes’ intellectual life are a trifle over-dramatized, but he gives a truer picture of his subject than that which Pascal conveys in his unfortunate description of Descartes as ‘a geometer who is only a geometer’. The volume which M. Valéry introduces contains, in translation, the whole of the Discours de la Méthode, some brief passages from the Meditations Métaphysiques and half a dozen of Descartes’ letters.
Socialism and Ethics Review of Howard Selsam, Socialism and Ethics (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1947). First published in Cambridge Journal, 2 (1949), 692–4. The writings of true believers normally make sad reading, not merely because they are disfigured by arrogance, but because for many years now they have degenerated into the repetition of a formula: no other religion ever became so intellectually stagnant in so short a time. But what makes this book worth while, in spite of its troubled verbiage, its ignorance of history and its naïve faith, is the absence from it of the usual sanctimonious arrogance: Professor Selsam (an American) is a quiet, reasonable writer, who propounds his doctrine in a civilized manner. His object is ‘to show that socialism represents a fusion of objective social science and the highest ethical ideals of the ages’. The good, he maintains, is what we need and desire; ‘the needs and desires of men alone make a thing good’. This is a view which he attributes not only to Marx but also to Spinoza. He offers no analysis of this definition, and if we follow his argument I think we shall find ourselves encouraged to put ‘desire’ on one side and concentrate on ‘need’. We begin, then, with a naturalistic ethical doctrine, not (unfortunately) convincingly argued, but stated on the authority of Marx and common sense. Every society sets up an ideal which incorporates its interpretation of human need, and the activities of a society, as approximations to this ideal, reveal this interpretation. We are concerned with two different sorts of society, the first of which is called ‘Capitalist Society’. This is a society based upon the ownership of property by individuals, a society in which the means of production are owned privately and consequently one in which ‘a factory is not built to make shoes because people want and need shoes. It is built because, people needing shoes, a profit can be made by producing them.’
The master in this society is, alternatively, the owner of the means of production or ‘the market’—it is not quite clear which. Now, what are the moral values of this society, what is its interpretation of human need? They will, of course, be the moral values of the ‘masters’, the dominant class. But if we consider the activities of this sort of society we find that its interpretation of human need has had the following remarkable results: The death-rate drops steadily and the life span increases. Great plagues are as extinct as the dodo and the dinosaur. Many of the physical ills that have cursed humanity have been conquered, while others, such as blindness, deafness and bodily deformity have been alleviated. The majority of the population in capitalist countries are not only literate but also have a technical competence and at least a speaking acquaintance with some of the culture of the ages. In recent years the moving picture and the radio, in spite of their shortcomings, have brought not only recreation but the materials of culture to the great masses of people and even to the most outlying regions. Parks, playgrounds, beaches, camps and automobile travel have made healthful recreation possible for millions who knew no such thing only a generation ago, etc. etc. This seems to Professor Selsam not at all a bad interpretation of human need; he finds these things good. Capitalist society, following its interpretation of human need, has, indeed, acquired ‘the facilities for producing sufficient material goods for a decent life for all’. But there is a debit side to the account. These goods are not enjoyed by all, and they are uncertain: capitalism, so far from overcoming poverty, unemployment and war, actually causes and supports characteristically virulent forms of these evils. With all this tremendous advance, with almost unlimited productive forces at our disposal, there is a growing gap between productive
capacity and actual production, there is poverty in the midst of potential plenty. Indeed, so impressive are the evils of a capitalist society that it may be said to ‘operate totally irrespective of human values’ [real needs?]. This is not due to the malice of individual capitalists, it is the fault of the system. Marx predicted this crisis, and it has now appeared. Every man asks of the economy under which he lives that it shall satisfy his needs; the capitalist economy fails to do this for the vast majority with the certainty and the fullness that they demand. This situation has inspired a new sort of society—that is, a new interpretation of human need, a new moral ideal and a new structure of society to bring about and to embody the satisfaction of this need. This new sort of society is a Socialist Society, and we are lucky in having an example of it before our eyes in Russia. If a society could be established in which production were for need and not for profit, and if the need were that of ‘the working class’, then all the great but unfulfilled promise of capitalist society could be harvested. The operative ‘need’, the moral ideal, in this society is that of the ‘organized workers’, ‘the vast majority’, ‘the people’. This, to the uninitiated, might appear to be a merely class interpretation of need and neither better nor worse than any other. But Professor Selsam has an answer to the difficulty: Here [he says] we have an apparent anomaly that causes mechanical-minded intellectuals no end of difficulty but that class-conscious workers and all who have learned to think dialectically can easily understand. The attempt to solve current problems by appealing to so-called universal moral truths, to the ‘common good’, to humanity in the abstract is in danger of being an idle gesture and even of beclouding the real issues. On the other hand, appeals to and actions in behalf of the working class, while giving superficially the appearance of being concerned with the good of only a part of humanity, turn out to be in fact the only true
humanism … The working class carries with it in its own class morality, the only true human ethics. The moral ideal, then, is the need of the majority, ‘not because the goals of the working class are good in and of themselves, but rather because they are the sole means to general human progress and the widest human good’. And there is a further reason why the needs and desires of the ‘working class’ should be the operative needs and desires. Where ‘need’ is the need of a small class (as it is assumed to be in a capitalist society), there is no opportunity of determining and satisfying that need scientifically; need and desire fall apart and men desire what they do not need. But when the ‘need’ becomes the need of the masses (and no other need is recognized), this can be determined scientifically, satisfied economically by a standardized product, compulsorily supplied. It can be proved ‘that such and such a dietary deficiency causes rickets’. ‘Science can tell us what our people need and want and what would be good for them’, and ‘it is not too fantastic to suggest that there are cultural needs’ which can be similarly determined and supplied in the same manner. In short, ‘the use of science in determining values implies and requires a community of interest’ such as exists only in the masses of a society. But we are warned that it would be a great mistake to suppose that socialism is an attempt ‘to bring civilization down to the level of the barracks’. Now, how far all this is orthodox doctrine is difficult to determine. It rests upon the absolute acceptance of some of the orthodox dogmas, such, for example, as the inevitable decline in the standard of living in a ‘capitalist’ society. But without inquiring into the inconsistencies of the argument, two observations may be made. First, the good life here is nothing other than the enjoyment by more and more people of more and more of everything: ‘the ever-increasing development of all the productive forces of human society and the resultant improved living standards of all people are at one and the same time the index of social evolution and the rational goal of mankind.’ In short, this is the plausible
ethics of productivity, distinguished from ‘capitalism’ only by being alleged to be more successful. So far as I am concerned it involves a revolting nothingness, which has only to be successful to reduce human life to absolute insignificance. Secondly, the ‘socialist’ society is presented here as a society in which only those desires are approved which all can satisfy at the same time: none shall have what all cannot enjoy. The desires of the masses (in so far as desire is allowed to appear at all) are to be the standard for everyone, and the result is a tyranny of the majority. Or, when ‘need’ is substituted for ‘desire’, the result is the tyranny of those who determine the need, the ‘scientists’. Of the two, any sane man would no doubt choose the former; but it is a desperate alternative.
The Tree of Commonwealth Review of Edmund Dudley, The Tree of Commonwealth, ed. and intro. Dorothy Margaret Brodie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948). First published in Cambridge Journal, 2 (1949), 763–4. Every schoolboy used to know Edmund Dudley as one of the agents of the rapacious exactions of Henry VII: the other, appropriately enough, was Epsom. Dudley, moreover, was known pejoratively as a ‘lawyer’. And what was known seemed to account for the fact that, as Hume remarks, ‘the death of Henry VII was attended with as open and visible a joy among the people as decency would permit’. It accounted also for the fact that, on the death of Henry, Dudley was arrested, accused of extortion and of constructive treason, tried, convicted, imprisoned in the Tower and executed in 1510. What more belonged to the character and career of Dudley lay hidden: the collector of revenue, the persecutor of merchants who evaded taxation, the man who enforced anachronistic feudal dues alone survived. Dudley, however, played more parts than these. He was one of the most distinguished lawyers of his day, he was Under-Sheriff of London and Speaker of the House of Commons before he became a member of the King’s Council. Moreover, he wrote a book; he wrote it in prison, and it is called The Tree of Commonwealth. This has now been edited, with an introduction and a full critical apparatus, by Dr Brodie. It is an admirable piece of work, performed with all the necessary care and scholarship. Every student of English history will welcome its appearance. There are two points of view from which The Tree of Commonwealth may be seen. First, as Dr Brodie remarks, it expresses, in the allegorical style of the time, the political ideas current among ordinary men in the late fifteenth century. It is neither original, nor perhaps very profound; certainly Dudley
makes no claim to be a philosopher. But he was a politician and an observer of politics, and in the cracks of the elaborate allegory are to be found the observations of a man who understood not only the perennial principles of politics but also the shape of the politics of his day. He writes in an attractively reflective style: there is a quiet irony in his observation and a concentration of mind which, if Dr Johnson is to be believed, comes to a condemned man. When the historian has done with it, there is something here for the politician of today. But secondly, the book belongs to the literature of the education of princes; it is addressed in the first place to the King. And in this respect it is instructive to compare it with the work of Dudley’s great contemporary, Machiavelli. In both writers the turmoil and disruption of the time is clearly reflected, the clash of interests, the arrogance of nobles, the greed of merchants, and the discontent of a people easily roused to rebellion by worthless and self-interested leaders. But, whereas Machiavelli wrote for a prince ‘of new creation’, a prince without a tradition, ruling a society composed of men whom ambition had pulled up by the roots, Dudley wrote for a prince who might be expected to recognize a tradition if his attention were called to it and the ruler of a less disintegrated society. The times might need a vigorous ruler, but not a tyrant. The strength of a commonwealth, Dudley saw, lay neither in sporadic success in subduing enemies nor in the ability of an upstart ruler to keep his people in subjection, but in the rule of law, in the maintenance of justice, in keeping faith, in honesty, humility and compassion. He shows no pious abhorrence of worldly prosperity or of the energy and enterprise which go to make it; but he sees clearly the defects of the virtues of each of the classes in the commonwealth, and in this charming medieval allegory recalls each man to his true path.
Insight and Outlook Review of Arthur Koestler, Insight and Outlook: an Enquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art and Social Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1949). First published in Spectator, 183 (1949), 20, 22. Mr Koestler has given us something to think about. It is true that there is a long-windedness about the book which is unexpected from so practised a writer; it is over-elaborate, and its argument is encumbered, not only with jargon, but also with an over-weighty apparatus of technical psychology; but I do not think anyone interested in the subject will read it without excitement as well as profit. In effect, it is a book about the psychology of what is commonly called ‘creative’ human activity, in which Mr Koestler includes art, science, and moral conduct. Its main hypothesis is that all ‘creative’ activity has at least a psychological common denominator (if not a common pattern), and that the isolation and definition of this denominator will add to our understanding of the activity. This is a reasonable hypothesis; certainly one worth exploring. And, further, there is an agreeable freedom about the method of investigation. Mr Koestler has a doctrine to propound; but instead of a direct assault upon his problem he takes us in by the ‘back-door’ through which he himself entered upon the enquiry. This is, perhaps, a ‘literary’ rather than a ‘scientific’ method, but it gives the reader the instructive experience of seeing the doctrine coming into being, gradually formulating itself, and making itself convincing without the misleading appearance of being ‘proved.’ The back-door by which we enter is a theory of laughter and the comic. It was in working this out that Mr Koestler came upon a principle which he later conceived to be applicable to ‘creative’ activity in general. Thought and behaviour (so the theory runs) normally follow repetitive patterns, and are organised into homogeneous ‘operative fields,’ each with a logic of its own. The
‘operative field’ of a card-player, for example, is determined by the rules and conventions of the game he is playing. And there are as many ‘operative fields’ as there are definable attitudes to the world. A joke or a comic situation springs from the interpenetration of two ‘operative fields.’ The essence of the comic is simultaneous association of two habitually incompatible contexts. This Mr Koestler calls the principle of ‘bisociation,’ and in the first part of the book he analyses it with great care and subtlety, and investigates its application to numerous forms of the comic. But this is merely a preliminary, because it appears that the principle of ‘bisociation’ not only makes the comic intelligible, but affords the basis for a complete theory of ‘creative’ activity. ‘Bisociation’ is the spring of the discoveries of the scientist and the ‘creations’ of the artist and the poet. Merely ‘associative’ thought, moving along beaten tracks and keeping to the rules of the game, is the bread and butter of mental activity; but ‘the brilliance of discovery, the sparkle of humour and the radiance of art’ spring from ‘bisociative’ thought which disrupts the normal pattern and produces something new. The third step in the argument, which the attentive reader will have been waiting for, is designed to provide a principle for distinguishing between various ‘bisociative’ activities and to answer the question: How is it that the intersection of two ‘operative fields’ sometimes produces a joke and at other times a scientific discovery or a poetic image? Nietzsche, of course, was prepared to see all ‘creative’ activity as ‘a joke,’ and understood at a profound level this no doubt is true; but most readers will be on the look-out for some help from Mr Koestler in distinguishing tragic from comic art and both from scientific discovery and moral achievement. The help comes in the form of a psychological analysis of human behaviour. There are (we are told) two opposed tendencies in human emotional behaviour, the one self-assertive (aggressivedefensive) and the other self-transcending (integrative). The exposition of this hypothesis takes Mr Koestler far afield into biology, sociology, ethics, and the history of civilisation. What he says is always interesting and often convincing; but there is too
much of it to attempt a summary. Suffice it that, in general, the outcome of ‘bisociative’ activity is determined by the emotional tendency with which it is associated. In the extremes, ‘bisociation’ linked with a self-assertive emotional tendency is characteristic of the comic, and the genuinely aesthetic experience is linked with an impulse to self-transcendence, an impulse which is also taken to be biologically, socially, and morally progressive. But between these extremes lies the region of science—the ‘neutral art’ of invention and discovery, as Mr Koestler calls it—which has ‘neither a pronounced aggressive nor, a markedly sympathetic emotional charge.’ Mr Koestler pursues this theme in great detail. In a chapter called ‘The Eureka Process’ he examines, in the light of the ‘bisociative’ hypothesis, the activity of the scientist. Here, in the ‘exploratory drive,’ logic takes a back seat; ‘each original scientific achievement is a bisociative act of the same mental pattern as the creation of wit and the creation of art.’ The last part of the book is concerned with art proper—what Mr Koestler calls ‘the emotive arts’—and is an elaborate application of the principle of ‘bisociation’ to poetry and drama. It will be clear that the reader must expect from this book, along with the excitement of following a well-constructed argument, a certain portentousness. It is to be followed by a second volume in which we are promised a deeper exploration of some of the psychological problems touched on here. Mr Koestler believes himself to have found a ‘unifying formula’ for all ‘creative’ activity, and, like most people who have discovered a formula, he is apt to ride it hard. Indeed, the main defect of the book is that it never comes out on the other side of the formula. The intelligent reader will find—as he finds in any well-thought-out formula (Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and imagination, for example)—something to inspire reflection; but the inspiration will be proportional to his ability not to succumb to the formula. But if its power to tempt us to accept the formula is the chief weakness of the book, it is not the only one. Mr Koestler is not
enough of a philosopher to write on aesthetics or ethics with any great confidence. His main business is with psychology, but he cannot avoid excursions into philosophy, and they are not always fortunate. He accepts without discussion the naïve view that all art is communication, and I confess that the ‘natural system of ethics’ he propounds leaves me puzzled, and I look forward to the more detailed exposition of it promised in Volume II.
Deviation into Sense Review of Oswald Stewart Wauchope, Deviation into Sense: the Nature of Explanation. London: Faber and Faber, 1948). First published in Times Literary Supplement (15 January 1949), 45. The genuine amateur in philosophy, the unprofessional philosopher who yet is neither a crank, nor impatient of discipline, nor a man who comes to philosophy carrying all the apparatus of a foreign profession (such as politics or natural science), is a rarity. But when he appears he is usually worth listening to. Mr Wauchope is a philosopher of this kind. He is by no means ignorant of what other philosophers have thought, nor is he as independent of the history of philosophy as he sometimes suggests; and he is certainly not an incurably informal philosopher, a stranger to the rigour of the game. But it is not on account of its learning or its logical acuteness that his book will be read with excitement and delight by those interested in philosophy, but because it reflects unmistakably an anima naturaliter philosophica. It is at once simple and profound, clearly the fruit of many years of quiet reading and reflection, written not tentatively but with the modest dogmatism which belongs to all bold and lucid thinking, yet written witha freshness and grace uncommon in the too often tortuous literature of philosophy. ‘The business of philosophy,’ he writes, ‘is, as it always has been, to find a standpoint from which all the variety of reality could be viewed as parts of a comprehended whole. It is to say something such that, if it were true, everything would be as it is.’ Unfortunately, he continues, the business has been a failure because philosophers have fallen into the error of supposing that intellectual operations (such as understanding the world) would give their best results if the ‘subjective factor,’ the person who thinks, could be eliminated from the conclusion. The project of finding a world at once intelligible and ‘absolutely objective’ has
been the evil genius of philosophic enterprise. This condemnation, fully merited by only the cruder forms of positivism, is perhaps a trifle too sweeping. And the notion that if this error were abjured, and philosophers made an entirely new start, we human beings would be in a position to ‘settle for ourselves once and for all what we are and what we are about’ is perhaps a trifle too Roman in its philosophical optimism. But when Mr Wauchope begins the exposition of his own doctrine we soon leave behind the amateurish eccentricity of these early exaggerations. ‘The stuff of reality is mind/matter, Self/not-self, subjective/ objective’—is, in short, experience. Matter per se is unintelligible because it is non-entity; there are only ‘events,’ mind and matter in union. And the aim of philosophic explanation is to hold fast to this union and to make it intelligible. The Self in experience is ‘alive.’ The meaning of ‘being alive’ has, however, been restricted to its ‘logical’ meaning, ‘not being dead’; the activity of living has been confined to the rational, purposeful, defensive activity of avoiding or delaying death, and the communal tactics of deathavoiding activity have (under the name of morality) engaged the main attention and loyalty of mankind. This is unfortunate because the ‘logical’ meaning of ‘being alive’ is not the most significant meaning. ‘Living’ is primary; ‘dead’ does not mean merely ‘non-living’, it means ‘having ceased to live’. This suggests that the activity of the living Self is not merely death-avoiding, but is twofold: to ‘live’ and to avoid death. And if we turn to our personal experience we shall find this confirmed; much of our activity cannot be explained in terms of avoiding death. And what is more, purposeful, defensive activity is, properly speaking, subordinate to purposeless ‘living’ activity; we avoid death, not for its own sake, but in order to ‘live.’ In other words, ‘living activity’ is the soul’s primary activity, and rational, defensive activity— sense—is a deviation from it. Now, if we are prepared to follow Mr Wauchope to the top of this hill—and his talk on the way up is most persuasive—we shall find spread out in front of us a world, not unlike that which
Blake offers us, in which the values of the ‘subjective Self ’ (e.g., spontaneous affection) are primary and the death-avoiding values of rational and moral behaviour are secondary and derivative. But Mr Wauchope is not a Manichee; matter in union with mind is not evil, and the deviation into death-avoiding activity is legitimate so long as it is recognised as deviation. The problem of human life is not how to survive, or how to emancipate the Self from deathavoiding activity, but how to preserve a proper balance between the two activities of the Self. And the handicap from which we suffer in solving this problem is the erroneous assumption that death-avoiding activity is primary and that ‘living’ is secondary. In the hands of Mr Wauchope all this blossoms into a political theory for which ‘the fretfulness of modern civilization, and its vulgarity, its constant plundering of the realm of spontaneity and individuality for the “general good,” its bullying sociality, are the consequence of its unbalance, its morbid preoccupation with good reasons and death.’ He rarely refers to other writers, but as one reads one becomes conscious of certain affinities, and among philosophers it may be supposed that Hobbes has had some influence upon his thought. Indeed, this is a philosophy such as Hobbes himself might have conceived if the fear of death had not stood in the way of his developing a more positive doctrine of Felicity. The book ends with an allegory, subtle, charming, and profound, and able to stand beside the great myths of philosophic literature. This brief description of Mr Wauchope’s argument does much less than justice to its variety and power, and the excitement with which the reader follows it. But when it is finished it will not be surprising if some doubts make their appearance. The general metaphysical position is a form of what used to be called objective idealism—a very respectable doctrine. But it is difficult to be certain that the ethical doctrine presented to us here avoids some of even the cruder errors of naturalism. The conception of ‘life’ and ‘living behaviour’ remains indistinct. There is room also for doubt whether the conception of the ‘subjective Self,’ the Self
insulated from the not-self, upon which so much of this argument is based, is not reached too simply and too rapidly; an absolutely ‘subjective’ subject is as indefensible as an absolutely ‘objective’ object. Indeed, the ‘subjectivity’ of the Self, upon which so much of his argument depends, is assumed rather than demonstrated or even argued. But whatever error or incoherence in detail the reader may find to deplore, this is not the sort of book to which such error is fatal; it has enough genius, and more than enough vitality, to survive errors far more gross.
The Life of Reason Review of William George de Burgh, The Life of Reason (London: Macdonald and Evans, 1949). First published in Times Literary Supplement (19 March 1949), 190. This book is not merely the last work of the late Professor W.G. de Burgh, it is (and was intended by its author to be) the crown of his philosophical labours. It was left unfinished at his death, and its appearance now is due to the initiative of his wife and to the editorial exertions of several of his friends. The foreword is by Dr C.C.J. Webb, the arrangement of the chapters is the work of Professor G.H. Langley, and both the late Professor A.E. Taylor and Professor T.M. Knox have helped to prepare it for the press. In form it is a speculum mentis. Its project is ‘to survey the forms of rational activity, both in thought and conduct, not in order to reach an abstract definition, but in order to display the nature of reason as a unity of diverse functions.’ It is recognized that reason cannot be taken as co-extensive with mind, but it is contended that ‘wherever in our experience there is conscious unification of diverse elements, be the unity discovered in the real, or constructed by human agency; wherever we discover or produce form in a given material, be it in sense-perception, in a work of art, in moral or economic action, in scientific, philosophical or religious thinking—there intellect or reason is at work.’ The book, then, is written to expound a philosophy of reason, but it is written also to combat an error—the error, ‘prevalent throughout the thought of the last three centuries in Europe and America,’ which in speculation confines reasoning to logical ratiocination, and in practice to the determination of fit means to achieve nonrational ends. The forms of speculative reason are first examined and arranged in an hierarchical order. Science, ‘the speculative activity of reason as concentrated on the factor of generality,’ is concerned
with quantitative and measurable relations. History is knowledge of the individual. These are complementary activities of mind, but it is an ‘optimistic fancy’ which finds a complete knowledge of reality in their conjunction. Art is a form of cognitive activity which gives a more complete knowledge of the individual than history; and in philosophy there is a knowledge of the universal which carries us beyond the universals of science. But the summit of the forms of speculative reason is religion, the claim of which to give knowledge is maintained against the denials of the Logical Positivists and others. And further, the Christian faith is a form of religion which can be shown to conform to the criteria of rationality. The practical, no less than the speculative forms of reason, compose an hierarchy. At the bottom is that kind of purpose, free, rational activity which Signor Croce called ‘economic.’ And above it comes activity regulated by law, and the moral life. But this hierarchy also culminates in religion—religion as praxis—and in Christianity as ‘exhibiting on the highest plane the essential characteristics of the rational life.’ To demonstrate this, ‘to display religious experience as the crowning type of rational activity, as the synthesis of the highest activity of speculative reason and the highest activity of practical reason in a single form of rational life’ is, indeed, the ultimate aim of the argument of this book; and not merely religion in general, but Christianity in particular. For ‘if reason is taken in its full breadth of meaning as the faculty of intellectual synthesis, it cannot be restricted to the consideration of what is known as Natural Theology, but the whole corpus of religious knowledge, both natural and revealed, must be included within its province.’ Philosophy here is seen both as Fides quaerens intellectum and Intellectus quaerens fidem. De Burgh drew his inspiration from many sources, and not least from his extensive reading in medieval philosophy. But what is perhaps most impressive about this book is its combination of religious and intellectual sincerity. It presents us with a doctrine, clearly imagined and articulated with the intellectual power of a
man practised in argument. Some readers may find the doctrine at times a trifle over-formalized and the argument lacking in meditative freedom. But at the end of a long life of reflection a man may surely be allowed to display a mind made up.
Matter, Mind, and Meaning Review of Whately Carington, Matter, Mind, and Meaning (London: Methuen, 1949). First published in Times Literary Supplement (20 May 1949), 332. The late Mr Whately Carington was well known as an experienced investigator of those ‘supernormal’ phenomena which are the concern of psychical research. In this book, however, which he left unfinished, his business is not with experiments and observations, but with the conceptual framework which would make these observations (when taken at their face value) intelligible. In other words, his question is: ‘What must the world be like if these things happen?’ And his attempt to answer the question resolves itself into an investigation of the conceptions of mind and matter. The book has been edited by Professor H.H. Price, who contributes an informative preface and a number of judicious footnotes. The project itself is a little puzzling: this distinction between the ‘mass of queer facts’ and their ‘intelligibility’ is hardly one to be insisted upon, and perhaps a better way of stating the question would be in the form of a self-examination: ‘What presuppositions am I making about mind and matter when I accept these “facts” at their face value?’ But, as Professor Price says, even if the result is somewhat rough-and-ready, the attempt to construct a philosophy of psychical research is a laudable enterprise. The professed object of the book—‘to clean up once and for all—in principle and in outline at least—the muddle about the relation of Mind and Matter which has fretted philosophers ever since philosophising began’—is not perhaps accomplished, but something valuable is achieved by the way. Mr Carington attributes ‘the muddle’ to the ‘metaphysicians’; he rapidly reaches the conclusion that ‘all metaphysics is nonsense,’ and says so vigorously, if sometimes without any great insight. He is a positivist, and for him any statement which it is impossible
to verify or refute by observation of some kind is meaningless; metaphysical statements are all of this character. ‘Pure logic is all right,’ but the trouble with metaphysics is that, even after all these centuries, there is no reliable text-book such as one may find on electricity or hydrodynamics. The nature of mind and matter must, then, be investigated without the help of the ‘philosophers’. Starting from the principle (in Bertrand Russell’s words), ‘in dealing with any subject-matter, find out what entities are undeniably involved, and state everything in terms of these entities,’ the doctrine that Mr Carington comes to favour is a form of Neutral Monism: the common constituents of mind and matter are sense-data or cognita. In themselves these cognita are neither mental nor material. ‘A material object is a sequence of cognita or cognitum groups related in a particular way,’ and ‘if you want a more exact specification you must apply to the physicist’; a mind is the same sequence of cognita related according to the laws of psychology. The usefulness of such a view as this to those involved in psychical research is clear. It removes in principle the difficulty of understanding how mental and material cognitum systems may influence one another, how individual minds may interact, and perhaps how minds can survive death. Mr Carington’s masters are Bertrand Russell and to a lesser extent Professor Ayer, and he acknowledges a debt to Messrs Ogden and Richards. But he has something to say on his own account, and the light-heartedness of his style may be taken to spring from modesty rather than from arrogance.
Barbara Celarent Review of Thomas Gilby, Barbara Celarent. A Description of Scholastic Dialectic (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949). First published in Times Literary Supplement (3 June 1949), 369. Anyone, already persuaded that thinking is an admirable and profitable activity, who listens to a dialectical disputation in the scholastic manner will have the impression at once of deep seriousness and of play. If the dry pertinacity of the method reflects that profound scholastic faith in the power of reasoning to correct the inadvertencies of thought, its subtlety betrays the amateur’s unspoilt delight in a good argument. The reader is likely to gain the same impression from this book; it takes reasoning seriously but does not exaggerate its place in human intercourse. It has a double purpose, and in both it succeeds admirably. First, it is a study of the dialectic of St Thomas, of the structure of the Summa Theologica, in which the philosophy of St Thomas is presented as an intellectual adventure and not (as it too often appears in the manuals) as a kind of staff-college doctrine. And Father Gilby’s success here springs from his sure and easy grasp of his subject. Secondly, it is an account of the principles of scholastic logic and dialectic which, deriving from Aristotle, were so deeply reflected upon by medieval thinkers and transmitted by them to the modern world. The history of scholasticism is littered with handbooks on logic, many of which are dry and trivial; what we are given here is a treatment of the subject which is so humane and businesslike that the result is a book on logic that can be read with genuine pleasure as well as with profit. The logic it deals with is, of course, the traditional logic; but the view taken is that while the more modern technique of mathematical or symbolic logic has opened up new fields, a place still remains for the older study—a view which few will wish to combat.
Logic is the good manners of argument. Its concern is with the muster and arrangement of our thoughts. Its business is not with the truth of our conclusions but with their conclusiveness. To get rid of formal defects in our thinking, to avoid a bungled argument, are modest purposes, but not to be despised. The security of communication depends upon logic—not on the science of logic (men reasoned cogently before Aristotle) but on the experience from which that science derives. Incorrect statements, recklessness in enumerating contradictories, illicit inference from negatives to affirmatives, these are forms of inconsiderateness in argument which make rational talk impossible. But poise is not the whole of behaviour, and the logic which runs on rails must pass into the freer, warmer, more conversational dialectic if we are to think to any purpose. Logic is an indispensable rudder, but it operates most effectively when it is under the surface, and it cannot take hold unless we have steerage-way. In dialectic we reach out to consider possibilities, we call upon myth and analogy, we recognize that even equivocation can be benign and that all circles are not vicious. The logical censor is kept in his place, that of a servant, and the movement of the conversation is not held up unnecessarily: the game is not played for the benefit of the referee, and the friendly opposition in disputation (for dialectic is between two and is a cooperative effort to trace disagreement to its source) is as ready to understand a clumsily expressed argument as to counter with the distinctions necessary to put it right. Of course, there are dialectical as well as merely logical fallacies, sophisms, sham arguments, false or strained analogies, and these are more subtle offences against good taste in disputation, to be exorcized by a sympathy for rational argument rather than by the application of a clear rule. Philosophy, said Ferrier, may be true but must be reasoned: this is a study of the necessary side of scholastic philosophy. It was written in the Mediterranean while the author was on active service with the Navy and had only a miniature Summa to consult. Perhaps the chapters on Induction and the Method of the
Sciences are weaker than the rest; but the whole book is written with such good humour and grace of style that the reader has the experience of being in communication with a full, well-ordered and generous mind.
The Freedom of Necessity Review of John Desmond Bernal, The Freedom of Necessity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949). First published in Times Literary Supplement (17 June 1949), 400. As Professor Bernal remarks, the unity of this volume (in which he has collected a number of his essays published in a variety of periodicals during the last twenty years) lies in a point of view consistently expounded and reiterated. The theme is science and society; the doctrine is science as the saviour of society. He is an energetic writer, with a facile optimism which is, no doubt, encouraging to those who already believe. But the argument is too often slipshod, and the exaggerations too blatant to persuade others, or even to make much impression upon them. There is a certain carelessness in formulating antitheses; and before he has gone far the reader becomes suspicious of the word ‘therefore.’ What is to be made of such a sentence as: ‘Isolated man is a fiction, man carries society in himself, therefore there can be no better criterion for understanding, value, and action than the collective judgment of the people’? And a writer who asserts that ‘no one who has ever considered the matter would now doubt that, given the political conditions, it would be perfectly feasible to set up and get working within a few months a comprehensive, productive and distributing mechanism for the whole world’ can scarcely hope to win a reputation for care and caution by turning the ‘months’ into ‘years’ on a subsequent page. However, from the troubled verbiage of these pages a point of view does emerge. Professor Bernal has set himself the hard task of interpreting ‘the forces which are moulding our time.’ To write contemporary history when it is confined to diplomacy is a notoriously difficult undertaking, but when it is enlarged to a survey of the more profound movements which are afoot it is understandable that the interpreter should retreat upon a formula;
and the formula here is that of Marx. The reader would, however, have more confidence in the interpretation if the knowledge displayed of modern European history generally were less superficial. But he is given to understand, in the end, that when the relics of effete capitalism have finally been destroyed, a society will come into being fired by the ideal of establishing ‘the best possible biological and social environment for human beings.’ The biological environment which is ‘the common human birthright’ is ‘what for years it has meant for domestic animals’; the social environment is more complicated, but the prime necessity is the consciousness of a common purpose, and the most revealing example of the achievement of this is to be found in a society at war. The ‘planned economy’ of war presents men with an ideal for peace: ‘a society is always at its best when the people who compose it are working for a common recognized end … Except in Socialist countries, only war can bring out this consciousness of social unity in action.’ And further, the experience gained in this war has immensely increased our knowledge of how to organize a society for the achievement of a ‘clear and single purpose.’ Science for the first time (outside the U.S.S.R.) was given a chance to show what it can do—not as big a chance as it should have been given, because the scientist was kept in a subordinate, advisory position and never allowed to command—but enough to show what might be done. This, indeed, is the message of Professor Bernal’s book—the inspiration of war for peace in backward societies like our own. But the reader is left in some uncertainty about the result. Is the new society to be a technocracy in which ‘the ministries, as organs of State, are the servants of the people: their work begins in finding out what people need and, having found this out, they must set about discovering the best means of providing it. Scientific research is the new and sure way of doing this’? Is both ‘the direction of policy’ and ‘the actual carrying out of policy itself ’ to be in the hands of the scientists? At some moments it would seem so. ‘The war has taught us that we can succeed if we use science
to find out what we really want and not only to get what we think we want.’ And the corollary is that scientists must be organized in order to make their views prevail. Or is ‘every cook’ to rule the State? But whatever the solution of this problem, it seems clear that every man is to have a ‘place’ in society determined by his ‘ability,’ and that it will be of advantage to society to determine that ability and to assign the place as early as possible in a man’s life. In the ‘scientific’ fantasies of a generation ago the dominating figure was a megalomaniac professor whose invention had put the world in his power; his intention to destroy the world was frustrated only by the ingenuity of a schoolboy or of the schoolboy’s pet dog. And this still prevails in the strip cartoon, perhaps the most revealing evidence of the impact of ‘science’ upon the world. This relic of capitalist individualism has disappeared from Professor Bernal’s world; ‘science,’ or a team of scientists have taken the place of the crazy professor. Megalomania still raises its head; the invitation to power is still irresistible. But the purpose now is beneficent—to achieve ‘an ever-increasing standard of material well-being and social culture.’ The motive of ‘private profit’ has gone, but in its place appears a society in which power and profit, the project of wringing from the earth in the shortest time the maximum that can be extracted, are the sole motives to have social approval.
The Life of Reason Review of David Gwilym James, The English Augustans, vol. 1. The Life of Reason. Hobbes, Locke, Bolingbroke (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949). First published in Times Literary Supplement (5 August 1949), 509. This is the first of a projected four-volume study of the English ‘Augustans,’ the name Professor James appropriates to the leaders of thought and letters in the period from about 1650 to 1780. It deals with the writings (in so far as they concern the nature of human knowledge, imagination and religious feeling) of three speculative writers who did much to set on foot and fix the intellectual idiom in which the men of this period were reared. It is not the story of the steady development of a rationalist ideology, but a study of the intellectual ‘state of affairs with which the literary men of the age had to come to terms and in which they must do the best they could.’ As Professor James sees it, this intellectual state of affairs was something of a handicap to the Augustan poets and dramatists; but they are not to be blamed for it—rather, admired for what they succeeded in achieving within the idiom. The three studies which compose this book are executed in a manner both subtle and profound, and Professor James has made a notable contribution to our understanding of this period of the history of English thought. He writes in a discursive, meditative style, and the reader has the agreeable experience of watching him turn over in his mind, in a leisurely, reflective, unemphatic manner, the ideas of these writers. There is much close argument and a certain amount of repetitiveness, but there is no attempt to plug a doctrine or exaggerate a tendency. He has a genuinely philosophical mind, alive not merely to the answers which his authors provide, but to the problems they are tackling and the difficulties they encounter; he has both the temperament and the learning required of a historian of ideas. The literary man
when he turns to examine a piece of philosophical writing is apt to be awake to much that the mere philosopher passes over as irrelevant—to style, mood, intention, and emotional spring. He considers not only the cogency of the argument, but also its impulse. Self-contradiction is not merely a lapse to be observed, but an effect which inspires a search for its cause. The concern of the literary man is as much with the quality of mind as with the actual argument. And when, to support this point of view, he has the necessary philosophical equipment to understand the argument, he will be able to make a valuable contribution to the interpretation of a philosophical writer. Indeed, the contemporary movement to draw philosophical writing back into its place in the history of literature has already contributed to a more profound understanding of our philosophical traditions. There is no more promising subject for this kind of treatment than Hobbes, and Professor James’s study, under the title of ‘The Proud Mind’, goes deeply into the subtleties of this most passionate and intuitive of English philosophers. He finds in Hobbes the unequivocal expression of that exaltation of ratiocination which was to be characteristic of the Augustans; and in Hobbes’s opposition of sense, judgment and fancy he finds the ‘centre of Augustan orthodoxy’: chapter eight of Leviathan is the locus classicus of Augustan aesthetic. It is a crude doctrine that is to be found there, so crude that Professor James considers that Hobbes ‘does not so much as begin to give a serious account of aesthetic experience’; he is without any proper appreciation, much less theory, of imagination. But, in default of anything else, this is what prevailed. Here, as at some other points in the argument, the reader may feel the absence of proper perspective; it is not, of course, suggested that Hobbes was alone in his generation in holding the theory of poetry that he did, but little is said to show that in essentials this theory and its corollaries were in fact part of the common stock of ideas of the time. And one of the few exaggerations Professor James allows himself is his assertion that ‘Hobbes … has no continuity with the past.’
Professor James is both fascinated and repelled by Hobbes; Locke, whom he studies under the title of ‘The Humble Heart,’ he admires and speaks of as ‘the greatest of English philosophers.’ What he admires is, chiefly, the piety, the fairness, the modesty, the ‘mediocrity’ of Locke’s mind, which saved him from the rationalism of Hobbes and the extreme empiricism of Hume. In Locke Professor James finds, what he cannot find in Hobbes, the possibility of a sound and serious doctrine of imagination; but unfortunately it remained an unrealized possibility. And Locke’s bequest to the Augustans, his chapter ‘Of Enthusiasm’ which was added to the fourth edition of the Essay, inadvertently inspired the rationalist deism (so foreign to Locke himself) of the Augustans of the early eighteenth century. There is no difficulty in detecting in Bolingbroke the least philosophical of the writers under consideration. He is called here ‘The Man of the World’ and he earns his place not because he was a profound or even a serious thinker, but mainly an account of his direct influence upon Pope. Bolingbroke’s acknowledged master was Locke, but he was an insensitive pupil, turning into a crass formula all the tentative modesty of Locke’s philosophy. ‘Locke’s empiricism springs from a profound sense of human ignorance … Bolingbroke’s came from assurance and certainty.’ And in his hands the errors of Augustan thought became a fixed and finished doctrine. The greater part of this book is concerned with the exposition of the ideas of these writers, but not the whole of it. Professor James is critical as well as expository, and he knows that it is impossible to be profitably critical without having a point of view. Hence the pages, unfortunately scattered up and down the book, in which he suggests an aesthetic theory of his own. Enough is said for the reader to wish for more, and to wish for it to be collected into a sustained argument; until this is done criticism is difficult. There is, however, a certain uneasiness in what appears to be an unfortunate hypostatization of ‘the imagination’ as if it were an independent ‘power’ or even ‘faculty,’ and Professor James’s
doctrine of knowledge and being seems to start on the wrong foot, with a separation which he seeks to reduce but cannot succeed in abolishing; and there is sometimes an unphilosophical appeal to ‘facts’ as if they constituted an independent and final authority. But here, without doubt, is the suggestion of an aesthetic theory, very much in the Kantian tradition, which it is to be hoped that Professor James will later expand.
Marxism and Contemporary Science Review of Jack Lindsay, Marxism and Contemporary Science; or, the Fullness of Life (London: Dennis Dobson, 1949). First published in Times Literary Supplement (16 September 1949), 605. A man whose thought has been profoundly influenced by Marx must be allowed to call himself a Marxist, but in one who is prepared to reconsider Marxism root and branch (almost) it is puzzling to find still the urge to excuse Marx and Engels because their doctrine is not acceptable in every detail. Of all the exaggerations of Marxists, this expectation that here was something proof against time and error is the strangest: much of the history of Marxism has been a repetition of the more regrettable passages in the history of Aristoteleanism. But in spite of this oblique relic of dogmatism, this is the book of a candid man; and it would have been a better book if Mr Lindsay could have freed himself more effectively from the jargon of Marxism. He is prepared to suggest that ‘Dialecticial Materialism’ is an unfortunate phrase, meaning either more or less than is intended; but for the rest, what he has to say is sadly obscured by his determination to translate it into this antiquated language. There was once real inspiration in the contrast between a dialectical and a mechanical view of things, but the words have become so overladen with the dust of polemic that anyone now wishing to revive the inspiration had better find another manner of expressing himself. Briefly, the thesis of the book is that by a ‘vulgar distortion’ a doctrine of human life in terms of economic determinism, of society in terms of ‘structure’ and ‘superstructure’ and of social transformation by class struggle, has been fathered on to Marx by followers who never grasped the fact that ‘his great contribution is the concept of dialectical unity’—the idea that man, society, and the natural world compose a single whole and that it is only within
this whole that change, differentiation, unbalance, contradiction and conflict take place. How successful Mr Lindsay has been in explaining, or explaining away, some of Marx’s statements which seem to run counter to this view, only the pundits can decide. He does not deny that this ‘distortion’ is widespread in Marxist literature and that there is some small excuse for it, but he claims that at least Lenin, Stalin, and Dimitrov are free of it. He claims, further, that it is ‘Marx’s unitary outlook which for the first time in history grasps at the fullness of human life, logical, economic and cultural, in a single focus’—which is perhaps going a trifle too far. Indeed, the main effect of Mr Lindsay’s argument is to remove from Marx’s doctrine that element of eccentricity which was thought to distinguish it and which made it influential. However, this is only one part of the project. The main body of the book is devoted to showing the fruitfulness of this concept of dialectical unity when it is applied to biology, psychology, anthropology, and the study of history. But, though the reader is not spared the technicalities of these sciences and is provided with many impressive lists of names and many quotations, he will not escape the suspicion that what he is being offered is not a ‘critical examination of Marxist dialectics in the light of contemporary science,’ but merely an account of some recent scientific enterprises in respect of their adherence to or departure from the ‘unitary principle.’ This is the touchstone: and, for example, Lysenko’s ‘genetics’ seem to be approved because they adhere to this principle, and all the three schools of psychologists whose doctrines are considered are disapproved because their doctrines depart from it. And if we ask what is the authority of this principle, we are told only that it is the great discovery of Marx and that the future of Marxism lies in its elaboration and application. What is attractive about this book is Mr Lindsay’s determination to be critical as well as loyal to Marxism and to seek the value in the work of others of a different persuasion. He is not a writer who helps his readers along with a clearly stated argument, but as a contribution to the now extensive library of works on ‘What Marx really meant’ the book has the merits of subtlety and fair-mindedness.
The Origins of Modern Science Review of Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (London: Bell and Sons, 1949). First published in Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1949), 761–3. What is the activity to which we have come to give the name ‘science’? That it is an important human activity, and that, while preserving a general direction for more than 2,000 years, it is an activity which in recent centuries has taken on a more precise character nobody doubts; but our question still admits of many different answers. The most general (but not the least ambiguous) description of the activity is, perhaps, ‘getting to know more about ourselves and the world we inhabit’; we always know something, we begin with knowledge of a sort and not with mere ignorance, and the project of the scientist is to get to know more. ‘The Beautiful Bosom of Nature will be Expos’d to our view,’ says Spratt in his elaborate way; ‘we shall enter into its Garden, and taste its Fruits, and satisfy ourselves with its plenty: instead of Idle talking and wandering under its fruitless shadows.’ Obtuseness, if not ignorance, is the inheritance of mankind; the book of Nature lies open before us, our eyes travel over its pages, but to interpret what we read is a task requiring application and discipline: the aim of science is ‘to repair the ruin of our first parents.’ More philosophically, the enterprise may be represented as the search for the causes of what appears before us, and the reward is the reputed happiness of those who understand, not merely things, but the manner in which things are generated. Or again, when the inquiry has been on foot for some time and a body of instructed opinion has emerged, the positivist may content himself with the view that the aim in science is to say something about the world which is convincing to the recognized experts in the matter, instructed opinion appearing as a kind of handy emblem of ‘truth.’
Every man, it may be supposed, has his own private ‘physiology,’ and it becomes scientific when it ceases to be eccentric and is capable of convincing those whose opinion matters. Or, to make an end of examples, the activity in science may be conceived as the attempt to derive from our manifold experience of the world a body of knowledge which is in the highest degree communicable, not resting upon the personal idiosyncrasies of the individual scientist, but based upon the sure foundation of measurement and expressed in the impersonal language of mathematics. But if this last view of the matter is one which the contemplation of the modern history of science encourages, we should not require a historian of science to commit himself to it. Gibbon claimed to have ‘described the triumph of barbarism and of religion’, but he made no claim to a philosophical definition of his subject; and the historian of science is not required to have decided upon a philosophy of science before he sits down to write. And yet, he must have an eye that sees below the surface, and a standpoint from which he can look down upon the activity whose fortunes he is recording—a standpoint from which those moments of selfconsciousness that have occasionally overtaken the activity are seen as part of the history itself. Perhaps the only, certainly the chief, conceptual qualification this historian needs is the vision of scientific activity, not as a mere series of discoveries and inventions, not even as a body of knowledge, but as a manner of thinking, as a ceaseless flow of hypotheses, as the perpetual reconstruction (in whole or in part) of our experience of the world. And his enterprise will be to trace the fortunes of this manner of thinking, to disclose its character as it comes to the surface, to discover the springs of its inspiration, to reveal the subtle mediations whereby one great hypothesis succeeds another, to investigate the effect of this activity upon a society or a civilization, and then (if he is a Ranke) to consider it in the context of human activity at large—and in all this using the discoveries of science, the ‘achievements,’ the formulations, as
mirrors in which to catch the reflection of the manner of thinking which is the true subject of his history. Every reader has his own preferences, and he is gratified when a history of the sort he finds agreeable comes his way. But it must be understood that what is being asked for here is not a history of science of a certain sort, but for the story of the part played by science in western civilization to be treated in a genuinely historical manner. This story has had its annalists and chroniclers; the great figures and the momentous occasions in it have long ago been made familiar to us; but history only begins where chronicles leave off. And even whena writer has undertaken to endow the story with a semblance of organization, when he has not left the scale of his figures and occasions to chance, he has too often read the story backwards, finding significant in the past only that which led subsequently to positive achievement: the lost causes, the ‘failures,’ the unsuccessful attempts, the dead-ends have been crowded out of a story which has thus acquired the appearance of altogether unnatural ‘success.’ Such a writer may not lack learning in detail, and he may come to his task with enthusiasm and disinterestedness; but he is not a historian. And if it is a simple, indeed an obvious, virtue, and one that should not require remark, it is nevertheless the first and greatest virtue of Professor Butterfield’s lectures on The Origins of Modern Science that they are informed with genuine and profound historical thinking. He has added something to our knowledge in detail, he has added more to our insight, and he has given scale and proportion, hitherto lacking, to one of the most important periods in the history of science. And he has begun to measure the potentialities in the history of science to transform our whole view of the history of western European civilization. But if, in addition to all this, his book were to persuade those who have control of this comparatively new study in our universities that the history of science should be in the hands of men who are genuine historians, it will have performed a timely service.
Professor Butterfield’s theme is the coming into being of modern science. In the abridgements of history with which we have long had to content ourselves we have been taught that modern science is the creation of an intellectual revolution which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; in these centuries our backward-looking historians found what they were looking for— the beginning of those methods and discoveries which have since established themselves. In history, of course, there are no absolute origins; but when the history of science ceases to be thought of as a history of discoveries, and when (with a more genuinely historical impulse) we allow our minds to proceed forward and not backward, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while losing nothing of their importance, lose their appearance of being even that kind of plausible and empirical starting-place which a historian looks for. ‘Modern history,’ said Lord Acton, ‘tells how the last four hundred years have modified the medieval conditions of life and thought’; and this is not less true in the history of science than elsewhere. That a great revolution did take place, that its main outline emerged unmistakeably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, remains true. And Professor Butterfield is not afraid to affirm it unequivocally. For him it is a revolution which ‘outshines anything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and the Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom.’ It represents ‘one of the great episodes in human experience.’ And even to the historian (who must always be suspicious of the apparent newness of the new) it seems to possess a novelty not easily accounted for: ‘there does not seem any sign that the ancient world, before its heritage had been dispersed, was moving towards anything like the scientific revolution, or that the Byzantine Empire, in spite of the continuity of its classical tradition, would ever have taken hold of ancient thought and remoulded it by a great transforming power.’ But the roots of this revolution lie in a more remote past, lie deep in the Middle
Ages. When the history of modern science is considered as the history of a characteristic manner of thinking, and not as a series of observations and discoveries, it is seen to spring up within an earlier manner of thinking and to derive its initial significance from the soil that nurtured it. To trace the slowly mediated changes which transformed medieval science into the science of the age of Newton is the first and most difficult task of the historian of modern science, and it is to this task that these lectures are addressed. Modern science had a difficult birth. And when one casts around to account for this difficulty, the explanation seems to lie, not in any natural conservatism of the medieval mind, nor in any supposed deadening effect of ecclesiastical authority, but in the remarkable fact that the men of the Middle Ages found themselves endowed with an explanation of the physical universe which they had not won by the exercise of their own faculties, but had acquired as part of an authoritative bequest from an already defunct civilization. What a man has invented for himself he will be ready to criticize and to reconstruct, first in detail and then perhaps more radically, because he is aware at least of the incoherences that are merely covered up; but he lacks a similar command over what he has acquired ready-made. And because his understanding of it is inferior, his hold on it must be more tenacious. Yet the authority of Aristotelian physics in the Middle Ages seems to have been obliquely acquired; it is at least probable that had not Aristotle already been established as a master in logic, his authority in science (when his physics came to light) would have been less absolute. But what made Aristotelian physics a hurdle to be surmounted, something to be ‘overthrown’ before modern science could gather impetus, was as much a habit of mind as the inherent attractiveness of the Aristotelian synthesis. And here a reader would like to have found in Professor Butterfield’s account some treatment of that manner of education which promoted and prolonged the life of this habit of mind: it was not so much the initial loss and slow recovery of Greek science which impeded
the progress of scientific investigation in the Middle Ages, as the inheritance of that restricted ideal of education which had taken hold of the Greco-Roman world before the invasions. But the chief task of the historian of the emergence of modern science is to show the manner in which the Aristotelian synthesis came to be broken down, and Professor Butterfield’s account of it is fascinating. The progress of science, at this point as at many others, is shown to spring, not from any fresh observations of the world, but from the detection of the weak points in a prevailing hypothesis and from an effort to repair the weakness. Every scientist now knows that observation by itself, experiment and the conclusions from experiment, are never the starting-point of advance, and are never in themselves authoritative; but this seems also to have been appreciated in the early days of modern science: Galileo was in no doubt about it. There are in every great hypothesis elements of marginal coherence, and it is the part of the great scientist to seize upon these and to use them as a lever to prise open the entire system. It was Aristotle’s unsatisfactory account of the movement of projectiles and the acceleration of falling bodies which made room for the development of that theory of impetus which in the end transformed physics. And it was similar cracks in the system of Ptolemy which gave a handle to the speculations of Copernicus. In conceiving that his task as an historian is to show how great thinkers—a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Harvey, a Newton or a Lavoisier—‘operated on the margin of contemporary thought’ Professor Butterfield has lifted the history of science to a new and higher level. It was, perhaps, unavoidable (in this, after all, brief treatment of the history of modern science, which concentrates upon ‘lines of strategic change,’) that Aristotle should appear always as an enemy, as somebody to be ‘overthrown’, to be ‘destroyed’, but it is difficult to avoid the feeling that an even firmer hold upon the historian’s task of providing the continuity, of revealing the mediations of change in all their detail, would result in a shift of emphasis, a translation of a negative into its positive,
which would have freed this history from what appears to be a last relic of the technique of the backward look. Just as it is only from an imperfectly achieved historical outlook that Roundhead and Cavalier remain mere enemies, or that astrology is seen as merely the foe of scientific astronomy, so it is only in an abridgment that Aristotle can appear as the mere opponent of modern science. Events as they actually happen and things as they exist have a subtlety, an absence of absoluteness, a dilution, which the historian must always be on the qui vive to catch. And while Professor Butterfield lays firm hold upon this conception of the science of any age as a systematic whole of hypotheses capable of indefinite expansion, he performs one of the essential offices of the historian in making his readers perceive that it is only an unfortunate abridgment which gives fixity to a system such as that of Ptolemy or of Newton. Not only are there incoherences upon the margin of every system which offer a hand-hold to the critic and which qualify the whole, but also it rarely happens that the system as it appears written down in a book corresponds to what is in the mind of its author or to what this author is understood by others to have taught. The mind, even the common mind, is always in motion; and the progress of science is not so much the replacement of one fixed or finished system by another which demands an equally unqualified attachment, as the supersession of a flowing, or at least a gyrating, nucleus of ideas by another of the same sort but different in detail. And the great change appears not when one rigid system gets the better of another but when the hidden thought of a system collapses under criticism, and the mind is set free to construct a new hypothesis with regard to the skies, the human body, the chemical composition of things, whatever it may be. And when we have learned this elementary lesson we are ready to follow the historian as he detects the significance of the work of a scientist, not in the system he created but in the impetus he imparted to the enterprise of scientific thinking. Copernicus, no doubt, had a system; but his great influence upon the progress of
science lay not in his system ‘but in the stimulus he gave to men who in reality were producing something very different.’ And the significance of the early and abortive self-consciousness which the scientific enterprise achieved in the work of Francis Bacon lies not in the Baconian system itself (which taken literally had greater potentialities of damaging than of advancing the enterprise) but in the piecemeal inspiration which he offered to the scientists of his time. Professor Butterfield is an austere and disciplined thinker; he scarcely needs to command his companions to bind him to the mast when the ship comes within earshot of the Sirens. And it is one of the great merits of this work that he has managed to steer a course which avoids on the one hand the merely biographical treatment of the story of modern science and on the other hand a treatment which would turn the story into a history of the rise and fall of systems. We are apt to suppose that courage is a virtue more appropriate to a life of action than to one of intellect, but nothing is more damaging to the work of an historian than its absence. It is the main ingredient of the power to recognize a great occasion, and a historian without this power is a historian without style or significance. But history is the enemy of the lonely great, the strange and the unexpected, in persons as well as in events; and to the courage of recognition the historian must add a molelike investigation of the composition and structure of the great occasion. Anyone (or almost anyone) can compose a story by leaping from peak to peak; so long as he does not lose his momentum he will retain his balance; but it will be an exiguous performance, in which the significance of even the peaks is lost. It is not merely one part of the task of the historian to descend into the valleys and to provide ‘continuity’; it is the whole of his task from one point of view. For the ‘continuity’ is not something added to a story whose main lines are already fixed; it is the story itself of which the main lines are only an abridgment. And in providing the continuity the historian performs his office of interpretation, an office which the history of science is in great
need of at the present time. This continuity may be found in the study of the work of that host of obscure scientific investigators who fill in the intervals between the men of genius. As Professor Butterfield points out, it is from a study of this sort that some of the most remarkable reversals of judgment in the history of science have sprung during the last fifty years. Galileo, Kepler, Harvey remain figures of supreme importance, but they are no longer isolated, and their ideas are no longer, what they once appeared, ideas without pedigree. But, further, the historian will find himself pressed down to a level where even the names of the obscure disappear from the story. It is never easy—if it is possible at all—to feel that one has reached the bottom of a matter (says Professor Butterfield), or touched the last limit of explanation, when dealing with an historical transition. It would appear the most fundamental changes in outlook, the most remarkable turns in the current of intellectual fashion, may be referable in the last resort to an alteration in men’s feeling for things, an alteration at once so subtle and so generally pervasive that it cannot be attributed to any particular writers or any influence of academic thought as such. When at the beginning of the sixteenth century an Englishman could write concerning the clergy that it was scandalous to see half the king’s subjects evading their proper allegiance to the crown—escaping the law of the land—we know that he was registering a change in the feeling men had for the territorial state, a change more significant in that people were unconscious of the fact that anything novel had been taking place. Subtle changes like this—the result not of any book but of the new texture of human experience in a new age—are apparent behind the story of the scientific revolution, a revolution which some have tried to explain by a change in men’s feeling for matter itself. Science is an activity which seems to have gained something from the mere lapse of time. This is seen to be so when, as so often happens, the conning over of ideas and observations long familiar blossoms into a new and fruitful hypothesis. But the
lapse of time is perhaps most significant in the formation of what may be called a scientific opinion. Science can scarcely be said to exist where this is absent, and it has always flourished most conspicuously where such an opinion has been most lively and firmly established: the lack of it still impedes the social sciences. If science proceeded to a predetermined end, the existence of a body of scientific opinion would be less necessary; the end itself would offer the needed criticism of the current achievement. But it does not proceed in this manner, and the possibility of distinguishing between the charlatan or the eccentric and the expert depends upon the establishment of recognized scientific standards. The great contribution of the University of Padua to the scientific revolution sprang not only from the fact that circumstances combined to establish in Padua a peculiar freedom of thought, nor merely because the variety of scientific investigation which was being carried on there in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries provided the kind of cross-fertilization among the sciences which has so often been the source of advance, but also because there gradually came into existence common practices of research and a recognized body of scientific opinion. For this scientific opinion is not an orthodoxy of doctrine, which may easily stifle the growth of new hypothesis: it is a fellowship of scientists, and consists in recognized standards and procedures of inquiry and traditions of research which cut across the different sciences and give the individual investigator a sense of support which he would otherwise lack. In England the Royal Society did much to promote a scientific opinion of this sort; and the fact that by the end of the seventeenth century something like a common scientific opinion had come to establish itself in western Europe is perhaps the best evidence that the scientific revolution had by then passed its critical point. Nevertheless, recession is not impossible. The appeal against the opinion of the learned which is implicit in the use of the vernacular by Galileo and Descartes is understandable in the circumstances, and even the appeal of the philosophes to the middle classes may
be regarded as an appeal from learning to intelligence; but it is not as easy to take so indulgent a view of the current confusion of political and scientific opinion in which much that has been so gradually built up seems in danger of being lost. Professor Butterfield is concerned solely with science in the strict sense, as a manner of thinking and as a flow of hypotheses about the physical world. The history of technology, of the use men have made of scientific discoveries, is outside his theme; and since he does not mention it even to exclude it, we may suppose that it was not mere lack of space which imposed this self-limitation. It is a limitation which goes somewhat against the current view of the history of science, but most readers will agree that he has made it a convincing limitation, and that here, as elsewhere, he has struck out on a new and promising path. Nevertheless, Professor Butterfield refuses to isolate the history of science. ‘The history of science’, he says, ‘ought not merely to exist by itself in a separate pocket.’ He is very properly critical of the notion that the historian can assign to the scientific revolution any precise ‘results’. Great changes were afoot in the eighteenth century, but for the historian ‘the hazard consists not in putting all these things together and rolling them into one great bundle of complex change, but in thinking that one knows how to disentangle them—what we see is the total intricate network of changes, and it is difficult to say that any one of these was the single result of the scientific revolution itself.’ But when the products of scientific activity percolated down to the level of the common mind they became translated (often somewhat precipitately and usually by men who were not themselves scientists) into a new world-view: the philosophes of the eighteenth century were among the first to take a hand in this translation. And this new outlook as it became disseminated must be counted as one of the more important of the assignable results of the scientific revolution. This convergence of the history of European science upon the history of moeurs is a testing theme for an historian, and Professor Butterfield is probably wise to confine himself to a general treatment in which
the relations between science and politics receive most of his attention. And yet it is disappointing to find that he has so little to say about the impact of the scientific revolution, not merely upon what may be called popular cosmology, but upon the current myth of human life and upon religion. And it is disappointing to find that what he has to say is all on one side, is designed to impress as with the loudness of the voice of science at the end of his period. The seventeenth century did not merely bring a new factor into history, in the way we often assume. The new factor immediately began to elbow at the other ones, pushing them out of their place—and, indeed, began immediately to seek control of the rest, as the apostles of the new movement had declared their intention of doing from the very start. All this, of course, is undeniably true: but it is not the whole story. The scientific revolution did not in fact succeed in shouting down the voices of religion and poetry, and its repercussions in the minds of men such as Pascal, Lichtenberg, Blake, and Goethe (to choose representatives to illustrate the variety of the rebound) are a significant part of the history of the impact of the scientific revolution upon European society.
The Coming Defeat of Communism Review of James Burnham, The Coming Defeat of Communism (London: Cape, 1950). First published in Evening Standard (20 November 1950) as ‘Stalin’s Four Weak Points’, headed: ‘MAN WHO TOOK LASKI’S JOB ATTACKS THE COMMUNISTS. At the London School of Economics, a new professor occupies the chair of political science formerly held by Left Wing propagandist Harold Laski. His name: Michael Oakeshott. In this article for the Evening Standard he examines a new book which gives an American’s answer to the question: Can we halt Russia without war?’ To be clear-sighted in one’s attitude to Communism is difficult alike for the believer and for the opponent. The believer adheres to a theory and a political programme, the one often obscure except to the eye of faith, the other dynamic but suicidal except for the few who may come out on top; and in spite of the constant efforts of acute thinkers, the theory and the programme are always on the point of falling apart. The opponent, on the other hand, if he is to be clear-sighted, needs to know exactly what he is opposing: and this is difficult for an Englishman or an American, though it is not at all difficult for an enslaved Czech or a Pole. It is easier for us to be either hysterical about Communism, or (like the BBC) to be ridiculously naïve. Mr James Burnham, a distinguished American writer on politics, has written a book which, if it does nothing else, should help us to understand the precise threat to our way of life which is comprehensively indicated in the word ‘Communism’. Up to about 1939 it was possible to become and be a Communist in this country from a variety of motives, none of them entirely foolish or deplorable.
The Russian Revolution, like the French, could appear as the dawn of a glad day. And in the time of Hitler’s rise or the Spanish Civil War one might join the party out of the generous impulse to side with the downtrodden; though many who did so were quickly revolted by the crooked thinking and subterfuge which comprised its theory and practice. This situation belongs to the past. The ‘intellectual’ or the ‘emotional’ Communist continues to exist, but what was once generosity has degenerated into sentimentality, and the demand for self-deception increases every year. This ‘Communism’, however, cannot be counted any greater menace than a hundred other pieces of foolishness. ‘Communism’ now is seen to stand for something else; it stands for the subjugation of the world, including the peoples of Russia, to the oligarchy which rules in Moscow. The Communists who are significant are those who comprise this oligarchy and its agents all over the world and (in those places which are subject to the immediate pressure of Russian armed power) those who from fear or an eye to the main chance wish to be beforehand in their allegiance to their supposed future masters.
The Tyrants To join the party is now to side with the tyrants. In short, ‘Communism’ is a menace because it represents Russian imperialism. And one does not need to be hysterical, the victim of a scare or to be heedless of other threats, in order to see this as a significant threat to what we regard as a civilized way of living. In recent years several writers have come forward to advise the government of the U.S.A. on its policy in relation to Russia, and certainly Mr Burnham is more level-headed than most. His criticism of present American policy is that it is purely defensive and that it lacks precision. Great energy is now being displayed in military preparations to avoid defeat in a war with Russia, but he thinks that less is being done than might be done to defeat Russian imperialist designs without a war. There is the Voice of America and there is the Marshall Plan, but the precise objectives of the opponents of Russian imperialism are not clearly thought out, and the readiest and most economical means are not being made use of. There are some people (mostly Americans) who see the objective as the establishment of what they call a world democratic order: the only defeat of Russian Communism they recognise is the substitution for it of a political ideology of their own. Mr Burnham does not take this view. ‘Democracy’ for him is a matter of degree. And we do not have to be confident that we possess the best possible institutions in order to oppose Russian Communism: all we need to know is that Russian Communism is a threat to much of what we value supremely. Consequently, our objective must be precisely to remove that menace, and to remove it without a war. And since the menace must remain so long as the present oligarchy is in power in Russia, our aim must be to assist in
overthrowing that oligarchy by working upon the weaknesses of the regime. The present Russian Empire, though strong, suffers from four principal weaknesses. The great masses of the Russian people are themselves the mentally and physically enslaved victims of their government: no one of the satellite peoples composing the empire is ‘reliable’: the Russian government must sustain a rhythm of conquest or confess itself defeated: and there is always the liability to the sort of defection now known as Titoism.
The Attack In a series of chapters, the best of which is called the ‘propaganda attack’, Mr Burnham examines what he believes to be the best ways of working on these weaknesses. He does not suppose that the Russian oligarchy can be overthrown by a spontaneous revolt—the crack must come from within the party. His aim is to enlist every possible ally inside and outside Russia, and his advice is to be unrelenting and absolutely consistent in our opposition to the oligarchy. He considers that we are unduly nervous of provoking Russia to a shooting war. And since his object is not to destroy either Russia or ‘Communism’, but to remove the menace of Russian imperialism, he sees the greatest hope in Titoism—Communisminspired defections within the Russian empire. As a political prophet Mr Burnham has not been remarkably successful in the past: he has often shown a tendency to believe that things must go on in the way they seemed to be going when he took a look at them.
Listen to Him! The significance of his book does not, however, lie in its assessment of the future intentions of Russian policy, but in its exploration of the most economical and most effective methods of defeating manifest Russian imperialist activities. Some people (but without much justification) will think that he exaggerates the menace, but what makes him a writer worth listening to is his great knowledge of the theory and practice of Communism and the fact that he cannot be mistaken for a mere spokesman of American imperialism.
Cambridge Conversations Review of Joseph Ronald Watmough, Cambridge Conversations (Cambridge: Bowes, 1949). First published in Cambridge Journal, 3 (1950), 312–13. It argues uncommon courage to write a book in that most difficult of all literary forms, the conversation. Success here depends upon a rare combination of imagination, flexibility of mind, and sense of character; failure can be dismal. Mr Watmough, moreover, has been bold enough to dispense with a central voice in his dialogues; there are eight speakers (six men and two women), none of whom is represented as much wiser or more in command of the situation than any other. The result is, in general, agreeable without being profound, and readable without being highly stimulating. Unfortunately it is conversation without dialectic. The speakers in these conversations are Cambridge undergraduates—inquiring minds, but rather portentous in their seriousness. Each has a fairly clearly defined position, though none appears properly as a character. There is a highchurch Tory reading history, a Liberal Nonconformist reading English literature, a proletarian Anglo-Catholic reading theology, a Socialist reading classics, and an Atheist-Communist reading economics. Of the two girls, one is reading modern languages and the other is an Anarchist reading biology—both are pretty earnest. One could wish that they had been revealed more fully as characters and less as mouthpieces of, on the whole, stereotyped points of view, so that after one or two sessions one knows roughly what each is going to say before he or she says it. They have six meetings, each devoted to a particular topic or group of related topics. The first is entitled ‘the merits of the law’, and comes as an agreeable surprise. There are in fact few better entrances to the study of our civilization than that afforded by the law, and it is an entrance too seldom used. Like most of the other
conversations in this book, this one does not get very far. One is not disappointed because it fails to reach conclusions, but because it ranges the subject at only a superficial level. However, it has something to say, and it goes smoothly. It is succeeded by sessions at which the problems of education, the forms of government (and some other political topics), the subjects of university study, some moral problems (marriage, celibacy, suicide, etc.) and religion are successively discussed. There is a certain primness about the whole performance; wit is absent, there are no practical jokes, and the talk rarely rises above the commonplace. But the conversation is certainly what Dr Johnson would have called ‘solid’. One’s disappointment is greatest on the occasions when a speaker makes a remark which might have opened up a discussion at a more profound level, but the opportunity is missed because the characters speak so much in the idiom of their prearranged points of view. For example, the earnest Socialist says of Rugby football that ‘I think it is an exciting game to watch and a powerful factor in the development of personality, but at the same time I think there is something irrational about it. I have known many accidents arise from Rugby—when I was at school, a term never passed without three or four cases of broken legs or broken collarbones. A boy might sometimes have to remain at home for six weeks under medical care before he was fit to return. Think of the expense and trouble to his parents; think too of the retarding effect on his academic progress—all for the sake of a couple of hours “sport”!’ And the only reply the high-church Tory can think of is: ‘Nobody worries much about that. It is all for the good of the side, you know. Most people consider it a form of heroism.’ This, from a people that (nurtured not upon oriental indifference or upon a stoic philosophy, but upon a tradition of ‘nerve’) has achieved a combination of love of life and indifference to injury and death more profoundly balanced than any other. Readers of this journal will note the reference to the ‘Baldwin Confession’ (as an example of political duplicity) which appears on p. 73 of this book.
The English Utilitarians Review of John Plamenatz, The English Utilitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949). First published in Cambridge Journal, 3 (1950), 312–13. There have been many studies of that school of political and philosophical writers who are known as the Utilitarians, and there have been many much more elaborate than this one— but I have never read one which was more to the point or one that went to the heart of the matter so simply and directly. Mr Plamenatz is concerned with what he justifiably takes to be the chief contribution of English thought to moral and political philosophy, and therefore worth study. But Utilitarianism is not so much a cut and dried doctrine as, in the first place, an attitude towards the problems of moral and political philosophy; and writers who are as diverse in doctrine as Hobbes, Hume and J.S. Mill (for example) may be seen to share this attitude. But further, Utilitarianism is a set of beliefs—but here it is difficult to find any one writer who holds them all or any writer in whom these beliefs are not contaminated by other, often inconsistent, beliefs. Mr Plamenatz formulates these beliefs in four propositions—not with the object of making Utilitarianism an exceedingly narrow and exclusive philosophy and of showing how few of the Utilitarians hold to it consistently, but in order to include all that might fairly expect to find a place. There is plenty of close argument in this book, and the author insists upon many fine distinctions; but there is nothing illiberal or piddling in his attitude. Having got clear the outline of the doctrine to be considered, he embarks upon a series of chapters on Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, James Mill, and J.S. Mill, with briefer studies of the ideas of others, such as Helvétius, Paley, Burke, Paine, Godwin and the ‘classical economists’. The purpose of each of these studies is to determine the quality and individual character of each of these writers
as an exponent of Utilitarianism. At the end of the volume is reprinted J.S. Mill’s essay ‘Utilitarianism’, not because it is the least ambiguous or most mature statement of the doctrine, but because he considers that a study of its ‘confusions and errors’ is profitable in a way in which (for example) a close study of Bentham’s tangled argument is not. This work is concerned with the history of ideas, but it should be pointed out that Mr Plamenatz is not at all interested in what Acton called the ‘pedigree of ideas’. We are shown the fortunes of an attitude and a doctrine over a long period of tine, but the mediation of the changes is not anywhere examined. For the historian the main value of this work is the clarity it gives to the conceptual skeleton of Utilitarianism, and in doing this it performs an exceedingly valuable service. In detail, Mr Plamenatz has much that is his own to say, and he says it so lucidly and economically and with such fair-minded consideration and moderation that one learns even where one disagrees. Most of the writers he examines were careless and often confused: to try to understand them is usually to try to determine what they probably meant, and here Mr Plamenatz is a patient and acute guide. And most readers will, I think, be grateful for the comments on matters of political and philosophical interest which are handed out on the way; they are all very much to the point and many of them are profound observations. In short, this book supersedes everything that has been written on this scale on the subject, and, though it unaccountably stops short of Sidgwick, is as comprehensive as one could expect.
John Locke’s Political Philosophy Review of John Wiedhofft Gough, John Locke’s Political Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). First published in English Historical Review, 65 (1950), 550. Mr. J.W. Gough has collected together eight essays, only one of which has been previously published. Between them (and with some unavoidable overlapping) they discuss the main features of Locke’s political philosophy. The method of treatment neatly circumvents some of the difficulties which a sustained exposition would encounter, but it is not adopted by Mr Gough merely in order to avoid the labour of a continuous argument: it reflects a point of view which (apart from some points of detail and some novelties based upon the investigation of some unpublished writings of Locke) is the main interest of the book. What is it that holds together Locke’s various views and opinions? The view has got about that, in spite of appearances, Locke’s Second Treatise on Government should be regarded as a logically coherent argument, as a political philosophy unfolded in a manner which frees it from the exigencies of time and place and gives it a universal cogency. And, on the other hand, the work has been held to be nothing more than a pièce d’occasion. Mr Gough’s contention is that we are not forced, and that it would be unwise, to choose either of these extreme alternatives. The value of Locke’s work is that it states, in abstract terms, what were generally recognized to be the realities of English constitutional practice: it is less than a philosophy of politics, but it is more than a mere defence of a single moment in the English constitutional tradition. Consequently the recent investigations which have tended to detract from Locke’s originality do nothing to shake the real value of what he wrote. The Second Treatise survived and owed its tremendous influence in England to the fact that it was the most cogent and level-headed exposition of what most people believed. With this approach, Mr
Gough says a great deal worth saying, and says it economically and lucidly. And if, from the point of view adopted, there is any misdirection of emphasis in these essays, it is perhaps a failure to give proper weight to Locke’s debt, not only to the general outline, but also to some of the more recondite details, of the current Christian myth of politics. For example, private property antedates civil society for Locke because it sprang directly from the Fall (man had to work and labour creates property); civil society appeared only with Nimrod, many years after.
Patriarcha Review of Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslett. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949). First published in Philosophy, 25 (1950), 280–1. Oakeshott also reviewed Filmer, Patriarcha, in Cambridge Journal, 3 (1950), 384. Blackwell’s Political Texts aim, in general, at reprinting, with a suitable introduction and perhaps some notes, some of the more notable political writings. But on this occasion something further has been added—an edition of a seventeenth-century English writer which gives for the first time a satisfactory and reliable text. It is well known that Filmer’s Patriarcha was not printed until many years after it was written, but that it had circulated in a number of manuscript copies among Filmer’s acquaintance. It was printed on three occasions in the late seventeenth century; the first two editions (in 1680) deriving from corrupt and imperfect manuscripts, and the third (1685) less corrupt but far from satisfactory. The only other edition was that of 1884 in which the editor reproduced one of the editions of 1680. Mr Laslett, however, was fortunate enough to have discovered in the Filmer family papers a manuscript (now in the Cambridge University Library) which gave a far more authentic text than had yet been published: it is this text which is printed here, with the useful addition, at the foot of the page, of the references which Filmer omitted to give for some of his quotations. It is an admirable and important piece of work, and Mr Laslett is to be congratulated both on his good luck and on the use he has made of it. The other political writings of Filmer which are reprinted presented no such textual problems, but since most of them are available only in seventeenth-century editions, it is valuable to have them here. If this were all, Mr Laslett would have put us deeply in his debt; but it is not all. In some forty pages of introduction he has given us the most intelligent account of Filmer and his ideas that has yet
appeared. There is a brief account of the results of his considerable researches into the life of Filmer, which is followed by an admirably concise statement of the argument of Patriarcha and its place in the political controversies of the seventeenth century. But the most notable part of the introduction is that in which Mr Laslett deals with the place and significance of Patriarchalism generally in seventeenth-century thinking. Nobody (least of all Mr Laslett) will contend that Filmer was a powerful and impressive abstract thinker. But in this introduction he is given his correct and not insignificant place as ‘the codifier of conscious and unconscious prejudice’ and as an opponent of the way things were going in his day whose archaic method of argument concealed something which we, even more than his contemporaries, can understand to be worth considering.
The Concept of Mind Review of Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949). First published in Spectator, 184 (1950), 20, 22. The hypothesis that every human being has a body and a mind (or is both body and mind) has presented philosophers with the problem of relationship and the intercourse between these two supposedly different (though in some accounts not wholly dissimilar) things. It is this hypothesis and this problem which, perhaps more than anything else, distinguishes modern from ancient philosophy; for the last four centuries they have dominated philosophical speculation. Professor Ryle is dissatisfied, not with the current solution of the problem, but with the hypothesis itself; the errors of the answers are of little account when the question is misconceived. He is not, of course, the first to have this dissatisfaction; anyone brought upon on Greek philosophy might be expected to be critical of the hypothesis. But what he gives us here is an exceedingly acute analysis of his dissatisfaction and an identification of the kind of error which he thinks the mind–body hypothesis represents. According to his account of it, it is a category-mistake. ‘It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type, when they actually belong to another.’ Mind is represented as a kind of ghostly body, and to think of it in this manner is to make the same mistake as that of a man who thought of the ‘British Constitution’ as a parallel institution to the Home Office or the Church of England. Professor Ryle’s view is that, generally speaking, we know without having to be philosophers how to use and apply the ordinary ‘mental-conduct’ concepts (like will, emotion, imagination), but we often make grave mistakes when we classify them and put them into logical categories. And he writes in
order to correct some of these mistakes. In general his doctrine is that ‘when we describe people as exercising qualities of mind, we are not referring to occult episodes of which their overt acts and utterances are effects: we are referring to those overt acts and utterances themselves.’ Mental activity is not the activity of a ‘mind,’ or activity which takes place in the hidden recesses of a mind, in distinction from the activity of a body: it is doing and saying things in a particular manner. Towards the end Professor Ryle remarks that ‘the general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatised as “behaviourist”’. Nevertheless he is not concerned with Behaviourism as a psychological technique. His book is not an attempt to give new information about the mind, but to consider the logic of mental concepts. It is a contribution to philosophy rather than psychology, though the acceptance of his doctrine would have some repercussions on psychological investigation. It is impossible to give here any proper impression of the range and subtlety of Professor Ryle’s argument, or to examine any of its parts. The reader, even if he is not in agreement with the doctrine propounded, will recognise before he is half way through that this isa piece of philosophical writing in the highest class. Philosophers will certainly find it an important ‘contribution’. Among much else, the criticism of the whole ‘sense datum theory’ is something that has long needed to be said. But the book is more than a ‘contribution’: it has something of the vitality and the power of standing on its own feet which belong to the philosophical classic. What distinguishes a classic in philosophy is (among other things) its fitness to be put into the hands of a beginner; and while the beginner might soon find himself here out of his depth, it would not be on account of specific ignorance but because of lack of practice, a handicap which reading this book would greatly reduce. Professor Ryle is sparing in his references to other writers; he is concerned with arguments not personalities. And though he half apologises for the polemical tone of the book, it seems to
me peculiarly free from excess in this respect. The chief critical argument in his armoury is the reductio ad absurdum, the demonstration that if we take a certain view we have committed ourselves to an endless and profitless regress. But perhaps the most obvious characteristic of his manner of writing is the abounding wealth of analogy with which he illustrates his arguments. This is at once a source of strength and a danger in a philosophical writer. While it certainly contributes to understanding, the reader is apt to think he understands the argument when all has done is to appreciate the analogy. Not until each analogy has been examined with care can we be certain that we are not being misled. I think the elaborate analogy on pp. 289–290 is misleading; the difference between the farmer making a path and the philosopher making a theory is that, while the stages of path-making are successive contributions to a final result, each stage in theory-making is itself a complete theory. I do not quite understand the confidence with which the expression ‘the physical world’ is used throughout the book; and there is perhaps an unfortunate abridgement in the description of what is called idealism as ‘the “reduction” of the material world to mental states and processes.’
Tell Me the Next One Review of John Godley, Tell Me the Next One. On Foretelling the Winners of Horse-races from Dreams (London: Victor Gollancz, 1950). First published in Spectator, 184 (1950), 734. There are dreams that are pleasant and dreams that are potentially profitable. Any man of sense prefers the former; they can be enjoyed for the pleasure they give. But if the latter came, a man (I suppose) may be excused when he wants to tell us about them. He should, however, remember that it is easier to be boring about dreams than about anything else—even family photographs. This is an account of the circumstances in which Mr Godley had revealed to him, in a series of dreams which came to him at intervals during a period of three years, the winners of eight horse-races, to which is added a tentative ‘explanation’ of the experience. The dreams did not all take the same form; on three occasions Mr Godley saw in his dream a page in the newspaper giving the results of the races, on one occasion he dreamed he saw the race itself and recognised the winner by the jockey’s colours, once he dreamed he heard the result of the race broadcast, and once he dreamed that he was told the name of the winner by his bookmaker on the telephone. On three occasions his dream revealed, not the name of the winner, but a name near enough to one of the horses engaged (Tubermore for Tuberose) to make him feel fairly confident. But twice his dreams let him down, once giving him an unplaced horse and once a horse that ran third. His bets gave him a net profit of £126 14s. 7d. Mr Godley, unfortunately, is a dull man and a not very skilled writer; he is rather portentous about it all. The drama is inflated, and the style is that of a feature article in a Sunday newspaper. His elaborate calculation of the odds against his experiences is tedious, he never put his shirt on any of his visions (he seems to have been more interested in selling his story to a newspaper and
in getting it investigated by the S.P.R.), there is no preface dated either from the best hotel in Ragusa or from the workhouse, too large a part of the book is taken up with demonstrating that his story is so well authenticated that he should not be suspected of perpetrating a hoax, and his ‘explanation’ in terms of determinism is jejune. However, to those who may be interested (not, I think, racing men), he gives a pretty complete account of his experiences, disposing satisfactorily of the hypothesis of telepathy as an explanation. There is one point on which the reader would like further information. Were there in the races in which Mr Godley’s dreams led him astray horses whose names were near enough to those he dreamed to have caused a confusion?
Beyond Realism and Idealism Review of Wilbur Marshall Urban, Beyond Realism and Idealism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949). First published in Times Literary Supplement (27 January 1950), 61. An experience of excitement comes rarely enough from reading a close-packed philosophical argument to be noticed and welcomed when it appears. To convey excitement is not a meretricious achievement arising merely from a certain vivacity of style; it springs from being able to convince the reader of the importance of the problem being discussed and to infect him with the belief that this way of going about it might lead to some important or really unavoidable conclusion. And Professor Urban’s book has this quality in spite of its repetitiousness and flatness of style. Idealism and Realism come to us first as two contrasting theories of knowledge; but since each of these theories has appeared in a variety of forms, it seems sensible to try to discover the unity which in each case underlies the variety. Thus, the ‘driving force’ of Idealism is the belief that the known cannot be independent of the knower; and the ‘resistance’ of Realism is the belief that what is known must be an antecedent reality. These beliefs appear to stand in crass opposition to one another, but the remarkable thing is that neither has succeeded in refuting the other. This failure, however, in Professor Urban’s view, does not spring from the incompetence of philosophers, but from the nature of the opposing beliefs; and the hope of reconciling them arises from the observation that neither is a belief concerning fact; both are beliefs about the meaning of knowledge. What is opposed is two views, not about the character of knowledge, but about its value; and oppositions between values do not necessarily have the character of contradictions. The conflict is, therefore, a dialectical conflict.
Having reached this point in his argument, and on the way made interesting excursions into the history of both Idealism and Realism, Professor Urban considers the three manners in which a theoretical reconciliation between them might be achieved. For his view is that in the actual pursuit of knowledge they are reconciled; what is required is a theory of this reconciliation. The theory of psychological types seems to offer a psychological reconciliation—the Idealist being the introvert and the Realist the extrovert—but this is rejected because it falls short of a ‘real solution to the problem.’ The ‘pragmatic’ solution springs from the belief that there is no real problem here at all, and is similarly rejected. The only satisfactory solution must be axiological—to show that knowledge is valueless unless the demands of both Idealism and Realism are admitted. Professor Urban achieves this in a brief exposition of a theory of communication. The last part of the book (nearly half) is given to a discussion of relevant objections to the thesis, and to illustrating the harmony between Idealism and Realism in such concrete enterprises of knowing as the physical and social sciences, history, and Geisteswissenschaft. A great deal of the subtlety of Professor Urban’s argument has, of course, been lost in this brief abstract. The book owes much to both Rickert and Alexander, and must be considered a notable attempt to argue out a problem to which much thought has already been given. Technically, the device of trying to determine the minimum demands of both Idealism and Realism and then seeking a manner of recognizing both the minima is neat, but not altogether convincing. It leaves the reader with the doubt whether what have been reconciled are permanent and irreducible attitudes or values in knowing, or whether they are, taken separately, simply mistaken theories of knowledge.
The Great Philosophers Review of Eric Walter Frederick Tomlin, The Great Philosophers: The Western World (London: Skeffington and Son, 1950). First published in Times Literary Supplement (24 March 1950), 189. Mr Tomlin is not the first to embark upon the enterprise of offering the general reader an approach to philosophy through the lives of the great philosophers, and his book may be counted among the more successful of its kind mainly because he has command of a style which is bright and entertaining without being vulgar, and because his purpose is unpretentious. This really is a book for the general reader; it is not profound or original, but neither is it a ‘professorial’ blunder. Nobody, having read it, will imagine that he knows all about philosophy; nobody will have wasted his time or have been seriously misled in matters of detail. The information supplied is, on the whole, accurate (though Hume should not have been credited, on two occasions, with a work called an Essay Concerning Human Understanding) and, with perhaps the exception of the space given to the adventures of Abélard, a good sense of proportion is preserved; there is no striking failure of judgment in what is included and what is left out. And Mr Tomlin seems to have a fairly wide personal acquaintance with the writings of the more notable philosophers from Plato to Bergson. In his brisk manner he carries us through the centuries, filling in the spaces between the great men with pages which mention the lesser, and combining biographical information with exposition of philosophical conclusion. Of course there is simplification; there is regret for the unhappy faculty philosophers have of writing books ‘making difficult problems more difficult still’, and the reader comes to expect remarks such as: ‘Spinoza’s theory of Substance has proved a stumbling-block to philosophical students. But the idea which he is trying to put forward is really quite simple’; or Hegel’s
terminology and method of exposition have not been calculated to endear him to the ordinary reader. Both are difficult, sometimes aggravatingly so. But the fact to which he is endeavouring, here and elsewhere, to draw attention is a very simple one. But there is little which could be called gross over-simplification. The mesh of Mr Tomlin’s sieve is rather too large to retain much of the quality of a man’s mind, but it holds something of what he thought with tolerable reliability. These are the virtues of the book. But it is more difficult to answer the question: What sort of a view of the nature of philosophy will the reader carry away? He may be persuaded that there is nothing futile in philosophical discussion; at least he is told that it is a serious and worth-while occupation. And occasionally he will get a glimpse of a man (Berkeley, Hume or Kant) applying his mind to problems which his immediate predecessors had thrown up for consideration. But beyond this there is ambiguity. He will get nothing so simple as the idea of a philosophia perennis, or of philosophy as a gradually developing body of doctrine; but he may easily get the misleading impression that all these philosophers are talking about the same thing, and that there is something called ‘traditional philosophy’ (‘reflection about the nature of reality as a whole’ which is capable of providing ‘a guide to life, an incentive to right action, a light to wisdom’) from which certain mischievous contemporaries are leading us away. The serious and dispassionate voice of ‘philosophy’ usually makes itself heard without difficulty from peak to peak, but now and again (in the Middle Ages and also today) it is obscured by the ‘din of logic-chopping’ which rises from the valleys. Philosophy is not dogma, indeed we are told that it is an ‘attitude of mind; at bottom it is nothing but that irrepressible impulse towards inquiry, that itch to probe at the meaning of things,’ but somehow or other the proper course for the inquiry has become fixed and errancy is deprecated. In short, Mr Tomlin’s sympathies are with metaphysics; ‘philosophy’ at its best is metaphysics with a message.
Mr Carr’s First Volume Review of Edmund Hallett Carr, A History of Soviet Russia, vol. 1, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 (London: Macmillan, 1950). First published in Cambridge Journal, 4 (1951), 504–6. This opening volume is the first of three which are designed to compose together a history of the Bolshevik Revolution, 1917– 23. And these three volumes are themselves the first part of a project which is to carry the history of Russia down to 1928. We have, therefore, a work in progress, and criticism must await further instalments before the value of the whole enterprise can properly be determined. Moreover, the manner in which the first three volumes have been planned makes it all the more necessary to withhold judgment until the fellows of the first instalment have appeared. For the volumes are not consecutive parts of a chronological tale: each deals with an aspect of the history of the Bolshevik Revolution and covers, from its own point of view, the whole period. The second volume is to deal with economic policy, the third with foreign relations; the volume now published is concerned with the story of the CPSU(B), the early constitutional pronouncements of the revolutionary régime, and its policy in respect of the national units of the former Russian empire. Consequently, some of what the reader may find absent from the first volume may perhaps be supplied in those which follow. But, with only the first volume before us, there are certain observations which may profitably be made and which are not likely to be falsified by what is to come. It may be remarked, first, that Mr Carr has a profound, perhaps unrivalled, knowledge of the Russian writings, particularly Bolshevik writings, which bear upon this theme. He handles his material with great mastery and no sign of impatience: he is never at a loss for an apposite quotation. Secondly, the volume is preeminently readable. Its structure is clear, its details lucidly exposed
and at every point there is evidence of a strong intelligence at work. Mr Carr is aware of the difficulties of his project, and he is disarmingly modest about his achievement. And thirdly, without being himself a Communist, he has so much sympathy for the whole enterprise he is recounting that he is able to enter into the intentions of his subjects with remarkable success. In this volume he is dealing, in the main, with institutions, with the Bolshevik party, with the various congresses which met to discuss policy in these years, with the abortive Constituent Assembly and with the first Constitution of the USSR. But individuals appear, and particularly with Lenin Mr Carr has been to exceptional trouble to understand and expose his ideas and intentions. But there is nothing that can be called a portrait of Lenin, and in some respects the secret of his power is only imperfectly revealed. The two appendices, in which Mr Carr turns aside from the narrative to expound first Lenin’s theory of the state and then the Bolshevik doctrine of self-determination, are masterpieces of understanding and lucid, economical exposition. But to these observations must be added another, which because it concerns Mr Carr’s very curious notions of how to write history, is of more general importance. It may be said at once that Mr Carr does not conceal these notions; he parades them briefly in his Preface, and they are implicit in the plan and the detail of the work. And apart from the value, in detail, of his account of the Bolshevik Revolution (which is certainly great), it is particularly interesting because it raises in an acute form some of the more teasing problems of historiography. Everybody who has tried their hand at it, knows that there is nothing like writing a novel for revealing one’s emotional limitations; inadequacies scarcely visible in ordinary speech and action are magnified and become unmistakable. Similarly, the attempt to write history shows up the crudities of one’s thought: the unguarded phrase reveals and magnifies a hidden prejudice and at every turn we betray our nakedness. Both Mr Carr’s powers and his weakness are fully revealed here.
Let us begin with something simple. Mr Carr (but not his publisher) disdains the intention of writing a history of Soviet Russia during the period concerned. His work, he says, ‘purports to contain not an exhaustive record of the events of the period to which it relates, but an analysis of those events which moulded the main lines of further development’. In saying this he excuses himself from providing ‘a vivid picture of the revolution itself ’ (which can be found elsewhere), but in fact he is confessing to the unfortunate enterprise of writing history backwards. And the effect of this decision is manifest on almost every page: the lost causes, the abortive attempts, the projects which came to nothing, the men who were eliminated scarcely appear, or appear only to be brushed aside by the historian in a story which can get on without them. ‘The victory gained by the Marxists over Narodism and the revolutionary actions of the working class, which proved that the Marxists were right’, says the official history of the CPSU(B);28 and though Mr Carr often improves upon the details of the story, he does not improve upon the point of view; his history is the story of those who were ‘proved right’ by success. On many occasions the defeated are not only squeezed out of the story, they are excluded also from giving evidence in their own persons. Of course it is not true that none but Bolsheviks appear in these pages, but it is largely true that everything that does appear is subordinated to the party which is predestined to win. Now, that some men are defeated and others victorious, that some policies and projects go down before others, is a common occurrence, and any history which did not recognize it when it happened would be convicted of incoherence. But that lost causes are not part of history, that they should be seen only through the eyes of the victors, that defeat at the hands of events must entail defeat at the hands of the historian, and that what is victorious i s predestined to victory a nd is insulated f rom what i t defeats— these are strange propositions to come from an historian. A bias [28] History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course, p. 30.
in favour of what is successful (or appears to the historian at the time of writing to have been successful) is far more corrupting than any merely partisan bias; and it is not to be excused here on the ground that after all this is the history of the intentions, the activities, and the fortunes of a victorious party, because these intentions and activities were not cut off from the rest of the story and were not, taken by themselves, what prevailed. History as a success story is always abbreviated history. Of course, often enough, the history of England has been written on this model— kings and statesmen being accounted ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in relation to some preconceived ‘logic’ of occurrences or development of events which is used as a ready-made criterion of relevance: some ‘contribute’, others are non-contributors, and are as if they had never been. But it is disheartening, just when we were beginning to get over this sort of thing, to find it reinstated in respect of a new tract of the history of mankind. It is, I think, Mr Carr’s concern with what he calls an ‘appreciation of the universal significance’ of the events he is recounting which has led him astray. ‘Universal significance’ is difficult to observe at the longest range, and it is not surprising that the enterprise of detecting it at the range of a mere twenty-five years should have degenerated into a peculiarly simple exercise in whiggish history. If the significance Mr Carr looked for had been something more modest, something less than universal, his history would have been more genuine. Besides the ‘appreciation of universal significance’, the other test imposed by Mr Carr upon himself as an historian is that of achieving ‘an imaginative understanding of the outlook and purpose of his dramatis personae.’ Here nobody will disagree. And every reader will remark upon the outstanding achievement of Mr Carr in this respect. But there is something else to be observed—not any simple excessiveness in his sympathy, not the mere fact of sympathy outrunning itself, but the manner in which, keeping so close to his chosen task, his sympathy is replaced with total immersion. Explorers of the jungle of history, when they depart from that mean in which they remain explorers, are apt
to fly to one or other of two extremes: they may insist upon all modern conveniences, dress for dinner in the jungle and never achieve a moment’s real sympathy with what they are exploring, or they may ‘go native’. Mr Carr has achieved the remarkable feat of ‘going native’ without being a Communist. He has, of course, been pushed towards this extreme rather than the other, not only by his commendable determination not to fail in sympathy, but also by his general view of the history of modern Europe with which readers of his other works are well acquainted. These presuppositions occasionally obtrude themselves in his writing about the Bolshevik Revolution; here and there, usually on the last page of a chapter when he is summing up a situation, passages appear in which they are expounded. But they lurk always below the surface, controlling the direction of his attention and the form of his analysis. Now, if this were merely a matter of what is called ‘bias’ in history, there would be nothing more to do than call attention to it and commend it for its insight or observe its shortcomings. And in so far as it is a matter of ‘bias’, it is certainly not mere passion or prejudice: Mr Carr has a considered view of the way things have been going for some centuries, and if he fits the Bolshevik Revolution into this view and interprets it in this manner, he is doing something that Maitland would scarcely approve of, but something common enough to be excusable—particularly when no attempt at concealment is made. But unfortunately it is not a mere matter of ‘bias’: it is something much more important: it is a matter of style and diction. It is scarcely too much to say that ‘going native’ in Mr Carr’s degree makes an end of anything recognizable as history. Let us suppose a novelist who is recounting the fortunes and relations of five or six characters, each of whom is known to the others by a pet name. These pet names spring up within the world of the characters: they are invented by the characters and they compose a nomenclature the significance of which is that it helps to disclose how A thinks of B or how C and D understand
the character of E. These names belong to the language which is spoken between the characters. But the novelist himself is not a character in his book: he is the creator of his characters. And if at any point he is engaged in disclosing the character of E, not as understood by C or D but as seen by somebody on the periphery of the world to which the characters belong, or if he wishes to disclose what E is ‘really like’, it will naturally be out of place, misleading, incongruous to refer to E by his pet name. Now, some such situation as this arises in writing history. The historian is the maker of his events; they have a meaning for him which was not their meaning for those who participated in them, and he will not speak of them in the same way as they spoke of them. He is the creator of his characters; and to reveal only what their contemporaries thought of them or what they thought of themselves (though this is of great importance) is to show an imperfect mastery over them. This, I assume, is what Mr Carr means when he speaks of the historian’s task as the appreciation of the ‘universal significance’ of what he is writing about. And when the historian merely ‘goes native’ (resigns the task of creation and allows sympathy to become total immersion) he handicaps himself severely—unless by some miracle the characters of whom he writes had themselves an appreciation of the ‘universal significance’ of their own activities. I think it is Mr Carr’s view that this was the happy position of the men he is writing about; but if it is, I think also that he should have elucidated the miracle at greater length. For most of his readers, however, Mr Carr in this history is dealing with a set of people who speak an extraordinary private language. They have an idiom in which they make their thoughts known to one another. Of course this language represents, like any other language, an interpretation of the world. But the significant thing for the historian is that it is an interpretation of the world (whether or not ‘true’) confined to a small body of men, and that this language requires to be translated if what these men are saying is in any proper sense to be understood by anyone else.
And it is on account, not of the greatness of Mr Carr’s sympathy, but of its misdirection, that he entirely fails to attempt the task of translation. He has himself become so adept in the language, perhaps he has come to believe implicitly in the interpretation of the world it represents, that he has forgotten altogether that it is the eccentricity of a few. A history of the Albigenses written in the idiom of Albigensian belief would ordinarily be supposed to have been written merely for the edification of the brethren: it could mean very little to anyone else. But Mr Carr writes the history of the Bolshevik Revolution in the language of Bolshevism and yet looks for his readers (one assumes) in the world at large. It is true that in recent years, we have been bombarded to such an extent by this idiom of speech that many of its turns are familiar to us, but that it can be said to have it any clear meaning for us is an exaggeration. The way it has been used, asa jargon in which the same few phrases are repeated interminably, has ensured that it never rises above a minimum standard of intelligibility. And, above all, one would have thought, the task it imposes upon the historian is that of translation. The sceptic might suspect that the failure to translate springs from a too small faith in the intelligibility of this language, but that I think is not the case here. Mr Carr does not translate either because he believes that this is the language which reveals ‘universal significance’ or because he has forgotten that translation is necessary; a piece of forgetfulness all the more remarkable because on occasion he is capable of remembering. The world, for Mr Carr, enjoys the use of two languages; the language of ‘the West’ (usually designated by the emotive epithet ‘bourgeois’) and the language of Marxist theory. His history, it would appear, is written for the instruction of ‘the West’, but it is written almost throughout in the language of Marxism. There are scores of passages where the reader finds himself begging the author to translate; but in vain. To begin with, the categories in which individuals are placed, the epithets used to indicate character or calling, are Marxist. We were treated in an earlier
work of Mr Carr’s to the classification of Burckhardt as a ‘bourgeois historian’, and here the idiom is unrestrained. Struve is ‘a Marxist intellectual’. Molotov is ‘a young intellectual from Kazan’—but what is an ‘intellectual’? ‘Proletarians’ and ‘workers’ abound in these pages; men are either ‘revolutionaries’ or ‘reactionaries’. And when the reader is introduced to ‘rich peasants’ and ‘poor peasants’, though it does not tell him very much, it is with a sigh of relief that he welcomes something that he can begin to understand. When Mr Carr wishes to describe the three leaders of the national movement in the Ukraine, one is called ‘a learned professor’ and another a ‘self-made man’ who had practised journalism, and we begin to see through the haze the kind of men we are being called upon to take notice of: but the third is merely a ‘revolutionary intellectual’, a term which, if it has a meaning, needs elucidation. Governments are ‘bourgeois’ (Finland) or ‘proletarian’; revolutions are ‘bourgeois’, ‘bourgeois nationalist’, ‘democratic’, or ‘socialist’. Parties are ‘right’ or ‘left’. And when these categories manifestly fail to give meaning to the situation, Mr Carr follows Lenin in finding ‘quasi-“proletarians”’ and “bourgeois” national governments’ in the eastern borderlands of Russia. And yet in observing the difference between the ‘federalism’ of the USSR and what we ordinarily mean by federalism, by some oversight Mr Carr does not refer to our federalism as ‘bourgeois federalism’, and having freed himself for a moment from the incubus of the Marxist idiom, he gives a reasoned and intelligible account of the situation. In short, Mr Carr almost invariably writes his history in the obscure, private language of the participants in the events he is recounting: there is no difference between the language of his numerous quotations from Lenin and Stalin and the language he uses to comment on them. Of course there are great difficulties. The historian has no vocabulary of his own; he is obliged in any case to use the language of morals and politics. But he should be wary of its implications. If he fails to perceive the difficulty, or surrenders to it, the ‘reformer’ in his pages will be opposed by the ‘reactionary’, ‘revolution’ by ‘counter-revolution’, and men and
projects will appear only as they were thought of by their partners or opponents. For Clarendon an incident in English history was a ‘rebellion’, for Mr Carr, Kornilov is the leader of an ‘insurrection’. But the art of writing history is precisely the art of overcoming this difficulty—the art of understanding men and events more profoundly than they were understood when they lived and happened. Mr Carr is guilty of hubris when, in his Preface, he makes light of the difficulty of writing contemporary or nearcontemporary history; its almost insuperable difficulty lies in making the translation from the language of morals and politics to the language of history. And the failure is aggravated here when the vocabulary is that of an eccentric view of morals and politics. One of the effects of Mr Carr’s surrender to the language of his characters is that he gives the appearance of accepting some of their doctrines with an uncritical readiness. The whole treatment of the much-advertised ‘union of theory and practice’ leaves much to be desired in this respect. And at one point an incoherence is uncovered, but not recognized, because of Mr Carr’s misdirected sympathy. In the Constitution of the RSFSR, it is observed, ‘the freedom of the worker was asserted, not against the state, but through the action of the state’, and the ‘bourgeois’ notion of the individual requiring protection against the power of government was superseded in the ‘autocracy of the people’. But the theory did not work out in practice. Not only did the VTsIK (as Mr Carr remarks) pass a resolution giving citizens ‘a right of appeal against any neglect or violation of their rights by officials’, but also a thoroughly ‘bourgeois’ conflict of interest appeared between the ‘proletariat’ and the ‘peasantry’. And again, Mr Carr asserts that ‘the essence of the terror [September 1918] was its class character. It selected victims on the ground, not of specific offences, but of their membership of the possessing classes’. This, no doubt, was the theory, but the brief account of the terror given in these pages shows it to have been of a different character—the elimination of ‘proletarians’ and their leaders who opposed the Bolshevik party.
It is not, however, to be thought that Mr Carr is universally uncritical—he can be critical, in detail, to great effect, even in respect of his hero Lenin. Inaccuracy in simple fact rarely escapes him; and he is not willing to pass over the more glaring examples of disingenuousness in the arguments of the Bolsheviks. And on the occasion when he assumes the proper role of the historian, he has some acute observations to make. For example, he points out that the principal leaders of the revolution took no part in composing the Constitution of the RSFSR, and he makes their abstention intelligible—they were engaged on more important work, the consideration of the party programme. But a more generally critical attitude is conspicuously absent. In his unwillingness to ‘measure’ Lenin and his partners in revolution by standards borrowed from the politics of more normal times or less disrupted societies, he comes to measure them by their own standards and endows them with a right to wreck their will in Russia whatever the consequences, approving their enterprise and applauding their ‘logic’. It would have been better if he had not tried to ‘measure’ them at all. Besides his prejudice in favour of success and his failure to attempt the task of translation inherent in the historian’s enterprise, there is another respect in which Mr Carr’s account of the Bolshevik Revolution falls short of genuine history. Indeed, he appears before us as a wizard rather than as an historian: with a wave of his wand he puts us to sleep and we are carried as if in a dream to an island in time, peopled by a race devoid of memory, a race (it appears) either without a past or with a past so obnoxious to it as to be regarded as non-contributory to its fortunes. And it is no part of Mr Carr’s project to call its or our attention to what it has forgotten or rejected. Into a Russia, which has a geography (though we are provided with no map) but no history, there broke a collection of extraordinary professional adventurers, speaking a curious language and led by a man of iron determination and almost miraculous proficiency in the language, able to express himself in it with an unmatched fluency and confidence. These
adventurers came with long-matured plans for the organization of this benighted people. They were not wholly at one about what they had to teach or what they had to establish, but subsequent events showed that one group was predestined to gain the upper hand and impose its ideas and policy. Consequently, we need pay little attention either to lost causes, to the context of confusion and contention from which this group emerged triumphant (it is represented as almost a sham fight), or to what they found on their appearance. We are present, it appears, not at a reformation or a revolution, but at the creation of a world ex nihilo by a demiurge who came from Switzerland. Consequently, the starting point of our investigation is the abstract ‘idea’ to be realized and the generation of this ‘idea’: we begin not with Russia, but with revolutionaries in conference. We are told that Lenin was ‘a practical Russian revolutionary, whose revolutionary theory was framed in the light of Russian needs and Russian potentialities’, and we are told something about the immediate situation when he appeared at the Finland Station in 1917, but virtually nothing is said about the Russia to be transformed. On any showing, even the most doctrinaire, this Russia could not be entirely excluded from the situation, and here and there it comes in for brief recognition, but proper consideration is given only to the revolution of 1905, which is treated as an incident in pre-messianic history. It is hinted that in the forgotten past Russia was ruled by an autocrat, that it enjoyed the advantage of a secret police, that the ‘proletariat’ had no legal status, and that the revolutionary task of eliminating the old bureaucracy was difficult. But Russia before the Revolution is never allowed to enter in detail into the story of the Revolution: it was merely non-contributory. Perhaps it is too early to make this complaint, perhaps in subsequent volumes Mr Carr will provide what is omitted from this; nevertheless, it is an omission here which most readers will regret. The story, even as the story of a revolution, seems to begin in a curiously remote place. In short, if we take the guidance given by this first volume, what Mr Carr is to provide us with is a more accurate version
of the legend of Soviet history—the story of the generation of Soviet Russia as seen through the eyes of its founding fathers. In detail it differs from the official histories; in general the difference is small, except in respect of lucidity. This is something valuable; it is important for us to know how this set of people thought of themselves and what they believed themselves to be doing and to have done. But it is something to one side of what a history of Soviet Russia should be expected to supply. The nearest parallel to Mr Carr’s achievement is to be found in some of the earlier writings on the history of the United States of America: his attitude towards the history of Soviet Russia is almost a replica of St Augustine’s attitude towards the history of the Roman Empire.
The B.B.C. Review of Report of the Broadcasting Committee, 1949 (Cmd. 8116, H.M.S.O, 1951); and Appendix H. Memoranda Submitted to the Committee (Cmd. 8117, H.M.S.O, 1951). First published in Cambridge Journal, 4 (1951), 543–54. On its first appearance, attention naturally fastened upon the considerations which fill the foreground of the Report of the Committee on Broadcasting, and immediate comment took these as its text. But it is not less appropriate that subsequent reflection should turn to some of the questions started, but not pursued, in the Report. For, as must happen with an inquiry bound by specific terms of reference, the investigation often opened up topics which could not be explored and as often avoided what is important merely because it did not lie directly in its path; more materials were gathered than could be used, and what was used was arranged to construct a consistent argument. Consequently, with help rather than hindrance from the Report, but with some rearrangement of the information collected, the inquiring reader is able to compose for himself a picture of broadcasting in Britain today; and it is a picture which has some curious passages. With us, broadcasting descended upon a literate population, a population which owed its education chiefly to newspapers and one accustomed to being entertained; and this, perhaps more than anything else, determined its character. In these circumstances broadcasting here could scarcely fail to be somewhat different from what it is, for example, in Russia. Chance (rather than design) made the activity a monopoly, deliberation kept it a monopoly and put it into the hands of a Public Corporation, and a masterful first Director General impressed a characteristic manner upon it. But it was a manner which, while leaving the patrons of broadcasting in some degree dissatisfied and making them in some degree rebellious, fitted tolerably their expectations. Of
course, the B.B.C. began with a considerable reserve of popularity to draw upon. The wireless-set was a new toy and itself afforded entertainment, whatever was broadcast; and when the newness began to wear off, a habit of listening had been contracted which could be disappointed only by having nothing at all to listen to. Further, the expectations were largely the creation of the B.B.C. itself, and consequently were not so difficult to satisfy. But, when all this is admitted, it remains true that among what was broadcast the listener could usually find something which was a good enough approximation to his desires for the divergencies (except in one or two respects) to pass unnoticed. It was some time before journalists began to tell listeners what they ought to think of the programmes, and until this happened the vast majority were on the whole uncritical of what they were given. A decade or more had to pass before the way things were going could be unmistakably detected. It is sometimes said that too much is attributed to broadcasting; in itself, we are told, it is nothing more than an activity of dispersing or disseminating. It is spoken of as ‘a channel for communication’, a means of bringing people in touch with one another, and our attention is called to the neutrality of the instrument. And there is some significance in this observation: it reminds us that the wireless transmitter, like the internal combustion engine, is a product of human inventiveness which carries with it the unfortunate suggestion that since we have discovered a means of doing something we are well advised to do it, and the more of it the better—a suggestion which seems to separate the activity of broadcasting from what is broadcast. No doubt a transmitter, like a telephone wire, exists when it is not being used and may not improperly be called a potential means of communication, but in fact what we mean by broadcasting is an activity which does not take place until a programme is broadcast: the neutrality of the instrument is not at all shared by the activity. The B.B.C. is not, and never has been, a mere channel of communication: it is
the organization of an activity in which a particular and carefully composed product is disseminated. The original Licence in 1926 precluded the B.B.C. from broadcasting an opinion of its own on matters of public policy, and in practice it does not overtly communicate its own opinion, if it has one, on any specific topic. Nevertheless, it has a policy, and what is broadcast springs, directly or remotely, from that policy. No attempt has been made to conceal this from us, and the long B.B.C. Memorandum which is printed with the rest of the written evidence received by the Committee contains only the latest of many statements of policy. But although the policy has never been concealed and has never seriously deviated from the inspired direction given it by the first Director-General, the passage of time has carried away some of the chaff and there can be no longer any doubt about what precisely is afoot. And it is something so remarkable that it could find the ready acceptance it seems to have found only in a world grown accustomed to remarkable happenings. Policy is often most effectively revealed, not when it is being expounded, but when it is being applied, and the discussion of monopoly in the B.B.C. Memorandum may be recognized as an occasion of this sort if we observe that much of the argument in favour of monopoly is, in fact, an attempt to show that the policy pursued by the B.B.C. would be difficult, if not impossible, for any but a monopolist organization. The foundation of B.B.C. policy, it appears, is the idea of broadcasting with a ‘social purpose’, broadcasting directed to the discharge of certain ‘social responsibilities’. These include ‘responsibility for impartiality, for the greatest possible freedom at the microphone, for the preservation of standards and the re-establishing on a broader basis of a regard for values, for the use of broadcasting as an educational medium and a means to raise public taste, for the discharge of broadcasting’s duty to and in all the arts, for the encouragement of all artistic endeavour whether of creation or performance, for the use of broadcasting to develop true
citizenship and the leading of a full life’; to which may be added, from another page, the responsibility for being ‘a bastion against the tide seeking to submerge values in a disintegrating world’.29 In short, it is the policy of the B.B.C. to be a standard-bearer: to inquire into and take notice of its patrons’ preferences, but instead of giving them exactly what they want now, to give them what they will want when they have been baptized in the broad stream of the Corporation’s ‘general educational purpose’. It might be supposed that, alongside this high social purpose, the B.B.C. would consider itself to be the purveyor of entertainment of a more ordinary character; but the conjecture is frowned upon. The Charter holds it to be desirable that the Corporation should be a means of information, education, and entertainment, and to these the tradition of the B.B.C. has added the raising of public taste. But in the policy of the B.B.C. they do not appear as disconnected activities, and it is thought pre-eminently important that the endeavour to raise public taste should never slacken or be excluded. This all-pervading purpose of the B.B.C. is articulated in three programmes, and there has been no more candid exposition of its policy than the words of the present Director-General: It rests on the conception of the community as a broadly based cultural pyramid slowly aspiring upwards. This pyramid is served by three main programmes, [29] There appears to be an unfortunate confusion of thought in this passage, arising from the ambiguity of the word ‘broadcasting’. It combines the definition of social—purpose broadcasting as the observation of a duty or responsibility to use the transmitter to disseminate programmes designed to promote certain specified social ends, with the misleading suggestion that this duty is somehow imposed by the power to transmit—thus making it appear that social-purpose broadcasting is the only dutiful sort of broadcasting. But social-purpose broadcasting cannot be ‘the discharge of broadcasting’s duty to the arts’, etc. (because there is no such antecedent duty); it is the imposition of a specific duty upon those who engage in broadcasting to use the transmitter for the encouragement of artistic endeavour, etc.
differentiated but broadly overlapping in levels of interest, each programme leading on to the other, the listener being induced through the years increasingly to discriminate in favour of the things that are more worthwhile. Each programme at any given moment must be ahead of its public, but not so much as to lose their confidence. The listener must be led from good to better by curiosity, liking and a growth of understanding. As the standards of the education and culture of the community rise so should the programme pyramid rise as a whole. To these general statements of policy must be added one or two important details. It is not at all the desire of the B.B.C. to create a population of what are called ‘passive’ listeners (or viewers, in the case of television) who merely enjoy what they are given. Indeed, those who treat listening as a ‘private pleasure’ and do not allow it to induce in them ‘public activity’ are sent to the bottom of the class; the ‘good listeners’ are ‘serious’, ‘active’, ‘responsible’ listeners. Further, it is the policy of the B.B.C. to protect this great enterprise of education from interlopers; it welcomes (or tolerates) broadcasts addressed to British listeners from foreign countries, so long, as they represent ‘the people or the Government’ of those countries; but it objects to foreign ‘commercial’ broadcasting (that is, broadcasting without a ‘social purpose’) reaching the British public, in the belief that it is ‘bad’ and that the ‘bad’ will inescapably drive out the ‘good’. With regard to the opportunity afforded by Relay Exchanges for listeners to take a foreign programme in preference to a British, the B.B.C. has pronounced that its ‘main concern is to ensure that the objectives of its broadcasting policy are not prejudiced … It desires to safeguard its standards of impartiality, its general programme policy, and its long-term educational intent.’ In order to pursue this policy wisely and with energy, the B.B.C. has surrounded itself with advisory bodies, it broadcasts 37 1/2
hours a day, and it employs a staff of nearly 12,000. Its aim is to make each of its programmes, including television, available to the vast majority of listeners in this island, and with the shortest possible delay. The promised time is not very far off ‘when it is possible every evening for every citizen of this country not only to hear but to see what has been happening in the world that day: when the great events of nations and in the international field can be remotely ‘attended’ by the inhabitants of almost every town and village; when the colour, the excitement, the variety and the ‘worth-whileness of everyday life can be communicated to the richest, the poorest, the loneliest and the most gregarious; when harmony, design and grace can be visually as well as audibly taken into every home; then there must surely be something added which, working with all the other beneficent influences within the community, will have the capacity to make for a broader vision and a fuller life’. Broadcasting in this country, then, is controlled by a policy: we have, first, a Corporation self-dedicated to the improvement of mankind according to a recipe of its own; and we have, secondly, that Corporation vested with the monopoly of broadcasting. We might have had neither of these things; we might have had the second without the first or (pace the B.B.C.) the first without the second; in fact we have both. It is a situation so astonishing that we must be ready to listen to those who would warn us against exaggeration. We shall be reminded that, after all, the B.B.C. does not control all the sources of instruction and improvement in the country; it has the monopoly of only one of the instruments of education and entertainment. And we shall be told that, although the material broadcast is fitted to a policy, it is (one way or another) supplied by the society to which it is broadcast; the B.B.C. depends upon the current activities of society—the stage, the worlds of music, literature and learning, and the course of external events—which are independent of it, and it merely disseminates a selection from what these provide. There is, of course, truth and relevance in both
these contentions; but when we consider the formidable power of the microphone, they offer little or nothing in mitigation of our situation. Both the B.B.C. and the Committee are aware of this power, but interpreting it solely in terms of ‘pervasiveness’, they mistake its character. For broadcasting (especially by a ‘publicservice’ monopoly organization) is not mere dissemination, and its power does not derive merely from its range. Everything that is broadcast is unavoidably given an amplified significance; it not only travels far and wide, but it arrives at its various destinations with an immeasurably increased authority. The mere fact of broadcasting an opinion adds to the weight of its impact. The strongest argument against allowing some eccentrics on the air is not that they may give offence (which is the only argument considered by the Committee), but that the very fact of broadcasting it gives to the eccentricity an altogether false degree of importance. What was intended as an insignificant addition to the museum of popular curiosity becomes mistaken for a significant character or opinion. Broadcasting adds to whatever authority an opinion may already possess, endows with authority opinions which have none, and (without any intention of doing so on the part of the B.B.C.) unavoidably distorts our sense of proportion. It is not fanciful to suggest that there is nothing so important as to merit being broadcast—not even the time-signal. And it must not be forgotten that to all this must be added the fact that, in sound broadcasting, the speaker is unseen. To be chosen to speak is to acquire authority; to appear only as a voice entails a partial anonymity which obliquely acknowledges and at the same time amplifies the source of the authority. To these heroic passages in this sketch of our situation must be added others of a somewhat different character. We need not, for the moment, consider the quality of the material used by the B.B.C. in its enterprise of evangelization, except to remark that here and there in its Memorandum the B.B.C. admits to difficulties in carrying out its policy. The material of the sought-for quality is not always available in the quantity required to fill the number
of hours for which patrons now expect to be entertained or educated. But what is more important than the difficulties of the B.B.C. in maintaining its standards, is the part of the picture which concerns the audience: and here we descend from the sublime to the ludicrous. There are now a little over twelve million licenced receiving sets. The B.B.C.’s Audience Research estimates that of those listening at any given moment in the evening 63 per cent are listening to the Light Programme, 36 per cent to the Home Service, and 1 per cent to the Third Programme (which has only a 50 per cent coverage as against the 97 per cent coverage of the two more popular programmes). For particular items the proportions may, however, be quite different. The same source of information detects the following order of preferences in the population as a whole—Variety, Plays, Light Music, Military Bands, Musical Comedy, Cinema Organs, Brass Bands, Religious Services, Discussions, Dance Bands, Talks, and so on. This suggests to the Committee that ‘the types of programme most naturally suited to broadcasting as a means of communication are Plays and Light Music’; but a fairer inference than this recondite conclusion would perhaps be that the patrons of the B.B.C. prefer to be entertained while they are being evangelised. There is, however, one more piece of information which must be taken into consideration—the most sardonic passage in the picture—‘the bulk of listeners treat listening as a secondary activity, a background noise while they are doing something else’. An odd situation. It is as if a benevolent newspaper proprietor were spending a fortune in an attempt to provide elevating reading-matter for mankind, only to discover that the vast bulk of those who bought his product never read a line of it, but used it for wrapping up fish and chips. A sketch does not pretend to explore every detail, but there is another feature of our situation which is important enough to be observed: the B.B.C. is not merely convinced of the merit of its policy but, when called upon, expounds it with an altogether remarkable show of self-righteousness—a priggishness which
reaches such proportions in the Memorandum submitted to the Committee as to make one wonder what sort of persons these are who control that considerable part of our life over which their monopoly presides. Even the most sympathetic reader must find this parade of ‘social purpose’ and ‘public service’ tiresomely sanctimonious: surely nothing should be taken quite so seriously as the B.B.C. takes itself. The schoolmasterish disposition towards its patrons is difficult enough to stomach, but when it descends to a deeper level, and the St. George-and-the-Dragon attitude makes its appearance, we may be forgiven (even when we exclude the more grotesque expressions of this attitude) if we reach the conclusion that here is something altogether excessive. At any rate, pretentions of this character unavoidably bring those who exhibit them upon the carpet. Those who endeavour to pass for the lights of the world must expect to attract the eyes of it, and their small blemishes are more justly ridiculous than much greater in those who are more modest. And perhaps the most curious characteristic of the Report is that it does not occur to the Committee to do anything but endorse and applaud this attitude—except, indeed, to add its own peculiar contribution of sententiousness. Glutted with ‘public service’ and bludgeoned with ‘social purpose’, the reader finds himself in the mood of the Frenchman who was so disgusted with the word fraternité que si j’avais véritablement un frère je l’appellerais mon cousin. This, briefly, is the picture which emerges: to say the least, it is curious. Broadcasting in Great Britain is, in intention, nothing less than a far-reaching experiment in universal education conducted by persons whose activities are to some extent circumscribed but are virtually uncontrolled. They recognize a responsibility to the nation, but it is a responsibility for the maintenance of standards of thought and opinion and taste which they have themselves determined and in a great variety of fields. Nothing like it exists anywhere else in the world, for a similar intensity of control is matched elsewhere by a restriction of the field of interest; and one wonders whether it would exist here if we had known from the
beginning what was afoot. The easy acceptance of the B.B.C. by a nation which for so long has avoided an authoritative Academy of Letters and a unified system of school or university education may be supposed to argue at least some absence of mind. Indeed, the acceptance is perhaps understandable only when we turn from the intention to the result which bulks largest, and recognize in the B.B.C. a monopoly providing a ‘background noise’. Now, if this is anything like the truth of our situation, the conclusion of the Committee, that the fundamental question for decision is the ‘issue of monopoly’, seems a little near-sighted. It might be thought that some room would have been found for the consideration of the much larger and more important question— whether broadcasting conducted on a policy such as that pursued by the B.B.C. is desirable at all. And it might be supposed that it would be time enough to consider monopoly when this question had been answered. Of course there must be attention to standards; but it is not unreasonable to ask whether these particular standards and this particular, over-heated pursuit of a narrowly conceived social purpose is the proper object for broadcasting, or whether what is desirable is something less highfalutin’. For if we are bidden choose between broadcasting conducted in the manner of the B.B.C. and the supposed standardless bedlam of commercial broadcasting we are offered an incomplete range of alternatives. And that the Committee did not address itself to this question is the more remarkable because the most cogent arguments against monopoly which it had to listen to were, in fact, not against monopoly itself, but against monopoly exercised by a Corporation with a severe and self-determined policy of social uplift. However, on account of a confused concern with insignificant detail, the full force of these arguments seems never to have been felt by the Committee, the majority having accepted in advance the propriety of broadcasting with the special kind of social purpose which is characteristic of the B.B.C. When we reflect upon the desirability of broadcasting in the manner of the B.B.C., it is perhaps relevant to consider how
the B.B.C.’s pursuit of its policy has worked out in practice—to consider, that is, the place the B.B.C. (not as a monopoly, nor as the provider of a ‘background noise’, but as a guide in matters of taste and education) has come to occupy in our society. And the Report does not leave us unprovided with information on this topic. The impact of the B.B.C. upon school education, for example, is great and is growing: is it a happy one? Do we regard with equanimity a public corporation (whether or not it enjoys a monopoly) which invites itself into the schoolroom with the offer of stimulants, ‘the voices of the outstanding men of our time’, ‘new facts’, ‘specialized knowledge’ presented by ‘highly skilled broadcasters’, and all this accompanied with instructional pamphlets and school prayers? It is not merely a jaundiced eye which may discern in this (and perhaps in much else of the B.B.C.’s general educational effort) an encouragement of one of the less good products of contemporary education: the extensive mind, curious, interested, pseudo-sympathetic, preferring many contacts to few intimacies, preferring fact to thought and crowded with a disordered array of imperfectly realized images—the quiz mentality. Do we look forward to a uniform curriculum with ushers to turn on the wireless set and keep order? And if (with the B.B.C. and the Committee) we have no such hopes, what, we may ask ourselves, relieves us of our fears? Already the B.B.C. is applauded (by some members of the Committee) for being a ‘unifying force’ in education, and the educational prospects of television are said to ‘seem almost boundless’. Of course, the remedy is in our hands: we may choose what seems good to us from all that is offered, or, if nothing seems good, we need not participate at all. But this is to reckon without the prestige of the B.B.C. and to neglect the laziness of mankind; to expect the worst is less foolish, all things considered, than to hope for the best. The schoolmaster need not fear to lose his job; he need fear only the ease and corruption which comes from having done for him what he should do for himself.
Or consider the News Bulletins broadcast by the B.B.C. A cloud of witnesses testified before the Committee to the high standard of impartiality; but when this is taken for granted, as it may be, there are other things to reflect upon. The world as it appears in the pages of a newspaper is a thing of rags and tatters, grim, grotesque, erratic and entertaining, and any sensible man chooses his newspaper for the quality of imagination which has gone to compose the picture it offers: truth, except in dull detail, nobody asks for. With this, of course, a B.B.C. bulletin cannot compete: the picture of the world it offers is necessarily more selective. But it is selected with a gravity which no newspaper would emulate. The world as it appears to the B.B.C. has room for trivialities, but their triviality is underlined; no listener is left in any doubt that life is earnest. ‘The object’, says the Memorandum, ‘is to state the news of the day accurately, fairly, soberly and impersonally’, but to complete the catalogue the word ‘continuously’ should have been added. No doubt we owe the multiplicity of news bulletins to the war, but is it in the public interest, and to what interpretation of social purpose does it belong, to keep the listening public informed, in a continuous situation report, about the dull and doubtful detail of the serious nonsense that is taking place all over the world? And when to the ten main daily news bulletins are added News Reels, days and weeks in Parliament, and the promise that before long, every evening, every citizen of this country will be able to see on the television screen what has happened in the world that day, we may wonder whether the bastion against the tide seeking to submerge values in a disintegrating world has not itself sprung a leak. Of course a news service, like a bus service, must run just in case anyone should be needing it: we cannot all listen at the same times. But this turns it into the ‘sale of a popular commodity’; as a whole, its educational effect is to encourage idle curiosity: listening to the news is becoming a nervous ailment. Or consider, to take a last example, the B.B.C. as an entertainer. It is a characteristic of the world we live in that activities which used to have their times and seasons, and were marked by a
certain ceremoniousness, are now carried on continuously: we work day and night, holidays are staggered, only the ancient festivals come at their proper intervals and consequently retain a significance and power over the imagination which nothing else can acquire. Entertainment, like the rest, is splintered, and the B.B.C. as an entertainer could not expect to be an exception to the rule. But in this matter, as in others, the scale into which the B.B.C. puts the weight of its influence will go down with a bump. The Derby, which one might witness once in a life-time and retain as a brilliant and happy memory to the end of one’s days, can be seen in an attenuated form every year without moving from the house; listening to a play (or seeing it) is a daily opportunity, offered euphemistically as ‘theatre’; the possessor of a wireless set is never at a loss for an escape from his own thoughts or from the conversation of his companions. Of course, once again, the reply is that nobody is compelled to listen, that in fact people who listen also go to the theatre; but it is a reply which either misses the real impact of broadcast entertainment or recognizes broadcast entertainment merely as the provision of a popular commodity. The felt necessity of filling all those hours with entertainment corrupts the entertainers, because it is impossible without including a quantum of material which nobody could be happy in using; and the opportunity of turning on the tap corrupts the listener in the same manner as the ready supply of tinned food corrupts the cook. This is not, however, to say that the B.B.C. as an entertainer has done nothing to win the approval of even the severest critic. When the conversation turns to criticize the B.B.C., the Lifeman has an easy entrance with the gambit: ‘but not the music’; and one does not require to spur one’s generosity to agree that here is a remarkable achievement. The policy of the B.B.C. in operation seems, then, to raise two main questions, one concerning quality and the other relating to quantity. And neither of these questions is properly discussed in the Report: the quality is merely applauded and the quantity scarcely considered. Our answers to both will, no doubt, be influenced by
the consideration of monopoly, but neither can be reduced to this consideration. Of the first enough perhaps has been said already. The problem is not how to improve the standards of the B.B.C., or how to bring about a closer coincidence of performance and standard, but whether these are the proper standards to impose upon the activity of broadcasting. At any rate, the opinion of the Committee, and of the B.B.C. itself, that what alone justifies monopoly is the quality of the article at present dispensed is a proposition which calls for further reflection rather than for immediate assent. On the lowest level, it is open to question whether the antics in which the maintenance of ‘impartiality’ involes the B.B.C. do not suggest that broadcasting is being made to pursue a too ambitious course; and perhaps what is indicated is not the abolition of monopoly but a reduction of the activities in which impartiality is desirable. What the B.B.C. broadcasts is, in quantity, pre-eminently suitable for the invalid, the house-bound and the inhabitant of remote places. To be able to turn it on at any moment in 17 hours out of the 24 is, for these, a benefit; for others it is a potential source of distraction. The indiscriminate competitive exploitation of the internal combustion engine has transformed our manner of life without demonstrably improving it, and there is little to show that the relentless and efficient exploitation of the power to transmit by a public service broadcasting monopoly is not having a similar result. And the opportunity which the Committee had of making recommendations which might change what has become a mere natural urge into a morally discriminating activity (so far as quantity is concerned) has unhappily been missed: the ‘courage of abnegation’, which the present Director-General urged upon those who devote themselves to broadcasting, finds only a distant echo in the Report, which mentions (without pursuing) the question ‘whether the B.B.C. is not endeavouring to broadcast too many different programmes for more hours than is necessary’. Apart from considerations of monopoly, then, the quantity of broadcasting is something that might have received a more
critical attention in the Report. But there can be little doubt that the eagerness and energy with which the B.B.C. has exploited its instrument is partly the outcome of monopoly: there was a felt necessity to show that monopoly and laziness or lack of enterprise in this case were not partners. And no doubt this is the spring of the strange assumption that broadcasting itself has somehow a ‘duty’ to discharge ‘to and in all the arts’, etc. But to suggest a continuation of the monopoly while suggesting nothing to relieve the B.B.C. from the supposed duty of ruthlessly exploiting its instrument is an unfortunate omission from the Committee’s recommendations. In short, enough evidence and argument was presented to the Committee to convince most people of the undesirability of approximating broadcasting in England to the American pattern, and of the difficulty involved in dispersing the monopoly between two or more corporations. The witnesses who favoured a move in this direction were inspired by the laudable desire for greater diversity of programme (that is, a desire to free us from exclusive reliance on the B.B.C.’s standards in broadcasting), and they seemed to think that this might spring from competing broadcasting organizations. But there is little evidence that competition itself produces diversity—rather the reverse. We enjoy a variety of newspapers, but wherever there is genuine competition there is less diversity (except in opinion) than makes no matter. And again, some argument (not very convincing and all based upon the assumed desirability of broadcasting inspired by the sort of social purpose which inspires the B.B.C.) is marshalled by the Committee itself to support its recommendation of a continuation of the present arrangements. But what does not seem to have been considered (and is consequently worth mentioning here) is the case for monopoly joined with a less grandiose purpose than that which guides the B.B.C. And this is surprising, for such a monopoly offers an escape from many of the recognized dangers and excesses which belong to the present situation. So large and so unwieldy a Corporation would be
unnecessary, its position as sole employer of broadcasters would become less significant, the burden of responsibility which now alternately spurs and restrains the B.B.C. would be removed, the fortuitous and unsought authority which it now enjoys would fade away, and the enormous power it exercises over mens’ minds would once more cease to be exercised by any single body. In such a monopoly there would be no danger, only convenience. And if some of the valuable potentialities of broadcasting remained unexploited, that perhaps would be a small price to pay for the removal from our midst of a concentration of power recognized by everybody, including the Committee, to be dangerous.
Modern Capitalism and Economic Progress Review of Thomas Wilson, Modern Capitalism and Economic Progress (London: Macmillan, 1950). First published in Cambridge Journal, 4 (1951), 504–6. A foolish objection has been taken to this book because it is the work of a scholar and at the same time does battle with the popular purveyors of economic wisdom who, having appointed themselves the guides of the people, were until yesterday considered by the less informed to be reliable guides—the Jays and the Stracheys. But we must take it for what it is—a book which ‘tries to discuss practical affairs’—and be glad that the author is a competent and thoughtful economist. Mr Wilson holds strong opinions and expresses them with vigour. The advantages he has over his opponents are that even when he is vehement he does not give way to gross exaggeration, and that what he is defending is neither things as they are nor a Utopia, but what, so far as his perception goes, is taken to be the next step in the way we have been going for some long while. His objection to contemporary British socialism, as it has worked out, is that it has stepped aside from the line of advance towards a more equalitarian and more prosperous society which had already been entered upon. ‘Lloyd George was on the right lines: Mr Attlee is not’: ‘nationalization will do nothing to reduce the inequality of capital unless the Government cheats in the payment of compensation.’ He is a ‘radical’, and believes that, as a form of economic organization, ‘capitalism’ can and should be ‘modernized’. As an answer to the various ‘cases’ for socialism, the effectiveness of his book lies in the fact that Mr Wilson has avoided taking his standards from his opponents. To some extent he is saying what they forgot to say, or suppressed, but his tone of voice is quiet, his manner is sincere,
and he is not given to exaggeration. It is not an exciting book; it will not win votes; but it may help to dispel the great illusion. The economic problem, as Mr Wilson sees it, is how to make the most profitable use of our available resources and how to increase those resources; and since everywhere this enterprise is undertaken with ‘certain broad assumptions’, our problem is how to do these things in a manner which conforms to our democratic and Christian traditions. The essence of ‘capitalism’ is not laissezfaire (which in fact never existed), but ‘private enterprise’ and the ‘flexible mechanism of the market’, controlled by law and the customs which represent our basic assumptions. Mr Wilson believes in the efficacy of these pieces of machinery (for that is how he regards them), and the book begins with a review of the social and political values which Mr Wilson believes to belong to our tradition, and with a reminder of the success which the ‘capitalism’ of the last hundred years has achieved—the remarkable increase in the income per head of population. The alternative to all this, preached and practised by British socialism, is physical planning and the nationalization of industry. And Mr Wilson’s carefully argued conclusion is that this alternative will do nothing to further economic progress. Physical planning in peace-time is not only dangerous to the social and political ends believed to be valuable; it is dangerous also to economic prosperity. And the widespread nationalization of industry has no contribution to make to economic progress; it is a blind alley. But the ‘capitalist’ machinery of economic organization needs to be kept in trim, and at some points it now creaks. If we refuse the socialist suggestion to get rid of it and replace it by something else, we are still left with the problem of maintenance and reform. What way shall we take with our economic difficulties? Some of these difficulties are temporary, and may call for treatment which takes us to the verge of our traditions: we are a society recovering from war. These are not neglected by Mr Wilson, indeed he has a lot to say about inflation and balance of payments, but his
argument goes deeper when he turns to the more permanent problems. There are three of them: inequality of income and capital; monopoly and industrial efficiency; mass unemployment. Mr Wilson would like to see a more equalitarian society, though exactly why he does not divulge. However, it is on account of this preference that he is not a socialist. Specifically socialist measures have little power to reduce inequality; the remedy is taxation (of income and capital) and not the curtailment of private enterprise. It is a remedy which has been in operation in England for some generations, and what needs to be done now is to make it more rapid and more efficient. The crux of the matter is inherited wealth, because inequality of capital is much greater and less justifiable than inequality of income. Mr Wilson believes that the inheritance of wealth is justifiable if bequests are not very large and if they are not handed down from generation to generation. Consequently what he sets his face against is large estates and the means taken to avoid the taxation (death duties) which have reduced them and should further reduce them. (But why is he the enemy of the voluntary dispersal of capital before death?) He presents this as comparatively simple in operation, and likely to have no damaging results. But here, I think, he is over-optimistic. There is room for a thorough investigation of the morals and economics of bequest and inheritance: the current moral objection to it is certainly superstitious, and the economic effects of abolition are far from easy to determine. Mr Wilson does not provide this investigation, and since his position is that very large inherited capital is objectionable, it is all the more necessary for him to make clear that he is not the enemy of inheritance itself and to say why. He insists that the product of a capital tax should be used for the reduction of the national debt and for nothing else, but whether his reason is economic or moral is not clear. In dealing with monopoly Mr Wilson is on firmer ground. It is now indisputable that ‘capitalism’ does not lead inevitably to monopoly, and it is equally obvious that the result of socialist practice to date has been more, larger, and less controlled
monopolies than ever existed before. His suggestions about how to deal with monopolies when they arise and are impervious to the criticism of the market, are sensible; but he says nothing about monopolies of labour. The long chapter on Unemployment and Socialism is a careful and judicious piece of writing directed again to a criticism of the socialist diagnosis and remedy for unemployment and recommending a Keynesian remedy (not physical planning) should it arise. The book as a whole may be recommended for its accuracy and the cogency of most of its arguments. But, like others of its kind, it has an unfortunate tendency to treat economic institutions, not as ways of being active, but as pieces of machinery held in stock, to be shuffled about, selected and rejected, brought or kept in use or put by for another occasion. And this attitude appears also when Mr Wilson is dealing with politics: the ‘liberty’ which he takes to be the most important criterion and worthy above all to be preserved remains an abstraction: it is not ‘liberty’ which is ‘gravely threatened by socialism’ but an entire, concrete, complex way of living. Naturally an economist must ‘believe in productivity’, but a writer in practical affairs should make it clear that, to say the least, ‘maximum productivity’ is one of the most damaging of the moral superstitions of our time.
The City of God and Introduction to St Augustine Review of John Henderson Seaforth Burleigh, The City of God. A Study of St Augustine’s Philosophy (London: Nisbet, 1949); and Reginald Hayes Barrow, Introduction to St. Augustine, the City of God. Being selections from the De Civitate Dei (London: Faber and Faber, 1950). First published in Cambridge Journal, 4 (1951), 567–8, 570, 572. St Augustine, in spite of the work of what has become a long line of distinguished scholars (mostly continental), has suffered and still suffers from being looked at backwards. He is interpreted to us as one of the ‘makers of the Middle Ages’, with never more than one foot in the world in which he lived. And even when a genuine attempt is made to understand him in his own world, to understand him historically, the understanding has been too often qualified by misleading distinctions: he is shown as a writer in whom a variety of disparate ‘influences’ converge; his world appears only as a ‘background’, text and context, the man and his world, are separated, are, perhaps, related to one another, but are never fully united. The process is familiar. First we form a notion of what belongs to an age, what is characteristic of it, and then, instead of using what appears to be exceptional in order to criticize and extend our notion of the character (and in this manner win a deeper insight into the character of the age), we are content to allow it to remain exceptional. It is a process which has seriously limited our understanding of the Victorian age, and not less seriously misled us in our study of those complicated and overwhelmingly important first four centuries of the Christian era. Even when passions have been laid aside, circumstances, the fact that we have been accustomed to go to those centuries with firmly insulated and narrowly formulated questions, as historians either of Christianity, or of the Roman Empire, or of the late
manifestations of Greek or Judaic thought, have made them seem at best a loosely twisted strand of Greek, Hebrew, Roman, Christian ‘elements’, and their concrete character has been mislaid. And, among much else, the non-historical categories of orthodoxy and heresy have entered in to increase the obscurity. The Talmud, for example, is regarded as the product, not of its place and time, reflecting the whole character of this ‘Hellenistic’ world, but of ‘Jewish thought’; and St Augustine is understood as a figure in ‘Christian history’ against a ‘background’ of ‘classical antiquity’. And yet St Augustine, because of his pre-eminent coherence with his world, offers an unrivalled occasion for a study of the concrete character of that world. However, though in this respect we have still far to go (and a study of the history of these centuries is still the most testing enterprise a scholar can undertake), the situation is far more promising than it was a generation ago; and it may be taken as a sign of progress that in both the books under review a genuine attempt is made to unite text and context and to allow each to modify the other. Professor Burleigh’s book is based upon a set of lectures delivered in Edinburgh in 1944. Its sub-title is, ‘A study of St Augustine’s philosophy’, but its strength is rather descriptive than analytical. It lays before us the circumstances and the world in which the De Civitate Dei was composed, the contents of the work, and the main stages of its argument. It is scholarly without being severe; sound rather than subtle; it reveals a thorough and upto-date knowledge of Augustinian scholarship; few of its chapters are without some illuminating observation; as a whole it may be regarded as a reliable introduction and first guide to the study of St Augustine’s thought, but a guide that makes, perhaps, too little demand upon those who follow. However, the class of reader who has hitherto depended upon Robertson’s chapter in Regnum Dei (1901) is now supplied with something which not only reflects the intervening course of Augustinian studies, but embodies also a more just historical perspective. Its predominantly descriptive and historical point of view makes it complementary to Burnaby’s
more reflective and analytical course of lectures published under the title of Amor Dei (1938). Dr Barrow’s enterprise is different. The modesty of the title of his book conceals a work of exact and severe scholarship which will take its place as an original and important contribution to Augustinian studies. It consists, first, of about fifty pages of extracts (including the greater part of Book XIX) from the De Civitate Dei, the Latin text and the English translation being printed on opposed pages; secondly, a running commentary on the matter and the manner of these extracts; and thirdly, Appendices and Notes in which bibliographical and other concerns are discussed. The extracts from the text have been chosen and arranged to present the main line of St Augustine’s argument and to avoid the many excursions and incidentals which make up the bulk of the work as St Augustine wrote it; the commentary is both historical and analytical. In composing the book, Dr Barrow had three purposes in mind: to promote a wider interest in the De Civitate Dei by making the main lines of its argument available to those who, though they might be deterred by the bulk of the original work, nevertheless wish for a scholarly understanding of one of the masterpieces of European writing; ‘to encourage a wider horizon in the teaching and learning of classics so as to include Christian writers whose debt to classics was great; and to link up once again the study of classics and the study of divinity’; and thirdly, ‘to reaffirm the importance of a particular method of study, the method (a) of reading the actual words of an author rather than reading about him, (b) of reading those words in the light of the author’s own day and not in the light of interpretations put upon them by later ages’. It is the third of these purposes which I take to be pre-eminently important, and in pursuing it Dr Barrow has made his own original contribution to Augustinian studies. It has been the unfortunate illusion of some historians to think that something less than a first-class knowledge of the languages involved in their subject of study will serve their purpose, and to think that a minute and exact attention to the words of a text is
unnecessary: they believe themselves to be dealing with things, not words. But the study of a text is a study of its words, and no text will reveal its meaning unless the interpreter goes to it with the questions, ‘why this word and not that?’ and, ‘what precisely, in this literary and historical context, is the connotation of this word?’ And the whole answer is never supplied by the text itself. And just as historians before now have transformed our knowledge of the course of a battle by a meticulous attention to the exact words used in the sources of information at their disposal, so Dr Barrow has illuminated our understanding of what St Augustine has to say by seeking answers to such questions as, why civitas and not republica? What precisely does Augustine mean by iustitia, amor, pax? These are historical questions, because though a writer like Augustine takes his liberties with language, liberties which must be examined and pinned down, he is using words which carry with them meanings of the moment, which reflect (particularly when they belong to a political vocabulary) events and situations. So Dr Barrow begins his discursive commentary: ‘the first lines of this chapter (Bk I. Ch. 1) are so important that the phrases are considered one by one’, and nothing will deflect him from his analysis. In short, this is not an easy ‘introduction’ to Augustine, it makes great demands upon the reader, but for anyone who is in earnest with the study of Augustine it is probably the best in our language. It is impossible to notice here all the points at which Dr Barrow illuminates his subject; one only can be selected for remark—his treatment of the well-known crux in Ch. 24 of Bk. XIX. He begins with the proper observation that what St Augustine is offering us is not a ‘political philosophy’, and he goes on to examine the various explanations (many of them misjudged because they assume that St Augustine has a political philosophy to offer) that have been given of the apparent paradox of St Augustine’s denial of iustitia to civil societies. His own solution is both simple and subtle and, I think, entirely convincing. It is an explanation which springs from a close attention to what St Augustine actually says
and to the context of the statement. At this point, as at many others, Dr Barrow has made a real advance in the interpretation of Augustine’s thought. The shortcomings of the book are mainly philosophical: analysis of the text and historical insight are Dr Barrow’s strong points; but every now and again the reader is conscious that the commentary touches what it does not elucidate. One would have liked to find a fuller discussion of what, after all, is the central subtlety of St Augustine’s thought—the relation between iustitia, ordo, and pax; and perhaps some indication of the relation between pax and that most important of contemporary Roman ideas, auctoritas. Pax et Princeps is more than a mere distant background to St Augustine’s thought. Now and again, as in the phrase ‘Augustinianism at its best’ and in the unfortunate and rash suggestion that ‘the whole intellectual framework of ancient thought crashed because reason had nothing on which to base itself ’, an unhistorical note is heard: the crash obscures what should have been a perception of the subtle mediation by which change was taking place. Nor is it enough merely to contrast the point of view of Dante in the De Monarchia in respect of the Roman Empire with that of Augustine; in fact the two writers are not talking about the same thing. Both books have useful bibliographical references, Dr Barrow’s naturally fuller than Professor Burleigh’s; but I miss from both any mention of F.C. Burkitt’s work. He wrote nothing directly on St Augustine, but there would be considerably less light on the period and its problems if we were without the Religion of the Manichees and Church and Gnosis.
Citizenship and Social Class Review of Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). First published in Cambridge Journal, 4 (1951), 629–30. By far the most important (and the longest) of the four pieces which compose this book is that which gives it its title. Citizenship and Social Class is an elusive piece of writing, very compact and concise, often suggesting more than it says, and giving off an intellectual dazzle which the reader has to accustom himself to. As a lecture (a shortened form of it was given as the Alfred Marshall Lecture in Cambridge in 1949) it must have been difficult; but nobody who has given any thought to the subject will come away from reading it without the impression that here is something unusually profound and philosophical. And besides its masterly treatment of its own particular theme, it will do more than the most brilliant external account of the nature of sociology to convert those who are doubtful about the whole enterprise which goes under that name. Professor Marshall is not a voluminous writer, but when he gives us something of this quality we can resign ourselves to his long periods of silence. His theme is the growth, in English society, of what he calls the ‘status of citizenship’ and its repercussions on the structure of the society and upon what he calls ‘social class’ and ‘equality’. He begins with a brilliant piece of histoire raisonnée in which he traces the uneven development of the three kinds of ‘rights’ which compose the status of citizenship: civil, political, and social rights. Civil rights are those which put no legal obstacle in the way of a man behaving in a certain manner: he has the right to speak if he has anything to say, the right to enjoy property if he has come by it legally. Political rights give a man a voice in government and a hand in the process by which civil rights are created and maintained. Social rights are those positive opportunities and
expectations a man is given, regardless of his means and his social class, to exercise his civil rights and in general enjoy a certain way of living—the right to education, to medical care, etc. Generally speaking, it is contended, these three sorts of rights were interwoven in medieval civilization, but in the seventeenth century they parted company—developed at different speeds and, in some respects, in different directions; by 1832 an Englishman’s civil rights were as complete as they are now, by 1918 his political rights were maturely established, but his social rights were slower in growth and their great period is the twentieth century. We are now in a situation in which the three have more nearly come together again and compose a coherent whole than at any period since the sixteenth century. This historical survey is preliminary to a discussion of the strains and tensions which compose and make stable contemporary English society. Elements of instability and incoherence are recognized, but on the whole we are given a picture of strength, though not of logical consistency. I have called Professor Marshall’s treatment an histoire raisonnée because, in spite of the great subtlety with which he traces the fortunes of these three different kinds of rights and their impact on social class, the result is something very much less than a concrete picture. In fact the three elements of citizenship never so completely parted company; and in fact they had far greater influence upon one another than Professor Marshall allows. It is too narrow a view to suggest that for a long period the Poor Law alone represented an Englishman’s social rights. Social rights are the ‘superstructure of legitimate expectations’ which a man may have as a citizen, but expectations do not have to wait to be ‘legitimized’ until they are ‘officially recognized’. ‘Legitimization’ also has its history and did not spring up suddenly and fullyarmed: social rights are not the creatures of the modern state. The passage from legitimate expectation to personal right may involve a legal jump, but socially it is a slowly mediated and uninterrupted process. The church (never mentioned in these pages), which is neither a functional association nor a local community,
over a long period gave men legitimate expectations. Further, Professor Marshall recognizes that when a form of activity (such as education) became a social right, the right was a claim on a minimum standard, but this characteristic should be recognized as universal: ‘political journalism for the intelligentsia’ may have been ‘followed by newspapers for all who could read’, but the quality was adapted to the market. It is not the ‘components of a civilized and cultured life, formerly the monopoly of the few’, which ‘were brought progressively in reach of the many’, how could it be? What the many enjoy is some shadowy counterpart of these components. Inequality is not so easily removed. And there are other, smaller but not unimportant, points where compression has led to historical inadequacy. The appearance of free compulsory education in the nineteenth century is spoken of as a signal departure from laissez-faire requiring some subtlety of view to make it seem coherent with its time and place: but this hypostatization of laissez-faire as the pre-eminent character of the age is surely a mistake—the same sort of mistake as that which ascribes intellectual self-confidence to the Victorian and then regards the morass of doubt and indecision which constituted the minds of so many Victorians as eccentric to the period. And does not the view that ‘citizenship is based upon a set of ideals, beliefs and values’ put the history the wrong way round; these ideals and values are the product of the enjoyment of citizenship, which in the first place is a manner of being active. These are small points—and Professor Marshall’s unwary use of the phrase, on two or three occasions, ‘absolute natural rights’ might be added to them—and they do not seriously detract from what is a modest and brilliant piece of analysis. Of course there are questions we should like to ask—why is the elimination of inherited privilege on all occasions thought to be an unquestionable advantage? How, after all that has been written, can ‘democracy’ and ‘equality’ be so naively equated? Why is the counterpart of government intervention in industrial disputes— trade union intervention in the work of government—thought to
be an asset and not a questionably high price to pay? Why does Professor Marshall speak of the ‘capitalist class system’ when (it would appear) what he means by ‘class’ has little to do with the organization of industry? Why, if the ‘development of democratic citizenship’ is so empirical, so paradoxical a phenomenon, should we have such confidence in it as a foundation for a ‘planned’ society? Is there any basis for the ‘personal obligation to work’ which is seen to be ‘attached to the status of citizenship’, other than the fact that we have contracted a number of very expensive social rights? And why is Professor Marshall (who seems to be without any of the traditional beliefs which have given men confidence in the way they are going) so optimistic? But there is so much sublety and reflectiveness and so little partizanship in Professor Marshall’s attitude and view of the contemporary social situation that, even if his conclusions are sometimes obscure, nobody can read him without enlightenment and the pleasure that comes from a sincere and cogent argument.
The Discourses of Niccoló Machiavelli Review of Niccoló Machiavelli, The Discourses, 2 vols, tr. and intro. L.J. Walker, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950). First published in Cambridge Journal, 4 (1951), 698. This is an altogether admirable piece of work, learned, judicious, and timely, and it is possible in this review only to recommend it and to say something of its scope. The Prince is the best-known work of Machiavelli, but it is a book so directed to a single narrow purpose that it gives an imperfect idea of the complexity and comprehensiveness of Machiavelli’s thought. For this, a study of the Discoursi is essential, and it is not too much to say that Father Walker has made this study possible for the first time for English students. First, the translation has been executed with great care; it is accurate and alive: the best we have. In particular, it is the translation of one who has pondered long on the whole of Machiavelli’s meaning; the greatest care has been taken in the rendering of the key words of Machiavelli’s thought. And in order to carry the reader with him at every difficult or doubtful point, the translator has frequently given the original word or phrase in a footnote. It is a thoroughly candid and intelligent piece of work. Secondly, the Introduction. This is a substantial piece of work of more than a hundred and fifty pages. But more than this, it is so learned in history, so deeply pondered and alive with thought, so calmly reflective and so full of finely noted distinctions and accurate observations, that it must be counted one of the most enlightening pieces of writing on the subject in the English language. It contains a brief account of Machiavelli’s life and activities, a discussion of the relation of the Discoursi to Machiavelli’s other writings, and an examination of Machiavelli’s method and general ideas. There is absent from it any tendency to jump to hasty conclusions or to accept ready-made opinions: it is
sympathetic, critical and written so lucidly and with such charm that the business of reading it becomes a pleasure. Nobody who has studied Machiavelli will fail to learn something from Father Walker’s exposition of Machiavelli’s ideas of Necessity, Fortune, and virtù, from his discussion of Machiavelli’s alleged belief in the depravity of mankind or from the long and acute account he gives of Machiavelli’s method of argument. There is, indeed, one point where Father Walker, usually so little given to wishful thinking, seems to have accepted Machiavelli’s statement too much at its face-value: on pp. 79 and 117 he seems to miss the disingenuousness, or perhaps the irony, of Machiavelli’s exclusion of the ‘ecclesiastical principalities’ from the normal rules of politics. And yet, even here, the important point is perceived— that these principalities enjoyed a political tradition which made them immune from some of the vicissitudes suffered by other states. Father Walker’s notes add enormously to the value of the translation. They are full without ever being irrelevant or garrulous; they tell the reader exactly what he needs to know, whether it is the elucidation of a piece of Roman or Italian history or of Machiavelli’s argument. And the constant and apposite references, with ample quotation, to Guicciardini’s Considerazioni, are most enlightening. To complete the work we are given chronological tables of events in Roman and Italian history referred to by Machiavelli, four genealogical tables, a discussion of Machiavelli’s sources, certain and conjectural, a list of Machiavelli’s mistakes, and finally, perhaps the most useful of all the appendices, a comprehensive index of names and subjects.
History, Its Purpose and Method Review of Gustaaf Johannes Renier, History, Its Purpose and Method (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950). First published in Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1951), 284–5. This is an unfortunate book. Its mood is light-hearted and its overconfidence seriously qualifies it as a contribution to the discussion of the nature of historical knowledge. Everything is so obvious and simple that one wonders what all the fuss has been about. There is, of course, an intermittent contact with a more subtle view of things, but this sometimes adds to the confusion. The indiscipline appears first in a doubt whether Dr Renier’s theme is the methodology of historical research or the philosophical consideration of history as a form of knowledge. In fact the book is concerned with both themes, but they are so confused that neither receives proper attention. There is an important sense in which it is true that ‘history reveals its nature through the familiarity of daily practice’, and if Dr Renier had described to us how he works, the sort of problems he comes up against and how he solves them, and had told us this free from ‘philosophical’ reflections, he would have performed a useful service. But his remarks on the methodology of historical research are either too general (as in the chapter called ‘Detecting the Traces’) or too simply schematic (as in the section given to the ‘divisions of history’) to be of much value. There are moments when he goes beneath the surface—for example, his perception that the historian begins neither with a ‘clean slate’ nor with his ‘sources’ but with what he calls ‘accepted history’, and that what the historian does is to make a contribution to a story which he is not the first to tell—but they are infrequent and instead of persevering with them he darts off on another track. Dr Renier’s other theme is history as a form of knowledge; and here his treatment illustrates his contention that ‘historians
… have the fullest right to adopt a philosophy’. He is engagingly candid about the philosophy he has adopted—or at least about the authors he relies upon—but what we are given is illustrations of an adopted philosophy rather than an exercise in philosophical reflection. And even the adopted philosophy is so lightly grasped—it seems to be a kind of positivism—that the reader is always coming upon apparently erratic departures from it. ‘The narrative of past experiences, active and passive, is for societies what memory is for their individual members’, says Dr Renier. This simple view gives him a flying start, and he never looks back. History has the ‘social purpose’ of recalling to a society its past experiences. When it performs this service ‘accurately’ it does all that can properly be asked of it: and ‘accurately’ presents no problem which cannot be solved by reference to the known and accepted methods of historical research and criticism. There would be little objection to this view of things—simple though it is—if it were not tied up with some rather slap-dash reflections on the nature of knowledge, the heart of which is a doctrine about the relation between historical ‘facts’ and the ‘explanation of the facts’ which is an ‘unavoidable concomitant’ of historical narrative. In the greater part of his treatment of this problem Dr Renier holds fast to his adopted philosophy. Research puts the historian ‘in possession of a large number of events’ of which, when fixed by criticism, he can be certain. But these are merely the ‘material’ of the story he is to write; they must be given a ‘shape’. And in order to do this the historian may call upon various ‘principles of serialization’—time, causation, etc.—and if these are not enough he must be prepared to use his imagination. The main point, however, is that he has the ‘isolated’, shapeless facts first, and the process of shaping is a process of fitting together, like the pieces of a puzzle, those facts which he decides are relevant. This doctrine, no doubt, has its difficulties, and to have it put before us once again in clear outline could do no harm. But having nailed this flag securely to his mast Dr Renier inconsequentially rips it off again with the admission that ‘the barest statement of fact implies
the expression of a view about the fact, a theory’, and the statement that it is only when he comes to write his story that the historian begins to know what his ‘facts’ are—a statement much closer to the experience of most historians than the naïve doctrine he has been at such pains to impress upon us. In short, this is a book in which the reader hardly knows what to expect next as he turns the page. There is some interesting information, there are some acute detached observations, there are some forcefully stated views but there is curiously little sustained argument, and even the criticism of Collingwood, which might have been valuable, peters out in irrelevance.
Liberties of the Mind Review of Charles Langbridge Morgan, Liberties of the Mind (London: Macmillan, 1951). First published in Spectator, 186 (1951), 419. Most people are aware that it is only by a disingenuous revision of the meaning of the word ‘freedom’ that we conceal from ourselves the fact that the exercise of freedom has been greatly reduced in the last twenty-five years. The prevailing mood is one of being ready to surrender freedom: among less foolish people, for something believed to be of equal value; among others, for the mere promise of a dream. Much, says Mr Charles Morgan, has been lost (some of it well lost), but those who are still absolute for freedom must now consider the defence of the citadel—not the ‘outward liberties’ of behaviour, but ‘the liberties of the mind itself.’ The concern of these essays is the danger in which the ‘core of the mind’ stands of being dispossessed of its independence. The opening essay, on Mind Control, states the theme. There are passages in it which run smoothly and whose meaning is interrupted only by the glossy mellowness of the prose; but as a whole the statement bristles with ambiguities. It would, perhaps, be a piece of philosophical pedantry to object to the way in which Mr Morgan uses the word ‘mind’ (as if it were a piece of sacred machinery): if we are to get anywhere with the book we must be content to suppose that we know what he means even if we should prefer another way of speaking. Nevertheless, a good deal of the confusion seems to spring from what may be called Mr Morgan’s concept of mind. However, apart from this, the reader is left in serious doubt about what Mr Morgan is getting at. We seem, at first, to be invited to take note of the appearance (or nearappearance) of a scientific technique by means of which a man may be dispossessed of his ‘mind’ and become an automaton in the control of a technician. The evidence adduced (and admitted
to be ‘scant’) is the behaviour of prisoners in the Soviet trials, and a conversation Mr Morgan had with an unnamed physicist whose vision extended to the possibility of being able to take possession completely of another man’s ‘mind’. When he is on this tack, Mr Morgan steers his readers, with a practised hand, on an artificially darkened course, beset with half-imagined Gothic horrors and uncanny experiences. But we are never properly frightened because the devilry is never properly revealed. The other tack is made in broad daylight; its horrors are palpable and familiar—and consequently genuinely horrible. Here we are not being scared by the vague suggestion of some diabolically ingenious psychological technique which science has in pickle for us; we are having our attention called to the circumstances in the contemporary world which restrict the range of independent judgment and individual moral choice—the gross pressure of numbers which goes to compose a morally worthless public opinion, and the moral delusion that when we have discovered how to do something we are well advised to do it. But even here, in the full light of day, the nameless horror cannot be excluded; the whole process (following a phrase of Tennyson’s) is presented as ‘a mighty wave of evil’ thrown up by comparatively recent events. And while the well-chosen phrase heightens the mystery of our predicament, our attention is directed to something very banal— not to the root of chaos, but merely to the danger of immorality when it is allied with great power. Mr Morgan seems to belong to that school of moralists which urges fear of destruction as the motive for mending our ways. We are left, then, with some latitude of choice in the interpretation of our disease, though in one way or another ‘science’ is at the bottom of it. This is unfortunate, because what we look for in a moralist is a clear vision of the predicament. Mr Morgan has chosen to write at an awkward level. There is a level of diagnosis at which it would be in order to ask for the villains to be named and to demand their prosecution. And there is a profound level at which hope and fear are equally out of place, where the
situation is seen to be desperate but not serious, as St Augustine, for example, saw it. Mr Morgan, however, has chosen a difficult middling station: he is remote without being profound, lofty without being confident, and he is engaged but with insufficiently identified enemies. And the confusion is carried over into the remedies he propounds. Surely it argues a want of proper consideration of the relation between this so-called ‘liberty of the mind itself ’ and the familiar overt liberties, or a deep-rooted ambiguity of outlook, to suggest that we should ‘disengage the liberty of thought as a distinct and inalienable liberty’ and ‘make it cognisable by positive law’. The bulk of the book consists in short essays, each a neat variation on the imperfectly imagined theme of the Introduction. Most of them have appeared before in periodicals, and taken separately they express an agreeably sentimental, nostalgic view of life. But the collection of them here serves mainly to show up the thinness of the theme they are set to illustrate. The truth is, I suppose, that Mr Morgan’s temperament is ill-fitted to deal with the theme which he handles so delicately in these pages. There is nothing disgraceful in being nostalgic or in turning over affectionately the things one has learnt to value; but nostalgia gets in the way of precision, and to treat this theme precision is necessary. And, again, a mind devoid of irony and incapable of satire, a disposition without the energy of bitterness and without either the anger or detachment of saintliness, will seem unfitted for the task. The book does not lack sincerity, Mr Morgan really does care about the predicament as he sees it; but he fails to convince us of its reality. The style—this urbane, smoothly confidential, humourless style—meets the theme, and we are left happily splashing one another in the safety of slack water. And if an occasional ripple gets up our noses and makes us splutter—if he throws in the observation that the history of the last fifty years has been ‘a steady movement towards barbarism interrupted by ineffectual idealistic swerves’—we are made to feel that it is all part of the game.
In short, Mr Morgan’s theme is that of 1984. But Orwell’s precise and microscopic imagination and his ironic vision are replaced by a soft anxiety about incompletely imagined possibilities and a mannered rhetoric too nicely tuned to be effective. Nowhere have the last days of mankind been more urbanely contemplated.
Dominations and Powers Review of George Santayana, Dominations and Powers. Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government (London: Constable, 1951). First published in Spectator, 187 (1951), 578. Human beings, who are otherwise quite used to doing two things at once (talking and drinking; travelling and enjoying the view), when they turn to reading are apt to demand something which engages them in a single activity. And when a book invites us to turn its pages and enjoy its separate scenes, and at the same time gives hints of a firm structure which encourages close study, we are apt to be suspicious. But when delight and instruction are both at a high level and avoid the suggestion that the union is synthetic, we are sometimes prepared to accept them together. This, I think, should be our attitude to Dominations and Powers, which is a book of this elusive and provoking sort. The casual reader, then, may turn its pages and find in them a collection of essays. Each of these hundred chapters is a finished example of the imaginative subtlety of thought and expression which we have long ago learnt to expect from Santayana. His manner has always been to explore images rather than analyse concepts, to meditate rather than argue. And there is so much individuality about the performance that it must be counted an achievement to have escaped all these years the nemesis of writing a parody of himself. His themes here are the varieties of human behaviour, the ambivalence of human enterprise, the hindrances and servitudes we suffer, the ‘false defiances of fate’ and illusory escapes, and the freedom we at once enjoy and seek. In this reading we shall observe also his loves and hates, his prejudices and predilections. Life is neither a journey nor a feast, but a predicament and a dream, to be meditated upon with a combination of sympathy and ironic detachment. In his earliest writings Santayana displayed an effortless sagacity which was
open to the suspicion of being precocious; in age the dazzle may be diminished, but the wisdom is still apt and has not grown garrulous. Here he disclaims a creed, a message or the power of prophecy; his attitude is at bottom aesthetic; and his sympathy lies with whatever exhibits ‘harmony and strength, no matter how short-lived.’ Longevity is a vulgar good, and consequently ‘the folly of the enthusiast may sometimes be wiser than the wisdom of the world.’ But if this manner of reading the book scarcely needs recommendation because it will come easily to anyone who opens it and will have its immediate reward, there is something else which must be pointed out lest it escape notice. The book is not, in fact, an anthology of miscellaneous reflections strung together on the thin thread of an arbitrary attitude to the universe. It is an intellectual structure, a vertebrate and well-considered philosophy. It is true that the articulation is not obtrusive, and it is true also that the title of the book is not a very explicit signpost to the structure; but not to have detected the articulation is to have missed the proper quality of the book. Santayana’s affinity is neither with Plato nor Hegel, both of whom make their appearance, however (and though Hegel is recognisable he is barely recognised). His affinity is with Spinoza. Indeed, though there is nothing crudely derivative about his thought, to explore its convolutions is like exploring a modernised version of Spinoza’s ethical and political philosophy. The human individual appears first as ‘primal Will,’ and in this appearance his activity is in relation to the world as ‘natural.’ To escape from this generative order of activity is impossible; it is our fate as animals. But in relation to their fellows the activity of human beings bifurcates into militant and rational modes. In the militant order of activity the wilfulness of the will is expressed; ‘the source of militancy’ lies in ‘the indecision or self-contradiction of animal Will in pursuing distractedly incompatible goods.’ In the rational order, on other hand, activity is animated not by a finished ideal of conduct, but by a harmony of conduct when it is appropriate to
its circumstances. And here, in relation to political activity (which is always generative and may be either militant or rational), there is an echo of Burke—‘all sound reforms must be massively generative movements and not thinly militant strains’—and an even more distinct echo of Coleridge. Writers in this tradition have a habit of bringing the argument up to a certain point and often, to this point, carrying conviction. But it is a point of uncertain equilibrium, and many questions remain unanswered; the analysis of ‘circumstance’ and ‘expedience’ is left incomplete. It is disappointing to find Santayana travelling this route with such acuteness of observation (and so much engaging talk by the way) and breaking off at the familiar point. But of the power and subtlety of the attempt there can be no doubt. Dominations and Powers is an achievement of philosophical imagination such as we have become unaccustomed to in these days of minute dissection.
The Price of Revolution Review of Denis William Brogan, The Price of Revolution (London: Hamish Hamilton. 1951). First published in Spectator, 187 (1951), 825. Political discussion (when it rises above the level of gossip or goes beyond the events of last week) has, for a long time, been bedevilled by abstractions. When it escapes vulgar realism, it becomes the exploration of the necessary relations between a collection of abstract nouns: Democracy, Imperialism, Communism, Capitalism, Nationalism, Freedom, Revolution, Reaction and the rest. And in shuffling these cumbersome pieces of mental furniture about, we first raise the dust and then complain that we cannot see. Half of human activity becomes incomprehensible to us, and the rest is misconceived. Anyone, therefore, who bids us desist and recalls us to concrete, if less imposing, realities, though he must appear to speak out of turn, may perhaps hope for a hearing. And when he does so with the vigour, the wit and the learning which Professor Brogan has at his disposal, the performance may be expected to attract even those who yearn for the merry din of the feast to which the ideologues invite us. The Price of Revolution is a tour de force. In the present gloom of political discussion a searchlight would dazzle us; Professor Brogan has illuminated the scene brilliantly, but with a diffused light. He wastes no time criticising the current abstractions; when they appear insufferably inflated he punctures them in a footnote. His main enterprise is to throw into our dream world the precipitant of precise and detailed knowledge, and in this manner to transform it into a world of concrete activities and their probable consequences. The range of Professor Brogan’s information and the readiness of his learning are now proverbial, and here the range and readiness are displayed in all their brilliance. But there is something more;
there is coherent argument and there is imagination. Hitherto, Professor Brogan’s readers might be forgiven for thinking that, while his knowledge was catholic, his sympathetic understanding was fully in play only when he was writing about his native place—the Clydeside. But in The Price of Revolution there is a well-informed imagination at work over a remarkably wide range of situations. Professor Brogan does not claim to illuminate the whole contemporary situation. His theme is the history and significance of violent change (political and technological) in the modern world; and this theme is explored literally from China to Peru. His thesis is that for about the last hundred and fifty years we have been living in an age of revolution, but that we have not yet adapted ourselves to this circumstance. We have not accustomed ourselves to counting the cost of violent change; our political book-keeping has not kept pace with our political activity. And we are further handicapped because our present political habits of mind were formed in a period of about two generations (immediately before 1914) when it seemed probable that the era of violent change was, for the time being, over—with the consequence that our present expectations are out of touch with political realities. A variety of conclusions emerge. All government is expensive, what we call good government is still beyond the means of the greater part of the world, but violent and revolutionary political methods are particularly costly and remarkably uneconomical. Their cost is to be counted not merely in the good that they destroy (that is often exaggerated), but in the very elementary goods (such as order and decency) which they endanger, and in the displacements in society which they cause, displacements which can be very little foreseen and which go on revealing themselves for generations after the event. And the uneconomical character of revolutionary remedies is revealed in their inefficiency: every revolution promised more than it was able to achieve, and what survives a revolution is often the more odious features of the ancien régime. But the costly and uneconomical character of
revolution (when it is considered in all its concrete detail and not merely in the abridged form in which it appears in the mind of the revolutionary) should not lead us to suppose that men are not on occasion prepared to pay the price: it should lead us to make a greater effort in the exceedingly tricky business of political book-keeping. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute to Professor Brogan the intention of persuading us to any precise course of action. He knows what he dislikes in our situation, and he can recognise what is hostile to the kind of society he thinks desirable; he does not hedge on these matters, but he is not disposed to cry over spilt milk. His main concern is that we should not be deceived about our situation. His hopes are not high and his expectations are not great. We have every prospect of remaining for some time to come in an era of revolutions and their costly consequences; ‘peace, in the old sense, is probably out for a generation.’ But, then, he knows also that life is nowhere, and never has been, couleur de rose, and that what we consider to be valuable—‘freedom,’ flexibility of government and so on—are known and desired by only a small minority of the world’s population. And having a firm grasp on these simple truths, he is able to avoid the contemporary habit of exaggerating our situation into a kind of cosmic tragedy—a Predicament. For Professor Brogan it is simply a situation, perhaps a dilemma, more properly a ‘pass,’ to be observed and understood in its all too human and historical proportions. In short, The Price of Revolution is to be welcomed and applauded as a piece of political thinking which manages to avoid the two opposed vices of most current political thinking—starry-eyed abstraction and vulgar realism. Politics are presented to us here neither as the pursuit of Utopias nor as mere ‘fixing,’ but as not being deceived about our situation and doing our best in almost unendurably ‘interesting’ circumstances. One could wish that the proof-reading had been a little more exact and that the publisher had been a little less niggardly in the matter of type and paper. But it is a book which has no difficulty in surviving such circumstantial handicaps.
Psychoanalysis and Politics Review of Roger Ernle Money-Kyrle, Psychoanalysis and Politics (London: Duckworth, 1951). First published in Times Literary Supplement (17 August 1951), 511. The reading of human behaviour proposed by psychoanalysts is often unsatisfying on account of an element of over-elaboration. Not only is it clear that if they are right everyone else must be wrong, but general propositions which seem to contain a measure of truth are made less convincing by being insisted upon in every detail; acute observations lose their force when pressed ad absurdum. Consequently, even the unprejudiced student is apt to do less than justice to writers who appear to be making rather more than all that can be made of their alleged discoveries. Mr Money-Kyrle’s contribution to the psychoanalytic elucidation of political behaviour is, however, welcome because, in spite of its ambitious character, it is candid, moderate, and free from gross over-simplification. His enterprise is to suggest that psychoanalysis has, first, something to offer in the determination of ‘goodness’ in human character and social order, and, secondly, something to offer in bringing this about. The reader must be prepared to accept the Freudian analysis of behaviour, but beyond that the argument is free from technicalities and is conducted with commendable common sense and sobriety. A ‘good’ order of society (so the doctrine runs) will be one which at once encourages and springs from individuals who behave rationally; and rational behaviour is the pursuit of desires based upon ‘true’ or verifiable beliefs as distinct from fantasies. Thus, to behave rationally is not necessarily to be without anxiety, love, hate, inner conflict or potential conflict with others; it is to be determined only by genuine anxieties and to be contentious, not compulsively, but only with a manifest cause. Rationality is to have nothing permanently excluded from consciousness. Mr
Money-Kyrle believes that this conception of ‘rationality’ offers a more extended and more satisfactory guide to conduct than the conceptions of ‘normality’ with which other psychoanalysts have worked. But it has its recognizable limits. It desiderates an absence of distortion and exaggeration in belief and behaviour, but it does not itself guarantee agreement or remove conflict. However, to have confined conflict to realities and to its real proportions would be no despicable achievement; and this is precisely the result which psychoanalysis aims at—the redemption of mankind by greater self-knowledge. But human behaviour is irretrievably ambivalent—alternating in love and hate. And in so far as they are moral beings, men are directed by the fear of a sense of guilt. This fear commonly takes either of two forms; it may be a fear of punishment or a fear of injuring or disappointing somebody who is loved. And these two forms of morality issue in two types of moral conscience, the one authoritarian and compulsive and the other ‘humanistic.’ The fact is, however, that in so far as behaviour is rational it tends towards the creation and maintenance of a ‘humanistic’ conscience, moved by love and free from merely compulsive obedience. The social order composes an environment favourable to one or other of these types of conscience, an authoritarian or over-regulated society tending to encourage a merely compulsive morality, and a ‘liberal’ society a ‘humanistic’ morality. A ‘good’ state will, therefore, be one which is well adapted to rational individuals and favourable to a ‘humanistic’ type of conscience. The task of bringing into consciousness (and so depriving them of their malign influence) the unconscious fantasies and deceptions of men in political activity is seen to be an exceptionally difficult enterprise; but when it is recognized, not as a magic technique for lessening all social and political conflicts, but as making political behaviour more rational by removing it from the control of undetected fantasy, it is neither utopian nor impossible. In the course of his argument Mr Money-Kyrle has some interesting remarks upon both German and English political
behaviour, but he seems often to over-simplify political decisions, making them appear to spring not at all from concrete situations, but from the isolated individuals of Freudian theory determined by their infant experiences.
Introduction to Politics Review of Dorothy Maud Pickles, Introduction to Politics (London: Sylvan Press, 1951). First published in Times Literary Supplement (23 November 1951), 743. There is a contemporary belief that an ‘Introduction’ should avoid the advocacy of any specific doctrine and make the reader think for himself by presenting him with an array of problems and a summary of the available views. As an emblem of intellectual restraint this may be commendable; but it may be doubted whether it is the best manner of introduction. The range of a subject is usually better displayed in arguing an interesting case than in summarizing the views of x, y, and z: unanswered questions are often imperfectly conceived questions, and the value of an answer (from this point of view) lies not in its freedom from error, but in the thoroughness with which it is elaborated. Plato’s Republic is the best introduction to philosophy, not because its doctrine is acceptable but because it reveals a master at work. Mrs Pickles’s book, however, conforms to the contemporary belief, and has the virtues as well as the defects of the sort of enterprise it encourages. Its object is to suggest questions without supplying answers. And in spite of a certain breathlessness in the manner in which questions tumble over one another, the problems presented for consideration are often displayed with subtlety and a wealth of illustration. The background of the book is the conception of politics as the means to the achievement of variously denoted general ends, such as social justice, or happiness: political activity is the solution of the problem which the pursuit of such ends throws up. Some of the questions considered are of the familiar generalized kind— What is the best sort of government? Are there any general principles which ought to guide a government in exercising its power? On these Mrs Pickles usually has something interesting
to say, though she is not always successful in observing the appropriate distinctions. Many of the questions are closely related to our current situation, and in considering these Mrs Pickles shows admirable good sense and a welcome touch of realism. She is often obliged to discuss matters of contemporary political controversy, but she manages to do so without prejudice. Mrs Pickles warns the reader that, although she has occasion to quote from writers ‘who have made important contributions to the history of political thought,’ no exposition of the ideas of these writers must be expected. In a book of this sort, this is a legitimate piece of self-limitation; but even so there are some unnecessarily misleading statements. Hobbes should not have been credited with a belief in a contract between subject and sovereign. And though it is perhaps a permissible piece of shorthand to say that for Rousseau ‘the sovereign is the people,’ shorthand becomes parody in the few lines devoted to Hegel. And surely it would have been better to have avoided the terms ‘Church’ and ‘State’ in speaking of medieval political communities.
The Vocabulary of a Modern European State
Michael Oakeshott Edited by Luke O’Sullivan
Preface As noted in the Preface to the previous volume, preparing Oakeshott’s published essays and reviews for this series of his Selected Writings posed problems not raised by the earlier volumes. Obtaining the rights to reproduce them involved negotiating with around twenty different parties, whereas for the first two volumes it was only necessary to obtain the permission of the British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES). As editor I am obliged to all those who assisted with the effort to trace the copyright holders. In some cases—where, for example, a journal or magazine was now defunct, or a book had long been out of print—it was not immediately obvious who, if anyone, currently claimed the copyright, and indeed it sometimes proved impossible to find a current copyright holder. In such instances, it was assumed that the copyright had reverted to the BLPES as the holder of Oakeshott’s literary estate. With respect to the items reprinted in this fourth volume, I am grateful to Julia Gardner of the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago Library for her help with an unsuccessful search for the current copyright holder of Encounter magazine; to Jennifer Jones of Elsevier for confirming that rights to material from Chamber’s Encyclopedia had reverted to the BLPES; Anatol Shmelev, Project Archivist at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, for help regarding Radio Free Europe; and to the British Library for their efforts in a similarly vain search for the copyright holder of material published in Time and Tide. In the majority of cases, however, a copyright holder was found, and given the total absence of a budget for obtaining the rights to reprint the material included in these two volumes, it is gratifying to be able to record that in every case the owners of the rights were prepared either to accept a significantly reduced fee or in some cases even waive their fees altogether.
I am therefore very pleased to be able to thank the following for their willingness to accept less than their regular fee: Sophie Buchanan on behalf of the Spectator; Kahren Ehrmann of Sage Publications (USA) for granting permission to reproduce material from Political Theory; Mathew Lambert of Sage Publications (UK) for granting permission to reproduce material from the European Studies Review (now the European History Quarterly); Toby Lichtig on behalf of the Times Literary Supplement; Rosemary Parkhill of New Society for the rights to material from New Statesman; and Eve Thompson of Guardian News and Media for the rights to material from the Observer. For generously agreeing to waive their fees altogether, grateful thanks are owed to: Richard Bentley on behalf of Telegraph Newspapers for permission to use material from the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph; Professor David Boucher, editor of Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, for permission to reprint ‘The Concept of Government in Modern Europe’, and to Charles Kelley and Francisco Lopez for consenting to the use of their translation; Zoe Ellams on behalf of Blackwell for permission to use material from Philosophical Quarterly, Government and Opposition, Political Studies, and Public Administration; Craig Rimmer on behalf of the Bow Group for permission to use material from Crossbow; and the London School of Economics, for permission to use material originally published in Clare Market Review. Once permission to use the copyrighted material had been obtained, of course, it was necessary to raise the funds to pay for it. I would like to restate my gratitude to the British Academy for the award of a Small Research Grant which was sufficient to cover the costs involved in purchasing the reproduction rights for both volumes. This assistance was all the more welcome as the editor was without an academic affiliation for a significant portion of the period during which this volume and its companion were in preparation. Thanks are also due to Professors Robert Grant and Terry Nardin, who lent their support to the grant application.
Professor Nardin deserves additional thanks for commenting on a draft of the Introduction. Imprint Academic, publishers of the Selected Writings, continue to playa vital role in the success of the series; their ongoing support remains a major contribution to Oakeshott studies. The Political Science Department of the National University of Singapore provided a congenial environment in which to complete the volume. Finally, I would like to thank my parents once more for their unfailing support and encouragement. My wife Olga again assisted with the editorial drudgery of preparing a volume for the press, and she deserves the thanks of Oakeshott scholars everywhere for her careful proofreading and checking of the text. Of course, responsibility for any errors it contains rests entirely with the editor. Luke O’Sullivan Singapore, 2008
Introduction This volume collects together all of the essays and reviews Oakeshott published between 1952 and 1988 that have not previously been republished elsewhere.1 Together with its companion for 1926–1951, it makes the vast majority of these writings easily accessible in print for the first time. The rationale for republishing them given in the Introduction to the previous volume need only be restated briefly here. Obviously, it is far more convenient to consult all these pieces between just two sets of covers. They also supply valuable bridges between the major works that Oakeshott published during his lifetime—in particular, in the case of this volume, between Rationalism in Politics (1962) and On Human Conduct (1975). The essays and reviews place Oakeshott in dialogue with his contemporaries in a way that his books seem almost to have been deliberately designed to avoid. Moreover, they constitute a distinctive record of developments in the humanities and social sciences over a good portion of the twentieth century. Finally, they have remained entertaining to read even though some of the books reviewed have been forgotten. Such collections, however, are not often read through in sequence, so once more it is appropriate in this introductory essay to offer an overview of a collection of writings that were never designed to form a whole. Oakeshott’s review of E.M. Forster’s essays remarked that they were worth republishing ‘because the [1] For these previously published essays and reviews see M. Oakeshott, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, ed. T. Fuller (New Haven: Yale, 1993), and M. Oakeshott, What is History? and Other Essays Selected Writings Volume 1, ed. L. O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004) [SW hereafter]. A full list of the contents of these volumes is online at http://www.michaeloakeshott-association.org/ bibliography.htm. ‘A Reminder from Leviathan’ (1951) appears here as reproduction rights were not obtained in time to include it in vol. 3.
pieces re-enforce one another in a manner which might escape notice had they not been collected together’, and the reader will hopefully agree that this is also true of the writings collected here.2 The majority of the essays and reviews in this volume belong to the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, Oakeshott’s reviewing slowed considerably, probably because in retirement he was concentrating on finishing On Human Conduct and On History. In the 1980s, he published just three reviews, though he remained intellectually active—On History did not appear until 1983. His very last review is dated 1988, just two years before his death. This volume contains fewer items than its predecessor, but is only slightly shorter as it contains several lengthy essays. Once again, it is named after its longest piece. ‘The Vocabulary of a Modern European State’ (1976) constitutes Oakeshott’s most thorough investigation of a theme that runs throughout this volume, the fundamental ambiguity of European political discourse. It is an essential companion piece to the search in On Human Conduct for a vocabulary of ‘civil association’ that avoided the use of words such as ‘democracy’, ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘socialist’, ‘conservative’, ‘liberal’, and so on. Oakeshott generally eschewed all of these terms in his own philosophical works, and the reasons why he found them so ambiguous are discussed below. But in these shorter reviews, he was more prepared to acknowledge such conventional labels. If one is curious about what he made of contemporary American Conservatism, the New Right in Britain, or French Marxism, this is the place to look. But these pieces are also fertile sources for his views on the rhetorical character of political speech, on historiography, on political theory, and hopefully much else besides.
[2] #3, Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 44.
I: Religion After WW2, Oakeshott ceased reviewing works on religion and theology altogether. The explanation seems biographical; a convinced Christian in his early twenties, he gradually became disillusioned in the 1930s, and never wrote exclusively on theological matters again. Nevertheless, his early interest in religion left a lasting impression.3 He was no less sensitive than Carl Schmitt to ‘political theology’, or the roots of contemporary European political ideas in earlier Christian beliefs. While none of these reviews dealt specifically with religion, they contain a number of significant references to it. For example, Oakeshott more than once referred to modernity in general and to the Enlightenment in particular as ‘Pelagian’.4 The analogy is between the early fifth-century claims of Pelagius and modern ideas of human nature. Pelagius had denied, not the reality of sin, but its originality, and hence its ineffaceability. He claimed, furthermore, that divine grace (other than the grace of the act of creation itself) was unnecessary to salvation; free will sufficed. The Council of Carthage definitively condemned Pelagius’ ideas as heretical in 418 CE. But Oakeshott was not concerned with early Christian doctrine as such; he was drawing an analogy between Pelagianism and two beliefs he ascribed to the Enlightenment and modernity. The first was that human beings were naturally good; and the second was that permanent solutions to political problems were possible because all difficulties lay in the structure of society and not in human beings themselves. Oakeshott read Hobbes’s Leviathan as a rejection of both these beliefs. The Hobbesian state of nature took the place of Augustinian [3] See G. Worthington, Religious and Poetic Experience in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005). [4] #1, A Reminder from Leviathan, p. 39; #3, Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 47; #48, The Works of Joseph de Maistre, p. 202.
original sin, from which a final escape was impossible; it remained a permanent danger. This was the ‘reminder’ Oakeshott took from Leviathan; the threat of the breakdown of civilization was always lurking, as WW2 had made so abundantly clear. Oakeshott sympathised with Joseph de Maistre for similar reasons. Maistre’s belief that there was no escape from ‘wickedness and suffering’ in the world found a parallel in Origen, another of the early church fathers. Like Augustine, Origen insisted that salvation was not of this world and that the earthly church must always contain sinners. Oakeshott found Maistre’s modern rendering of these themes ‘somber, even savage’, but, vitally, not ‘pessimistic’; the absence of unconditional perfection or final salvation was no justification for either political or existential despair. Origen had also opposed the Gnostic heresy because it asserted the possibility of human beings obtaining absolute knowledge. Oakeshott (like Eric Voegelin) considered Rationalism analogous to Gnosticism; the idea that planning could reduce all political problems to the technical level implied a similar over-confidence.5 From a theological point of view, Rationalism constituted a form of impiety with potentially dangerous consequences, however well-intentioned. Thus, although religion and theology were no longer at the forefront of Oakeshott’s concerns, they continued to provide him with a critical frame of reference for modern political ideas.
[5]
SW, i. 229–33.
II: Philosophy After 1945 Oakeshott also reviewed fewer philosophical works lying outside the areas of political philosophy and philosophy of history in which he increasingly specialised. There are, however, two notable exceptions. The first is his review of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (1958), which had a major impact on the philosophy of science during the years covered by this volume; the second is a review of Realism and Imagination by the critic and poet Joseph Chiari.6 With a background in physical chemistry, Polanyi’s scientific credentials were impeccable, so his attack on the current understanding of ‘objectivity’ in philosophy of science commanded attention. Oakeshott regarded Polanyi as seeking to debunk the empiricist idea that scientific knowledge was the result of pure observation. Polanyi proposed instead that science ‘begins not in naive observation of the world but in the current state of scientific explanation’. A corollary was that a great deal of scientific truth was taken on trust; the place of doubt in scientific inquiry was much less fundamental than was commonly believed, and ‘objectivity’ was a property of a shared world of scientific inquiry. At the same time, no scientific truth could establish itself without provoking a feeling of inner conviction in the scientist—the ‘personal knowledge’ of the title. But the ‘personal’, Oakeshott took Polanyi to be saying, was not merely subjective. Indeed, in a rather ‘disordered’ manner, he took Polanyi to be dealing with the problem Hegel had confronted of bridging the gap between subjectivity and objectivity. Rather than reaching, however, for the Hegelian concept of a ‘concrete universal’, Polanyi employed an idea of ‘rationality’ that was [6] #36, Personal Knowledge, pp. 148–52; #37, Realism and Imagination, pp. 153–54.
supposed to lift scientific theory beyond the realm of ‘personal conviction’. Here, Oakeshott’s view of science parted company with Polanyi’s. While he clearly found its implicitly historicist position attractive, he could not endorse Polanyi’s ‘Platonic’ solution to the problems it raised. He regarded it as resting on a naive conception of rationality that revealed a certain ‘philosophical innocence’. Oakeshott gave a similarly mixed reception to Chiari’s Realism and Imagination. On the one hand, he looked kindly on Chiari’s view of art as an ‘autonomous activity’ that could not be appreciated solely in biographical or psychoanalytic terms. This is unsurprising, as his own essay on ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’ (1959) had added ‘poetic’ or artistic experience to the four main autonomous forms of experience that he had distinguished in Experience and Its Modes.7 On the other hand, Chiari’s introduction of a concept of ‘reality’ raised problems similar to those he detected in Polanyi. Chiari, like Polanyi, had resorted to ‘reality’ in an attempt to find an unconditional standard, a ‘true essence of things’, a move both problematic in itself and out of keeping with the main tendency of their thought. Chiari’s work had the additional difficulty of proposing the artistic imagination as “the highest of the human faculties”, implying an adherence to a hierarchy of forms of experience from which Oakeshott had gradually liberated himself—though in his case it was philosophy which had once occupied the summit. Together, Oakeshott’s reviews of Polanyi and Chiari serve as useful reminders of his insistence on the conditional nature of all thought.
[7] For ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’ see M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 2nd edn, ed. T. Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991).
III: Culture Oakeshott found a faith in the possibility of unqualified knowledge of reality in literature as well as philosophy, but at the level of implicit assumption rather than explicit argument. E.M. Forster is a good example.8 Clearly, there were significant similarities between Oakeshott and Forster; both began their careers as Cambridge undergraduates, and were broadly ‘liberal’ in their outlook. It is safe to say that Oakeshott, like Forster, was opposed to what Two Cheers for Democracy called ‘Belief ’, or unconditional devotion to dogma. But Oakeshott would not have accepted Forster’s view that ‘science … ought to have ruled’ in the modern world.9 Forster considered that the application of objective scientific knowledge to politics was a good thing in principle; it had been frustrated only by circumstances and bad faith. Oakeshott, by contrast, felt that precisely this belief was responsible for many of post-war Britain’s political problems. At a deeper level, what restricted Oakeshott’s sympathy for Forster was his conviction that the civil and the contemplative transcended the purely personal. Though he shared Forster’s view that private life in the modern world ‘can only be enjoyed in the imprecisions of any social and political organization’,10 his own political philosophy laid far less emphasis on the importance of personal relationships. In the end, despite their shared admiration for Montaigne’s scepticism, Oakeshott detected a ‘certain finicky self-centredness’ and ‘superiority’ in Forster absent from Montaigne himself. Jacob Burckhardt struck him as a more reliable guide to the problems of [8] #3, Two Cheers for Democracy, pp. 44–47. [9] See E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1951), p. 77. [10] Compare the remark that students of history should be ‘grateful for merely being allowed to exist’ in the modern world: LSE 1/3.
modernity.11 The Swiss historian undeniably possessed a personal style, but it had not blinded him to the way in which ‘prosperity was breeding a profound desire for “security” and uniformity, a love of mediocrity and a deep hostility to everything that was not commonplace’. This ‘subtle change of mood from “prosperity” to “security”’ had provided the backdrop to twentieth-century European politics. Burckhardt had speculated where this trend might lead; the masses, ‘helpless despots without initiative of their own’, would in the end give up all authority and responsibility to tyrants. Oakeshott, however, had no time for any suggestion that historical inevitability was at work: ‘to consider him wise because we have permitted to happen what he thought might happen is to pay ourselves an undeserved compliment through him.’ What Oakeshott admired was not Burckhardt’s prognostications but his rootedness in his own character. It was Burckhardt, rather than Forster, who had successfully emulated the ‘Epicurean detachment’ displayed by Montaigne. This attitude of ironic resignation lay beyond faith and hope but left his interest in life undimmed. Burckhardt never articulated this standpoint as a philosophy; it manifested itself instead as a historical and poetic vision of the past in all its specificity. Burckhardt’s historical sense was far too refined to lead him to suggest the kind of ‘link between “blood” and “ability”’ suggested by Bloomfield’s Uncommon People. There was no dispute over the historical fact that certain English families since the sixteenth century—the Cecils, the Wedgwoods, the Darwins, and the Russells, amongst others—had produced a number of exceptional individuals, but the problem of ‘isolating blood from nurture when “ability” is in question’ was one that Bloomfield failed to overcome. Moreover, his judgments were eccentric; the limits of Oakeshott’s sympathy for Forster are revealed in his comment that in ‘the identification of the Bloomsbury set with the high point of English art and literature … Mr Bloomfield may be thought to have gone farther than he need or than it is wise to go.’ [11] #10, The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, pp. 66–71.
IV: Historiography and Philosophy of History English philosophers largely continued to neglect the philosophy of history between the 1950s and the 1980s, and nothing Oakeshott reviewed on the subject in these years struck him as surpassing Collingwood’s Idea of History. His reception of E.H. Carr’s What is History was scathing, but remained unpublished.12 W.H. Walsh’s essentially Collingwoodian Introduction to Philosophy of History was ‘an Introduction to a subject … by no means in a condition to be treated in that manner.’13 Oakeshott agreed with Walsh that the starting point for any philosophy of history had to be the dual meaning of the term ‘history’ itself. Many of the confusions in philosophy of history stemmed from a failure to recognize that it could designate both a series of events and a form of enquiry. Thus, Walsh was right to distinguish speculative philosophical interpretations of historical events from critical philosophies of historical knowledge. Oakeshott accepted that there was nothing illegitimate about either enterprise provided they were kept apart. Speculative philosophy of history was a ‘legitimate [attempt] to explain the past subordinated to a moral and practical purpose’, a form of ‘retrospective prophecy’; but it was entirely different from a philosophical investigation of the conditions of an understanding of the past exclusively in terms of its own past. Other difficulties remained. Not only did Walsh take for granted that ‘cause’ was a crucial concept in history without explicating it, his conception of historical understanding focussed on truth at the expense of meaning. Though ‘is it true’ or ‘is it genuine’ could be important historical questions, ‘the historian is much more often concerned with the question “What does this mean” in which “what” and “why” are combined.’ [12]
SW, i. 319–32.
[13] #4, An Introduction to Philosophy of History, p. 48.
Furthermore, Walsh’s account of the nature of historical thought shared the problems of Collingwood’s idea that historical understanding was fundamentally a matter of ‘re-enactment’. The project of ‘resurrecting or reconstructing the thoughts, feelings and emotions of the past’ suffered from the problem that ‘an historical account of the past at least purports to present something which was never in the mind of anybody at the time’. Historians at least appear ‘to have a way of thinking about the past which would have been impossible for anyone who lived in that past.’ Historians observed the conditions of their discipline with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Collingwood was as reflective a historian as one could wish, while at the other end of the scale stood the practitioner who might write excellent history but cared little about the philosophical issues involved. F.W. Maitland furnished Oakeshott with an example of a scholar whose perfect historical ‘manners’ did not extent to philosophising about his own practice.14 Somewhere in the middle stood writers like Forbes and Butterfield who took the history of historical investigation as their problem. Oakeshott gave The Liberal Anglican Idea of History and Man on His Past enthusiastic welcomes.15 Forbes’ book was a major contribution to the task of ‘replacing the contemporary myth (the understanding of the nineteenth century had of itself) by an historical “myth” (an understanding of the nineteenth century in the categories of historical thought’. This idea that the historical past, like the practical past, could be understood as a ‘myth’ deserves emphasis. It explains how the historian, while inhabiting a world of theoretical discourse logically distinct from the world of ordinary speech, can nevertheless make a vital contribution to it. History can emancipate common sense [14] #20, Man on His Past, p. 108. [15] #7, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History, pp. 55–60; #20, Man on His Past, pp. 108–9.
from the ‘selective prejudices and simplifications’ any received understanding of the past inevitably entails; this is its social value. The received ‘myth’ of the past was necessarily unhistorical for two reasons, according to Oakeshott. First, ‘what is remembered is arranged in terms of what is believed to be the destiny of the age.’ Practical thought always takes place within a horizon limited by a vision, implicit or explicit, of what the future holds. Second, it ‘easily forgets whatever seems irrelevant to the fortunes of the age.’ In every era, common sense shapes the understanding of the past as well as the future to fit its own needs, which by definition are never historical. Forbes’ book addressed the contrasting understandings of the past held by the ‘Liberal Anglicans’ (the moderate wing of the Church of England in the mid-nineteenth century) and the Utilitarians. The Utilitarian ‘myth’ was ‘heir to eighteenth-century rationalism’ in which ‘the past was the March of Mind: a single grand line of intellectual and moral progress’. In this ‘Lockean’ conception, only what had contributed to progress was perceived, and ‘the rest is forgotten, denied or relegated to the status of a dead end’. The Liberal Anglicans, inspired by Vico, Coleridge, and Niebhur, provided an alternative organic analogy; a nation, like an individual, passed through a definite cycle of life. Oakeshott’s main criticism was that Forbes confused this organic conception of the past with an authentically historical understanding of the past. While it ‘opened the door to a much closer and more detailed inspection’ of the historical past, it was later replaced by a still more sophisticated conception of history as ‘a manner of speaking about the world … not to be confused with any other’. It was this latter conception with which Oakeshott’s own attempt to identify the ‘categories’ peculiar to historical understanding was concerned. Oakeshott had always admired Butterfield’s historical work,16 and was particularly struck by the account of the eighteenth[16] See SW, i. 219–23; iii. 297–305.
century Göttingen school of historians in Man on His Past. It was ‘among these, often obscure … historians, who had felt the touch of both rationalism and romanticism, that the current conceptual problems of historical writing first came to the surface’—though they did not attract the attention of English philosophers until F.H. Bradley published ‘The Presuppositions of Critical History’ in 1874.17 Forbes and Butterfield were major contributors to ‘a genuine history of historiography’, a subject ‘only now beginning to be transformed into a genuine history’. While historians could do without critical philosophy of history, they could not ignore the history of their own subject. Historiography could make them ‘aware and critical of the intellectual fashions … liable to affect [their] work, and … show [them] that to be an historian is to think in a certain manner’. History in a Changing World struck Oakeshott as a less accomplished attempt at philosophically informed historiography.18 Barraclough’s complaint was not dissimilar to Butterfield’s; it was that historical writing, at least before 1939, often suffered from an implicit progressivism which Oakeshott agreed was present there only illegitimately. Barraclough’s solution, however, was not to disregard the idea of history as having an overall ‘plan’, but to supply an alternative one. Whether or not civilisations ‘enjoy similar fortunes and conform to a single general pattern’, this was not the sort of truth that Oakeshott thought historical research could establish. Barraclough had been overcome by a Spenglerian pessimism that was powerless to support his criticisms of the historical ‘specialist’. When Barraclough stuck to medieval history, he was capable of ‘masterpieces’; otherwise, his failure to appreciate the difference between historiography and the speculative philosophy of history undermined his conclusions. [17] See SW, iii. 141. [18] #22, History in a Changing World, pp. 114–16.
Oakeshott regarded Doris Stenton’s The English Woman in History as a more successful historical survey, probably because it was not carrying the kind of philosophical baggage that hindered Barraclough’s work. Nevertheless, he felt this early milestone in feminist historiography retained a somewhat ‘whiggish’ view of history as a story of progressive emancipation and might have been ‘a little more “sociological” in … outlook’. Oakeshott sounded something of a feministic note himself when he asked ‘What is man … that he should be made the model to be copied? Why is his status reckoned to be “emancipation”?’; modern feminists have repeatedly raised the same question. Overall, however, Stenton’s book achieved its aim of showing how ‘the legal subjection which overtook women’ after the Norman Conquest slowly began to break down after the Restoration. In Oakeshott’s eyes, Barraclough and Stenton were only two instances of a much more widespread post-war trend towards revisionism in history. Historiography had become ‘an activity in which a more or less familiar story is perpetually revised and modified. The historian begins with a current interpretation; and his task is one of criticism and reconstruction.’19 With respect to the eighteenth century, the works of John Brooke and Sir Lewis Namier as well as Butterfield supplied an exemplary instance of historical controversy. The publication of Namier’s The Structure of English Politics at the Accession of George III in 1929 had provoked a major reassessment of the period, but its conclusions were by no means unanimously accepted. Butterfield was one of Namier’s most prominent critics, and Oakeshott tended to take his side.20 As Oakeshott read him, Butterfield was complaining that Namier’s method of analysis turned historical actors into ‘automata, slaves of a situation’. Whether or not this was a fair criticism of [19] #27, The Chatham Administration, 1766–1768, p. 125. [20] #33, George III and the Historians, pp. 139–40.
Namier, it suggests that Oakeshott thought the historical virtue of contextualism could be taken to excess. What happens when this occurs is that ‘a set of dispositions and possibilities allowing room for movement and individuality [becomes] a perpetually operative set of necessary and sufficient conditions and is even regarded as the cause of events and actions’. But even if one avoided this problem, it seems that Oakeshott believed there were other structural conditions of thought that the historian of political ideas needed to take account of, as we shall see below.
V: History and Political Thought The numerous works Oakeshott reviewed on the history of political thought permit the construction of an outline narrative of the subject that runs from Hobbes to Marx. In considering Leviathan’s enduring appeal, Oakeshott suggested there was ‘something undeniable’ in it.21 It contained nothing of immediate political relevance to the modern world, but the crisis that provoked Hobbes to write it revealed the nearest thing to a timeless political truth Oakeshott could accept—that beneath the ‘uneasy achievement’ of civilized life, there lay always ‘a volcano of primordial barbarism’. Modernity had tended to ignore this fragile quality of civilisation. In turn, this had produced confusion about what could realistically be expected from government. Civilisation itself was not the task of government; it sprang from the way of life of a society. All government could do was ‘maintain that peace and order without which civilization is impossible’. The ‘limited but essential office’ of Leviathan was ‘to be guardian of the peace’, and it ‘was to operate, not arbitrarily, but by rule of law’. This ‘liberal’ reading of Leviathan has continued to grow in popularity, and Oakeshott played a significant part in disseminating it. Though Oakeshott acknowledged the continuing influence of Leo Strauss on Hobbes research in the 1960s, it was Warrender’s The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes with which he engaged most closely.22 Warrender focussed on a problem central to political philosophy, the ground of obligation. In what Oakeshott called a ‘brilliant performance’, Warrender argued that political obligation ‘is not, in Hobbes’s argument, a special kind of [21] #1, A Reminder from Leviathan, p. 38. [22] #30, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, pp. 132–34. Compare SW, iii. 110–21.
obligation but is grounded upon the moral obligation, common to all men (save atheists), to obey the law of nature.’ Warrender’s conclusion that Hobbes’s theory of obligation is ‘less divergent from the current natural law theory than is commonly supposed’ may well have prompted some of the revisions to Oakeshott’s own ‘Introduction’ to Leviathan when it was republished in 1975. At any rate, in the revised ‘Introduction’, Hobbes’s appropriation of the language of natural law assumes an importance not given to it in the earlier version. What pleased Oakeshott most was that a ‘somewhat dim figure in the positivist’s calendar of saints’ had been replaced by ‘an incomparably greater degree of historical authenticity.’23 To the subjects raised in Brown’s volume of Hobbes Studies, which included religion, politics, and ethics, a later generation of scholars has added rhetoric, natural science, psychology, mathematics, and much else besides. Oakeshott would have surely welcomed this ongoing expansion of Hobbes scholarship.24 However, Hobbes was by no means the only figure undergoing major reinterpretation after 1945. Oakeshott hailed Laslett’s edition of Locke’s Two Treatises as definitively superseding the text with which he had grown up, and the change in its significance that resulted from Laslett’s showing that it was initially written as a contribution to the failed attempt to exclude James from the succession rather than to justify the ‘revolution’ of 1688 has become well known.25 Oakeshott was particularly impressed by Laslett’s re-integration of the first Treatise, written against Filmer. It emphasized the importance of religion to Locke, and it underlined the extent to which Locke’s position was, if not directly influenced by Hobbes, then very much a reflection of ‘Hobbism’. The difference between [23] #51, Hobbes Studies, p. 212. [24] See for example T. Sorrell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). [25] #40, Two Treatises of Government, pp. 160–64.
Locke and Hobbes, however, was the level of political reflection at which they wrote. Whereas Leviathan was ‘a work of political philosophy’, the Two Treatises had to be understood at least partly as ‘not explanatory … but prescriptive.’26 Locke had blended ‘political theory’, or ‘the questionable enterprise of recommending a political position in the idiom of general ideas’, with ‘political philosophy’. This mixture gave ‘a spurious air of principle to his recommendations and a false suggestion of practical applicability to his explanations’, ensuring that the Two Treatises was ‘exactly the sort of work to make a profound impression upon mankind’. This distinction between different levels or types of political argument is a persistent theme in Oakeshott’s thought, and he criticised Isaiah Berlin for showing an insufficient appreciation of it.27 Historians needed to grasp it if they were not to be misled as concepts ‘move from one employment to another’, or be ‘inhibited by the instability of the concepts themselves’. To do so was not impossible; J.G.A. Pocock was an example of a historian who could ‘combine, without coming to grief in irrelevance, the analytical activity of the philosopher and the exploration of contingent connexions’.28 On Oakeshott’s reading of him, Montesquieu had been entirely self-conscious about the level of argument L’Esprit des lois was employing; it was an exploration of ideal types of government. Oakeshott praised Shackleton’s biography as ‘more complete than any other I am acquainted with’, and applauded its ‘wellconsidered attention to historical detail’.29 If there was a fault with Montesquieu, it was its handling of philosophical ideas; Oakeshott was ‘not sure that Montesquieu’s debt to Aristotle is as fully recognized as it should be’. [26] #40, Two Treatises of Government, p. 163. [27] #46, Philosophy, Politics,, and Society, pp. 192–93. [28] #46, Philosophy, Politics, and Society, p. 192. [29] #41, Montesquieu, p. 166.
This is significant, because Oakeshott described his own work on political philosophy as ‘Aristotelian’, and regarded Montesquieu’s exploration of ‘monarchy’ in particular as one of the precursors of his own discussion of civil association.30 Aristotle’s ‘distinction … between “kingship” and “tyranny” was in terms not of the number of rulers but the manner of ruling, the one by law and the other without law, and in this respect it corresponds very closely to Montesquieu’s distinction between Monarchy and Despotism’.31 It also corresponded very closely to his own distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘enterprise’ association. As Oakeshott understood Montesquieu, monarchy was ‘the only genuine form of government in modern Europe’ because it fell between the extremes of Despotism and Republicanism, preserving a lawfulness which each of the other two corrupted in their own fashion. De Maistre, writing in the aftermath of the French revolution, sometimes employed arguments that struck Oakeshott as ‘bizarre’, but he argued that the rule of law and the problem of obligation were as important to Maistre as they had been to Hobbes and Montesquieu.32 Maistre’s target was an erroneous understanding of authority as derived ‘from the quality of its acts’. That this was indeed an error (of a logical, categorial, kind) was a view Oakeshott shared; we shall go more deeply into his reasons for holding this position below. Moreover, Oakeshott was sympathetic toward Maistre’s ‘recognition … of contingency in politics’, something he had also found in Hobbes. For Maistre, ‘circumstance is everything’, and even authority ‘rests upon contingent current opinion’. He attributed to Maistre the view of political speech that we shall see he held himself: ‘Political discourse can never be demonstrative; the event never corresponds to the design’. [30] #59, On Misunderstanding Human Conduct, p. 277. [31] #41, Montesquieu, pp. 166–67. [32] #48, The Works of Joseph de Maistre, pp. 200–202.
Where Oakeshott did not follow Maistre was in seeking an understanding of ‘the world as it lies in the hand of God’. The relation of human affairs to ‘divine love and justice’ was not a major theme in his own work.33 Unlike Maistre, he wished to separate ‘the politics of time’ and ‘the politics of eternity’. Nevertheless, as we observed at the outset, Oakeshott regarded theology and religion as vital for understanding the history of political thought. The response to Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution underlines this point.34 If the response of his close LSE colleague Maurice Cranston is any guide, Oakeshott would have found little to admire in later works such as One Dimensional Man (1964). However, this relatively early work struck him as having ‘great merits’.35 Marcuse’s reading of Hegel made clear that: The most important texts for understanding the modern are Biblical: the two passages in the Book of Genesis in which human beings are recognized to be free of the world and as having to exert themselves in the practice of this freedom—dominion and work. These were the spring of Bacon’s understanding of the exploitation of the world which he both observed and preached; and it was to their authority that Locke somewhat naively pointed. It was left for Hegel to construct an incomparably more critical and more profound philosophy on this hypothesis. Hegelian Geist was interpreted by Oakeshott as the same recognition of a conditional human freedom that informed his [33] The striking remarks on contrasting ideas of God in M. Oakeshott On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 324–5, are not the main theme of the essay. [34] #17, Reason and Revolution, pp. 90–92. [35] See Maurice Cranston, ‘Herbert Marcuse’, Encounter, 32 (1969), pp. 38–50.
own distinction between intelligent practices and non-intelligent processes. Geist, like a practice, implied a distinctively human realm of existence unintelligible by reduction to ‘scientific’ explanation of any kind. The notion of ‘individuality’, to which Oakeshott’s Hegel attached as much importance as he himself did, belonged to this realm. This individuality had emerged relatively late in the history of humanity, and was notable for being ‘difficult to manage’.36 Whereas Hobbes had seen the modern individual as ‘preeminently a centre of religious belief apt to conflict with others of his kind’, Hegel ‘recognized him as a centre of practical activity apt to collide with others in his efforts to enjoy the world’. The solution was the Rechtsstaat, whose inhabitants were governed ‘by laws, not imposed from above but made by the people concerned.’ Like Oakeshott’s reading of Hobbes’ Leviathan, this interpretation treats Hegel’s Rechtstaat as a broadly liberal defense of the rule of law. Following Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, the argument that Hegelianism was the ‘foundation’ of fascism was put forward by some influential political theorists in the 1950s, but whenever Oakeshott encountered this sort of claim, he was completely dismissive.37 It was nevertheless true that the young Hegel had spoken ‘the language of Jacobinism’, often identified (not least by Kuenhnelt-Leddihn) as one of the roots of fascism.38 In Oakeshott’s opinion, what had attracted Hegel to Jacobin ideas in his early work was the view of government as ‘a sovereign [36] For a discussion of Oakeshott on Hegel see P. Franco, ‘Oakeshott’s Relationship to Hegel’, in T. Fuller (ed.), The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), pp. 117–31. [37] #9, The Vocabulary of Politics, p. 64. [38] ‘The spirit of the Marseillaise was Nazi and racist’: E. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited (Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1990), p. 84.
activity in which men exercised their power to make rational laws for themselves’. Whether or not this is correct, it underlines Oakeshott’s belief that a philosophy of the rule of law had been articulated in the vocabularies of both ‘left’ and ‘right’. His review of Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State argued that this early ‘Jacobin’ phase was composed of writings ‘exploring what may be called a negative identification of a still largely notional association … the procedure is one of exclusion, and … the terms are descriptive and concern characteristics’.39 In other words, Hegel’s early writings were mainly concerned to rule out an identification of a state as association in terms of religious or national consciousness, on the one hand, or in terms of bureaucratically imposed purpose, on the other. There was room to question Hegel’s view that the idea of the state as ‘an association of persons wedded to the enjoyment of a multiplicity of substantive conduct’ had been ‘promoted by the French Revolution’, but once he abandoned his early affinity with Jacobinism and became more concerned with the aspect of the state he called bürgerliche Gesellschaft, he began to examine ‘an ideal mode of association and to theorize it in terms of its postulates’. In Oakeshott’s terms, then, the later Hegel moved away from ‘political theory’ and towards ‘political philosophy’; in Hegel’s own terms, away from ‘understanding’ and towards ‘reason’. The Philosophy of Right certainly provoked reservations in Oakeshott—he described it as ‘dreadfully miscellaneous’—but he insisted that Hegel had known which level of reflection he was employing. Key terms such as der Geist, das Subjekt, der Wille, das Recht and das Gesetz did not refer to ‘contingent states of affairs’. They were philosophical ideas designed to distinguish a particular ‘ideal mode of relationship’ (‘non-instrumental or moral law’) from other such ideal modes, including love, virtue, and interests or wants. In Oakeshott’s view, no English thinker produced a political philosophy of comparable sophistication during the nineteenth [39] #57, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, p. 228.
century, unless perhaps one counts Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State (1899). Coleridge was not the philosophical equal of either Hegel or Hobbes.40 His work was more akin to Locke’s, occupying that ‘middling level of generality’; Coleridge’s ‘understanding of life in a modern state is in terms of the tensions of its historic character … between solidarity and volatility, between civil authority and intellectual freedom, and between the public and private characters of those who govern.’ This approach had allowed Coleridge to attack ‘the modish notion (still, regrettably, with us) of a state as an economy’ which Hegel’s distinction between state and civil society had also been designed to dispose of. But the extent to which Coleridge’s writings were rooted in what Oakeshott called ‘their local context of European and English thought’ had left him of less lasting interest than either Hobbes or Hegel. The dissemination of Marx’s early writings on Hegel, unpublished until 1927, was a major stimulus to the reconsideration of Marxism in the West following the rise of Soviet totalitarianism. They contributed to the development of the intellectual movement known as the ‘new Left’, so Oakeshott’s response to Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is particularly significant.41 In the inter-war era, Oakeshott’s attitude to Marx, if not to Marxism, had been critical but not entirely unsympathetic.42 After the war, however, his attitude hardened. Marxists, Oakeshott complained in 1957, ‘used to have some semblance of pride, the cloudy dignity of fanaticism’; but their ‘whining complaint that they are always misunderstood by those who do not agree with them’ had now just become ‘tiresome’.43 Moreover, the interpretation of Hegel on which revisionist Marxism was partly based was deeply flawed. [40] #49, Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State, pp. 203–5. [41] #56, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, pp. 223–26. [42] See SW, iii. 17. [43] #32, Marxism and the Open Mind, pp. 137–38.
Marx, Oakeshott argued, had simply failed to recognize the philosophical character of Hegel’s writings. ‘Instead of understanding Hegel to be asking the question, “What is the character of a society of rational free agents—persons in respect of being ‘wills’? that is, What is the idea State?, Marx understands him to be offering a demonstration of how the Absolute Idea (regarded as a kind of cosmic demiurge) creates the empirical actualities of political sentiments and relationships.’ Oakeshott realised however that Marx’s aim had been practical change, and from this point of view his philosophical confusions were relevant only insofar as they impacted on the kind of changes that he sought. Action as such did not require a philosophical understanding of the issues to be faced before it could take place, and political action in particular tended to take place in what (misquoting Conrad) he called a ‘blessed fog of ideas’.44 The nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, and Mazzini’s thought in particular, provided a pertinent illustration of this point. As ‘one of the chief progenitors of the rhetoric of liberalism’, Mazzini’s nationalism also served as a reminder of ‘how unprotected this liberalism is against metamorphosis into its opposite’. Given this mention of liberalism, we might note that Oakeshott described Mazzini’s author, Gaetano Salvemini, as himself a ‘great liberal’. An Italian MP from 1919–21, Salvemini, later the author of some highly critical works on fascism, actually sat as a socialist before his arrest for opposition to Mussolini in 1925 forced him to flee Italy. Whether this is a misrepresentation of Salvemini’s politics or an example of how Oakeshott’s interpretations tend to cut across the standard categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’ is something readers may decide for themselves.
[44] #26, Mazzini, p. 123. The phrase ‘Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog’ occurs in Joseph Conrad, Victory, ed. M. Kalnins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 73.
In principle at least, Oakeshott wanted to avoid an overly synthetic approach to ‘the’ history of political thought.45 At a minimum, the ideas of the Greek, Roman, medieval and modern periods needed to be kept distinct.46 Hence his unfavourable reception of Bowles’s attempt to represent it as ‘a cumulative process’, ‘a tradition in which the ideal sought is a “constitutional commonwealth” [that] constitutes a norm for judging the projects of statesmen and the speculations of theorists’. But Oakeshott qualified his view the history of political thought was composed of a number of entirely distinct periods in at least one important respect. He always insisted that modern political thought must be understood in as a modification of medieval ideas. A good illustration of this belief can be found in his enthusiastic review of Holt’s ‘first-class’ history of Magna Charta.47 From being part of the nineteenth-century ‘legend of English life’, in which it appeared as ‘the palladium of English liberty’ the Charter had now been placed firmly in its thirteenth century context. But precisely because the Charter was now historically ‘recognized as a political document’, it could also be treated in terms that transcended time and place. The Charter as ‘a piece of political thinking … reveals practical men grappling with a practical situation with the aid of ideas which sprang directly from their experience’. It occupied the first rung on the ladder of political thinking that led on to political theory and ultimately political philosophy. To see the Charter in this way, of course, meant that one was necessarily no longer treating it exclusively in its own historical context. Instead, it became an instance of resistance to arbitrary government which had threatened to produce ‘political novelty’ with respect to ‘the duties of rulers and the obligations of subjects’. [45] #12, Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century, p. 75. [46]
See the Introduction to SW, ii. 6.
[47] #47, Magna Charta, pp. 194–99.
In this respect it was obviously comparable to 1688 and to many other moments in history. The most important of these novelties was the beginnings of a practice of ‘opposition’. Opposition is ‘something more sophisticated than either mere dissidence or insurrection’ because it ‘assumes a distinction between “ruling” and “opposing’. Again, the conditions of the practice of opposition can be specified in terms that do not address a particular historical situation; it requires ‘a legitimate government recognized to have authority to “rule”, and … an unshaken allegiance to this government’. Opposition ‘is possible only when it is recognized to have an authority of its own—an authority to “oppose” but not to “rule”’. Oakeshott admitted that to apply the term ‘opposition’ to the activities of the English barons without qualification was anachronistic; the barons were more accurately identified as ‘quasi-rebels’. Even though the barons ‘never denied the authority of kingly government’, they were still ‘negotiators who had no recourse but to withdraw their allegiance’. Nevertheless, at this structural level of the transmission of practices, Oakeshott asserted a significant degree of continuity between medieval and later English politics.
VI: Politics—The Reviews In the decades immediately after the war, there was a vogue for ‘comparative government’ in political studies, but it was not a trend Oakeshott welcomed. ‘The expression “comparative government” has settled itself like a blight upon the academic study of politics’, he remarked, but there seemed to be no clear notion of what it involved. The ‘dilemma’ it raised was that ‘to know something in comparison with something else is to know only an abstraction’. In the rhetorical tradition, comparison was ‘an old and valued literary device’, but The Study of Comparative Government and Politics failed to show that it could be anything more. What sustained ‘comparative government’ was the ‘Baconian fervour and optimism’ then surrounding the idea of modelling ‘political science’ on the natural sciences. Oakeshott, who had always wanted to keep the physical and human sciences firmly separate, had never found this attractive.48 ‘Public administration’ seems to have struck Oakeshott as a more promising branch of political science. He devoted considerable attention to Nevil Johnson’s In Search of the Constitution. Johnson’s notion of a constitution as a ‘kind of corset for us all … establishing the boundaries for the exercise of power by both office holders and by one citizen against another’ was very close to Oakeshott’s own, and so was Johnson’s diagnosis of Britain’s predicament. Both used the term ‘providential’ to describe the type of government that they opposed. Oakeshott rejected ‘a patronising, providential, bogusly ‘caring” government’; Johnson complained that ‘we accept like sheep the providential view of the role of Government’. Both Johnson and Oakeshott also argued that considering government policies solely in terms of outcomes had marginalized [48] #31, The Study of Comparative Government and Politics, pp. 135–36.
the question of its authority to undertake them in the first place. The authority of parliament in particular had been diminished as a result. Oakeshott’s observation that ‘The House of Commons is composed of two highly disciplined parties, related to one another as “adversaries”, irresponsible, without constitutional recognition, unrepresentative of the variety of local political interests and become “mere agencies for the competitive production of rulers” … dominated by an executive government over which it exercises little control’ endorsed rather than merely paraphrased Johnson’s view. Johnson’s suggestion that a Bill of Rights might provide a solution to this constitutional malaise was greeted with more scepticism. It lacked content, and it ignored ‘the muddle which we … have already got ourselves into by awarding rights, in absolute terms, to the enjoyment of substantive satisfactions’. Nevertheless, Oakeshott did not decisively reject a Bill of Rights that would make acts of government subject to judicial review, although he considered it a departure from the British tradition of using common law to protect civil rights. Wheare’s Government by Committee, like Johnson’s In Search of the Constitution, stemmed partly from practical experience of day to day problems of government. Wheare had combined his career at Oriel with tenure on Oxford City Council, and was able to discriminate carefully between the various functions of committees (‘advice, inquiry, negotiation, legislation, administration and scrutiny’) and the nature of their members (‘officials, experts, laymen, party men and interested parties’). Oakeshott welcomed Wheare’s recognition that the use of committees was ‘not only valuable in public administration’ but also ‘has significance in government’; they could be used to rule as well as manage. ‘They may be designed to allay suspicion, to remove opposition, to secure co-operation, to pacify popular agitation, or to conceal, to postpone or to avoid action’. Indeed, they were the natural counterparts of ‘democratic’ government.
The belief that constitutional and administrative changes ought to be in keeping with existing practice was characteristic of Oakeshott, even though he had decided well before 1939 that most contemporary statements of conservatism were unsatisfactory because of their reliance on natural law or Christianity. The continued reliance of conservative thinkers on these foundations after 1945 meant that in the last resort they were unable to resist sceptical criticism.49 A good example was Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty and Equality, which based a conservative defence of liberty on monarchical and Catholic foundations. While Oakeshott sympathised with the view that ‘democracy’ understood as ‘the pursuit of equality’ led inevitably to collectivism and thus was incompatible with liberty, Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s was not the best foundation for conservative thought. What was needed, in Oakeshott’s mind, was a kind of conservatism that avoided invoking particular religious or constitutional forms. Oakeshott increasingly inclined to the view that religious and political traditions could only provide ex post facto justifications for what was really a ‘disposition’. Oakeshott did not equate this conservative disposition either with a party political affiliation or with support for particular policies. In reviews of two works by prominent American writers, Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind and Clinton Rossiter’s Conservatism in America, he detected visible signs of a revival of conservative thought. Indeed, what Oakeshott called the ‘New Conservatism’ became the transatlantic movement known more generally as the ‘new Right’.50 In both England and America, Oakeshott argued, conservatism had been on the defensive against liberalism, utilitarianism, and other forms of radicalism since the early nineteenth century. But [49]
See the Introduction to SW, iii. 30.
[50] #14, The Conservative Mind, pp. 81–84; #23, Conservatism in America, pp. 117–18. These reviews, plus those on British Conservatism discussed below, are a useful collective complement to Oakeshott’s essay ‘On Being Conservative’ in Rationalism in Politics, pp. 407–37.
he found the attempts of these other schools of thought to identify this type of Conservatism simply with ‘reaction’, or the impossible task of arresting change altogether, implausible. However, Oakeshott explicitly distanced himself from Russell’s view of Burke as the author of a “charter” for modern Conservatism, a view he felt Rossiter shared. It was a mistaken reading of Burke, who was a ‘great intellectual melodist’ rather than the creator of a philosophical system. Furthermore, it was an unfortunate pedigree for these writers to fasten onto modern conservatism, because Burke’s thought suffered from at least two significant shortcomings. First, Burke had failed to achieve a ‘clear recognition of politics as a specific activity’. His general dislike of change extended to matters Oakeshott considered politically irrelevant. There was, Oakeshott emphasized, ‘no inconstancy in being conservative in politics and “radical” in everything else’. Second, Burke lacked ‘speculative moderation’. He had a tendency to invoke ‘a manner of reasoning characteristic of the Middle Ages’ with no real place in the modern world. Oakeshott’s remark that ‘it would perhaps have been more fortunate if the modern conservative had paid more attention to Hume and less to Burke’ has not been noticed often enough, but it surely indicates his sceptical distance from Burke. Though Oakeshott has sometimes been seen as a ‘Burkean’ Conservative (chiefly on account of his use of ‘tradition’ in Rationalism in Politics), for the label was far more appropriate Russell, whose later conversion to Roman Catholicism underlines their differences. Though Oakeshott was often sympathetic to Anglo-Catholic writers like Hilaire Belloc (whom he quoted at the end of his review of Russell’s book) and T.S. Eliot, in the last resort he did not share their faith and never made religion the basis of his political thought.
In Britain, the fortunes of the ‘New Right’ are charted in reviews of three collections of essays published roughly a decade apart.51 The first, The Conservative Opportunity, appeared in 1965, at the beginning of a period of Labour dominance in British government; the Conservative party was in power for only four of the fifteen years between 1964 and 1979. It contained contributions from a number of Conservative politicians who later held high office under Margaret Thatcher, including Geoffrey Howe (Chancellor and Foreign Secretary) and John Macgregor (Leader of the House of Commons). On the whole, Oakeshott’s reception of this volume was enthusiastic. The contributors, faced with the choice between ‘government charged with a managerial task and responsibility (“telocracy”) and … one which conforms to a judicial analogy (“nomocracy”)’, had chosen the latter. They favoured ‘government as a custodian of a system of law designed to allow the maximum freedom of choice among its subjects’. While he detected ‘the language of telocracy’ in the commitment of David Howell (also subsequently a Thatcher cabinet minister) to “the growth of productivity”, he gave the collection the benefit of the doubt. The ‘occasional perfunctory bow to current gibberish’ and ‘lapses into … commercial’ rhetoric did not alter its fundamentally ‘civil’ nature. A more dubious note is discernible in Oakeshott’s response to the collection of Conservative Essays edited by Maurice Cowling, and published shortly before Thatcher’s first electoral victory. The insistence that British politics is ‘a tension between two … different beliefs about the office and authority of government’ was still present, but it was no longer clear that the Conservative party consistently favoured the idea of government as the ‘custodian’ of ‘rules of conduct which do not represent the demands of interests’. [51] #45, The Conservative Opportunity, pp. 187–89; #60, Conservative Essays, pp. 280–82; and #64, Conservative Thoughts and Conservative Thinkers, pp. 295–97.
Instead Oakeshott detected the increasing influence of ‘the belief that a State is (or should be) a purposive association’. Oakeshott still displayed enthusiasm for particular essays, notably Shirley Letwin’s piece ‘On Conservative Individualism’, but was concerned that the contributors ‘do not all understand that “capitalism” is a supreme irrelevance’ or that ‘a Conservative government … has no place for an “economic policy”’. Moreover, the frequently expressed desire to “roll back the frontiers of the state” struck him as ‘a near-disastrous blunder … a surrender to the old parody of Conservatism as a “do-nothing” conception of government, whereas what needs to be emphasized is merely that such a government has no place for managerial activity.’ His remark that ‘Mrs Thatcher … seems to be more ofa genuine Conservative than her predecessors’ must surely be qualified by his subsequent refusal of an honour from her government. Oakeshott’s last ever review examined two collections of essays from the conservative journal Salisbury Review. It was published in 1988, towards the end of Thatcher’s term in office. By this time he had decided that ‘conservative’ had become an almost uselessly corrupt term: ‘Stalinists in Russia are now commonly called “conservatives”’. The implication was that in Britain, a party bearing the Conservative name could no longer be relied on to support political conservatism understood as a ‘relationship in terms of rules (laws) which impose obligations to observe simple conditions … while performing our self-chosen actions’. That said, Oakeshott remained complimentary about the intellectual quality of individual contributions. If genuine conservatism was currently lacking from British politics, he plainly felt that it survived in philosophical circles; Robert Grant, John Gray, and Roger Scruton were all singled out as authors of ‘reflective’ and ‘carefully and honestly argued’ essays. Several reviews of works by French authors give some indication of Oakeshott’s response to developments in political theory outside the Anglophone world. We can begin our discussion of them by noticing his responses to two books by Bertrand de Jouvenel.
Apart from anything else, these serve as a useful reminder of how small the worlds of academia and politics could still be in the 1950s: Jouvenel had once worked as the private secretary to Eduard Beneš, whose memoirs are also reviewed here. Their works neatly illustrate Oakeshott’s point about the existence of distinct levels of political reflection. The aim of Beneš’ account of his years as President of Czechoslovakia (which included a period of wartime exile in England) was chiefly to justify the political calculations guiding his efforts to preserve Czechoslovakian independence, while Jouvenel was interested in the meaning of concepts such as sovereignty, equality and authority. Obviously, Jouvenel’s work lay much closer to Oakeshott’s own interests, and the two almost certainly met in 1949 when Oakeshott attended a meeting of the Mont Pelerin society which Jouvenel helped to found.52 This organisation, which still exists, was established after WW2 by a number of leading political philosophers including Friedrich Hayek, Walter Lippman, Karl Popper, and Ludwig von Mises. Its aims were to provide intellectual opposition to socialism and to promote a view of politics and economics inspired by classical liberalism. Oakeshott’s public expressions of disdain for political planning in general and the politics of the post-war Labour government in particular made him a natural invitee. Jouvenel’s conclusion that the ‘difficulties involved in any genuine process of redistribution of income are … so serious that it seems they must in the end defeat the enterprise’ was identical to the view Oakeshott himself had reached, and he endorsed Jouvenel’s argument that the approach to redistribution was logically incoherent. The most important consequence of redistributive policies, he argued, was to produce a ‘vast increase in the powers and activity government’. Power, not incomes, was what really ended up being redistributed, and police powers are [52] See The Economist, 26 December 1992.
‘at their greatest whenever the destruction of private property has been most completely achieved.’ It is easy to see, given this analysis, why both Jouvenel and Oakeshott considered sovereignty important. Indeed, Oakeshott stated that ‘nothing matters more to the well-being of an association than firm agreement about the identity and character of its sovereign’. The question of the political ‘good’ that an association is dedicated to pursuing was a distinct problem. As we shall see below, the claim that beliefs about the source of sovereign authority (for example, that it is located in the demos) carried no implications for what government ought to do assumed a central importance in Oakeshott’s later political philosophy. As Oakeshott read him, Jouvenel made a distinction between the temporary authority of a dux, ‘appropriate to an action-group devoted to a specific enterprise, like victory in war or success in business’, from the authority of a rex ‘appropriate to associations whose members have common interests but are engaged in a variety of enterprises’. Evidently, he found Jouvenel’s argument compatible with his own distinction between government devoted to the pursuit of a particular purpose and government in accordance with the rule of law. Oakeshott still had criticisms to offer, however. In particular, he felt Jouvenel treated the idea that governing was the activity of a leader rather than a ruler’ as simply ‘an error, a confusion of categories’. For Oakeshott, confused though it might be, it was one of the two distinctive attitudes to government in modern European history. Hence, Jouvenel did not make as clear as he might have the ambiguity contained in terms such as ‘justice’ and ‘liberty’. Maurice Duverger’s work on Political Parties also drew a positive response from Oakeshott for its appreciation of the way in which studying politics raised just this kind of linguistic problem.53 ‘[The] terms of this science are never securely insulated from those of the world of political enterprise … words [53] #13, Political Parties, pp. 78–80.
which the political scientist would like to use dispassionately’, like ‘democracy’, ‘conservative’, ‘liberal’, and so on, ‘are being shouted in the street as terms of approval and abuse’. Duverger’s book was a model of ‘the kind of analytical historical study which promises to be the most profitable direction for a science of politics to take’. What Duverger had done was to ‘establish certain ideal types and then to interpret the generation and structure of the parties of contemporary European and American politics as approximations’ to them. In Oakeshott’s opinion, any meaningful study of politics that was not philosophical had to be historical, and Duverger’s analysis was employing the same approach as ‘Troeltsch’s study of the ecclesiastical structures of the sixteenth century’. Oakeshott’s criticisms of Duverger were again in terms of his own understanding of European historical development. For example, the political party as Duverger portrayed it was essentially modern, a product of ‘the extension of popular suffrage and the necessity for organising a mass electorate’. But for Oakeshott, there was less novelty in their organization than Duverger imagined. Political parties, like every other feature of the modern political landscape, reflected one or other of the two dominant dispositions in European politics. Either parties were ‘organizations appropriate to the understanding of a political activity … as the pursuit of a single comprehensive end’, or they were bodies suitable to ‘the pursuit of heterogeneous ends which compose no comprehensive pattern’. The third French political thinker whose work drew a favourable response from Oakeshott during this period was Raymond Aron. However, Oakeshott’s review of The Opium of the Intellectuals puts his attitude to French thought into perspective. Despite his admiration for Jouvenel, Duverger, and Aron, Oakeshott believed had ‘taken a remarkably silly turn’.54 Dominated by Communism, it had become ‘the monologue of a set of “intellectuals” … remote from the current problems of French politics.’ [54] #34, The Opium of the Intellectuals, pp. 141–44.
Though Oakeshott did not mention Sartre by name, the reference to philosophers publishing in L’Esprit and Les Temps Modernes whose ideas had also been novelised by Simone de Beauvoir (in The Mandarins) would have left little doubt as to his main target. If any remained, the reference to ‘a quixotic longing to transpose the contingent into the idiom of a set of metaphysical notions, part Marxist, part Existentialist’ (almost certainly an allusion to Being and Nothingness) would have dispelled it. Oakeshott’s hostility to Sartreanism was not an expression of a general dislike of all ‘left-wing’ thought. He praised Bassett’s The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy (though he was writing a Preface to a work by a late colleague). Still, there is no reason to doubt that he found Bassett’s membership of the Independent Labour Party compatible with a kind of Whiggish attachment to the institutions of British parliamentary government, or that his respect for Bassett as a historian of contemporary politics was genuine.55 The Fabian Society (to which his father Joseph Oakeshott belonged) also commanded a certain respect. Reviewing Margaret Cole’s history of Fabianism, he commented that Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw offered an ‘unbeatable’ combination of ‘colour … humour … lightness … and … capacity for irresponsibility’.56 Even anarchism was not dismissed; reviewing Herbert Read’s Anarchy and Order, Oakeshott found ‘something endearing about the bearded-bomb throwers of the past’, who at least ‘belonged to an individualist world’. Anarchism’s attractiveness was largely illusory, being inversely proportional to the existence of a real threat of a Hobbesian absence of government. Nevertheless, insofar as ‘the philosophical anarchist’ was protesting against a government with a ‘propensity for over-activity’, he was ‘a friend
[55] #43, The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy, pp. 178–80. [56] #39, The Story of Fabian Socialism, p. 158.
whose head may be a little light but whose affections may be trusted’.57 We have already seen, however, that Oakeshott had considerably less respect for those still willing to espouse socialism or Marxism by the later 1950s. The belief in the ‘piecemeal social engineering’ favoured by the British Labour party and its supporters had inspired the polemics of Rationalism in Politics, so it is unsurprising that he received Blackham’s Political Discipline in a Free Society in a weary tone.58 This was nothing, however, compared to his contempt for the French left. ‘[D]isfigured by an unusual amount of intellectual dishonesty’, was his verdict. The only exception was Camus, whose ‘attempt to rescue the “truth” of human revolt against the absurdité of the universe from the hands of false propets’ possessed an integrity the writings of other authors lacked. Oakeshott endorsed Aron’s judgment that ‘the foundation of Marxism as it is understood by these French writers is a teleological interpretation of history’. He described it as ‘a refined sort of secular millennialism … in which the “Redeemer” (the Proletariat) turns out to be miscast for its role and obstinately refuses to act its part’. Part of the appeal of Communism had always lain in its ability to offer the Christian ‘the reflection of an attractive heresy’; but the real secret of its success was its participation in the ‘heterogeneity and vagueness’ of left-wing thought as a whole. Once again, Oakeshott read Aron in the light of his own account of European politics. He was not persuaded by Aron’s argument that ‘we are in the process of coming free from the war of ideologies’. Even if the current ideological conflict were to end, ‘the conditions which generated this style of politics are much older and much more deeply rooted than M. Aron supposes’. In other words, the enterprising style of politics could continue, [57] #11, Anarchy and Order, pp. 72–74. [58] #38, Political Discipline in a Free Society, pp. 155–56.
even if shorn of its ideological element. The only genuine defence against the subordination of society to a single purpose was to keep the sceptical style of politics alive. In 1939, Oakeshott had edited a reader entitled The Social and Political Doctrines of Modern Europe. The book had proved timely, and was reprinted several times in America as well as Britain. By the mid-1950s, however, the topical character that had made it successful had rendered it out of date. When Oakeshott reviewed its successor, Documents of Modern Political Thought, he remarked (without acknowledging his original editorship) that Fascism and National Socialism were no longer ‘operative and significant bodies of political belief ’.59 More importantly, Oakeshott now considered that ‘the section devoted to Representative Democracy’ in the original volume had been ‘far too narrowly conceived’. ‘The passages chosen … were one-sided and too exclusively concerned with what may … be called “Liberalism”. The eligibility of so-called “democratic” institutions and of the current political vocabulary of “democracy” to push political activity in a variety of divergent directions and to be interpreted in widely different senses, was concealed.’ The new edition had partly corrected this fault by recognizing a divergence of opinion over ‘democracy’, though it also left out some important figures whom Oakeshott would have preferred to see included, like Tocqueville. What it had not done was to trace the disagreements to their source. In the post-war era, Oakeshott had increasingly come to think that ‘democracy’ was subject to the same general tension that he had first pointed to in a note in the 1939 volume contrasting a society subjected to total planning with one governed by law.60
[59] #35, Documents of Modern Political Thought, p. 145. [60] M. Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1950), xxii n. 1.
VII: Politics—The Essays The final, most sophisticated form of this contrast—the distinction between democracy as ‘civil’ and as ‘enterprise’ association—was set out in On Human Conduct, but in the intervening decades it underwent numerous reformulations in which some significant nuances are detectable. To the contrasts between the ‘politics of faith’ and the ‘politics of scepticism’, and between ‘telocracy’ and ‘nomocracy’, we can now add the distinction between government as a ‘primary’ and a ‘secondary’ order of activity drawn in the lecture on ‘The Concept of Government in Modern Europe’.61 This is one of four essays in this volume which if read together provide some useful clarifications to Oakeshott’s political philosophy. The other three are the ‘Reply to Professor Raphael’; ‘Political Laws and Captive Audiences’; and the title-piece ‘On the Vocabulary of a Modern European State’. These pieces, written over a period of roughly twenty years as Oakeshott increasingly left his post-war polemics on Rationalism and ‘tradition’ behind, can effectively be treated as a unity. Amongst the published works, they fit most closely with essays such as ‘Talking Politics’ and ‘Political Discourse’, owing to their focus on the nature of political speech. This focus had two main aspects, historical and philosophical, though the emphasis varied. In ‘The Concept of Government in Modern Europe’ the discussion is weighted toward history; in the reply to D.D. Raphael and ‘Political Laws and Captive Audiences’ it is more philosophical; and in ‘The Vocabulary of a Modern European State’ the two approaches were more or less evenly pursued. ‘The Concept of Government in Modern Europe’ argued that modern European political thought and practice revolved [61] #13, Political Parties, p. 80, actually adds an additional contrast between ‘the politics of scepticism’ and ‘the politics of passion’, possibly the only place in Oakeshott’s writings where the distinction is drawn in these terms.
mainly around the question of what the government of a state should do.62 This was not the only possible question for political reflection, but since at least the late eighteenth century there had been a consensus in Europe over the source of the authority of governments; they were held by their citizens to be legitimate insofar as they were based on the principles of nationality and democracy. These beliefs about authority necessarily rested on a kind of myth; they could have no other basis. Practical reason, simply as such, could not ground authority; nor could political philosophy, which we have seen he thought bore no direct relation to practice. Oakeshott was of course not alone in thinking that even in an era of science and technology, ‘myth’ was the basis of the state’s authority; Cassirer is a notable example of another major twentieth-century philosopher who put forward the same argument. Another relevant comparison is with Tocqueville, who had pronounced democracy to be the difficult ‘fate’ of modernity at an early stage of its development. Oakeshott can be said to have accepted this view, though he also believed the political ‘predicament’ democracy represented had by now reached an ‘advanced stage’.63 The modern acceptance of the myth of the democratic foundation of state authority nevertheless allowed for fundamental disagreement over the kinds of things governments should do. These disagreements had arisen for reasons largely unconnected with politics, in particular the rise of technology. This had made much more power available, and governments, like every other institution, had taken advantage of it. Policies that would have been literally unthinkable in the medieval era now seemed perfectly feasible. The great divide since the Reformation had been between those who thought governments should use this power to impose the pursuit of a single purpose on their citizens, [62] #18, The Concept of Government in Modern Europe, pp. 93–105. [63] #5, Liberty or Equality, pp. 51–52.
and those who believed that governments should be confined to using it to uphold a framework within which citizens could pursue purposes of their own. As we have seen, Oakeshott sought to bring out this qualitative contrast by using a number of different terms. But all of his contrasts pointed to the same ideal distinction, between a kind of government devoted to an all-embracing goal, and a government whose goal was solely the preservation of the rule of law. He also argued that it was precisely this difference which was responsible for the ambiguity of European political language; it was almost impossible to find ‘political’ words that had not been part of the vocabulary of both styles of government. A ‘right’, for example, could mean both a formal and a substantive entitlement. The historical reasons for the development of this ambiguity could in part be traced back to the theory and practice of medieval kingship. Kings had been enterprising in respect of their lordship of their own lands, but as monarchs they were expected to do justice on behalf of their subjects. The Reformation, in which kings acquired many of the rights and duties that previously belonged to the church, greatly increased the temptation for governments to become enterprising towards their own citizens, as princes were now also in charge of their moral and spiritual welfare. So had the development of a market economy in which the nascent state was intimately involved, and so had state adventures like colonialism and war. But the rival conception of government in which the state was expected to confine itself to providing legal redress for its citizens had also found plenty of defenders. Indeed, given that on Oakeshott’s reading of them so many leading political philosophers of the post-Renaissance world favoured the noninstrumental concept of the state, one might question how the purposive state ever gained such popularity; though in response one could point out that his interpretation is quite consistent with his belief that philosophy has no direct impact on practice.
Oakeshott did hold, though, that the ambiguities arising from the dispute over the character of the modern state had systematically affected our modern political vocabulary. Furthermore, he regarded the search for an unambiguous and demonstrative form of political argument of the sort which Hobbes and Spinoza had tried to construct as a response to this situation. But as his reply to D.D. Raphael and his address on ‘Political Laws and Captive Audiences’ made clear, he considered this search had led down a blind alley. No such form of political discourse was possible.64 Following Aristotle’s approach in the Rhetoric, Oakeshott treated all political argument (‘argument designed to recommend an action’) as a species of practical reason. We can now see more clearly why he insisted on the existence of different ‘levels’ of political argument. It was a corollary of the fundamental distinction between explanatory and injunctive or persuasive forms of speech. ‘Theory’ was an ambiguous concept because it could refer to reasoning designed to support both forms. Where Raphael seemed to Oakeshott to acknowledge only that kind of ‘political theory’ which supported ‘normative reflection’, he wanted to establish the existence of a realm of political theory which was purely explanatory. Normative political theory, correctly understood, could not possibly be regarded as demonstrative. It was inevitably the product of casuistry; Raphael had not appreciated that any search for an absolute standard for evaluating political argument resulted in an infinite regress. Such a search could only culminate in the Platonic paradox of a need for a ‘form of forms’ or ‘norm of norms’. The circumstantial and contingent could never be removed from political discourse, and its conclusions, even in the rare circumstances where they commanded something approaching to general assent, could never be regarded as universally formally valid. [64] #44, Rationalism in Politics, pp. 181–86; #42, Political Laws and Captive Audiences, pp. 168–77.
Raphael’s approach also failed to grasp the situation of radical ignorance which necessarily formed the context of all political discourse. This ignorance was not merely due to a condition of ‘imperfect information’ of the sort that might be specified in rational choice analysis; it was dictated by the impossibility of being informed in advance of the consequences of one’s actions. There would always be unintended consequences, welcome or unwelcome, and they would always be impossible to forsee in their entirety. Both Liberalism and Marxism, in different ways, had attempted to deny the reality of this situation by invoking laws of social development or economic progress. When Oakeshott revisited the theme of the persuasive nature of all political discourse in the talk he supplied for Radio Free Europe (a series to which two other senior members of the LSE Department of Government, Leonard Schapiro and Maurice Cranston, also contributed),65 Oakeshott argued that there was an inherent tension in political speech between truth and plausibility. What is essential, from the point of view of the politician who wishes to persuade an audience to undertake a certain course of action, is that what is said is believed; that what is said is good or true are only instrumental considerations in this context. There was always the danger, therefore, that political discourse could suffer fundamental corruption, becoming a purely persuasive means to the pursuit of power for its own sake. This, one might say, is the structural reason behind Oakeshott’s belief that a return to barbarism was a permanent possibility. National Socialism was an instance of precisely this reduction of politics to an intellectually counterfeit activity; so was the political discourse of Stalinist Russia with its rhetorical invocation of inevitable historical development. These examples doubtless represented an [65] See Leonard Schapiro, ‘The Dawn of Marxism and Leninism’, and Maurice Cranston, ‘The Dialectics of Monsieur Sartre’, in G. Urban (ed.), Talking to Eastern Europe (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), pp. 29–55, 168–81.
extreme, but they rested on the same ambiguities of thought about the role of government that marked European political discourse at large. ‘The Vocabulary of a Modern European State’ was Oakeshott’s last major effort to disentangle the confusions he detected.66 The metaphor of the ‘state’ was ambiguous in itself; a state was somehow like an ‘estate’, a description of a ‘tract of land and a condition of its inhabitants’, but quite how initially went unanswered. Gradually, three main characteristics were identified. Statehood entailed (i) authoritative offices, possibly identified in a constitution which might also express some beliefs about the sources of this authority; (ii) an executive apparatus through which power was exerted; and (iii) a distinctive kind of relationship between its members. Each of these three aspects of the state had its own peculiar logic. Confusion over the nature of the state had arisen for two main reasons. Each of these three characteristics could be thought of in terms that made it more likely the state would be understood as a civil rather than an enterprise association, or vice versa; and second, the conceptual structures of all three characteristics had been conflated with one another. This resulted in ‘categorial error’. In his early writings, Oakeshott had been concerned mainly with confusions between different modes of experience such as history, science, philosophy, and practice. Here he was dealing primarily with confusions within the world of practice itself. Still, the result of categorial error was the same as the outcome of mixing modes of experience—logical irrelevance and conceptual confusion. (i) The coherence of the vocabulary of authority depended on its being restricted to considerations of right. The question of whether or not an agent had the right to speak or act could not be answered with reference to whether what the agent said or did had a positive outcome. This ‘logic of right’, as we might call it, could not encompass such considerations. Similarly, our reasons for having a particular obligation cannot have anything to do with the fact that we believe those in authority to be particularly wise [66] #58, The Vocabulary of a Modern European State, pp. 232–66.
or holy or benevolent. This belief might provide good reasons for fulfilling our obligations, but it cannot be the ground of them. For Oakeshott such a ground can only lie, as we observed earlier, in a ‘myth’ of the state which founds authority on some culturally acceptable source. ‘Sovereignty’ was one of the terms belonging to the vocabulary of authority that had suffered from such confusions. For example, being a property of authority, and thus legal in character, it presupposed a limited and conditional form of rule; but ‘absolute’ sovereignty (an office beyond which there was no further legal appeal) had been confused with absolute power as if it were the ability to overcome all possible opposition. ‘Power’, too, contained a confusion in itself; it had frequently conceived of in mechanistic or naturalistic terms as if it were identical with force, but this ignored the fact that in politics one was always dealing with human relationships. The practices in terms of which these relations must be understood, Oakeshott insisted, are never identical with causal processes of any kind. It is impossible, he argued, to exert power (in any sense other than pure force) over someone who does not fear you and wants nothing from you. Nor is pure force ever what is at issue in the exercise of political power, because the person exercising it is looking for a particular response from the other party and not merely seeking their subjugation. That would be ‘war’, not ‘politics’. Political power is always power that has been moralized in some fashion; the claim that a citizen should obey an official is always grounded in the fact that the official holds an office and can therefore claim a right. Whatever the ground of this sovereign right of the state to insist that its citizens meet their obligations, it had no implications for its constitutional shape. Certain institutions had, historically speaking, been closely linked with particular beliefs about sovereignty, but this was, in Oakeshott’s eyes at least, a contingent relationship. One might debate this; Dahl’s work has suggested that the holding of regular free and fair elections in which all
citizens have the right to office is a minimum requirement of democratic authority, for example. But Oakeshott could respond that the use of elections is not exclusive to democracy, and in that in any case their presence says nothing about what offices there should be, which is what really defines a constitutional shape. The idea of ‘consent’, which has played a central role in both early modern contract theory and in modern liberal and democratic theory, also contained a significant ambiguity. It begged the question of whether this consent was simply an acknowledgment of authority, or signified approval of what those in authority had done. The maintenance of authority required acknowledgment, but approval was logically irrelevant to it. Nevertheless, consent had increasingly been identified with approval of the measures taken by authority. Seen in this light, the state appeared as simply one provider of satisfactions amongst others. In itself, this development had simply marginalized the question of state authority; it had not necessarily undermined it. It had, however, resulted in a changed meaning for ‘democracy’. From signifying beliefs about the source of authority and about the proper shape of a constitution, it had increasingly come to stand for ‘what is called a “method of government” … “a utilitarian device” … distinguished by its propensity to generate prescriptive conclusions which “concur with the will of the majority”’. The proof of this change was the appearance in the nineteenth century of criticism of democracy’s propensity to create a ‘tyranny of the majority’ (a criticism Oakeshott had once made himself).67 An authoritative constitutional shape was designed precisely to limit power, and therefore could not be tyrannous. (ii) ‘Democracy’ in the modern sense, however, referred to the activities of government. The claim that a popular mandate legitimated the imposition of certain goals on the citizenry as a whole was characteristic of ‘enterprise association’, and in this sense Oakeshott agreed with Read that ‘modern “democratic” governments are often the most hostile towards individualism’. [67]
See the Introduction to SW, iii. 28.
The idea that there was an inherently democratic form of ‘bureaucracy’, or of the state’s executive apparatus (the second of its features) was one that he dismissed. In respect of their possession of power, states were indeed indistinguishable from corporations. Nevertheless, ‘bureaucracy’ was an inherently unfortunate term, suggesting etymologically that it belonged to the vocabulary of constitutional authority even though conceptually it could not possibly do so. Incidentally, Oakeshott came to dislike ‘telocracy’ on similar grounds; it suggested a government could derive its authority from the purpose it pursued, a notion he also found logically incoherent. (iii) The third and final characteristic of the state was that it implied a distinctive relationship between its members. It was quickly realised that a fundamental feature of state membership is that it is an unchosen condition. As the outlines of the modern state became visible in the early modern period, an analogy was needed to describe it more fully. Oakeshott pointed in particular to the use of two terms from Roman law, societas and universitas, which provided contrasting answers. A universitas, or corporation aggregate, seemed to imply that people were joined in promoting ‘a chosen substantive purpose or interest’. Societas, by contrast, was conventionally distinguished precisely by being association exclusively in terms of rules which prescribed no common purpose. As with the two other features of the state, categorial confusions had hindered the theoretical and practical exploration of these analogies. There had been a persistent tendency to use the vocabulary of authority to describe the kind of relationship state membership involved. Ambiguous terms like ‘nation’ and ‘society’ that ‘purport to disclose conditions of association but which specify no mode of association’ had further muddied the waters. Perhaps most importantly, however, there had been an enduring confusion ‘between the constitutional shape of an office of government and another quite different aspect of such an office which is necessarily related to the mode of association, namely,
the character of its engagement.’ In other words, it had been expected of a republican form of constitution (by thinkers like Kant and Paine) that it would provide a government that would act in certain ways but would be incapable of acting in others.68 Oakeshott believed this was a serious error. What was relevant to the nature of the relationship between citizens, state, and each other was not the constitutional form of the government but ‘the character of its engagement’. In other words, if state membership is thought of as an instance of instrumental or enterprise association, then the proper office of government will be ‘necessarily a managerial engagement’. Whatever its constitutional shape, such a government will assist and direct the ‘exploitation of the appropriate resources of the association in the furtherance of its purpose’. In contrast, where state membership involves rules designed to allow groups and individuals to pursue their own purposes, the task of government is simply to ensure these rules remain appropriate and if necessary to punish violations. Government based on this analogy of societas does not presuppose any particular constitutional form; it need not have a ‘democratic’ constitution any more than it must have an ‘oligarchic’ one. The muddle into which Oakeshott thought the term ‘democracy’ had fallen was underlined by his remark that it was used to mean ‘a constitutional shape, a method of governing, an apparatus of power and a mode of association’. The trend since the eighteenth century had been unmistakably in the direction of the state as a universitas, a ‘development corporation’. Distinctions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ were irrelevant here; socialism and liberalism, as well as national socialism, communism, and fascism, had all shared this understanding of the purpose of the state. Its moral failing was that it necessarily lacked the freedom characteristic of enterprise association—the freedom to choose whether or not to belong. [68] M. Oakeshott, Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, ed. S. Letwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 9–10.
Non-state forms of enterprise association preserved the ‘link between belief and conduct’ by allowing members to come and go as they pleased, but in a state this was impossible. This is why Oakeshott found it ‘disingenuous’ when Read described the workers collectives he intended should “administer the whole economic life of the community” as “voluntary associations”; it was not clear one could opt out of such an organisation, and so the type of ‘freedom’ involved in enterprise association was lost. It is noteworthy, too, that he considered the Labour Front ‘probably the most important of all the party institutions’ of National Socialism.69 ‘Freedom’ was only possible if the state was confined to a primarily judicial role, leaving its citizens the greatest possible scope to decide for themselves what goals and purposes to pursue, including their degree of participation in market relations; there was no necessary relation, in Oakeshott’s mind, between societas and capitalism. Seen in this light, the philosophy of civil association is clearly a more stringent rephrasing of liberalism in the tradition of J.S. Mill that retains the bohemian tinge of the original. He was keen, moreover, to insist that the form of the state and the nature of its rules always remained subject to choice. That is not to say that they were the outcome of design; indeed, they were often the results of the conceptual confusions Oakeshott had identified. These had helped to render the modern state ‘a strange and perhaps unstable mixture of civil and enterprise association’. Nevertheless, the idea that the development of the modern state represented an ‘evolutionary process’ we could do nothing about was one that he completely rejected. No political change, whether the development of world government or anything else, was inevitable: ‘human associations are not processes but practices intelligible and acceptable in terms of the understanding of the associates’. Finally, Oakeshott turned to the term ‘political’, arguing that this adjective shared in the confusions affecting the rest of [69] #11, Anarchy and Order, pp. 72–74; #50, Nazism, p. 211.
the vocabulary surrounding the modern state. In an attempt to extricate it from them, he proposed the following definition: Formally, the word “political” identifies utterances in the active voice, the subjunctive mood, the present tense and (usually) in the first or second person plural (‘Let us …’, or ‘Do you …’), which may be responded to in a conditional or an unconditional ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, with a request for elucidation, ‘For what reasons do you urge me/us to agree to do this? Substantively, they are the utterances of one who acknowledges himself to be associated with others in terms of understood conditions which are eligible to be changed or added to in some recognized procedure and are thus capable of being considered not only in terms of their authority (that is, as authentic rules of conduct) but in terms of the desirability or cogency of what they prescribe. They are utterances about some large or small part of the acknowledged conditions of association in respect of their desirability or cogency. And they are utterances concerned argumentatively or persuasively to defend their desirability or cogency, or to question it and to propose or to canvass a change in which it is alleged they will become more desirable or cogent, this proposal being supported by reasons which relate to these considerations and addressed mediately to any who are disposed to listen and ultimately to the occupants of an office with authority to institute or to reject the proposed change. This dense definition encompasses formal and informal contexts, and action as well as speech, up to and including civil disobedience: ‘It is inherent in “political” engagement that it needs neither office nor power’. Genuinely ‘civil’ or ‘political’ disobedience, however, cannot be a denial of authority; ‘civil war … is not
“politics”’. Ultimately, all conceptions of ‘the political’ presuppose an authoritative framework of rules and a similarly authoritative body with recognized procedures for changing them.70 Oakeshott’s definition also makes plain why he found ‘political state’ or ‘political association’ less satisfactory terms than ‘civil association’. If ‘politics’ is debating what the terms of association should be, then clubs or parties may be devoted to this activity, but the state as a whole cannot be defined as a type of community primarily devoted to debating its own conditions. Oakeshott seems to have appreciated this distinction between the ‘political’ and the ‘civil’ fairly late, for in reviewing Lucas’ The Principles of Politics in 1967 he had declared that it was disappointing to find that Lucas had ‘more to say about the conditions of a “civil” than of a “political” society”’.71 This definition, we should also note, was designed to exclude the pursuit of exclusively financial or material ‘interests’ as conceptually distinct from ‘politics’. On one reading, this would rule out the kind of liberalism associated with Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. There, the ‘original position’ was used partly to determine the level of enjoyment of what, in Oakeshott’s terms, were substantive satisfactions. It is tempting to argue that he would have seen Rawlsian ‘politics’ as the politics of enterprise association, ‘deliberation and utterance about desirabilities in respect of managerial decisions contingently to deploy these resources in this way or that’. This ‘engagement which seeks to determine who gets what, when, and how’ may be an important consideration in the life of the state but it was not, as Oakeshott understood it, ‘politics’. In fact, however, Oakeshott had given an extremely positive reception to Rawls’s essay ‘Justice as Fairness’.72 He declared [70] This passage on the political complements the discussion of ‘politics’ in On Human Conduct, pp. 160–74. [71] #52, The Principles of Politics, p. 214. [72]
See #46, Philosophy, Politics and Society, p. 191.
Rawls’s philosophy of justice was important precisely because it rejected the utilitarian view of justice as simply the satisfaction of desires. Rawls appreciated that justice must not be arbitrary, and that it must decide between competing claims, two features of the concept that Oakeshott likewise regarded as essential. In addition, he drew attention to Rawls’s condition that judicial procedure should reflect ‘the constraints of having a morality’. He appears to have accepted without reserve the Rawlsian view that the practice of doing justice should satisfy the principles of those who participate in it. This is all the more important because, as Oakeshott reemphasized in ‘On Misunderstanding Human Conduct’, civil association was itself a kind of non-instrumental moral practice. Moral practices are always non-instrumental, but they are not necessarily civil. Romantic love, familial loyalty, and friendship are all moral practices that are not part of the practice of civil association, even if they are protected by it or inform it. Rules of civil conduct (the laws of a state) differ from the ‘rules’ of such private and personal moral practices in several ways. Firstly, they are ‘subject to enactment, repeal, and alteration in a recognized procedure’. Secondly, there is an ‘authoritative procedure for determining whether or not an agent in acting has adequately subscribed to these rules, and in there being known penalties attached to inadequate subscription and an apparatus of power to enforce them’. And thirdly, ‘the conditions they prescribe are narrower, less demanding, and more precisely formulated’ than those of other moral practices. The ‘rules’ that may be abstracted from the moral practices of private life may be used to criticize the laws of the civil association, but they can never be identical with them; they always remain informal. The distinctions of On Human Conduct were finely drawn, and after the easy style of Rationalism in Politics, its dense prose proved too elusive for many. Oakeshott, now openly claiming Aristotle, Hobbes, and Hegel as ‘predecessors’,73 had written a philosophical [73] #59, On Misunderstanding Human Conduct, pp. 267–79.
work without a word wasted. Consequently, those unwilling or unable to read him carefully badly misconstrued his meaning. One of the commonest errors was to assume the ideal type of civil association was intended as a kind of blueprint for setting up a government, whereas (just as Oakeshott had remarked of Hobbes’s Leviathan) it was explicitly intended to lack any particular constitutional ‘shape’.74 Oakeshott’s bitter disappointment at the book’s reception was reflected in the sardonic, patronising, and even vicious tone of his reply to his critics (Auspitz excepted). Oakeshott’s review of Skinner’s Foundations of Modern Political Thought, struck a completely different note.75 He received it as ‘a notable historical achievement’, although he by no means agreed with all it contained. One criticism was methodological; Skinner had not brought out clearly enough the level of political reflection occupied by the texts he addressed. What he called ‘ideology’ was what Oakeshott had sometimes called ‘political theory’; the ‘middling level’ of political thought that excluded both the purely practical at one extreme and the purely philosophical at the other. The book ‘leaves out of account both the instrumental reflexion devoted to administrative invention and philosophical reflexion concerned with reasons of a different kind from mere justifications or rebuttals’. There were also differences over the substance of historical interpretation. Skinner presented the emergence of the idea of the modern state as a change from “the idea of a ruler maintaining his state” to the idea of a state as “a form of political power separate from both the ruler and the ruled and constituting the supreme political authority within a defined territory”. Oakeshott, however, questioned whether the idea of ‘the ruler maintaining his state’
[74] ‘[The] civil condition … is an ideal character … not … specifiable in terms of … its own rules or arrangements’: On Human Conduct, p. 108. [75] #62, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, pp. 287–92.
was available so early or so widely as Skinner believed; it might be ascribed to Machiavelli, but he did not find it in the medieval era. The idea of ‘Foundations’ seemed to Oakeshott to imply an anachronistic view of what medieval authors had been doing. Skinner, notoriously, emphasized the intentions of the author; but as Oakeshott pointed out, something that Marsilius of Padua could not possibly have understood himself to be intending was laying the foundations of the modern state. The modern state was a historical contingency; it was the outcome of no-one’s design, and could not be understood as the result of a deliberate attempt to construct it. Skinner had confused ‘the analytical components of a concept’ with ‘the devious and often logically irrelevant historical circumstances which mediated its emergence’. Nor had medieval efforts to assert what later became ‘sovereignty’ resulted in a single conception of the modern state as Oakeshott took Skinner to be claiming. As we have repeatedly emphasized, Oakeshott distinguished two main varieties or types of conception of the state, and within each of these many variations were possible. In modern European politics, nothing had ‘disappeared beyond recall and nothing was established beyond peradventure—not even the requirement that the authority of the government of a state should be “sovereign”’. Skinner’s idea of the state as ‘an independent association of persons … ruled by a government … whose office … is to maintain the “peace”’ clearly fell within the history of approximations to the type of civil association, but it was still only one idea amongst others. To the end, Oakeshott insisted on the essentially ambiguous character of the modern European state.
A Note on the Texts As this fourth volume consists entirely of previously published material, obtaining a good text was generally unproblematic. Assembling the contents was greatly facilitated by the comprehensive bibliography maintained by the Michael Oakeshott association.76 Photocopies were made and either transcribed by the editor or electronically scanned using optical character recognition software and checked for accuracy. Obvious errors in spelling and punctuation in the originals have been silently corrected, and to assist the reader, fuller bibliographic details have been provided.
[76]
See n. 1, p. 1 above.
A Reminder from Leviathan First published in Observer, 29 July 1951. Three hundred years is a long time for a book on political philosophy to remain relevant: what change of situation does not destroy is apt to be dissolved in the aqua fortis of criticism. Some books, like Plato’s Republic, survive their circumstances because (in addition to more substantial qualities) they have cast a spell over us. But Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651, in spite of the beguiling art of its argument, has enjoyed no such supplementary advantage; it was greeted with denunciation and pursued with reproach. No writer has been more severely rebuked; no book more consistently censured. Leviathan, it must be supposed, has survived because of something undeniable in it. Hobbes appears as an enemy, but as a ‘sweet enemy’; not a flattering commentator on human affairs, but one impossible to ignore—like Machiavelli, only more so, because if Hobbes chose his ground like a fanatic, he defended it like a philosopher. Of course, there is much in the concrete detail of Leviathan which has no bearing upon our circumstances. The relevance of Hobbes’s writing to succeeding generations must be oblique, and it lies, I think, not in any lasting cogency in its proposals but rather in its power to recall to us an aspect of politics which we find easy to forget. Leviathan has convinced nobody: but it would be a very dull reader who came from it unenlightened. The occasion of Leviathan, says its author, was the disorders of the time. And a political philosophy sprung from civil strife might be supposed to have only a limited significance. But in local and temporary calamities, Hobbes (like his continental contemporaries, Bodin and Pascal) perceived a permanent possibility of ruin. He had what Henry James called ‘the
imagination of disaster’; and being an intrepid reasoner he explored the ground of his apprehension. A civilised manner of living is not the gift of the gods; it is the invention of men, a delicate and uneasy achievement. Beneath, and always ready to disrupt it, lies a volcano of primordial barbarism. In the ‘undiscerned and undiscerning hand’ by which his best friend, Sidney Godolphin, perished, Hobbes perceived the operation of that ‘restless desire for power after power’ in all men which waits an opportunity to spread confusion. Our predicament is not the difficulty of achieving happiness, but the difficulty of avoiding the misery to which the pursuit of happiness exposes us. Government has a qualified but important part to play in extricating us from this predicament; its role is not to civilise but to maintain that peace and order without which civilisation is impossible. It also is the invention of men, who endow it with authority; when its power is commensurate with its office it constitutes our most dependable safeguard against barbarism. What remains relevant, then, is Hobbes’s diagnosis of the situation. The specific he prescribes to relieve it (though not so damaging as is often supposed) has many notable drawbacks. Perhaps he gave too great or too exclusive a significance to government. What in fact keeps us from relapsing into barbarism is the day-to-day operation of the mild inducements and scarcely perceived checks which compose our manner of living, and what a contemporary of Hobbes called ‘the practice of commonwealth’. And the exercise of overwhelming power by government, besides being less effective, may bring us too close to barbarism to be easily recognized as a safeguard. But there was no lust for government in Hobbes: the Leviathan, he thought, must be omnipotent, but he never imagined it omnicompetent. Intoxication with the opportunity which great power gives for doing great things was no part of the character of the Leviathan, whose limited but essential office was to be guardian of the peace. It was to operate, not arbitrarily, but by
rule of law, and whatever was not forbidden was to be allowed. Supreme power was never more narrowly hedged or more finely directed to a special purpose, while being left with its necessary supremacy unimpaired. We, in our Pelagian times, believe ourselves to have moved on to higher things. The predicament, as we have come to see it during the last hundred years or so, is not the difficulty of abating the threat of barbarism, but the frustration of enjoying less prosperity than we might. We resent as a passing annoyance what Hobbes recognized as a permanent condition. And our belief in the evanescence of imperfection has encouraged us to suppose that civil and international order will spring from the pursuit of prosperous projects, and that if we solve the larger problems the smaller will take care of themselves. And to match our interpretation of the predicament we have invented the providential State and made government the chief agent in the enterprise of progress, suitably endowing it with almost unlimited competence. From time to time situations arise to suggest that in all this we have too easily forgotten the danger of having only a fair-weather rig at our disposal; and Hobbes himself comes to remind us that if we reckon without ‘the known natural inclinations of men’ our projects will end in disaster. In a world where ‘peace’ is counted a ‘non-political’ enterprise for which every man has his own recipe, where massive concentrations of power play artlessly with the volcanic fire of syndicalism, and where the government is often more disposed to dispense prosperity than to preserve order, there is already much to remind us that the ius zelotarum (which is the law of barbarism) is always ready to reestablish itself, and that the pursuit of welfare is not a substitute for auctoritas in human affairs. But if one writer more than another is capable of dispelling the idle dream of peace without a sword, it is Hobbes. In his reflections on political activity, the figure which most readily occurred to Hobbes was that of a game of cards. It is a civilized figure, a war of all against all mitigated by inflexible
rules, in which good behavior consists, not in not trying to win, but in not revoking. There is room for chance; there is room for skill; and there is room for the sharper, but he will not be tolerated for long; he concentrates opposition against himself. But it was an odd game of cards which Hobbes imagined—one in which government held all the trumps, and, as he sardonically remarked, ‘where nothing else is turned up, clubs are trumps’.
The Ethics of Redistribution Review of Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), first published in Clare Market Review, 47:2 (1952), 4–5. M. de Jouvenel is a most engaging writer—calm, lucid, incisive and unpretentious; not a hurricane to flatten all opponents, but a fresh, invigorating breeze, signifying that rational discussion of matters of political controversy is still possible. The two lectures (originally delivered in Cambridge in 1949) printed here are not intended as ‘a contribution to the great debate on redistribution; but rather as an attempt to stress values commonly disregarded in this debate’: and M. de Jouvenel achieves his purpose with plenty to spare—in fact, they are an exceedingly subtle contribution to the debate. And the method is not (he says) so much an argument as ‘a circumgyration around the concept of redistribution’. This again is an understatement. The redistribution of incomes with a view to greater equality, which is M. de Jouvenel’s theme, is identified as ‘the predominant preoccupation of our day’. And what he sets out to consider is the various enterprises which fall under this head, the arguments and emotions with which they are supported, the observable or forecastable social and economic results, and the assumptions (some of them very odd) of even the most cautious advocates of the enterprise. He writes mainly about England, and he has a remarkable knowledge of our affairs and history. Redistribution (whether or not effective) is something that is afoot; at the same time it is incomplete; and further it is an enterprise which has been reasoned about. Consequently M. de Jouvenel has three tasks to perform: to audit of the present social account, to forecast of the probable effects to come, and to consider the cogency of the supporting structure of argument.
The discussion does not get far before some of the more subtle ambiguities of the enterprise begin to come to the surface. The serious difficulties involved in any genuine process of redistribution of income are noticed, and are discussed more elaborately in an Appendix. These difficulties are so serious that it seems that they must in the end defeat the enterprise, or (what is the same thing) reveal such redistribution as appears to have taken place as an illusion. But, be this as it may, the attempt itself has consequences which bear examination. But first there are the ambiguities to be considered of even the most convincing arguments in its favour. For example, there is the argument which begins by supporting some degree of redistribution of income because it is believed to be a way of getting rid of the distorted allocation of productive resources which springs from the demands of the wealthy and of thereby maximising the total satisfactions in the society. This seems a reasonable start; but (because of some sudden loss of confidence on the part of the advocate) nonsense is made of the whole argument when much of the old allocation of resources is reintroduced but with the State as financier. There is an obvious inconsistency in accepting the criterion of merely maximising satisfactions when we are destroying private incomes and rejecting it in favour of support for activities which do not find a market when we are planning State expenditure; and yet this is often what is advocated and what has happened. Again, one of the odd effects of redistribution of income is that the notion of income is transformed from being a sum by means of which a man makes his demands on productive resources and also makes his contribution to the constructive outlay of his society by (for example) educating his children, into a sum made up of the means of physical support plus pocket-money— the rest, because after redistribution it is beyond the individual’s means, being taken care of by the State. ‘The citizen thereby loses a fundamental social responsibility: that of contributing in his private capacity to the advancement of his dependants and his surroundings. He is encouraged to become something like a
maintenance man. In so far as he adopts this attitude, equalisation of income becomes justified. If surplus over mere cost of physical need is to be spent at the races, why indeed should one have a greater surplus than the other?’ M. de Jouvenel’s argument is woven of a series of observations of this kind. He notices the effect of redistribution in our different attitude toward personal expenditure and expenditure of corporations and businesses, its effect upon the family, and its effect in the replacement of men who performed many necessary services without payment by a more numerous class of paid public servants. He has a sympathetic understanding of the various motives which set foot on the enterprise of redistribution, the approvals and disapprovals which lie behind it. But here again he unearths ambiguities and inconsistencies. He observes that the moral seduction of equalitarianism lies in the fact that it repudiates the methodical exploitation of the personal interest motive, but in so far as the equalitarian endorses (as he usually does) the social pursuit of ever-increasing consumption he appears to contradict himself. For it is difficult to discern upon what principle a productivist society is virtuous and a productivist individual is vicious. ‘If “more goods” are the goal to which society’s efforts are to be addressed, why should “more goods” be a disreputable objective for the individual?’ And, indeed, it turns out that redistributionism has no ethics but the plausible ethics of productivity guided exclusively by a starkly individualistic consumer-enjoyment. But beyond all this, and many other relevant considerations often neglected in the debate, there is one result, already apparent, which is so remarkable that it makes M. de Jouvenel wonder whether redistribution with a view to removing inequality of income is not merely incidental to it. This result is the unavoidable vast increase in the powers and activity of government. With every step in the direction of equalisation, consumption determined by income more and more approximates to a mere means of supporting life and satisfying the least significant
desires of individuals; the rest—including investment, education, and all the more expensive cultural activities of the society— is undertaken by the State or ceases to exist. ‘The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.’ And ‘we may well wonder which of these two closely linked phenomena is predominant: whether it is redistribution or centralisation’. Nor is the situation relieved when we observe that even the crudest powers of the State, police powers, are at their greatest whenever the destruction of private property has been most completely achieved, and when we observe, moreover, that this is an unavoidable sequence. Every social enterprise has its cost. This cost can never be completely determined in advance (even if the enterprisers were disposed to enquire into it); it reveals itself only gradually as the enterprise gets under way. Nevertheless, imaginative social accounting can forsee some of the cost, and anyone who undertakes it is performing a valuable service. As a piece of social cost-accounting of this sort M. de Jouvenel’s lectures are remarkable for their range and insight.
Two Cheers for Democracy Review of Edward Morgan Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1951), first published in Cambridge Journal, 5 (1951–2), 436–8. There is, of course, the puzzle why a writer, who is usually rather finicky than otherwise about what he publishes, should have allowed himself to be persuaded into collecting together a volume of (for the most part) scraps and snippets, brief reviews of books, obituary notices, broadcasts of the moment, lectures of the occasion. But it would be unwise to delay over it: most readers before they reach the end of the book will have come to the conclusion that it was worthwhile—not because everything included is worth its place on its own merit, but because the pieces re-enforce one another in a manner which might escape notice had they not been collected together. They re-enforce one another not, however, as parts of an argument, but as manifestations of a temperament, a disposition: these pieces are essentially the responses of a disposition to various occasions—personal, geographical, political and literary. It is a well-knit disposition; and it is a pre-eminently ‘civilized’ disposition. Consequently, the pieces may be read for the excitement of observing the disposition at work: its integration is such that, given a theme, the reader can before long anticipate what is going to be said (though not the felicity with which it is said) and remark the trueness to form which every performance exhibits. Or they may be read with admiration for the quality of the disposition—civilized without being over-civilized, detached without being olympian, flexible but not flabby, sympathetic but not sentimental. As a civilized man, Mr Forster is disposed to suspect most of the things which make the largest stir in the world: ‘Faith’, violence, great men, great power, great hopes or fears, great causes
and projects, great victories or failures—great anything. These are dangerous where they are not actually disastrous; if they do not destroy the quiet exercise of individual taste and preference, they hinder its enjoyment or retard its growth. What he values supremely is ‘personal relations’, the contact of the individual man with his fellows and with the things of the world. But from ‘greatness’ Mr Forster would not have us turn to ‘littleness’; his disposition is not given to extremes or absolutes of any kind: he is always on his guard against making too much even of what he values most. And above all it is a mistake to think that the world is or ever could be expressly organized in a manner likely to encourage the pursuit of personal relations. There have been times when the world (or parts of it) was better organized from this point of view than it is at present (indeed its present condition is peculiarly hostile to this kind of activity) but it is not to be supposed that perfection in this respect could ever come about. This kind of activity can only be enjoyed in the imprecisions of any social and political organization. Life, from this point of view, is not a campaign, but a skirmish, a game of tip-and-run in which we may hope to win a point here and there, but never hope to defeat finally the forces of worldliness. Mr Forster’s disposition is, therefore, optimistic without being progressive; he is a rebel without being a reformer. This disposition belongs to him pre-eminently as an artist (for an artist can hope for nothing more than to be allowed to live and work in the imprecisions of the social order); but it belongs to him also as a man. Indeed, it would appear that since what is finally good in human life is the enjoyment of these ‘personal relations’, and since the artist is specially dedicated to that enjoyment, he is, in this respect, the representative civilized man. Now, Mr Forster’s arguments in support of this view of things are few and not very remarkable: if he begins an argument, he never pursues it very far; and in arguing he writes at a peculiar half-way level, neither on the surface nor in the depths, but floating in a lucid middle region where there are no difficulties— the simple problems have been solved already, and the more
difficult never appear. But if the argument in Mr Forster’s pages is not remarkable, what is remarkable is the manner in which this view of things is consistently reflected in the direction of his attention and in the style of his writing. Everything here—books, pictures, music, men, women, places and politics—is presented at the level of a ‘personal relationship’, a reflection in the mirror of this disposition. The objects of the world are here seen only in their relation to Mr Forster himself, and in this manner he exemplifies his point of view rather than argues or expounds it. The persons who hold his attention are, for the most part, his blood relations and his friends, and they are studied as relations and friends, not as independent existences. And the point of view, the doctrine, flows over into the style: his suspicion of ‘greatness’ appears in his faculty for understatement, his suspicion of power appears in the studied absence of force with which he presses his judgments. This gives to Mr Forster’s writing the appearance of half-heartedness and of turning away just when the intellectual difficulties begin. But everything is so much of a piece—doctrine and style so closely knit—that the critic who is disposed to convict Mr Forster of half-heartedness finds himself outmanœuvred: here is a doctrine of personal relations uncovered in a series of personal relations, here is understatement not as a device or as an ornament, but as a principle, here is a cultivated (not a casual) lukewarmness; and what could be more appropriate? And yet it won’t quite do. It is difficult to put one’s finger on the principle of the defect, but here and there oddities appear above the surface which indicate that something is amiss. The figures from the past who hold Mr Forster’s admiration are Erasmus, Montaigne and Gibbon: Erasmus for his tolerance, Gibbon for his aristocratic detachment, Montaigne for his scepticism. But to set Mr Forster’s disposition beside that of Montaigne is revealing. The one is no more concerned than the other to argue his case or to convince the reader by mere logic, but in place of the robust self-confidence of the Master, the disciple displays a certain finicky self-centredness; the large, loose
sympathy of the one is partnered in the other by a more intense sympathy but one of a narrower range; the serene humility of the one appears in the other as an unquiet humility, unquiet because it is touched with superiority. The genuine ground is there in Mr Forster’s disposition, but it has been overlaid by something circumstantial: here is a Montaigne unfortunately at home in Bloomsbury. There is, also, something erratic in some of Mr Forster’s judgments: his over-estimation of Lytton Strachey’s achievement, of T.E. Lawrence and of Voltaire spring from the purely personal point of observation which he occupies. Mr Forster knows that there is a problem here, he discusses it in one of these essays, ‘Anonymity: An Enquiry’, but he never gets to the bottom of it and his doctrine conflicts with his disposition. Since everything is known in a personal relation, the activity falls short of contemplation and therefore falls short of being either art or philosophy. And again, although there is nobody writing who is freer than Mr Forster from the illusion of the abstract, he is unable to prevent the abstract noun from creeping in—‘civilization’, ‘culture’, ‘tolerance’, ‘Germany’, ‘democracy’, ‘the individual’: the substantialist fallacy which the use of those words promotes is never quite avoided; manners of activity are turned into ‘things’ just when we hope that the force of Mr Forster’s disposition (which is all in the other direction) will rescue him. And once more, there is ambivalence in what Mr Forster has to say about the artist and ‘society’. With admirable insight he propounds the doctrine of co-operation through independence and even conflict, but he ends up by wishing to have it the other way as well. He complains that the artist is hardly done-by, and accounts for the present difficulties of the artist by attributing a ‘sudden’ hardening and centralization to society, forgetting that the ‘diffuse society’ in which the artist finds himself most at home is altogether abnormal and that in any case its occasional appearance does not touch the principle of the matter. Here, as elsewhere, Mr Forster has a sharp eye to recognize and identify his enemies, but he does not fully understand them. And on more than one occasion he hints at a
golden age in the past: it is ‘Hitler’s Germany’ which ruined what promised to be a ‘golden moment’, or it is ‘the mentality of 1918’ the loss of which brings down ‘the second darkness’. Anyone who is going to discuss these matters must have a longer perspective than Mr Forster’s disposition allows him. The defect, then, such as it is, of Mr Forster’s point of view is that it remains the creature of a disposition while unavoidably suggesting that it is something more. It is an admirable disposition whose activity uncovers much that lies hidden from more pretentious observers: there is more insight in these essays into the character of the ‘democratic’ manner of politics than in most of the more formal examinations. Mr Forster at least perceives that ‘democracy’ and pelagianism, so frequently identified, are, in fact, hostile to one another. But it remains a perception; it never achieves the status of a conclusion. The most argumentative of the pieces, ‘What I Believe’, is the most thorough exposition of the temperament which informs all these essays, but, because it remains at the difficult middle level of argument, the reader will turn from it to the essay on ‘Mrs Miniver’ for a less ambiguous exhibition of his skill and insight. For here the fact that nothing is pursued very far, that nothing is finished, is not a defect but belongs to the character of the piece. Mr Forster’s touch has great delicacy and he can handle both with care and severity; but to grasp and to hold does not belong to him. His genius, therefore, lies in ‘personal relations’, where to grasp and to hold is to destroy. But when it comes to argumenta different principle must prevail. To complain that his scepticism, remaining mild, never becomes a burning scepticism would be to mistake the defect; what is lacking is a profound scepticism.
An Introduction to Philosophy of History Review of William Henry Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1951), first published in Philosophical Quarterly, 2 (1952), 276–7. One cannot help wishing that Mr Walsh had been given a slightly different assignment. He has written an Introduction to a subject which is by no means in a condition to be treated in that manner. An original critical essay would have been more in place. As it is, however, what we have is a book which gives some reliable and well-arranged information (though some of it unavoidably scrappy) about how the expression ‘philosophy of history’ has been used and of the worlds of reflection and of some of the problems which it opens up and comprises. Combined into this there are pages (all too few) where reflection breaks through exposition, which makes us wish the mere information to the devil. Mr Walsh shows that the expression ‘philosophy of history’ has two meanings: it stands for an enquiry into the nature and validity of historical knowledge (‘critical philosophy of history’), and it stands also for various attempts that have been made to give an over-all, ‘metaphysical’ interpretation of the course of events (‘speculative philosophy of history’). He does his duty by both these meanings, dealing with the first in four chapters and the second in three, hinting (and later elaborating the view) that the second enterprise is not so irrelevant to the first as is sometimes thought. The preliminary account of the history of critical philosophy of history is brief and not very revealing. Mr Walsh suggests some reasons why the study has been pursued only fitfully in England, but he underestimates the amount of English thought on the subject and he does not bring to light the main condition of its appearance in the apparent necessity for Christianity of a belief in the validity of historical knowledge. Critical philosophy
of history is investigated in four main discussions: the relation of history to other forms of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge; historical explanation; truth and fact in history; and the question, Can history be objective? In each of these Mr Walsh is preeminently cautious; and the ‘Introductory’ character of the book appears in his determination to give the reader a fair account of all the main views, in his predilection for intermediate positions, and in his candid admission of difficulties. But avoiding extravagance, he also often fails in decisiveness: the mean position he frequently arrives at is, on more than one occasion, an unconvincing compromise rather than a synthesis. During these discussions, besides the problems actually faced or glanced at in passing, others keep floating near the surface but never quite manage to come close enough for examination; and some of them are important. In the background, for example, is the question of causation. It would appear that Mr Walsh regards the concept of cause as belonging properly to the stock-in-trade of historical thinking, but he never examines or defends his view. And further, the question, Is critical philosophy of history an examination of the habits of thinking manifested by historians (and if so, which historians?), or is it something else?, is nowhere properly faced. Sometimes Mr Walsh appeals to historians; at others, away from them. And perhaps the most general defect of his book is the rather hazy notion it reveals of how an historian thinks and of the sort of questions he asks himself. He is represented as asking, ‘Is it true?’ or ‘Is it genuine?’, and as being concerned mainly with questions of credibility, and as following up a decided ‘What?’ with a supplementary ‘Why?’; whereas the historian is much more often concerned with the question, ‘What does this mean?’ in which ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ are combined. He is represented as starting from a ‘bare fact’, whereas it is safe to say that he never does so, because such a starting place is impossible— he begins with an interpretation which he reinterprets. With regard to historical explanation, Mr Walsh accepts substantially the view favoured by Collingwood, though he
is critical of some of the details. History is presented as the enterprise of resurrecting or reconstructing the thoughts, feelings and emotions of the past; and some of the presuppositions of this reconstruction are examined. But the main difficulty of this view (if we neglect the difficulty of actions as expressions of thoughts and feelings) is not considered at all, namely, that an historical account of the past at least purports to present something which was never in the mind of anybody at the time; the historian at least appears to have a way of thinking about the past which would have been impossible for anyone who lived in that past. Mr Walsh regards the question, ‘Can history be objective?’ as very important and discusses it at length. What he has to say is always interesting and lucidly expounded, but one is left with the doubt whether the question is not misconceived. On speculative philosophy of history Mr Walsh has some interesting chapters in which he gives an account of the ideas of Herder, Kant, Hegel, and (in a final chapter) glances briefly at Comte, Marx, and Toynbee. What he says is always acute and well-considered, but I doubt whether those speculative treatments of the past have anything at all to do with history, but should rather be understood as legitimate attempts to explain the past subordinated to a moral and practical purpose: not history but retrospective prophecy. Nor do I think it correct to see in Positivism the inspiration of Historismus: it is Toynbee rather than Stubbs or Maitland who owes a debt to Positivism.
Liberty or Equality Review of Erik Maria von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time (London: Hollis & Carter, 1952), first published in Spectator, 188 (1952), 338, 340. Mr Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is a man of many talents and great learning. He is bold, lively, speculative, precise and encyclopaedic. But one is left wishing that he were sometimes a little more judicious. He supports his opinions and arguments with an immense array of references and quotations; but, although it is often interesting to be shown that other observers have reached some of the same conclusions, this display of ‘authority’ is apt to distract attention from the cogency of the argument. A smaller body of more thoroughly reliable witnesses would have served his purpose better; for example, I would not myself put Count Hermann Keyserling or de Wulf in the box with the same confidence as Burckhardt or de Tocqueville. The book is an exploration of certain inter-connected hypotheses, of varying generality, about contemporary politics— some historical, others speculative; some fresh, others not so novel. The first set of propositions to be examined is: That the impulse of ‘democracy’ (popular government) is the pursuit of equality, and that this leads unavoidably (and has in fact led) to collectivism and on to oppressive totalitarianism; and that ‘liberalism’ is the pursuit of liberty and is an incompatible mate for ‘democracy’. This, on the whole, is a well-conceived hypothesis; it is not new, but its exploration reveals much that might otherwise lie hidden in our politics, and it is explored with admirable thoroughness. I think it would be possible to formulate a more revealing hypothesis, but that is not the point. The second proposition to be considered is more abstract: That ‘monarchy’ is a more serviceable manner of government than ‘democracy’ and likely to be more ‘liberal.’ The superiority
of ‘monarchy’ is alleged to lie, for example, in its economy, its peacefulness, in the high quality of the public servants it attracts, in its inherent moderation and in its ability to protect a society from the worst sort of despotism, popular despotism. Within its limits, this also is explored with learning and intelligence. The third, as it turns out, is less well-conceived: That the political temper of Catholic nations is more ‘liberal’ than that of Protestant nations; it is at once more ‘demophile’ and less ‘democratic’. The difficulty here, of course, is to determine which (beyond the obvious few) are the ‘Catholic’ nations and to establish the connection between their ‘Catholicism’ and their alleged greater ‘liberality’. But Mr Kuehnelt-Leddihn recognises these difficulties and explores the hypothesis energetically, eliciting the modicum of truth it represents. He then turns to consider two smaller-scale historical propositions: That German National Socialism has a pedigree which connects it directly with Protestantism and particularly with Hus and Luther, and that the German National Socialist Party had its roots in the earlier Czech National Socialism. The first of these turns out to be less well-conceived than the second, because in the course of exploration it has to be emended. It is shown that the Protestant parts of Germany were far more susceptible to the appeal of National Socialism than the Catholic, but (since the general thesis is that Catholicism rather than Protestantism is given to the folly of ‘absolutes’ in politics) it transpires that ‘notwithstanding the fact that the Nationalist Socialist movement achieved fatal growth only on a Protestant, and especially Lutheran, subsoil, covered with a democratic layer, the Catholic element in German culture, generating a tendency towards absolutes, not only made an organic parliamentary republic psychologically impossible, but also fostered the reductio ad absurdum in the ideological field.’ In a postscript Mr Kuehnelt-Leddihn, with understandable nervousness, ventures to consider the best possible ‘form of government adapted to preserve liberty in modern times’.
Needless to say, after what had gone before, it is a monarchical form of government, filled out with a Council, a popular Diet and a Supreme Court. It is thoughtfully designed; but where it might be established would be difficult to guess. And this concern with the ‘forms of government’ appears a little remote when we consider the fate of the work of all the good and optimistic designers of the past. Mr Kuehnelt-Leddihn, of course, writes as a Roman Catholic, but without special pleading. His Catholicism is often responsible for his choice of hypothesis, but the exploration is the work of an unprejudiced scholar. As a historian he is thoughtful as well as learned. The book is full of acute perceptions (for example, the misdirection of attention which resulted from the early predominance of the ‘leftist’ account and criticism of National Socialism), and in detail he is careful and precise. But his weaknesses are a certain over-optimism (arising from an insufficient acknowledgement of the depth from which our difficulties spring and the advanced stage of our predicament. Is it possible to modify the course of ‘democracy’ without modifying the course of technology?) and a tendency to schematism. There are moments when, as a historian, he appears as a terrible simplificateur.
The Problem of Power Review of Cyril John Radcliffe, The Problem of Power. The Reith Memorial Lectures, 1951 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952), first published in Spectator, 188 (1952), 451–2 It is a pity that the B.B.C. has, intentionally or wantonly, surrounded the Reith Memorial Lectures with so portentous an atmosphere. The enterprise of commissioning each year a set of lectures designed to be a major and original contribution to contemporary thought is admirable, if a little naïve; but so far they have turned out to be something of a different character. And, since their character is not at all to be despised, it would be better not to obscure it with absurdly excessive claims which only invite disappointment. Lord Radcliffe (the author of last year’s lectures) is himself nothing if not modest. He does not set himself up as a prophet or even as an instructor, and he is aware of the severe limits imposed by his medium, a medium in which he has clearly taken great pains to school himself. He speaks unpretentiously out of a full mind: his learning is ready, his touch is light and what he has to say is well considered. His theme is the exercise of political power; and his method is to consider some of the more notable pronouncements about it, and to consider a remarkable example of it in action. Political power, of course, is never absolute; but what makes its exercise a peculiarly appropriate theme in these days is that there is now so much more of it available for use than at any earlier time in the world’s history. The most nearly absolute governors of the past had not a tithe of the power available to the least ambitious Government of a modern State. Lenin observed in the ration-book a source of power which far exceeds even the power possessed by a Church whose claim to dispense salvation or damnation was recognised.
We are, then, quite right to be nervous about political power. And our nervousness is likely to be increased if we listen to the doctrine that the exercise of power is insatiable, that power is inevitably abused, that (as Blake said) ‘The strongest poison ever known Came from Caesar’s laurel-crown.’ But one of the interesting things about Lord Radcliffe’s lectures is his criticism of this doctrine. It seems to him not only that the exercise of power is necessary to any civilised order in society, but also that even very great power is not always abused. And he adduces in favour of his view the convincing and inspiring example of at least one long period of British rule in India. But it is an example which puzzles him: he is hard put to it to find an explanation for this moderation. He recognises the moral and intellectual qualities of those who exercised power, but I do not think that he gives enough weight to the schooling in the Whig tradition at home which went to promote this quality. And, in any case, for every example of a great concentration of power not being abused, a hundred examples could be cited to the contrary. If we hesitate to believe that there is always a deterioration of human conduct when men find themselves in the possession of great power, at least Bossuet’s more moderate view is difficult to oppose convincingly: ‘Let us candidly confess that there is no temptation equal to that of power, nor aught more difficult than to refuse yourself anything when men grant you everything and think only of stimulating or even anticipating your desires.’ Great power, then, is something at least to be suspicious of, and I think Lord Radcliffe’s suspicions would have been greater if there were not at some points in his argument a confusion between power and authority. For authority is authorised (that is, defined) power; and whereas it may easily be true that ‘most men are the better, not the worse, for having authority’, the same is not necessarily true of mere power. However, Lord Radcliffe’s main
concern is, unavoidably, with the moral and mechanical means which men have devised or recognised in order to guard against the abuse of political power. Plato, Locke, Rousseau and Bentham are the chief theoretical writers discussed; and, among the practical engineers of the limitation of power, proper recognition is given to the authors of The Federalist. The chapter on the Middle Ages is perhaps the least adequate, partly because of the immense difficulty of saying anything significant in the space, and partly because it is concerned exclusively with mediaeval ideas about the authorisation of political power and not at all with mediaeval inventions for seeing that this authorisation was not exceeded. The theorists divide themselves into two classes—those who are out to produce an infallible remedy for the abuse of power (like Plato and, in his more mechanical manner, Rousseau) and those who offer more modest suggestions. These suggestions often, as in the case of Locke, reflect well-tried practices, but they are too often made to appear rather larger than life by being turned into a theory of government. Lord Radcliffe has no inclination to sum up his reflections. But the thought which he seems to wish to leave with us in these admirably dispassionate lectures is that we can overdo our distrust of power, and that we should be wise to avert our minds from the illusion that there is any infallible method of preventing men who have authority from abusing that authority.
The Liberal Anglican Idea of History Review of Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), first published in Cambridge Journal, 6 (1952–3), 248–51. It has fallen to the present generation of writers to be the first to embark upon the enterprise of reconstructing the nineteenth century ‘historically’. There were earlier writers who appeared to some people to be pioneers in this project, Lytton Strachey for example; but in fact they had nothing to contribute except the destruction of a myth. In their ridicule of the understanding which the nineteenth century had of itself, they may perhaps be said to have prepared the ground for a new sowing; but they had neither the ability nor the patience to play any positive part in replacing the contemporary myth (the understanding which the nineteenth century had of itself) by an ‘historical’ myth (an understanding of the nineteenth century in the categories of historical thought). There have, of course, been others who have done something to transform the politics of the nineteenth century into history. But as the more fundamental work of constructing the historical myth progresses in the hands of more patient and more profound students, we are beginning to discern a fullness and complexity which had no place in the contemporary myth. This is what was to be expected, for in historical understanding an epoch or a society must always appear more complex than the contemporary view allows. And if we avoid the fallacy that what an age understands about itself is the criterion of the veracity of an historical interpretation, this added complexity presents no difficulties. We are, then, beginning to enjoy an understanding of the nineteenth century which, because and in so far as it is genuinely ‘historical’, is emancipated from the selective prejudices and simplifications which unavoidably determine the manner in which an age understands itself. And it is not at all surprising that
we should have had to wait so long for this beginning: the lapse of time, as well as the effort of scholars, is required to transmute a contemporary interpretation into an ‘historical’ interpretation. The task of constructing an age ‘historically’ is inevitably in its beginning a task of reconstruction. Its course is determined in part by the peculiar characteristics of the ‘non-historical’ understanding which comprises its materials and from which it can only gradually free itself. The historian begins, not with an array of ‘facts’, but with an understanding, and with an understanding which ex hypothesi is non-historical because it is an understanding in relation to what were believed at the time to be the fortunes of the age concerned. His task is to precipitate an historical understanding by allowing the categories of historical thinking to work upon this ‘non-historical’ material. And the process (though not the result) of precipitation is governed by the character of the materials. The understanding which an age has of itself is, generally speaking, ‘non-historical’ in two respects. It is an interpretation in which what is remembered is arranged in terms of what is believed to be the destiny of the age, and it is an interpretation which easily forgets whatever seems irrelevant to the fortunes of the age. Consequently, the task of the historian is not only a task of rearrangement and of translation, but often also of recalling what has been left on one side and forgotten in a process of simplification. Mr Duncan Forbes’s book is a chapter in this historical reconstruction of the myth of nineteenth-century England, and its particular interest is that it is concerned with a passage which has remained obscure because (for good reasons) it never properly appeared in the contemporary myth: the simplification largely eliminated it. His task, therefore, has been first to recall what was put on one side, and then to reinterpret it in the categories of historical thinking. He is concerned to consider what a certain group of early and middle nineteenth-century writers wrote about their times, and to explore their understanding of the world they lived in. The writers in question are Thomas Arnold, Dean Stanley,
Whately, J. C. Hare, Thirlwall and Milman; and in consideration of their connections with one another and of the world of ideas they had in common, and the common inspiration they derived from Coleridge, Mr Forbes groups them together under the name ‘Liberal Anglicans’. For various reasons, their interpretation of their time fell upon stony ground. Their scepticism and pessimism was out of tune with what were generally taken to be manifest and accumulating signs of progress. When the nineteenth century began to put together a myth about itself, it understood itself (so far as England was concerned) as heir to eighteenth-century rationalism, and this interpretation was the work mainly of another group of writers, the Utilitarians. It is true that there were other contributors to the myth, but generally speaking the prevailing interpretation was that provided by the Utilitarians and their sympathizers. And the ‘Liberal Anglicans’ moved in so different a world of ideas that it was not to be expected that the myth should reflect their way of thinking to any great extent. Mr Forbes’s first achievement is to have unearthed a group of writers whom contemporary circumstances caused to be neglected if not forgotten. And in his hands, the simplicity of the myth begins to dissolve. What contemporaries were inclined to write off as a dead-end is restored by the historian: it was a dead-end only in relation to a prevailing myth. The ‘Liberal Anglicans’, like others of their contemporaries, cast their understanding of their time, their interpretation of what was afoot, its direction and its destiny, into the form of an understanding of the present in relation to the past. The Utilitarians also had a view of the past in relation to the present, and the differences of interpretation exhibited by these two groups, as they are explored by Mr Forbes, turn largely upon their radically different views of the past. For the Utilitarians, the past was the March of Mind: a single grand line of intellectual and moral progress was discerned, and the quality and standing of contemporary civilizations were assessed in respect of their place and standing in this unilinear
progressive movement. This manner of thinking has obvious defects, even from the point of view of interpreting the present in relation to the past. It promotes, even from this point of view, an unduly simplified understanding of the situation; a large proportion of the activity of the time is neglected or dismissed merely because it cannot be made to fit in with the single line of advance which is recognized as exclusively important. Only what contributes to the March of Mind is perceived; the rest is forgotten, denied or relegated to the status of a dead-end. The children are separated into ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’, and the less said about the ‘illegitimate’ the better. For the Liberal Anglican group, on the other hand, the past (and therefore the present situation) was more complex. Progress was recognized; but it was not thought of as a single, cumulative process, but sporadic and indeed cyclical. Inspired partly by Vico and by the historical work of Niebuhr (and like their continental contemporary Burckhardt), they composed their understanding of past and present in terms of a set of images different from the images which went to make up the Utilitarian-Rationalist view. ‘Progress’ and ‘Providence’ were given a new interpretation; and the idea of the ‘nation’ as an organism which passed through a ‘fatal cycle’ of change analogous to infancy, childhood and maturity in the individual man, was made the centre of their thought. This entailed a rejection of the unilinear conception of the Rationalists and of the principle which underlay it—the uniformitarian conception of man (‘man is the same in every part of the world and in every period’)—and opened the door to a much closer and more detailed inspection of what was afoot. A ‘crisis’ in the civilization of Western Europe was detected; but the ‘crisis’ was different from that which Utilitarian thought revealed, and one not so easily surmounted. The design of ‘Liberal Anglican’ thought was to provide at once a diagnosis and a remedy; an interpretation of the present in relation to the past and a guide for present activity. A large part of Mr Forbes’s book is occupied with an acute and thorough exploration of the intricacies of this ‘Liberal Anglican’
view of things. He disentangles the various strands which went to compose this interpretation and detects the debts of this group to earlier writers. It is made to appear, not as an unaccountable divergence from the prevailing view, but as an interpretation with a well-authenticated lineage in English and European thought. The impression left on the reader is of a group of men who between them constructed a coherent view of the situation of their society and argued their case with great learning and subtlety. There were in this group scholars and writers of great brilliance, and some of them, of course, held prominent positions. Nevertheless, it is not altogether surprising that their message was largely rejected; it was opposed to the social and intellectual current of the time, and yet it was not so remote as to have the appeal of eccentricity. Of all this Mr Forbes gives a brilliant account, and the only criticism which the reader will find himself inclined to make is that (understandably enough when one considers the primitive condition of the historical study of the nineteenth century) the ‘Liberal Anglicans’ are presented not in relation to the concrete world in which they lived, but in contrast with certain components of that world and in particular with the Utilitarian-Rationalists. And this contrast, like all other specific contrasts, involves a simplification which the historian would avoid if he could: to know something in relation to some one other thing is always to know it imperfectly. Mr Forbes has a second theme: he considers this group of writers not only in order to display their doctrine about the condition of the world in which they lived and the way it was going, but also to determine the value as ‘history’ of some of their writings, and their view of the past in general. As he understands it, these writers, though they are much concerned with writing about the past, are not, in the proper sense, ‘historians’ at all: their view of the past is always strictly related to the present and subordinated to the enterprise of elucidating the present, and it is therefore a ‘non-historical’ view of the past. And the same is true of the Utilitarian ‘historians’ of the time, with their very different,
though similarly circumscribed, view of the past. Nevertheless, Mr Forbes thinks that the ‘Liberal Anglicans’, in spite of this radical defect from the point of view of ‘history’, have a significant place in the emergence of what he calls the ‘historical movement proper’. Here again, the view of the matter he presents is to some extent narrowed by his considering mainly the comparative advantages which the ‘nonhistorical’ perceptions of the ‘Liberal Anglicans’ have over the ‘non-historical’ perceptions of the Utilitarians when considered from the point of view of historical writing; and his conclusion is that the ‘Liberal Anglicans’ had ‘an attitude to the past more truly historical than that of the Rationalists’. But in spite of this narrowed view, what Mr Forbes has to say on this topic is of very great interest and importance. In his opinion, what freed the ‘Liberal Anglicans’ from some of the disqualifications, as historians, suffered by the Utilitarian-Rationalists was their emancipation (achieved under the inscription of Vico and Coleridge) from what may generally be called the Lockean philosophy of mind. This, Mr Forbes shows, gave them a superior elasticity and enabled them to recognize in the past features hidden from the positivist historians. For example, Milman’s understanding of the Middle Ages was deeper than Hallam’s because his psychological assumptions were less restricted. And Mr Forbes speaks of ‘the two life-giving historical doctrines’ of the Liberal Anglicans, which brought their non-history closer to history proper, as ‘the indivisibility of history [the past?] and the ultimate historical reality of the individual mind’. Now, so long as Mr Forbes confines himself to the contention that the ‘Liberal Anglicans’, with all their defects (such as reading the past backwards), came closer than any of their contemporaries to what can be recognized as a genuinely ‘historical’ point of view, he is, I think, on firm ground. In his exploration of this ground he is able to show the connection between this group of writers about the past and the contemporary German writers in whose work genuine historismus was first emerging. And the reasons Mr Forbes gives for the superiority as historians of the Liberal
Anglican writers are convincingly expounded. But he goes further than this, and going further, he is, I think, less convincing. For his contention is not merely that the Vichian philosophy of mind enabled this group of writers to be more properly ‘historical’, even when they were being ‘non-historical’, but that this philosophy of mind, or something like it, is the essential presupposition and foundation of historical thinking proper. And this seems to me to be an excessive, if not a wrong-headed contention. History proper may have made its debut in the rig-out of this philosophy of mind, but when it grew up a little and ceased to be a debutant, the merely historical character of the connection between history proper and this philosophy of mind began to appear. And what Mr Forbes seems inclined to do, at this point in his argument, is to identify as necessary and sufficient what in fact is historical. At any rate, I do not think this is any longer a convincing manner of characterizing history proper. What, I take it, is becoming clearer now as the fruitful line of thought in respect of the nature of history, is that it may be regarded as a manner of speaking about the world, a particular language not to be confused with any other. And when we reflect upon this manner of speaking, what we are on the look out for is the categories which belong to it. It may be that the Vichian philosophy of mind is more convincing than the positivist philosophy of mind, but it seems also that, from the point of view of determining the character of historical thinking proper, this is an irrelevant observation. What we want to discern in ‘history’ is not the reflection of a ‘true’ philosophy of mind, but a coherent and appropriate manner of speaking. However, to have ventured beyond his brief is a fault in this case to be easily condoned. There is so much thoughtfulness and originality in Mr Forbes’s book that it would be foolish and ungenerous to allow disagreement on this point to obscure its very great value.
Freedom: A New Analysis Review of Maurice Cranston, Freedom: A New Analysis (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1953), first published in Spectator, 190 (1953), 579. In this thoughtful book, Mr Maurice Cranston applies the techniques of linguistic analysis to some of the words in our political vocabulary; in particular to the word ‘freedom’. The results are not startlingly novel, but they are set out with admirable orderliness. At this level the virtue of this kind of analysis is to reveal the ‘logic’ (that is, the meaning) of statements, a meaning frequently obscured by their grammatical form. It was a failure to perceive the difference of logical standing between ‘Nobody is in the room’ and ‘X is in the room’ that was the undoing of Polyphemus. Mr Cranston’s first point is that ‘freedom’ is an ‘incompletely descriptive’ expression. If we agree that it stands for absence of constraint, then there are as many ways of being free as there are possible forms of constraint. We must specify a particular constraint if we are to use the word intelligibly; there is no such condition as ‘freedom’ tout court. In short, he says, ‘I am free’, though grammatically similar to ‘I am hungry’, is logically different. I think the example is unfortunate, because it seems to me that ‘hungry’ is also incompletely descriptive; but the point remains, and, having got it clear, we are in a position to observe and to straighten out some of the muddles that people get into when they use the word ‘free’. Mr Cranston then goes on to consider various general answers that philosophers have given to the question, ‘What is freedom?’; he examines the assumptions upon which they rest, and (sometimes much too crudely, I think) the recommendations they conceal. Some turn out to be more defensible than others; but the important point is that we are shown how to work out these linguistic sums
for ourselves and in the process how to think more clearly than we usually do. The second part of the book is devoted to the words ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’; and although the conclusions are similar—namely, that the words have many different meanings—Mr Cranston is concerned solely to pick out some of the more important of these meanings, and to observe certain historic changes of meaning. He shows, among other things, that Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Americans each use these words with characteristically different meanings. Here he has attempted far more than he can properly accomplish in the space he allows himself, and the result is unfortunately scrappy. In the last part he returns to argument, to analysis, and applies it to the problem of free will. He rejects the once fashionable view that this, like so many others, is a pseudo-problem. There is a genuine problem here, and he examines first the way in which some of the more notable philosophical writers have set about answering it. He reaches the conclusions that moral responsibility is not ruled out by determinism and that the real problem of free will is: ‘Are human choices and actions wholly predictable?’; and a lot of muddle is cleared up on the way. The answer (which, of course, isn’t the important point) is that they are certainly partly predictable, but probably not wholly so. The book is agreeably written in what has now established itself as the best Third Programme style. Here and there rash or exaggerated historical statements have crept in, and some connections are made much too easily. But it is a thoroughly honest piece of work. It would, however, have been improved if certain passages of very ephemeral interest had been left out; they seem to be relics of the occasions for which some parts of the book were originally composed. And, considering the criticism it has received, it is now surprising to find a writer using the word ‘cause’ so confidently.
The Vocabulary of Politics Review of Thomas Dewar Weldon, The Vocabulary of Politics, first published in Spectator, 191 (1953), 405–6. This is a light-hearted book, and is all the better for being so: philosophy is getting rid of one’s phlegm, and this should not be a very solemn exercise. Mr Weldon may make things look a little easier than they are, but he is mainly concerned with removing spurious difficulties, which is always a grateful task. His thesis is the now familiar contention that a great many of the questions that philosophers have asked themselves are questions to which there is no answer—not because information is lacking, but because they are nonsensical. And, in general, there is only one kind of question that is answerable, and therefore only one kind that it is profitable to ask, namely, those whose answers are empirically verifiable. And when he turns to survey the writings of the political philosophers he is pained (but invigorated) to find that most of the questions they propound (like, What is Justice? Whence is the authority of the State derived?) are so formulated as to be nonsensical. However, he does not leave it at that. First, he suggests that the propensity to ask nonsensical questions sprang from certain erroneous beliefs that bewitched philosophers in general and political philosophers in particular until (it seems) yesterday. Secondly, he goes on to show what it is that makes a question nonsensical. And thirdly, by examining the logic of our political expressions, he helps us to formulate answerable (and therefore profitable) questions and puts us on the way to a less confusing manner of thinking about our politics. The three most notable illusions that have lead to asking unanswerable questions are, the illusion of real essences, the illusion of absolute standards, and the illusion that political philosophy is the same sort of enquiry as geometry. It is, of
course, impossible to exaggerate the confusion these beliefs are capable of producing, but I think Mr Weldon does exaggerate their prevalence and therefore the harm they have actually done. It is, no doubt, possible to read Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Hegel and others and see in them mere victims of one or even all of these illusions, but I do not think it would be correct. The propensity of the Greeks to personify abstractions is well known, but it will hardly do to present Plato as the mere dupe of this poetic fancy. And it is by no means certain that if we agree in rejecting these beliefs we are led inevitably and exactly to the views Mr Weldon recommends. But what makes questions nonsensical is misconception about the logic of the expressions they contain, mistaking one kind of word for another, thinking (for example) that ‘He is free’ is logically similar to ‘He is in bed.’ And what Mr Weldon has to say about the logic of some of the more important words of our political vocabulary is admirable, though it must be confessed that he is more successful with some than with others: what he says about ‘the State’, ‘rights’ and ‘freedom’ is excellent, but he is not so convincing about ‘authority’ and on ‘the rule of law’ I think he is perverse. Progress in these matters is not always easy to discern, but I think if what Mr Weldon has done and encouraged us to do for ourselves is compared with Sir George Cornewall Lewis’s Remarks on the Use and Abuse of Some Political Terms (an admirable work of the last century) it will be seen that genuine advance has been made in one department of the study of a political vocabulary. Asking nonsensical questions has had one very important concomitant: it has led to the belief that manners of government and political conduct are valuable (and even right) in virtue of a theoretical foundation of some sort which underwrites them or even supplies the proof of their correctness. And Mr Weldon goes on to show that the so-called theoretical foundations of ‘democracy’, ‘fascism’ and ‘communism’ are not foundations of the sort they are often believed to be, and that, indeed, no such
‘foundations’ are necessary or possible. This is an important, but puzzling chapter. Its general doctrine is unexceptionable; but I am not at all certain that he has discovered what these so-called ‘foundations’ really are. Further, it is not clear why the Hegelian philosophy is selected as the ‘foundation’ of ‘fascism’, and it is quite clear that the account here of Hegel’s philosophy leaves much to be desired. And the attempt to extricate the empirical from the ‘metaphysical’ element in Marxism is unconvincing. Having, among other things, disposed of the illusion of absolute standards, Mr Weldon is concerned to show that (when it comes to judging the relative value of political arrangements) we are not driven to mere ‘scepticism’ or ‘subjectivism’, and in a chapter called ‘Empirical Politics’ he gives an excellent account of the questions we are still allowed to ask and the way we should go about answering them. It is part of the doctrine that the ordinary man (and even the ordinary politician) usually manages to formulate sensible questions, unless he is perverted by incompetent philosophers: the proper business of the philosopher is to make the formulation of sensible questions more certain by revealing the logic of sense in these matters. Reading this book is rather like listening to somebody who talks very fast; speed of utterance sometimes carries us over awkward points. But there is nothing obscure, stumbling or chaotic about it, and it is not unduly repetitive. There are some errors of fact, some perversities of interpretation, some loose expressions; but as an agenda raisonné for every future political philosopher it has the immense merits of timeliness and rigour: as a chairman Mr Weldon will listen to our prejudices (though he has a pretty firm hold on his own), but he will not allow us to wander from the point. There are, however, two observations that may usefully be made about the line of argument pursued. First, I think Mr Weldon is over-impressed by its novelty. Although the classical political philosophers were apt to commit the errors he accuses them of, they were not always quite so naïve as he makes them out to be.
And secondly, anyone who sets out on Mr Weldon’s path has got to be pretty wary if he is to avoid some of these errors himself. I think his account of the so-called ‘empirical’ element in Marxism is not above suspicion in this respect. And, although he may have got ‘the State’ and ‘rights’ straight, is it an ungenerous suspicion that finds his use of words like ‘feudalism’, ‘Liberalism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘communism’, ‘democracy’ still tainted with the illusion of real essences? What, in any case, are ‘capitalism’ (and if it is its opposite) ‘communism’ doing in the gallery of our political vocabulary? And what is the meaning of the expression ‘a capitalist Society’?
The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt Review of A. Dru (ed.), The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt (London: Routledge, 1955), first published in Encounter, 2 (1954), 69–70, 72–4. It is the measure of how nearly the voice of poetry has been silenced that we require all utterances to be ‘messages’ and great men to be ‘law-givers’. Oracular pronouncement is expected from every seedy politician, and even the poor don is not exempt. Burckhardt himself has been credited with a ‘message’: he has been recognised as a fortune-teller whose predictions have either come true or are on the way to being fulfilled; and, I suppose, the Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen was the occasion of this recognition. That this should have happened in Germany in the early thirties in respect of a book already known there for a generation, is not altogether surprising. Circumstances then called attention to things Burckhardt had written half a century earlier, and aut prophetes aut nullus has long been the rule among that perplexed people. And when in 1943 the book was translated into English as Reflections on History, perhaps our mood also encouraged us to listen only for the voice of prophecy: the innocent delight with which the schoolboy long ago discovered and devoured the Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy was suppressed by a censorious memory. Nevertheless, it was a mistake, an intellectual disorder; and Mr Alexander Dru, in his selection and translation of some of Burckhardt’s letters, has provided English readers with a much needed specific. For what the Letters reveal is not a man with a ‘message’, but a man keenly aware of what was afoot in his time and blessed with resources which enabled him to accommodate himself to his situation; not a visionary (like Nietzsche) who came and saw, was disgusted, said so, and made known the cure, but a man who meditated much upon the scene before him and, when he
found it not altogether to his liking, remained not indifferent but unperturbed. In short, the Burckhardt who appears here is something much more significant than the messenger he was being turned into: a character admirable for its integrity and restraint, and one supremely adapted to its situation. ‘As a teacher and professor,’ he says (writing to Nietzsche in 1875), he understood his task to be that of ‘leading people on to acquire a personal possession of the past … I wanted them to be capable of picking the fruits themselves; I never dreamt of training scholars and disciples in the narrower sense, but only wanted to make every member of my audience feel and know that everyone may and must appropriate those aspects of the past which appeal to him personally, and that there might be happiness in doing so.’ And his disposition as a teacher towards his pupils was also his disposition as a writer of books and of letters, whatever the topic he touched. Situated at Basle as a professor of history and of the history of art, with connections in Germany, Italy, France, and England, he looked out upon the European scene, meditating upon what passed. There was much that he was glad not to be involved in; but there was little that did not have the power of drawing him to the window. The period of his observation covered the last six decades of the nineteenth century, and he must be counted as an observer not less acute than the best of his time—than, for example, de Tocqueville or Renan or Sorel—with a quality of his own that sprang from his temperament rather than from any acquired point of view or system of beliefs. In place of Nietzsche’s or Dostoevsky’s erratic and pathological sensitiveness, he displays a steady and lucid perception of the way things were going; he was ‘weather-wise’, not on account of a rheumatic shoulder, but from the constant practice of observing the signs. What he saw was not very much to his liking: it was the destruction of almost everything he valued most highly. He perceived a world in the grip of a passion for ‘prosperity’, which sacrificed everything to ‘the practical sense of the nineteenth
century’. It was a world proliferating with desires and in love with luxury. But it was also a world in which actual prosperity was breeding a profound desire for ‘security’ and uniformity, a love of mediocrity and a deep hostility to everything that was not commonplace. It was from these roots that he saw ‘the coming age of barbarism’ springing up. This, I think, was an acute observation; only Sorel perceived this subtle change of mood from ‘prosperity’ to ‘security’ as clearly as Burckhardt and saw where it might lead— to ‘an era of wars’. But further, what might to some extent have mitigated this movement—government—was beginning to suffer the same corruption. ‘Politics are at last entering upon a great new phase and have become “the peoples’ politics”.’ Nevertheless ‘the century is not made for genuine democracy’; the authority of governments having disintegrated, what was taking its place was the exercise of naked power. But, as he observed, the source of power was now the masses, who consequently were becoming the new despots. But the ‘despotism’ of the masses is a back-handed sort of despotism; they are helpless despots without initiative of their own. What is being imposed upon the world is not the desires and beliefs of the masses, for they have none and wait to be informed about what to believe and what to desire, being moved only by a disposition to demand that ‘something shall always be happening, otherwise they don’t believe “progress” is going on’. These rois fainéants fall into the hands of ‘the first swine who comes along’ to tell them what to think and then to speak in their name, of ‘leaders’ who seek and win power by fulfilling (or pretending to fulfil) expectations that they themselves have provoked. And the end of it all is the collapse of this tyrant mass, whose passion for uniformity and security delivers them into the hands of the rulers they have themselves evoked. Writing in 1870 of Germany Burckhardt observes: ‘After people had been played about with for two decades and always egged on to will and to want something, suddenly a really first-class “willer” appeared at Sadowa; and since then, exhausted by their former effort of will, they have collapsed at his feet and want what he wants and
just thank God that there is someone to give them the direction.’ And in this manner, the military machine becomes the model of all government, the vocabulary of war imposes itself upon politics, and an exclusive passion for ‘security’ generates absolute insecurity. But what makes these observations interesting is not that, read as predictions, they have in some part been fulfilled in the twentieth century, but that, as Burckhardt understood them, they were merely reports of a situation before his eyes. He was not concerned with anything so nebulous as the ‘trend of events’, because he knew that events are the product of such complicated circumstances that fortune-telling about them was scarcely worth while. He admits to a penchant to ‘prophesying’, but he is not at all surprised when events rebuff his forecasts: it is remarkable how often, in these letters, he expects outbreaks of war which did not happen. To find in him a man who made some guesses, lucky or profound, about the way things were going is to mistake what he said. And to consider him wise because we have permitted to happen what he thought might happen is to pay ourselves an undeserved compliment through him. Events he regarded as contingencies, never with certainty to be foreseen. What could however be observed, studied, and understood were the propensities of the situation. And, although propensities are to be gathered from events, they are neither proved nor disproved by events. Moreover, it is just as interesting to observe the discrepancies between propensities and events as it is to observe the illustration of propensities in events. ‘Italy wanting to be a great power and a centralised military state,’ he observes in 1878, ‘is such a colossal untruth that it is bound to incur punishment step by step.’ All, then, that Burckhardt said might remain true and significant even if the twentieth century had never known two world wars and the appearance of the socalled welfare state. Now, whatever value we place upon Burckhardt’s observations, the fact remains that the situation in Europe was very little to his
taste. Yet throughout his writings he preserved an extraordinary equanimity. And to those who take a not dissimilar view of the situation the secret of his equanimity is something to be curious about. Indeed, it is in this connection that he is credited with a ‘message.’ In such a situation, equanimity might spring from sheer delight in decay (as Venice today can impose calm upon the observer, provoking neither regret nor disappointment), or from a belief that this is a particularly puzzling section of the spiral of ‘progress’, or from absence of interest in anything topical or transitory, from a belief in providence, from a doctrine of fatalism, or from an arrogant conviction that one has a remedy. But Burckhardt’s aequanimitas sprang from none of these sources. It was not that he had ‘hung up philosophy’ as unequal to the situation: he never needed it. His resources lay, not in a theory or a faith, but in his temperament and his character. And what is remarkable is how early in life he found his character (almost as he came of age), how faithful he was to it, and how faultlessly he managed it. There is as little of the twice-born in Burckhardt as there is in Montaigne. At the age of twenty-one he speaks of his attitude as one of resignation; and as an old man, in spite of the vision of a Europe disposed more and more to fall into the hands of terribles simplificateurs, he says: ‘How the younger generation will survive, and build its nest, is something which, seeing the complete inconstancy of things, one ought not to worry too much about.’ And on another occasion he says: ‘My attitude is willy-nilly ironical.’ These, however, are constructions, rationalisations. The truth is that Burckhardt and his circumstances were so exactly matched that, in order to avoid dismay, he needed only to remain faithful to himself. He grew up with his times; they presented him with a situation, but with no problem, no dilemma: life could not have been less a predicament for Burckhardt, and therefore he has no ‘message’. If the world were disposed to collapse, then, not belief, but courage was required; courage that exhibits itself first in a very modest view of one’s own importance and of the importance
of the present state of the world, and secondly in a determination to enjoy while enjoyment is still possible, to preserve in oneself the remnants of a civilised life, to encourage others to do the same, and to give shelter to what might be allowed to reappear if events in the future took a different turn. This, as Burckhardt early understood, entailed a certain asceticism, an Epicurean detachment from ‘the enormously expensive life of the great cities and from the horrific luxury to which official literature and art are falling victim’; and he was able to achieve this detachment without any feeling of tension or resentment: it was a tactic, not a protest. He gave no hostages to his circumstances, and could disregard their pressure. In short, the secret of Burckhardt’s equanimity is not, as has been suggested elsewhere, an unacknowledged dependence on the resources of Christian belief, or indeed on faith of any sort (even the belief that other times had been better or that there was a good time coming), but simply nerve—the nerve ‘to hold life here and now in no higher esteem than it deserves’, and yet to enjoy it. This character (its counterpart is to be found in Montaigne and in Vauvenargues), in which charity has survived the disappearance of faith and hope, is neither a nostrum to be peddled nor even a model capable of being copied; it is a spectacle to be observed and admired, even venerated: to be equal to one’s fortune and not to be humiliated by want of greater perfection is a rare achievement. Burckhardt possessed this character in a high degree and remarkably little qualified by the defects of coldness, egoism, and pride to which it is subject. He did not, of course, scorn small helps; it is a difficult character to sustain continuously, and he was lucky to find in Italy something to support it. But he was an âme forte, with none of the neurotic disposition that clutches at one support after another, resentful of ill-fortune, selfpitying, rocketing from optimism to pessimism and back again, and dependent in the end upon the illusion that the worst cannot happen. Yet this character remained in him a ‘gift’, which he never worked up into a ‘philosophy’; and therefore his gift is an ‘image’ and not a ‘message.’
But, after all, Burckhardt was not only an observer of the contemporary scene; he was a scholar and an historian. And the Letters reveal him to have been acutely aware of his particular talents, and to have been content to cultivate them without wishing they were larger or other than they were. Here, also, was equanimity. And what is interesting to observe is how even his technique as an historian is naïve, not an acquisition but generated from his native cast of mind and accepted without misgiving. In a pretentious man, or in one less gifted, this might have led to disaster; but in him the result justified the incaution of following ‘the way that came naturally’ to him. Burckhardt had learned from Ranke, but he was a pupil who took only what he knew how to use. He recognised (even at the age of twenty-four) that his métier did not lie in the patient establishment of an obscure course of events. He did not despise this sort of engagement, but he knew it was not for him. And further, from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he disclaimed any faculty for philosophical reflection or abstract thought. ‘I never,’ he says, ‘had any thought that was not connected with something external.’ Consequently, both the paths that lay before the historian at that time were closed to him: the paths of historismus where Ranke led; and the path of speculation, muddied by the tramplings of the Hegelians, but still distinguishable and still respectable. But, as a young man, he discovered in himself a propensity for ‘reverie’, of which he became ‘wary’, fearing that he might fall a victim to it. But turning to history as an escape, he found a remedy, in which what he had taken for a disease was transformed into an activity appropriate to his peculiar talents and which he could engage in without misgiving. ‘I can do nothing unless I start from contemplation (Anschauung),’ he says; and what he means by ‘contemplation’ is ‘reverie’ upon which order and direction has been imposed by scholarly habits. When he writes of this activity there are acknowledged echoes of Schopenhauer; and it was a word Goethe had been fond of, meaning by it an intuitive mental process in which the general was discerned in the particular. And
these connections lead Burckhardt to understand history as ‘for the greater part, poetry’, and even to venture upon a speculative identification of history and poetry. But this is not the direction in which we need follow him: history as contemplation has a much more immediate spring in Burckhardt, and ends in something much less high falutin’. ‘My entire historical work,’ he says, ‘like my passion for travel, my mania for natural scenery and my interest in art, springs from an enormous thirst for contemplation.’ Burckhardt’s genius lay in seeing and in making images. And when he turned to history as an escape from ‘reverie’, he turned, not away from images, but towards more substantial and more coherent images that gave him greater satisfaction. And to assert that history is poetry was to assert, not a general theory, but an attitude native to himself. Moreover, since the activity which he felt to belong to him was Anschauung, its pursuit led not to a narrative in which the past appeared as a succession of pictures and to vulgar ‘pictorial’ writing, but to the composition of a picture, the realisation of an image. He searched always for the picture, the image which the facta composed, and he speaks of the discovery of this image as the ‘prize’, the reward of contemplation. But what he was in search of was not a mere generality, but the propensities of a situation, and the facta were used as the evidences of these propensities. In short, what he looked for, and was interested in, in the past was what held his attention in the present—not a course of events, but the dispositions revealed in events. And as an historian, what he has left us are studies of the characters of two ages—Renaissance Italy and the Age of Constantine the Great—in which events are presented as emblems of the propensities of these situations. And for his pupils, his lectures were, as Wölflin (his successor at Basle) said, ‘lessons in contemplation’. Burckhardt as an observer of the contemporary scene and Burckhardt as an historian are, then, the same man—a profoundly thoughtful man, but one who owed as small a debt as may be to theory. His virtues were his own; there was nothing in him that
was not first-hand. And the springs of his intellectual activity were, in both respects, almost physical. His contemplation began as an activity of the eye, began in his delight in the sights of the world, and from this he composed his images. Similarly his moral attitude began in the nerve to enjoy what still remained to be enjoyed, without bitterness or complaint on account of its evanescence. He knew a barbarian when he saw one, and he believed the situation to be disposed towards barbarism; but his judgements were, as an historian’s should be, appraisals and not imputations.
Anarchy and Order Review of Sir Herbert Edward Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), first published in Spectator, 192 (1954), 593–4. There was something endearing about the bearded bombthrowers of the past: they were supreme amateurs, enjoying an activity (mostly harmless) for its own sake. These were the ‘anarchists’ whose adventures belonged to an individualist world; and although they were depicted (in engravings; photography came later) not only tossing their infernal machines but also in conclave listening to inspired words, they were touching in their inarticulateness. They were, indeed, a cosy crew. But they had companions of another sort—‘philosophers’, pre-eminently, if a little confusedly, articulate; and now that the dust begins to settle, it is these who are seen to have survived. But the practical anarchists had a certain intellectual superiority over their more theoretical successors: at least they knew whom they were against, although their chosen victims were often innocent enough. All that the ‘philosophers’ can find for an enemy is something they call ‘the State’. This leads to a diminution of bomb-throwing, but in other respects it is not an improvement. Sir Herbert Read, it is safe to say, never contemplated the manufacture of an infernal machine: partly because he is a pacific character, partly because he is ‘not concerned with a practical programme’ but with ‘the truth’, partly because his chosen enemy is not susceptible of demolition in this manner. There are certain people whom he would like to see the back of—‘landlords’, ‘capitalists’, ‘exploiters’—but they are figures made of printer’s ink and to be met only in the Sunday papers. His demands are few and simple: he wants a world without ‘rulers’. He believes that if what he calls ‘individuals’ were rescued from their present corrupting circumstances (‘the State’, ‘the profit motive’, ‘poverty’ etc.) which
are the source of all crime and disorder, they would ‘spontaneously associate themselves into groups for mutual aid’ and enjoy peace and freedom. All this is, somewhat unaccountably, confused in his mind with ‘workers’ control’—‘the control of each industry is wholly in the hands of the workers in that industry, and these collectives administer the whole economic life of the community.’ But if one suggests that these collectives (which, a little disingenuously, he calls ‘voluntary associations’) must be supposed to enjoy ‘government’ of some sort, and may perhaps require to be deflected from tyrannising over the community, his reply is ready. Of course they are ‘governed’, they are ‘self-governed’; and such organisations, moved solely by a desire for the common good, can have no serious propensity to assert themselves tyrannously. In short, he wants only to get rid of the government, because he understands it to perform no useful ‘function’ and to be always disposed to over-activity. There are inconsistencies, of course; one of his objections to the modern ‘State’ is that it is indifferent to art—which, one would have thought, might have been counted in its favour. But the main puzzle is how he persuades himself that what he calls a ‘communal type of society’, ruled not by ‘rulers’ but by its own ‘organic consciousness’ of mutual aid, is the proper home for ‘individuals’ who are not ‘units’ but ‘self-contained, independent personalities’. For it comes easily to the anarchist to forget that this ‘individual’ is not a metaphysical entity but an historic achievement, and to forget also how decisive a part ‘government’ has played in this achievement. He perceives only the hostility that governments display towards this ‘individual’; and sees, correctly, that modern ‘democratic’ governments are often the most hostile. Nobody touched by a feeling for mortality, or moved to find happiness in seeking his own intellectual or other fortune, will be dazzled by the prospect of a world set on a single course by rulers powerful enough to prevent the enjoyment of any salvation but that which they impose. But what the anarchist misses is that the object of this hostility is a step child of government itself. For him, government
has had no hand in making the connection between happiness and the exercise of choice. Indeed, he has a prejudice against all human achievements, and is satisfied only when he fancies himself surrounded by an order and laws which men have had no share in making—‘the universal principles of reason’. He cannot love the earth without hating the world; which is a strange inconsistency in an anarchist who is also a poet. And consequently, instead of being able to recognise in government a relief (though often in these days an equivocal relief) from the despotic pressures that so readily assert themselves in any community and a beneficial concentration of duty that leaves some room for delight, he turns his thumbs down upon the whole enterprise of governing. Sir Herbert displays, of course, a generous faith in the future, and in the good will and wisdom of human beings, but it must be said that he makes things easy for himself by offering us only black or white. For the whole plausibility (which is not very great) of his argument in favour of ‘anarchy’ rests upon the fact that the only alternative he considers is a government which ‘compels uniformity’. It may be true that this is the direction in which most governments are now turned, but it is a trifle myopic to see only anarchy or collectivism. ‘Your only alternative,’ he tells us, ‘is to be a nihilist or an authoritarian.’ The ‘ruler’, for him, must have the character of a Redeemer; he has no ear for the whistle of the Referee. But perhaps it is here that the real character of ‘anarchy’ reveals itself. It is a plausible doctrine in a certain context. We can entertain the notion of ‘no government’ with equanimity, even with enthusiasm, when government has established habits of orderliness that have some momentum of their own, and when disorder seems to be a remote contingency. This condition is, at best, fragile, and it is good to be reminded that it is so: Sextus Empiricus tells us that when a king died the Persians used to be left without laws for five hair-raising days in order to impress upon them the need for government. Nevertheless, if this condition seems at any time to be firmly established, the doctrine
of anarchy will seem plausible. Further, when government has not only established habits of orderliness, but has itself come to display a propensity for over-activity which can be opposed, even in a somewhat exaggerated manner, because the margin of safety is great, the doctrine of anarchy will be particularly attractive. In these circumstances the philosophical anarchist may be welcomed as a friend whose head may be a little light but whose affections are to be trusted. He is on the right side in this game of tip-andrun we play with our masters, even if he is inclined to end the fun by swiping the ball out of the field. This book is a collection of Sir Herbert Read’s writings on anarchy during the last fifteen years. But it cannot be said that the writings gain force and coherence from being collected. Instead, the exaggerations of the doctrine, the tenuousness of the thought, the repetitiveness of the exposition and the propensity for clichés, all become more obvious. There is a certain perky brightness about the writing, but it is all too like a daylight display of inferior fireworks that goes on too long.
Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century Review of John Bowle, Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century: An Historical Introduction (London: Cape, 1954), first published in Spectator, 193 (1954), 66, 69. The sense of literary situation that might, for example, restrain a contemporary writer from epic composition is sometimes regarded as a piece of over-sensitiveness: if the adventure calls, why should the poet hesitate? And a similar perception that the ‘state of scholarship’ in a certain field does not favour a general synthesis sometimes seems all too like a less than admirable eye for the main chance. Nevertheless, I do not think we may hope, at the present time, for anything very illuminating from an attempt to write a general history of what has come to be called ‘political thought’—even if that general history is concerned with only a century or so. We have grown dissatisfied with the questions that earlier historians asked of their material, but we have not yet formulated more fruitful questions to take their place. Satisfactory, even clear, hypotheses are lacking; a set of organizing categories is absent by means of which the history of political thought might be rescued from a more or less inconsequential account of what writers, who are lumped together as ‘political’, have said; and the temptation to read this story backwards is almost irresistible. These difficulties are illustrated in Mr Bowle’s somewhat precipitate attempt to write a history of European political thought in the nineteenth century as a sequel to his work on the earlier centuries. It would be ungenerous to decry the attempt altogether; it is gallant in spite of its conventionality. But that so much industry and good intention should come to little more than another collection of chapters expounding the views of ‘important’ political writers confirms the suspicion that the conditions for
writing a proper history are lacking: what confounds the author is the attempt rather than the deed. Mr Bowle, however, has an organising idea. To use his own favourite adjective, it is a ‘curious’ idea; but it is something to have one of any sort. The notion is that in Western Europe, in a cumulative process that has its spring in remote times and though often interrupted has never been abandoned, certain tendencies in politics have come to predominate; and these tendencies compose what may be called a Western European political tradition. It is identified as a tradition in which the ideal sought is a ‘constitutional commonwealth’ exemplifying the principles of ‘rationality, justice, compassion and freedom’. This tradition constitutes a norm for judging the projects of statesmen and the speculations of theorists. And the history of nineteenth-century political thought is, therefore, to be understood as the story of the attack upon, and the defence and the development of this tradition. Thus, ‘romantics’ like Herder and Hegel, ‘conservative’ reactionaries to the French revolution, some kinds of socialist writers, ‘ferocious nationalists’ like Treitschke and political nihilists like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Sorel appear in the role of opponents of the tradition; and the Utilitarians, Mazzini, Mill and de Tocqueville (who ‘endeavoured to adapt constitutionalism to democracy’), the early and the post-Darwinian sociologists and British social democrats are all identified as its friends, who enjoy the occasional support of less simply partisan writers such as Saint-Simon, Comte, Godwin and Proudhon. If this story is carried no further than the first decades of the twentieth century, Mr Bowle thinks that the note upon which it ends is a hopeful one: the supporters of the European tradition were winning, and an upto-date version of the tradition had emerged, a ‘New Humanism’. But in recent years ‘the situation has greatly deteriorated’; we have on our hands a new problem—how to ‘arrest the political misuse of science’—which can be solved only by the extension of the principles of ‘constitutional commonwealth’ to a world organisation.
How illuminating this reading of the history of nineteenthcentury political thought is, the reader must decide for himself. I do not myself think Mr Bowle manages to make it convincing, and it has the defects of enabling him to recognise political thinking only at certain levels, of encouraging him in the use of some unfortunate expressions (such as ‘the proto-Fascist leanings’ of Carlyle), and of often leaving the reader with only dim and distant landmarks upon which to take his bearings. But, if we remain unconvinced that the writers whose views Mr Bowle describes are all talking about the same thing or can intelligibly be related to one another, we may nevertheless expect to acquire some knowledge about what each has to say. His method is to select a number of writers and to give an account of the contents of one or more of their works, together with some odd scraps of biographical and bibliographical information. The selection is, of course, partly governed by Mr Bowle’s general thesis, but the account he gives of each writer is fair-minded and sometimes acute. He has his favourite authors—Saint-Simon and Lecky in particular; but since his sympathies are with the friend of ‘the European political tradition’, he displays less insight when he comes to deal with its opponents: the chapters on Hegel, Nietzsche and Sorel cannot be said to be very enlightening. And too often a writer is made to appear from nowhere, a curiosity with an unaccountable set of ideas, illustrating the lunatic propensities of much political speculation.
Political Parties Review of Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, tr. Barbara and Robert North (London: Methuen and Co., 1954), first published in Spectator, 193 (1954), 92–3. Political science has some claim to be the oldest of the sciences; at least, while physics was still a sacred study and biology a collection of myths, the facts of political activity were being considered with some degree of detachment. Indeed, it was as an analogy of the political world that the natural world first acquired intelligible shape and articulation. But, if it is the oldest, it is also the least sure of itself. It has often tried to model itself upon other sciences, and the failure of these attempts now gives the expression ‘political science’ a somewhat antiquated appearance. Moreover, it had some special difficulties to encounter. ‘Every science begins with sacrilege,’ says M. Duverger in his study of political parties in the contemporary world; and to divest himself of the handy and partisan prejudices of the practical politician is the sacrilege most difficult for the political scientist to achieve. The difficulty springs from the fact that the terms of this science are never securely insulated from those of the world of political enterprise; the words which the political scientist would like to use dispassionately are being shouted in the street as terms of approval and abuse— ‘democracy’, ‘fascism’, ‘communism’, ‘socialist’, ‘conservative’, ‘liberal’, ‘left’ and ‘right’. The mental effort of translation is difficult to sustain, and the conjunctions and distinctions of political passion impose themselves in place of scientific distinctions and conjunctions. Moreover, spurred by the achievements of other sciences, the political scientist has often sought a precision and a certainty which are foreign to his material. However, the reader will find in M. Duverger a political scientist remarkably free from the defects and exaggerations which often
mark the study. In spite of some imperfect translations of current political expressions, he achieves a remarkably high degree of detachment from current political prejudices, and, in consequence, is able to suggest some fresh and illuminating resemblances, connections and distinctions. And, being free from the vice of over-ambition, he is content to observe propensities rather than affirm necessary connections, to establish approximations rather than ‘laws’, and concomitants rather than causes and effects, and he is alive to the difficulties and the narrow limits of relevant comparison. Here and there he drops into the language of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ which is difficult to sustain, and at one point in his argument he speaks of the dispositions towards conservation and change as a ‘natural’ dualism of political temperament connected with age and youth, instead of recognising it as a dualism always connected with particular historic circumstances; but he is not often caught napping in this way. And when he ventures to call a certain kind of organisation ‘admirable’, the reader is at once aware that this is only a Machiavellian judgement of virtù. In short, in both its intellectual restraint and its political detachment M. Duverger’s book is a model which political scientists could follow with profit. Political parties, their generation, their organisations and the systems they come to compose afford an almost unrivalled opportunity for the kind of analytical historical study which promises to be the most profitable direction for a science of politics to take—especially if it is managed (as M. Duverger manages it) so that the analysis controls the history and the history circumscribes the materials to be analysed and no pretence is made that either is independent of the other. In a vague and general sense, party is as old as politics. But just as ‘dictatorship’ confuses a great variety of exceedingly different regimes, so ‘party’, if the expression is to be used profitably, must be confined to more or less homogeneous phenomena. As M. Duverger understands it, the parties of contemporary politics are the concomitants of the progressive establishment of universal
suffrage. They have appeared above the surface of politics only in the last fifty years or so, and they are not properly comparable to anything that went before. In order to discern their character, M. Duverger has recourse to some elementary abstract distinctions; but once they have been identified, the proper task of analysis begins. The method followed is to establish certain ideal types and then to interpret the generation and structure of the parties of contemporary European and American politics as approximations to these types. The types are what the parties themselves portend, and the characters of the parties are illuminated by relating them to the types. This method has, of course, been used by others; it is for example the basis of Troeltsch’s study of the ecclesiastical structures of the sixteenth century. But instead of working with a few simple types, M. Duverger’s analysis leads to an elaborate system of overlapping classifications, parties being distinguished and related to one another and to ideal types in respect of the manner in which they are generated, their internal structure, their notions of membership, their relation to parliamentary representation, to electoral systems and to the habits and dispositions represented in written or conventional constitutions, and in respect of the different systems they tend to compose. And it is difficult to know which to admire most—his command over information, the ingenuity with which he multiplies his hypotheses in order to display every aspect of contemporary political parties, or the judicious manner in which he draws his conclusions. All this as M. Duverger recognises, is no more than drawing ‘imaginary lines to link a few brilliant points scattered in the darkness’; but the result is very much what he aims at—a general theory, a picture that can be used to guide the formulation of questions profitable to be asked about political parties in the contemporary world. M. Duverger’s picture is tentative, but no more so than it should be. It is not confused, but perhaps a clearer outline would have appeared if, in addition to relating party to the structures of governments and to electoral systems, he had considered it also
in relation to the activities of governments. This would have had the effect of modifying the appearance of novelty in the parties of twentieth-century politics, and it would have drawn together some of the loose ends of the analysis. For M. Duverger’s starting point—the extension of popular suffrage and the necessity for organising a mass electorate—was a modification that affected but did not destroy the dispositions of modern European governments in respect of their activities. And, in general, the new parties and the new kinds of party (like nearly all other of our political institutions; parliaments, cabinets, etc.) follow the development of these dispositions, appearing as organizations appropriate to the understanding of political activity either as the pursuit of a single, comprehensive end (a society of a particular and exclusive character), or as the pursuit of heterogeneous ends which compose no comprehensive pattern—the politics of passion and the politics of scepticism. And because these two styles of politics have been with us for something like four centuries, and are perhaps the most settled features of our political character, it is not surprising that political parties (even before the twentieth century) should show a tendency to provide electoral and parliamentary organizations appropriate to both.
The Conservative Mind Review of Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), first published in Spectator, 193 (1954), 472, 474. A Conservative is a man particularly disposed towards a certain exactness or frugality in conduct. And in the exercise of this disposition he learns to handle things with care, intent upon getting the most out of them without immediately wishing that the store were greater or other than it is. To snatch and to discard are equally foreign to his character. He is not worried by the absence of innovation, and is not inclined to think that nothing is happening unless great changes are afoot. Of course he recognises change to be unavoidable, and like anyone else (except those who are infatuated with change) he may consider some changes to be improvements and others to be changes for the worse. But, because he perceives the loss in every change more readily than the gain, he is not apt to initiate change. He favours a slow tempo, and is averse from large or sudden changes which he considers to be unnecessarily extravagant. Decay he can often view with equanimity; what grieves him is the wanton dissipation of achievement and the destruction of what has no ground of dissolution within itself. He is cautious by temperament; if he is forced to gamble he will bet in the field rather than on some favoured animal. And, of course, like any other character, he is apt to suffer from the defects of his virtues. If he is of a reflective turn of mind he may cast about for some convincing intellectual support for his disposition, and he may even come to compose, or to adopt, a system of general beliefs about the world and about human conduct which he thinks to be appropriate. He will be mistaken if he supposes that these beliefs are in any proper sense the ‘ground’ of his disposition, or that they afford any cogent ‘justification’ of it; but, in spite of their ex post facto character
and the exaggerated symmetry they are liable to impart, they may serve to make his attitude more intelligible to himself and to others. Mr Kirk, of Michigan State College, has devoted a long and vigorous book to an examination of this disposition as it has exhibited itself, mostly in respect of politics, in Great Britain and in the United States during the last hundred and fifty years. His view is that, in the late eighteenth century, a particularly reflective and articulate man of this conservative disposition was provoked by circumstance to formulate an ‘intellectual system’ which displayed so cogently the character of conservatism that it gave substance and colour to the work of all subsequent defenders of this attitude, except that of a few eccentrics. This seminal genius of modern conservatism was Edmund Burke; and a study of the conservative mind, for Mr Kirk, resolves itself into the study of a way of thinking that emanated from Burke. New circumstances during the last hundred and fifty years have provoked new formulations of conservative principles and fresh attempts to show that the conservative disposition had something valuable to contribute in the conduct and understanding of human affairs. But everywhere conservatism reflects the image of Burke. This, then, is Mr Kirk’s starting place. And in a series of chapters he reviews the writings of the long line of Burke’s acknowledged disciples. They have not all belonged to a conservative party, and among the more articulate of them there are few politicians. The English reader who is already familiar with such writers as Coleridge, Maine, Lecky, Mallock and J.F. Stephen will nevertheless find much to admire in what Mr Kirk has to say about them. But he will be particularly grateful for an introduction to the writings of some American writers little known in this country—John Adams, for example, and John Randolph of Roanoke. The book ends with a chapter on ‘The Promise of Conservatism’ in which Mr Kirk takes stock of the contemporary situation. So many extravagant hopes have now been shaken, or have already collapsed, that the great conservative thinkers of the nineteenth century seem more than
justified in many of their fears. They were not mere reactionaries out of touch with what was happening; and they were by no means so intellectually incompetent in the management of their own beliefs as their opponents supposed. But the difficulty remains of bringing to bear the virtues of the conservative disposition in a world still turned in another direction. That the conservative disposition in general should have been on the defensive for the last hundred and fifty years is not at all surprising. The over-activity which marks modern European civilisation, and to which we owe many of the comforts and all the discomforts of the world we live in, represents a disposition altogether opposed to the conservative—a supremely uneconomical disposition for which pieties are fleeting and loyalties conspicuously evanescent. And in order to sustain himself in these circumstances, the conservative has had recourse to speculative beliefs about the world and about human conduct which, while they served to make his attitude more intelligible, distinguished him all the more clearly from the prevailing attitude and made him appear a blind man in a company of confident visionaries. And it is not perhaps an exaggeration when Mr Kirk says that the conservative has had to give ground before the ‘liberal’ and the ‘radical’ ‘in a manner which must be described as a rout’. The ‘cosmic Tory’ has certainly been on the run both in England and America. Nevertheless, the story Mr Kirk has to tell is not that of a defeated rabble pushed from pillar to post. Without its conservative critics the Victorian age would have been much less distinguished than it was; and it was an illusion that the Utilitarians, the liberals and the Fabians had a corner in ideas. But this broad survey of the conservative disposition does not avoid a certain confusion. What I think Mr Kirk never makes clear is that the conservative disposition in politics (that is, in respect of government and the instruments of government) does not need to be buttressed by the kind of speculative beliefs (such as a belief in a Providential Order) which the conservative in general has often favoured, and that political conservatism is not only intelligible in
an age of incessant innovation and ever accelerated change, but is particularly appropriate in these circumstances. He perceives the isolation of the modern conservative, but he does not perceive that this springs, in part, from the odd intellectual excess in which the political conservative has been apt to call upon general beliefs which, whether or not they are valid, are certainly redundant. And he does not make clear how unwarranted is the assumption that there is something amiss unless dispositions in respect of government are the same as those displayed in the current activities of its subjects. There is indeed no inconstancy in being conservative in politics and ‘radical’ in everything else. Mr Kirk is not responsible for this confusion; Burke himself, more than anyone else, impressed it upon modern conservatism. And on account of his speculative moderation and his clear recognition of politics as a specific activity, it would perhaps have been more fortunate if the modern conservative had paid more attention to Hume and less to Burke. However, Mr Kirk is correct in perceiving that the followers of Burke outnumber those of Hume, and this examination of the tradition that sprang from Burke is both timely and acute. It is conducted with becoming moderation, and reminds us of much that we are apt to forget too easily. Nevertheless, I cannot think that his reading of Burke is altogether satisfactory. For, in these pages, Burke is presented as an initiator and as the formulator of the ‘canons of modern conservatism’; his works are described as ‘the charter of conservatism’. It is, of course, true that Burke was provoked by an acute situation and that he had to meet opponents who occupied carefully chosen ground; but the disposition they represented had already been fully revealed in seventeenthcentury England, and Burke’s thoughts were composed of an appropriate selection of long-current and well-tried notions. For example, when he said, ‘Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world,’ he used a word with a technical meaning that invoked a manner of reasoning characteristic of the Middle Ages. But further, Burke was
not the formulator of a set of propositions to which his followers could dedicate themselves with assurance. He was not, indeed, a great composer at all; he was something much rarer, a great intellectual melodist whose tunes were all the sweeter because they owed so much to the intellectual folk-music of Europe. Others, coming after him, produced grandiose compositions, but what these owed to Burke was not their architectonic but whatever melodiousness they managed to retain. And this perhaps accounts for the recognition of his genius, not only by men of a similar disposition, but also by men whose own political compositions often fall: Far below The very worst of modernistic rot.
Memoirs of Dr Eduard Beneš Review of Eduard Beneš, Memoirs of Dr Eduard Beneš: From Munich to New War and New Victory, tr. Godfrey Lias (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1954), first published in Spectator, 193 (1954), 639–40. President Beneš, when he was reinstalled in Prague after the war, conceived the notion of writing a detailed account of his policy and activities during the period of his presidency. This Report to the Nation was to be in three parts. The first was to deal with the period up to the ‘outrage of Munich’; the second, with the war years and the establishment of the Czech government abroad; and the third, with the years after 1945. He considered that less was likely to be generally known about the second of these periods and that therefore this section of the Report should be the first to be composed. It was published in the autumn of 1947, and it is what is translated here under the slightly misleading title of Memoirs. The other two sections of the Report were never finished; but this section begins with an account of the ‘Munich’ period which was later to have been expanded. He deals successively with the situation created by ‘Munich’, with his exile after the events of February, 1939, with the negotiations for the recognition of the Czech government abroad, with the Czech participation in the war, and with the negotiations to re-establish his government at home after the war. Unavoidably, this is a work of self-defence; its object is to make clear the policies he pursued and to recommend them as the best. It is calm, unhurried (often rather boringly repetitive), but sincere and within limits, candid. Of course, it is not (and is not intended to be) history in the strict sense; the story is centred upon the interests of his country and everything else is considered in relation to this: the whole object of the war is the ‘revocation of Munich’. But what it provides is material for answering the
question: What sort of a statesman, on his own showing, does Beneš seem to have been? In this account of his public services, Beneš appears as a sincere, patient, rather plodding politician, who has his moments of astuteness and his moments (often prolonged) of naiveté. He is not a gambler (or does not care to present himself as such), there is nothing of the too-clever-by-half about him; he is pleased when he scores a diplomatic success, but he is remarkably free from personal vanity. He is a know-all, never surprised by the turn of events, rather than a magician. He is apt to be trustful where it might have been wiser to be suspicious, or at least reserved; the gesture of cards-on-the-table comes readily to him. He is by no means an ‘innocent abroad’, but he evidently thought it good policy to appear so on occasion. He is supported throughout by a belief in his own honesty which too often degenerates into sanctimoniousness. He possesses the valuable, but dangerous, faculty of enveloping what are often trustworthy, more often unavoidable and sometimes illjudged, expedients with an aura of righteousness. Czechoslovakia is not ‘God’s own country’, it is something more wonderful—a creation of rational human endeavour to be cherished regardless of cost. The policy of deporting a large population of Germans, which was settled during the war and later carried out, is defended not as a desperate expedient, but as a piece of stern retributive justice and as a ‘final solution’. And the conduct of others, however outrageous, is viewed with detached understanding so long as it does not impinge upon the interests of Czechoslovakia: the Soviet occupation of Lithuania is passed off as a justifiable piece of self-protection, and even the appropriation of Subcarpathian Ruthenia is accepted as a sad necessity. Dr Beneš is indignant that other politicians should keep an assortment of irons in the fire, not knowing when one of them may not come in handy; and he affects not to notice that this is precisely what he is doing himself. But, in spite of all this, he is capable of moments of refreshing simplicity and humility: ‘in this situation we defended ourselves as best we could.’
This, then, appears to have been Dr Beneš’s temperament as a politician. But he is moved also by some general ideas; some acquired from experience, others generated by hope out of make-believe. The circumstances of Czechoslovakia after 1939 are understood in terms of its earlier fortunes. The resistance to the German occupation is recognized as ‘the second resistance movement’. ‘Last time’ it had been directed from Russia, from Geneva and from Paris; this time it is directed from London with a subsidiary in Moscow. The ‘repetition’ of events is constantly observed: this is all one story of ‘liberation’ that goes back to 1914. Within this framework of myth, Europe appears as divided into Progressives; Reactionaries; powers which might be turned in either of these directions; and Poland, foolish and feudal. Progressives have peaceful intentions; they mean what they say and do what they undertake. Reactionaries have an upsetting drang in one direction or another and are quite without conscience. The rest may sometimes deviate into doing what is morally right, but they are ‘egoistic’ and will probably be pusillanimous when they are not actually perfidious. Poland is merely foolish and feudal. From ‘the moment of the arrival of Nazi Germany’ to (it appears) the day of his death, Beneš recognized it as the only enemy. Hitler was the author of all the sufferings of the Czech people; ‘a possible future recrudescence of German imperialism’ must be the focus of post-war diplomacy. The Russian government he regarded not only as a refuge from the perfidy of Western politicians, as a reliable support against Germany and as a power with which a modus vivendi must be found on account of its strength and proximity, but as a beneficent power; over-given to violence in its own affairs, but pacific and with its socialist heart in the right place: he never saw any reason to question the good faith of its pronouncements, even when Stalin told him, in 1943, that what Russia really wanted was an independent and strong Poland. The incident which best illustrates Beneš’s astuteness and his naiveté and the dilemma of his situation, is his negotiations with Russia for the recognition of his government after the war.
He saw that if nothing were done the Russians might set up a government composed of Czechs who spent the war in Moscow. His visit to Russia in 1943 was designed to prevent this move, and it succeeded. He was gratified by this success, and he contrasts his forethought with the obstinacy of the London Poles who refused to undertake similar negotiations and found themselves displaced. Beneš, we must suppose, was less confident than he appears in his account. But he had, on the most sceptical reading, bought time, postponed an evil day, and something might have happened to prolong the postponement; so far he was wise. He did his best and it turned out not good enough. The Poles, on the other hand, were not so astute, or perhaps they were more proud; but whether they were less wise— Who can tell? They order things so damnably in Hell.
The Hungry Sheep Review of Sir David Kelly, The Hungry Sheep, 1955. First published in the Daily Telegraph, 2 September 1955, headed ‘Sir David Kelly on the Problems of To-day’. The enterprise of saying what you think about the present condition of the world is not one that will attract either the sage or the fool. The wise man will know what he knows, but when he speaks it will be of palm-trees; the fool will have no thoughts to utter. But if one is neither very wise nor foolish (as we mostly are), and if one has been about the world and kept one’s eyes open and has read a lot and has reflected enough to have something in one’s head other than the rags of learning, then, if time and funds permit and the adventure calls—why should we hesitate? This is very much Sir David Kelly’s situation; and when he adds the virtues of candour and sincerity, the touch of light-hearted eccentricity which gets us over the dull passages, and a ready pen, it is not surprising that he has written a book which will please many and delight a few. Indeed, it is likely to displease only those who think they have heard it all before, and those who, because they think it is all wrong, will be deaf to its charm. But, although Sir David often writes within the dazzling idiom of ideas which Belloc exploited (perhaps invented) a generation ago, he has something of his own to add. And only those who are still convinced that we’re well on the way to Heaven by our own efforts will think his disenchanted view of our present condition is hopelessly wide of the mark. As a writer about contemporary Russia, Sir David is well known, and he has something to say about it here. His reflections on the conduct of international relations during the last thirty years are those of a man who has played some part in it and has been able to observe the folly of the ideologues both in the projects they have
pursued and in the method they have resorted to: the destruction of ‘diplomacy’ is one of our most lunatic achievements. But I think his chapter on colonial policy is perhaps his best in the book: in this department ignorance, stupidity and a failure of nerve have combined to aggravate an already difficult situation. Altogether the conduct of affairs during these years appears in Sir David’s pages as a notable passage in the history of human folly. When, however, in the second part of the book, he turns to consider the sources of our errors of conduct, he comes to occupy more questionable ground. Our situation is disclosed as the result of an intellectual or moral collapse that, one way or another, has been taking place for about four centuries. That under the guidance of stupid men (like H.G. Wells) we have recently entertained crippling illusions about the world, is no doubt true; and Sir David has a good eye for the sort of nonsense upon which popular belief (and therefore public policy) has been based. While he is aware that it is now some time since we ceased to swallow quite so readily the pronouncements of our selfappointed preachers, he sees us still suffering from the diseases they generated. But when he launches out into larger generalisations, detecting in Luther and the Reformation the root of most of our miseries, and seeing symptoms of decay in every intellectual enterprise of modern times (logical positivism, cubism, psycho-analysis, the Higher Criticism of the Bible), he seems to me to over-state an otherwise good case. And it is not clear why he should be so impressed by Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin, when his theses not only do not need their support, but are better without it. He is more acute in choosing his enemies than his friends. But the whole performance is redeemed by Sir David’s strong sense of our own responsibility for our intellectual and practical muddles. We have got where we are by our own foolish choices, and if we try we can do better. In the end he will have nothing to do with an inevitable decadence.
His manner is brisk but urbane, he has a good turn of laconic phrase, and an effective power of ridicule. If the meal he serves up to the ‘hungry sheep’ is not always as nourishing as he thinks it is, at least it is an improvement on the ice-cream and cola they have recently had to get by on.
Reason and Revolution Review of Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd edn (London: Routledge and Paul, 1955), first published in Spectator, 194 (1955), 404–5. This is a book about Hegel. It was first published fifteen years ago and is now reprinted with a brief epilogue. It has the defects of a work written by a man unfamiliar with the English language and who has been assisted by helpers in whom the love of the abstract noun is not dead. It is a difficult book, laboured and repetitive. Nevertheless, it has great merits. It removes many of the current misunderstandings about Hegel, and it reveals him as (what his attentive readers have always known him to be) a supremely observant man. The focus of interest here is Hegel’s political philosophy, its circumstances and its fortunes. The first half of the book groups an exposition of Hegel’s whole philosophy round this centre; and in the second half the affinity or lack of affinity to Hegel’s manner of thinking of subsequent reflection on politics and society is studied. This naturally entails a consideration of Marx, whose liberties with the Hegelian dialectic are, perhaps, insufficiently exposed. But there is a brilliant exposition of the rejection of Hegel contained in the ‘positivist’ way of thinking; and it is positivists and not Hegel who are convincingly shown to be the inspirers of much that hasty readers have laid at his door. Briefly, and neglecting many philosophical niceties, the situation with regard to Hegel is something like this. As it turns out, the most important texts for understanding the modern world are Biblical: the two passages in the Book of Genesis in which human beings are recognised to be free of the world and as having to exert themselves in the practice of this freedom—dominion and work. These were the spring of Bacon’s understanding of the exploitation of the resources of the world which he both observed
and preached; and it was to their authority that Locke somewhat naively pointed. It was left for Hegel to construct an incomparably more critical and more profound philosophy of human activity on this hypothesis. Somewhat cumbersomely, Hegel expressed the principle involved as the sovereignty of geist over the world, and as the ‘negating’ power of reason. He recognised ‘history’ as a course of events in which this sovereignty was exhibited. The natural world and the products of human activity are perpetually constructed and reconstructed in human activity, and in this process reason is both the impulse and the guide. The ‘dialectic’ is a description of this process believed by Hegel to be more exact than earlier descriptions. But further, he perceived that the singular exploiter of the resources of the world—the ‘individual’—had recently emerged, as a consequence of rational human choices. This ‘individual’ he recognised as a great achievement but one difficult to manage. While Hobbes had seen him as pre-eminently a centre of religious belief apt to conflict with others of his kind, Hegel recognised him as a centre of practical activity apt to collide with others in his efforts to enjoy the world. The ‘State’, as he understood it, is an association of such human beings in which the propensity for mutual frustration is mitigated by laws, not imposed from above but made by the people concerned. It is at once a product of reason and an emblem (but not more) of the inherent harmony of rational conduct. In the circumstances of the time, some thinkers dreamed of a human association from which collision had been excluded by the destruction of the ‘individual’. Others believed themselves to have discovered that the world, so far from being under the dominion of geist, is governed by iron laws of nature. And, since to perceive and to obey these laws was to remove human conflict, the race was to be delivered over into the hands of an élite who claimed to understand these laws. But Hegel held fast to the view that there are no such laws and that the ‘individual’ is an achievement not to be surrendered. He recognised government
(not a comprehensively managerial activity, but a sovereign activity in which men exercised their power to make rational laws for themselves) as the tertium quid required by the situation. In his youth, this way of thinking led Hegel to speak the language of Jacobinism; later, he was inclined to believe that the enjoyment of the world was so difficult an enterprise that freedom was to be found only in contracting out of it in favour of the contemplative activity of understanding the conditions on which the world might be enjoyed, a view he shared with Aristotle, Dante, Spinoza and many others. Where in all this is to be found Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, the ‘organic’ state and the rest of what are commonly regarded as the propensities of Hegel’s way of thinking, would be difficult to say. Professor Marcuse has done much to detach Hegel from what has little or no affinity to him. But, while to correct misunderstandings is valuable, there remains something more to be done. Hegel is so profound and stimulating a thinker that he deserves not only to be not misunderstood, but also to be learned from. In a casual note Hegel himself remarked upon the release which comes when we are indifferent to a writer’s defects and can regard him as an inheritance to be enjoyed. In respect of Hegel we have not yet achieved this release, and until we do so we shall continue to miss much of what we might learn from him.
The Concept of Government in Modern Europe First published as La Idea de Gobierno en la Europa Moderna (Madrid: Ateneo, 1955), 33, a Spanish translation of a lecture delivered in English on 20 April 1955 at the Ateneo, Madrid, as part of a series entitled ‘Tendencias actuales del pensamiento europeo’ (Current Tendencies of European Thinking). The text printed here is an English translation of the Spanish text made by Charles Kelley and Francesco Lopez, previously published in Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, 12 (2006), 17–35.
I Introduction The fact of governing is an activity that has been carried out in Europe for at least three thousand years; since then, we have reflected on and discussed it. It might not be an exaggeration to say that currently we think about and discuss this issue more than any other. Undoubtedly, it would be a matter of regret if a study on current intellectual tendencies did not include a part devoted to the consideration of what we think about this issue. My aim is to introduce here some of my thoughts about the common ideas on government and to examine how we have arrived at our present thinking about government. Governing is for us a familiar activity; the questions I am going to ask are: What character do we attribute to this activity? and What is the origin of our common ideas about government? To those who have written books on how to govern England or Spain, I would ask them: what do they understand by ‘government’? Of course, nobody will accuse contemporary Europe of presenting a unique and exclusive idea regarding government: on this point, as on many others, there are many ideas in circulation.
Nonetheless, this variety is limited; we have abandoned some beliefs that have previously had firm support, and we have acquired others on our own account. But, even though it is impossible to discern all of the special simple ideas about governance in contemporary Europe, it is possible, in my view, to distinguish at least one intellectual position. I am going to address it now. Or, to put it another way, different governments behave towards their subjects in different ways; but, generally speaking, we have acquired some points of view about the conduct of government; I am going to speak about these points of view.
II Assumptions for the Existence of Government Government, whatever the character we attribute to it, is an activity that appears only in certain circumstances. ‘Governing’, in the broad sense, is to regulate human conduct, to resolve specific issues, or to deal with rules governing an association. And, consequently, it only appears where there is an association, or at least a gathering of people. There are also associations whose regulations are not thought to be followed or which are not thought to require attention, because they are considered irrevocably fixed: that is the case of primitive societies. When this happens, we cannot talk about the role or the activity of government. What is required for the activity of governing is an association or a group of human beings whose regulations are not considered irrevocably fixed and in which there is a particular person or a group of people whose task is to determine them. To sum up: the concept of government exists, and the activity of government can be carried out only in a partnership in which rules can be modified and where governors and governed are differentiated. This happens in most of the associations of which we are part; in families, clubs, churches, factories and, above all, in all those stable associations that we call ‘states’ in modern Europe. In none of these associations are citizens ruled by themselves, nor do they directly appoint their governors; in each of them there are governors and governed, and governors are the ones who have, to some extent, authority to attend to the needs of the association; one thinks that such needs require constant attention.
III Different Ideas about Government The activity of governing is not a primordial activity. Those in the past who understood it as an activity unconnected with the human race were not mistaken, although their reasons for believing it are no longer convincing. But it is an activity that was established so long ago that it has now been carried out for centuries; and we may think that everything has already been said about it, and that we cannot expect, in contemporary Europe, to present any new or original ideas on this issue. However, we have clear evidence that different peoples, in different times and circumstances, have thought differently about this activity; so, it is conceivable that if we study the contemporary world, we may find ideas and opinions related to government that are peculiar to it. The meaning of the verb ‘to govern’ has undergone a considerable change: for instance, what we understand by ‘governing’ is, in many aspects, a different activity from that of a medieval king or a Roman emperor. Of course, changes in the meaning of words like ‘governing’ do not take place quickly. New ideas about government have usually originated long in the past, and it is easy to find echoes of those ideas in what we think today about the activity of government. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern certain changes in circumstances that are quite recent, which are likely to lead to changes in beliefs about government. If techniques advance, for instance, and give to governors of associations a greater degree of power, the activity of governing will start to acquire a new character. Governors will find themselves in a position of doing what they never imagined would have been possible, and in the long term the activity of governing will be conceived in a different way. Or, if subjects of a government that, for particular reasons, have until now certain limited powers, are able to develop their activity in new and different directions and have a wide range of opinions on every kind of topic, that could be reflected in the
character of government. We can expect in this case that the activity of governing these subjects may change and that the way of thinking about that activity will also change. Therefore, the change in ideas about government is for us something natural and to be expected; and if we take into account all changes that divide the contemporary world from the world two centuries ago, we will not think that we are wasting our time considering the modifications in our ideas about government that have taken place, nor will we be surprised at the differences between those opinions and those of the past.
IV The Constitution of Government As long as we have thought about the activity of government, our reflection has been focused on two aspects: the constitution of government and its function. I understand by the ‘constitution of government’ the questions relating to the setting-up and authority of governmental bodies. And by the ‘function of government’ I understand the questions relating to the activities of governments. The first was subject to particular attention in the past. The number of books written on the authority and constitution of government is enormous. And, according to this, the activity of governments presents a wide range of ideas. Therefore, we should ask ourselves: is there any characteristic position in contemporary European thinking? And if there is, what directions are indicated? I believe that if we consult the constitution of current governments and the general trends in European thinking, we would reach the conclusion that in contemporary Europe we agree with the principle that a government should be formed and set up in such a way that its subjects would identify it, not as an alien power, but as their own government. Of course, this is a broad principle, and, as we will see, it is rather ambiguous, allowing for a wide variety of constitutions instituted in a wide range of ways. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to exclude some ways of thinking about the constitution of government, the first consequence of which is to exclude practices that contemporary European thought has in fact excluded. No association in the modern world allows a governmental authority to be considered alien. Two centuries ago this was not the case. This principle embraces the three fundamental positive premises of European practice and thinking about the constitution of government: the premises represented by the words ‘sovereignty’, ‘democracy’ and ‘nationalism’. The word ‘sovereignty’ indicates a position which conceives the governing authority, by its constitution, as superior to any
other authority, not subject to appeal or prescription, and with no one being equal or superior. This exclusive sign of authority of a plenitudo potestatis for government is characteristically modern, and can be considered a consequence of the general principle that what controls the conduct of the subjects must be a control that, to a certain extent, the person has imposed on himself. So, unless the laws and dispositions that control the conduct of the subject are flexible, and unless there is an authority in whose hands these laws and regulations reside, we will soon cease to recognise them as self-imposed laws. In short, we understand that the function of government is to determine the laws and dispositions that control our conduct, and we grant it a genuine imperium on this matter, because, if it were not so, our conduct would be controlled by a coercive authority that would be alien to us. But, if the word ‘sovereignty’ essentially involves an aspect of our general principle, the word ‘democracy’ represents another. It means, among other things—since it is a word that has many meanings—the belief that each subject should be able to recognise in the authority that rules him a concern for his own interests, since this is his government. There have been, of course, many extreme opinions about this idea: for instance, the assertion of Rousseau that ‘a people that is subject to a law should be its author’. The different instruments and dispositions that are part of what we called ‘democratic’ government can be considered as a means towards this end: universal suffrage, representative assemblies, responsible ministers, etc. And where there appear to be incongruous survivals of another political world, such as the monarchy and the parliament in England, they have survived because they changed in accordance with this belief. Even despotism, in order to be accepted in the modern world, must be, in this sense, democratic; because democracy is the illusion, albeit satisfactory, that governor and governed are the same thing. Likewise contemporary ‘nationalism’ represents another aspect of our general principle and also evinces ambiguity. The adopted position consists in believing that there are certain human groups
each of which forms a unity which in so far as their government is concerned, they should determine themselves. But, how can these human groups identify themselves? Some people have chosen the word ‘nation’ to indicate the appropriate unity in order to enjoy self-determination; but there is no agreement on what constitutes a nation to this end. Language, religion, ‘race’, the constant occupation of a territory over a long period of time: all these criteria have been used to define the unit of self-determination. Our ideas on this point are undoubtedly rather confused; the only thing that remains clear is that modern European political thinking tends to seek a unit of population or territory which may be considered appropriate to enjoy self-determination, with regard to its government, because if this were lacking, government would be considered an alien authority. With regard to the first aspect of our political reflection—the constitution and authority of governments,—the positions in contemporary Europe are at the same time clear and ambiguous. It seems that we are in agreement that the appropriate constitution of government has to be such that the governed may feel satisfactorily governed by themselves. This is the conviction at which contemporary European practice and thinking has arrived; and it is maintained with such confidence that the enjoyment of that position and ability to exercise it by everyone is understood as political maturity. This is what the peoples of Africa and Asia have learned from Europe. However, we do not agree on how best to satisfy this condition. Furthermore, I believe that differences are greater now than in the previous generation: we are not as sure as our parents were of having found the infallible means of forming a government that is able to satisfy this condition. Of course, we are calling into question what the nineteenth century never doubted, the fact that there may be a type of government that is, at this point, superior to the rest. Today, the ambiguity of this principle seems clear to us. Nevertheless, there is so little reasoned or previous opposition to the principle in itself that we can conclude that the premise
that it represents has become accepted by European politicians; and this point of political reflection is now practically dead. We should add that no government in the contemporary world would be acceptable if it could not in some way satisfy this condition. This is our criterion for a good constitution.
V The Growing Importance of the Functions of Government Reflection on the second question of political thinking—the function of government—is considered in a different and much more lively way. From being a question of secondary importance it has become central. I understand by the ‘function of government’ what governments, in whatever form they are constituted, must do in attending to their appropriate activities. The reasons on account of which there was little thinking on this theme in particular and that there is more thinking now are obvious. Four or five centuries ago, the activities of governments were rarely discretionary. Maintaining peace and order, keeping the laws of the community, organizing defence and confronting great emergencies: the activity of government was confined to such a narrow group of tasks without great successes because of the scarcity of resources. That is to say, the activities of governments were severely limited, due to the lack of power to do more. No government does or ought to do that which it clearly does not have enough power to do, and the power of these governments was insufficient even to carry out effectively their few but important duties. But, in the modern world, the power at the disposal of governments has largely increased; and in parallel with this increase in power, the tasks that government can carry out have increased. Therefore, our position about the function of government, from being of little importance, occupies a pre-eminent position. This point is now central to almost all political thinking. We must therefore ask ourselves: Does political thinking in contemporary Europe adopt any characteristic position on this point? And if that is the case which direction does it take?
VI The Ordering of Governmental Activities If we consult the practice of governments and the tendencies of political thinking on the function of government, I think that we will come to the conclusion that no evident, special or noteworthy position is manifest. Our practice and our thinking in this area are confusing. But it is not an undifferentiated confusion: thinking and practice follow different paths, and there are specific ways of focusing this question. Frequently, we have observed the fact that contemporary Europe does not enjoy a single and unequivocal position with regard to the function of government, and also that the positions that it presents are in opposition to each other. But in my view these positions have quite frequently been misunderstood. And since, in order to understand them, it is necessary to specify them carefully in advance, this is the first task we have to undertake. It has been sometimes said that our idea of government fluctuates between the notion of ‘anarchy’ (or the lack of government) and that of ‘collectivism’ (nothing outside government). I think this is completely mistaken. Anarchy is not a form of government and no European today—especially if he/she has experienced it— would consider it as a desirable or possible form. The extremes of contemporary European political thinking are not anarchy and collectivism. Moreover, from this point of view, the positions adopted with respect to government are usually considered in two groups: those who think government should be very active and constantly undertaking new tasks and those who think government ought to remain relatively inactive or at least not prodigious in using its power. This is as if there were two tendencies that are differentiated over the quantity of activities that government ought to engage in. This also seems to me an erroneous point of view. I do not think I can find in the history of modern Europe a significant position which considers inactivity an appropriate
function of government; and I only find a rather vague position in favour of the greatest possible number of tasks. On the contrary, I believe that there are two directions in which our ideas and practice to govern are oriented, and I will try to define them. On the one hand, there is a tendency to consider that the function of government is what I will call an ‘activity of primary order’ with regard to the governed; and, on the other, one can point to a tendency towards what I will call an ‘activity of secondary order’. In short, it is possible to observe that there are not two different quantities of activity but two different orders or classes of activities which are attributed to government as its proper function. The distinction to which I refer is sufficiently well known. It is that which exists between a substantive activity and that which is simply regulatory. For example, if an entrepreneur commissions a book to be written on a specific theme describing certain characters who reflect specific feelings and not others, his activity is substantive. He is in fact intervening in its production. But if censorship removes only some words of a work that has already been written, the censor’s activity is regulatory rather than substantive. If someone raises a point of order in a debate, it cannot be said that this person is continuing the theme of the debate. If his/her question is accepted, whatever the issue being discussed, his/her activity is an activity of secondary order. Or, in another way, if a government were to control the development of agriculture in such a way that it decided which cereals must be grown, and where and when, its activity would be of primary order with respect to agriculture. But, if it regulates the activity without participating in it, establishing, for instance, a way of compensation with which we could protect the farmer from the damage caused to his crops by the negligence of his neighbour, the government’s activity would be of secondary order. There is here a distinction, not between two different quantities of activity, but between two different orders of activity. And, in my opinion, the position of modern Europe on thinking and practice
with regard to the function of governing tends to consider the two orders of government activity as its proper function. We are therefore dealing with an ambivalent and even contradictory position, in that both orders are not only different from each other, but are mutually exclusive. When government is an activity of primary order, relative to the activities of the governed, we arrive at the central direction of these activities: imposing a total way of life, and government is identified with public administration. On the contrary, if it is considered an activity of secondary order, government accepts whatever activities the governed carry out, trying only to smooth out possible conflicts. These two orders of activity follow different directions. It is not necessary to insist on the fundamental difference that exists between this interpretation and the point of view generally accepted, that the tendency of modern European thinking on the activity of government is either to prefer that government is more or less active, should get involved in everything, or do as little as possible and tend towards inactivity. Because there is no doubt that there is nothing in common between activity of the secondary order and inactivity; to be active in that secondary way is even to act intensely, but not in the same way as the primary order. I believe that the distinction I am making is clear and unambiguous. I could be asked to be more explicit in explaining this point of view, demonstrating that it is applicable to other characteristics of our political beliefs and practices and referring to how this ambivalent position has originated in relation to the function of government.
VII The Ambiguity of Our Political Vocabulary and Its Meaning It has often been emphasized that a characteristic of contemporary politics is the ambiguity of its vocabulary. Almost all words in its vocabulary have a double meaning, or are used in two contradictory senses. For instance, ‘freedom’, ‘betrayal’, ‘justice’, ‘war’, ‘peace’, ‘party’, ‘rights’, ‘security’, ‘democracy’, are words that in the political vocabulary of modern Europe mean one thing and at the same time its opposite; although we sometimes avoid confusion by using adjectives such as ‘ancient’, ‘old’ and ‘new liberty’, ‘political justice’ and ‘social justice’, ‘eastern democracies’ and ‘western democracies’. This well-known ambiguity is interpreted as a corruption of words, frequently with malicious intent, and is compared with conversations with a double meaning that aim to create confusion. I believe that this explanation is insufficient. What we must clarify is not subterfuge itself, if it be so, but why it has been used. I am convinced that this ambiguity of language is the counterpoint to the ambivalence of our position with regard to the function of government. But what the specific ambiguity of our political language requires as counterpoint, is not positions that differ in themselves over whether governments should engage in more or less activity, but whether they should engage in activities of primary or secondary order. And, consequently, a study of the directions which we are going to consider about the functions of government is also influenced by the ambiguity of our political vocabulary. I am going to explain this point. For almost four centuries, the word ‘war’ in our political terminology corresponds to an activity in which one imposes on the defeated enemy some specific conditions of life, and in which all peoples whose form of life differs from ours are considered as enemies. We understand by ‘war’ the defence or propagation of a specific way of human life. This is what was aimed at in the
case of the great religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; that is what war meant to both sides—although in different degrees—for the British Civil War of the seventeenth century; this is the meaning that war had for the armies of the French Revolution, and this is the way Hitler and President Roosevelt understood it: as a total war. In that case, ‘war’ is one of the possible activities of governments; and, understood in that way, it is an activity of primary order. But, at the same time, the word ‘war’ has another meaning; it is the activity undertaken to achieve a specific and concrete end, the defence, not of a form of life, but of a community and its possessions; the activity of not aiming at imposing a way of life on the enemy, but the only way of putting an end to something that threatens existence itself. That is the way Pitt and Wellington, and even Churchill, understood war. Of course, the word ‘peace’ also has a double meaning; it means a condition of universal harmony because a unique way of life and a unique authority has been established; or it means a modus vivendi where there are different interests, which have not been abolished, but between which for the moment a collision has been avoided. These double meanings are neither new, nor fortuitous. Each of them corresponds to a way of understanding the function of government. But I insist on the fact that this does not correspond on the one hand to the belief that government should be extraordinarily active, nor to the belief that it should be relatively inactive. Such beliefs correspond to those beliefs about ‘war’ and ‘peace’. What truly corresponds to those beliefs about ‘war’ and ‘peace’ is the belief that the proper function of government is an activity of primary order, with regard to the activities of the governed, and the belief that the proper function of government is an activity of second order. I believe that the diversity of points of view expressed by the ambiguity of our political vocabulary corresponds to those two beliefs about the function of government. Let us take another example: the usual ambiguity of the word ‘right’. We understand by ‘a right’ a way of conduct whose
enjoyment is assured to us by the authority of government. But we are accustomed to use the word in two different ways. On the one hand, we speak about a ‘right to freedom as opposed to misery’ and about a ‘right to work’, and when we do that, we are affirming (or enjoying), a ‘right’, a substantive way of life that may only be assured to us by a government whose task is an activity of primary order, as regards the activities of the governed. The right to work could not be enjoyed unless a government was recognised as being able to act ‘providentially’ for the society it governs and assign a role for each of the governed. On the other hand, we speak of a ‘right’ to ‘freedom as against arbitrary arrest’, to the peaceful enjoyment of possessions legally acquired, of a ‘right to work’. But we are using the word ‘right’ with a different meaning: in this case, the word means a form or manner of conduct that is assured to us by government activity of secondary order. In order to assure to ourselves this kind of right, it is not necessary that government acts ‘providentially’ with respect to the governed. An activity of the first order would be inappropriate coming from government with respect to those rights. To sum up, the difference does not reside in this case, in the greater or less amount of activity of government, but in the fact that this is about different orders of activity. And in my opinion, the specific ambiguity of our political vocabulary corresponds to a specific ambiguity of our position with regard to the function of government, and therefore it involves the ambiguity that I have explained.
VIII Historical Origins of Our Thinking about the Function of Government This analysis about our dual attitude towards the function of government becomes clearer if we investigate its beginnings. Of course, the way we understand the function of government in modern Europe has not suddenly emerged. Like so many other things in our contemporary world, it has its beginnings in medieval practices and ways of thinking. The type of dual attitude that I have attributed to the government of modern Europe can already be seen in government of the Middle Ages. There are two leading aspects of medieval politics that, duly modified, endure in our current thinking about the function of government. The role of a medieval monarch had two sides to it: he was at once the king and the owner of the land. His prerogatives as king and as landowner were not, in theory, limited. As the lord of the land, as the owner of his dominions or of the royal fiefdoms, his role was that of ‘administrator of estates’, that is to say, it was substantive, or using the terminology I proposed, of primary order. His role was similar to that of any other owner, that is to say, of administration and exploitation. But, as king, as sovereign, his role was principally of the secondary order; and became an activity of the primary order only in cases of emergency, in times of war or economic crisis. However, both orders of activity were attributed to him as governor. As a consequence, when the medieval regnum became a modern state this ambivalent and fundamentally contradictory idea of the role of government persisted. When the role of the medieval king as sovereign was understood to be a symbol of government in the new state, government was understood as an activity of the secondary order with respect to the activities of the governed. But, when the role of the king, as lord, was conceived as a symbol of government, this was understood as an activity of primary order: that is, the
central control of the exploitation and distribution of the natural resources of the community. The so called ‘welfare state’ of our time is reminiscent of an idea of government that comes from the medieval king as lord of the land. Thus modern Europe inherited its own ambivalent attitude towards the function of government. Nevertheless, these were not the only roots of that legacy. In medieval Europe, the activity of ‘government’ was divided between two authorities, the monarch and the Church, the magistrate and the priest. However, whereas the activity of the monarch was fundamentally understood as an activity of the second order (aimed at maintaining a terrestrial tranquilitas) that of the Church had a different character. The activity of government exercised by the Church with regard to souls was an activity where the ideas of ‘guidance’ and ‘pastoral work’, ‘education’, ‘family control’ and ‘salvation’ were predominant. The Church, understood as a governor, carried out the function of protection and teaching. And when in the sixteenth century the regnum triumphed over the sacerdotium, becoming the sole custodian of the bonum publicum, it broadened its functions, as a consequence of that victory. And it was that legacy of the medieval Church that perhaps had most influence on the transmission of the idea of government as an approach to and execution of the total conditioning of human existence to modern Europe, that is to say, the idea of government as an activity of primary order with regard to the activity of the governed, the idea of government as an ‘executive providence’ within the association that it governs. Nevertheless, what in this way came to be added to government in modern Europe did not displace what we had inherited from the medieval regnum; these are the origins of the duality of our position on the function of government. Therefore, we could say that modern Europe has inherited a dual attitude towards the function of government from the Middle Ages; and far from any change taking place in this attitude over the last four centuries, the two positions outlined have been amply developed. For instance, the government of colonies, which was
from the very beginning a mix of ‘pacification’ and ‘exploitation’, kept alive the idea that the proper function of government was to order the totality of the activities of the governed. And the emergencies which have befallen modern states (war, famine, plagues), together with the great increase in power which present governments enjoy, have revived the idea of government as an activity of primary order in cases where signs may have appeared of a government becoming something inert. But, on the other hand, this idea of government has not been able to abolish the idea of government as an activity of secondary order. As we can see, the usual idea of the function of government has two aspects and there is nothing that allows us to assume the abandonment of its complexity in favour of a simpler idea.
IX Conclusion Let us sum up what I have stated about the way of understanding the activity of government in the contemporary world. There are two main aspects to all political reflection: how governments ought to be constituted and what role they ought to have. The first of these aspects is in decline today. Undoubtedly, there are countries in Europe where the question of how to constitute their government is still of the utmost importance and unresolved. But, substantially, we all share the idea that every government has to be constituted in such a way that it can be considered as belonging to the governed, and not an alien power, and in such a way that it creates and maintains a satisfactory ‘illusion of unity’ between governors and governed. Of course, we have by now abandoned the idea that only one particular type of constitution may achieve this aim. With respect to the second aspect, we have at present also formed a view. But our conclusion, ambiguous and contradictory in itself, is that governments must simultaneously be active both in a primary and a secondary way, with regard to the activities of the governed. Of course, and from the theoretical point of view, it is impossible for a government to be at the same time active in two different ways. However, that is what we expect from our governments; and such expectations have deep roots in the distant past, since they first appeared many centuries ago. I hope everyone understands that in this lecture I have limited myself to the facts and their interpretation. I have not hazarded an opinion about satisfactory or unsatisfactory measures of our intellectual position with regard to the activity of government. And this is not because I believe that there is no possibility of criticizing or improving it, but because I consider it is more important for us to know with exactitude where we stand before trying to improve our position. Furthermore, there is also another reason. I think that it would be possible to succeed in bringing
more clarity of thought to the activity of government, and we ought to strive to achieve this; but the way we do this is so closely linked to our manner of thinking about other things and has become so firmly established, that I do not think we are able to change it rapidly nor fundamentally. Undoubtedly it will change and it is susceptible to some improvement. But in our present circumstances and, although it is in a certain sense a confused idea, it stands us in good stead, and I am firmly convinced that if one of the two pre-eminent positions on the role of government were to take over completely, and exclude the other, we would find ourselves in a worse situation both practically and intellectually speaking. In short, it is thus that we have come to think about the function of government and its activities. It is more important not to delude ourselves about what we currently think than to begin to think in a different manner.
Government by Committee Review of Kenneth Clinton Wheare, Government by Committee. An Essay on the British Constitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), first published in Spectator, 195 (1955), 129. Our common understanding of a political community, not only as a collection of human beings calling for government, but also as an ‘undertaking’ calling for management, has landed us in some confusion of thought. The rulers and the managers being for the most part the same persons, the distinction between the activities is often lost sight of; and it is not unusual to give an air of respectability to management by calling it ‘government’. However, the expression ‘public administration’ comes to our aid at this point, and Professor Wheare’s book is, in the first place, a study of a device now much used in public affairs—the conduct of business by means of subordinate groups of not less than three persons to whom a specific task is committed by a superior authority. Professor Wheare wants to find out the kinds of task suitable to be assigned to committees, and the kind of committee appropriate for different kinds of task. And to this end he reviews the kinds of task we are accustomed to give to committees, and the kinds of person whom we are accustomed to appoint as members. In general he finds that there are six tasks, not always easy to separate from one another, but tolerably distinct: advice, inquiry, negotiation, legislation, administration and scrutiny. And, again in general, there are five kinds of person normally to be found on committees: officials, experts, laymen, party men and interested parties. Also every committee has a chairman and a secretary whose characters and functions vary with the task committed. With this analysis in mind, he proceeds to examine some of the large number of the committees which are so marked a feature of current public administration, in order to consider their fitness for the tasks committed to them. Committees to advise are used
mostly in the application of policy and are valuable where specific advice is wanted; committees to inquire are usually consulted in the formation of policy. His examples of committees to negotiate are drawn mostly from industry; legislative committees are naturally parliamentary; local government supplies his examples of committees to administer; and the Select Committees of the House of Commons (such as those on Statutory Instruments and Public Accounts) provide instances of committees to scrutinise. A book on this topic might be expected to provide interesting information, and there is no lack of it here. But there is reflection as well; and up and down the pages there are sage remarks, expressed in homely and informal language, which illuminate the theme. Professor Wheare errs on the side of generosity; folly is sometimes observed, but humorously rather than scornfully. Dangers are pointed out, but not enlarged upon. Moreover, he does not lose sight of the fact that this device of committees is not only valuable in public administration (in spite of the waste of time and abuse of talent it sometimes involves), but also has a significance in ‘government’, although he would not put it quite like that. For committees are appointed not only to perform their ostensible tasks, but sometimes as a means (as legitimate as any other) of ‘ruling’. They may be designed to allay suspicion, to remove opposition, to secure co-operation, to pacify popular agitation, or to conceal, to postpone or to avoid action. And it is in this respect that they can be observed as a counterpart of ‘democratic’ government, and not (as Professor Wheare surprisingly remarks) because committees provide an opportunity for the participation of large numbers of people in the processes of government.
Man on His Past Review of Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), first published in Spectator, 195 (1955), 595–6. Activities emerge naively, like games that children invent for themselves. Each appears, first, as a direction of interest pursued without premonition of what it will lead to. How should our ancient ancestor have known what (as it has turned out) it is to be an historian? And yet it was he who, in turning his attention to the past, set our feet on the road which has led to what we now recognise as ‘historical inquiry’. For, from a direction of interest pursued pertinaciously there has sprung an activity specified by a ‘practice’; and a participant has come to be recognised not by his achievements but by his disposition to observe the manners of the ‘practice’: an historian is a man who thinks ‘historically’. The long process in which an interest in the past became specified as ‘historical inquiry’ has, it seems, thrown up two kinds of historian. First, the scholar who, like Maitland, seems to be very little reflective about the activity he is engaged in, but whose historical ‘manners’ are so perfect that he can appear as the image of what (for the moment) it is to be an historian. And, secondly, the scholar, like Ranke or Acton, who not only engages in the ‘practice’ as it has come to be, but is aware also of the history of its emergence and of the temporary character of its present condition; in short, the reflective historian who understands himself to be engaged in an historical inquiry and at the same time to be determining the nature of historical inquiry. Professor Butterfield is concerned with the impact of the second of these types upon the study of the past. In this book he travels over a passage in the emergence of current historical ‘practice’ and reflects upon the utility to the historian of a knowledge of the
history of historiography. In an earlier work, The Englishman and His History, he considered some episodes in the earlier history of English historiography; here his theme is the manner in which the activity of being an historian came to be understood by the great school of German historians. This is a supremely important chapter in the history of historiography because it concerns the emergence not only of the critical techniques and practices which constitute current historical inquiry, but also the current conceptual framework of historical writing. It has long been recognised that the activity of being an historian suffered a great transformation in the early nineteenth century; and this revolution is usually connected with the names of Niebuhr and Ranke. But, without denying their preeminence, Professor Butterfield is concerned, first, to disclose their antecedents in this matter, whom he finds at work in the University of Göttingen in the decades around 1760. Here is the spring of the intellectual movement which generated modern historical practice. It was among these, often obscure, eighteenthcentury historians, who had felt the touch of both rationalism and romanticism, that the current conceptual problems of historical writing first came to the surface. After, in this manner, pushing the origins of modern historiography back into the eighteenth century, Professor Butterfield turns to consider the later development of the activity of being an historian. And this resolves itself, chiefly, into a study of the impact of Ranke and Acton upon historiography. Many of the problems which these two writers reflected upon had already been opened up by their predecessors—the problems of periodisation; problems raised by the current general concepts of historical writing: ‘Europe’, ‘Western Europe’, ‘civilisation’, ‘society’, etc.; and problems which sprang from the notion of ‘general’ or ‘universal’ history. But in every case they transformed what they had inherited. Moreover, they had new situations to meet; not least the problems generated by the partial opening of official archives in the nineteenth century. It is a fascinating story, which
Professor Butterfield not only traces in the writings of Ranke and the notebooks of Acton but also illustrates in two detailed studies—on the historiography of the origins of the Seven Years War and of the massacre of St Bartholomew. But, in addition to this examination of the development of historical writing in recent times, Professor Butterfield is concerned to elucidate the character of a genuine history of historiography. This branch of historical study, like others, has its own history. It began with ‘chroniclers’—scholars who merely enumerate and describe the work of successive historical writers— and it is only now beginning to be transformed into a genuine history of an activity. And with this transformation its utility to the historian begins to be discernible, namely, its power to make him aware and critical of the intellectual fashions which are liable to affect his work, and to show him that to be an historian is to think in a certain manner.
Uncommon People Review of Paul Bloomfield, Uncommon People: A Study of England’s Elite (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), first published in Spectator, 195 (1955), 871–2. The possibility of a link between ‘blood’ and ‘ability’ has often been speculated upon, and it has provoked both superstitious hope and scientific inquiry. Convincing evidence can be adduced to support it; and when this link is not evident upon the surface we are disposed to believe, not that it is absent, but that we lack the evidence which would confirm it in this particular case. Further, the hopes of many have been centred upon the belief that we can detect desirable characteristics in human beings and encourage this appearance by appropriate progenitive arrangements. And others, more certain that they know what is undesirable, have limited their expectations and their projects to discouraging the dissemination of what appear to be hereditary defects. Impelled by curiosity, some general ideas about human quality and some hopes for the improvement of the race, and fortified by Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) and Mr W.T.J. Gun’s more recent Studies in Hereditary Ability, Mr Bloomfield has written a book designed to illustrate the manner in which uncommon ability has run in certain English ‘families’ since the sixteenth century. He recognises that there are men whose extraordinary talents seem to owe nothing identifiable to breeding, but with these he is not concerned; what holds his attention is uncommon ability when it seems to have been handed on in the blood. And since he believes that women are not less important than men as examples and transmitters of hereditary ability, a recessive name causes him no anxiety. The ‘families’ concerned are (from one point of view) the descendants of a dozen or so men, some of whom are known to history for their own achievements, but the significance of
others lies in their having been (with their wives) the originators or transmitters of a strain of uncommon ability: William Cecil, Sir George Villiers, Robert Barclay, Thomas Wedgwood, John Gurney, Erasmus Darwin, Sir Henry Strachey, Thomas and James Pattle, the Rev. John Venn, James Stephen and the Rev. Weedon Butler. There are others who came into the story at various points—Charles II, the Russells, the Sidneys, the Arnolds and the Macaulays, for example—and the descendants of the great sires often married outside their ‘families’ and are sometimes to be found intermarrying. Thus, the story resolves itself into the history of six large ‘family connections’. But the hypothesis appears to be that the uncommon ability displayed by many of their members was derived from a few identifiable persons who handed it on to their descendants. In chapters, enlivened with anecdote (relevant and irrelevant) and with some bold conjectures, and containing many excursions into the social history of England during the last four centuries, Mr Bloomfield follows the fortunes of these ‘family connections’ and comments on their contributions to human achievement. It is an engaging book. As a guide to the social history of England he is sometimes naïve, but on almost every page there are pieces of information which will come fresh to many readers; there are pictures in which we can observe the faces of some of the worthies who come into the story; and at the end there are six revealing genealogical tables. Mr Bloomfield does not pretend to do more than illustrate the phenomenon of inherited ability in representative examples of it; but he believes that his examples practically choose themselves on account of their illustriousness, and that they cover a very large area of English life. Such a study rests, of course, not only upon genealogical information, but also upon a foundation of general ideas. Unless we know what we mean by ‘ability’ (and are clear about what we mean by a ‘family’), it will be difficult to trace it convincingly in ‘families’; and unless there is some plausible manner of linking this ‘ability’ with particular ‘blood’, we may hope for more significant
conclusions than we can in fact establish. Mr Bloomfield recognises some of these difficulties, and also the difficulty of isolating blood from nurture when ‘ability’ is in question, and in a first and a last chapter he makes a courageous attempt to meet them. The result, however, is disappointing. Where he should be severe with himself, acquainting the reader with a precise line of inquiry, he is apt to be self-indulgent, vague and verbose. And the conclusions he is anxious to draw, besides being obscure and mixed up with irrelevant speculative opinions, are not always securely connected with his evidence. The thesis to be considered and illustrated is that ‘in England we have an élite of blood and intellect’. What sort of ‘ability’ distinguishes this élite? Unfortunately, Mr Bloomfield is never quite certain. Sometimes it appears as merely progenitive ability (these were often large and long-lived ‘families’); sometimes it is the characteristic of being able to look after oneself and come out on top (but what is ‘top’?); sometimes it is a morally neutral virtù, and at others it is a commendable disposition to be interested in social reform. Of course, it is no good being too finical about this; no doubt there is something that may be recognised as ‘crude ability’ and we may look for it in ‘families’. But it may be thought that Mr Bloomfield has not been precise enough, and has allowed his rather eccentric prejudices too long a tether. The ‘family connections’ he studies were certainly composed of men and women who made uncommon contributions to English life; but when this observation leads to the identification of the Bloomsbury set with the high point of English art and literature, and to the recognition of the Darwins as hors concours in the world of scientific inquiry, Mr Bloomfield may be thought to have gone farther than he need or than it is wise to go. ‘Ability’, then, stands for a wide and indefinite range of characteristics, and Mr Bloomfield is anxious to show that on occasion it may be seen to have been handed on to their descendants by some notable progenitors. But here (as he sometimes recognises) his evidence is often equivocal and
inconclusive. What, in fact, are the grounds for attributing the undoubted (but various and not easily identifiable) abilities of many of his descendants to Sir George Villiers? Marlborough, Pitt, Fox, Lord Melbourne, Lord Shaftesbury, Castlereagh, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Bertrand Russell and Lord Pakenham all have or had Villiers blood in their veins. But why should we not suppose that their ‘uncommon ability’ sprang from the non-Villiers blood that each carried: in the case of Sir Anthony Eden, for example, from Charles II? May not Chatham be supposed to have inherited more than his gout from his Pitt forebears? Mary Stringer (on the evidence) has as good a claim as Thomas Wedgwood to be the source of some of the ability displayed in the Wedgwood connection. What do the Cecils today owe to Lord Burghley and what to Mary Hill and what to Frances Gascoyne? And it is plausible that the distinguished descendants of James Pattle owe as much to Dr J. Jackson, to James Stephen (or his unnamed wife) and to the Rev. John Venn, as to Pattle himself. The truth is that what Mr Bloomfield shows us is not uncommon ability that, in each case, can be attributed to the blood of a single patriarch, but uncommon ability displayed in certain large ‘family connections’, each of which is characterised by a mixture of ‘blood’. And, believing that these ‘family connections’ account for a very large part of the uncommon ability current in English society, he is led to some odd conclusions: somehow, he feels, a certain sort of ‘ability’ (even a certain direction of interest and activity) must be connected with particular ‘blood’, and Lord Grey (in an aside) is made an honorary Villiers. Moreover, a page and a half is devoted to Florence Nightingale for no better reason than that her grandfather had been a friend of the Macaulay connection and her supporter was a Sidney (a descendant of Villiers). There is, then, no difficulty in showing that the members of certain great family conglomerations have displayed uncommon ability; but even if we suppose (as we may) that this ability is in the ‘blood’ and capable of being transmitted and inherited, it is impossible, in most cases, to do more than conjecture where
precisely it came from. We may applaud the appearance of the uncommonly able man or woman, and we may speculate upon which characteristic is the gift of which ancestor, but to go further often carries us beyond the evidence at our disposal. And the conclusions? Respect for ‘blood’? Special opportunities for those who carry ‘able’ blood in their veins? A policy of raceimprovement? Unfortunately, none of these and Mr Bloomfield’s other suggestions seems to be as relevant to his observations as he thinks they are. And although the members of the ‘family connections’ he has explored in this book certainly left their mark upon many sides of English life during more than three centuries, it is a considerable exaggeration to suggest that they displayed pre-eminence in more than a few cases, or that the total of their achievement is remarkably large for their numbers.
History in a Changing World Review of Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), first published in Spectator, 196 (1956), 451–2. Professor Barraclough is a pugnacious writer. In each of the papers he has gathered together in this book he enters the ring for another round in what he regards as a sustained encounter with the champ of a generation or so ago—pathetic old dry-as-dust specialist, who can’t see the wood for the trees, now brought out of retirement to defend his title. The challenger is a courageous, brisk, pertinacious performer, not much of a stylist but the master of some characteristic strokes which he uses relentlessly, and determined upon a knock-out. Although there is a certain monotony about the whole performance, none of the spectators will be inclined to ask for his money back. But his supporters have some anxious moments: he gives chances in every round; his attention wanders; and having delivered a blow he is apt to turn his back upon his opponent (sometimes with an exuberant gesture) without waiting to observe its effect. Indeed, the battle is not without its Kafkaesque moments; each of the contestants delivers himself some damaging blows; it sometimes seems that the title being fought for was not only never in fact held by the champ, but is such that the appropriate holder would have been, not a boxer at all, but a long-distance runner; and when the lights go dim (as they occasionally do) what is going on appears to be an auction-sale with only one bidder. There is (we are told) a demand by intelligent people for a ‘view’ of European history. They want to know what it is all about; they want to be told its ‘meaning’. But when they turn to the historian he is found unable or indisposed to provide what they want— and this is ‘another example of the notorious trahison des clercs’, because the demand is reasonable and one which an historian has
a duty to answer. Moreover, since historians give no ‘view’ of what it is all about, the vacuum is filled by the writings of ‘amateurs’ who point to the ‘lessons of history’ while the historian is fiddling about with isolated facts. But just when the reader is considering what all this is about, the scene changes. We are told what is wrong is not that the historian gives no ‘view’ of history (leaving it to H.G. Wells to fill the gap), but that he gives an erroneous ‘view’. And when we ask, Why is it erroneous? we are told that it is a ‘view’ which ‘the war has torn to shreds’, and that ‘the Russian victory at Stalingrad in 1943 [has] made a total revision of [it] imperative’, or alternatively that ordinary patient historical inquiry during the last ten years has made it untenable. It seems, then, that after all historians (inadvertently, if not intentionally) do provide a ‘view’ of what it is all about—but that it is not the sort of view to satisfy Professor Barraclough. It is an interpretation (we are told) based upon the notion of ‘continuity’ and ‘development’. In it the history of Europe appears as the story of steady and unbroken ‘development’ from Greco-Roman times to the present, divided into fixed and arbitrary periods, and assumed to take place without any significant incursions from the outside. ‘A myopic concentration upon Europe’ has led to a false interpretation of European history. But here, again, the indictment is carelessly drawn. The notion of ‘continuity’ is wantonly identified with that of ‘development’; the need for a ‘total revision’ of this view of things is said to spring alternatively from what has happened in the world since 1945 or from the work of historians who have studied the impact of happenings in the East and in America upon the course of European events, and we are given to understand that this work is so recent that it has not yet modified our ‘view’ of European history. Moreover, Professor Barraclough often spoils his case by gross exaggeration: St Augustine is represented as merely ‘filled with antipathy to Roman traditions’, and Baghdad is said ‘to loom larger in the ninth century than Constantinople and far larger than Rome’ in any true view of European history.
But Professor Barraclough is not merely a destroyer of what he regards as error; his criticism of what he takes to be the current ‘view’ of European history is followed by an exposition of what he thinks to be a more satisfactory ‘view’. And here he acknowledges the inspiration of Spengler and Toynbee. History has a ‘plan’, and those who can discern it are able to derive some useful lessons for the future. It is the story of the rise and fall of ‘a number of civilisations, each inspired by a different spirit and each pursuing different aims, but each passing through specific phases’. Between these civilisations there is no ‘continuity’. But since they enjoy similar fortunes and conform to a single general pattern, a study of those that have gone by permits us to identify the particular phase through which our own ‘civilisation’ is now passing: it corresponds to the phase of Greco-Roman civilisation which began about the year AD 100. And the message Professor Barraclough has for the intelligent man who is concerned about ‘progress’ and his own destiny is, not to worry: in the end all civilisations die; ours is on its last legs; but how fascinating is the rich variety of temporary human achievement. The only thing wrong with it, so far as I can see, is the illusion that these historical speculations make it more convincing. In general the advice to ‘close thy Wells and open thy Spengler’ is sound enough: it would be better if it stopped short at the first precept. But if Professor Barraclough’s attempt to reinterpret European history under the impact of the Battle of Stalingrad is more interesting than convincing, there is something else in this book which students of history will welcome without reserve. Some of these essays are concerned with the reinterpretation of incidents (particularly in mediæval history) in the light of what historical research during the last fifty years has revealed: and these essays are altogether admirable. The pieces on ‘Mediæval Empire: idea and reality’ and ‘Frederick Barbarossa and the Twelfth Century’ are masterpieces, clear, judicious and without the exaggerations of the more polemical pieces. And the essay on ‘Russia and Europe’ is a brilliant review.
Conservatism in America Review of Clinton Lawrence Rossiter, Conservatism in America (London: Heinemann, 1955), first published in Spectator, 196 (1956), 451–2. When American writers get on to a topic there are always so many of them that the result is like an avalanche. For every English writer who now has something thoughtful to say about political conservatism there are at least fifty Americans, and the English reader is apt to find himself overwhelmed. Professor Clinton Rossiter’s book is the latest contribution to this avalanche. But it has two characteristics which will be counted as virtues by English readers: it modestly concerns itself with indigenous American conservatism, and it provides a discriminating guide to the current literature of American conservatism. As it appears to Professor Rossiter, contemporary conservatism in America is something of a miracle. For, although American political practice has always been conservative in disposition, and although there have been notable conservative political writers in the past, the normal rhetoric of American political talk has been of a different character—and it is rhetoric that counts. Moreover, by the beginning of this century Conservatism had acquired so indelible an appearance of crankiness that no revival was to be looked for. Nevertheless, a New Conservatism has emerged during the last ten years. Its shape has been determined partly by the relics of the older conservatism which had been driven underground in ‘industrial, democratic America’, partly in opposition to local and temporary circumstances (a distaste for the politics of the twenty years between Hoover and Eisenhower; in one respect, it is an ‘anti-Roosevelt coalition’), and partly by what Professor Rossiter regards as a return to the true and imperishable principles of Conservatism. Like every movement of its sort, it has its lunatic fringe; and it embraces a great variety of intellectual disposition:
‘traditionalists’, ‘authoritarians’, ‘philosophical anarchists’, ‘Southern agrarians’, ‘Catholic political theorists’, ‘ultras’, ‘pseudos’ (like McCarthy) and ‘middling-conservatives’. But somewhere in all this Professor Rossiter detects the genuine thing—a character still in the making and not without intellectual and moral defects; but on the whole admirable. The New Conservative retains a ‘dogged distrust of government’, he has a profound belief in ‘liberty’ and he is inclined to be confused about ‘security’ and ‘equality’. But he is less ‘individualistic’ than his grandfather of the same faith (he believes in ‘free co-operation’), he is less ‘optimistic’, less ‘materialistic’ and also less ‘moralistic’. ‘His conservative fear of the tyranny of the unrestrained majority leads him to repeat the time-worn slogans of laissez-faire constitutionalism. He remains a cultist, a strict-constructionist, and an exponent of divided and balanced government. The circumstances of the past two decades have led him to place more faith in Congress, especially in those committees noted for obstruction and delay, and less in the Supreme Court, but in due course the latter will reassert its hold on his affections … As to the Presidency, even the sight of one of his own kind in this highest office does not allay his suspicion of executive power. The yearning for Mr Coolidge cannot be suppressed.’ There are one or two surprises in this character: he seems not to recognise John Dewey as an intellectual enemy; and while his message is still something less than coherent, he has acquired an aggressive and a missionary disposition. The contemporary Right (as Professor Rossiter, not very happily, calls it) is slowly turning away from an ‘exaggerated individualism’, but it ‘has miles to go before it sleeps in the plain bed of Conservatism’. Its chief needs are still ‘to break loose from the tyranny of laissez-faire individualism’; to be ‘tireless in factfinding and dauntless in fact-facing’; and to ‘hammer out a political theory for the use of conservative men of affairs’. And the last two chapters of the book are a contribution to these enterprises, in which Professor Rossiter urges sobriety and demureness.
It is itself a pre-eminently sober book, neither boring nor scintillating. But for a book on contemporary political belief and practice there is still too much of Burke and all that; there are still too many entries in the index under ‘Man’; and a great cloud of isms often obscures the sweet light of day.
Studies in Communication Review of Alfred Jules Ayer and others, Studies in Communication. Papers Contributed to the Communications Research Centre, University College, London (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1955), first published in Spectator, 196 (1956), 502. In 1953 scholars of diverse interests, but chiefly members of University College, London, met to form a Communications Research Centre. The enterprise was to promote the systematic study of the problems of (mainly human) communication. And since many of these problems were seen to have an obvious bearing upon practical activities, it was thought wise to interest ‘the more enlightened industrial leaders’ in the project—although nobody expected to reach any practical conclusions very rapidly. This book is the first offering of the Research Centre; it is a collection of nine papers, introduced by the Provost of University College. Professor A.J. Ayer’s contribution on ‘What is Communication?’ displays with characteristic lucidity and elegance the range and intricacy of the problems which present themselves, and deals specifically with ‘the relationship of verbal symbols first to the experiences they are supposed to encode and secondly to what they signify.’ It is followed by Professor J.B.S. Haldane on ‘Communication in Biology’, Mr Colin Cherry on ‘Communication Theory and Human Behaviour’, Sir Geoffrey Vickers on ‘Communication in Economic Systems’, Mr D.B. Fry on ‘The Experimental Study of Speech’, and two other papers dealing respectively with the Greek and the English language as mediums of communication. But, besides Professor Ayer’s, the two most original papers are Professor J.Z. Young’s on ‘The Influence of Language on Medicine’, and Professor R. Willkower’s brilliant contribution on ‘Interpretation of Visual Symbols in the Arts’. It is intended to publish further volumes as the work of the Centre proceeds; but a field of study has already been opened up in these papers which promises to be rewarding.
Minos or Minotaur? Review of John Bowle, Minos or Minotaur? The Dilemma of Political Power (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), first published in Spectator, 197 (1956), 31–2. Most of the present advocates of a world order ruled by a world government fall into either of two classes. One set of writers, moved by hope, recommend it as the ascent into a heaven of perpetual peace and happiness; the other, moved by fear, recommend it as the only alternative to the hell which the hydrogen bomb has disclosed to us. Mr Bowle seems to be inclined towards the second of these views. But he is not disposed to accept just any sort of world government: he has no use for a world order (ruled from Moscow or elsewhere), which, though it might remove the threat of destruction, would lack the ‘democratic’ character he requires. What he urges upon us, as the alternative to destruction, is a ‘constitutional world order’. In short, he demands the best as the alternative to the worst. But he finds ‘in the long perspective of history’ an ‘inevitable development of a world society’ of this character. This gives him hope, which his belief that mankind is now equipped technically to construct and manage such a society turns into confidence. It is true that, for the present, much of the energy of those he claims as allies in this project must go in devising expedients to avoid immediate catastrophe, but the larger enterprise should not merely be put by for another day. First, we must set about creating ‘areas of regional order’, and then we must establish ‘a world authority, with revocable powers, ultimately responsible to all mankind’. It is an old dream which Mr Bowle struggles to turn into a rational programme. The starting point of his argument is the achievement of mankind in establishing ‘constitutional government’ on a small scale. The fact that he does not always recognise how small a part of the world has ever experienced anything like what he calls
‘constitutional government’ and how precarious an achievement it is even on a small scale, makes his starting point appear firmer than it is; but, as far as it goes, it is sound. At least it is sounder than some earlier projects to abolish war, which turned out to be aimed at merely abolishing the current kind of war, dynastic war, for example. The project is to enlarge what we already enjoy; and the prospects of doing on a ‘supra-national level and ultimately at a world level, not by conquest but by consent’, what has been achieved in small areas seems to him encouraging. The path which ‘mass opinion’ and fear of destruction drive us to take has already been pioneered: the Parliament of Man is believed to be intimated in the democratic assemblies of modern Europe. We must have faith in a democratic world order and we must set about extending current international agencies: for ignorance is already being combated by UNESCO, and disease, poverty, famine and monetary embarrassment are being overcome by other energetic world organisations. All that is needed is for us to recognise ‘the political sequel’ of what is already afoot. Mr Bowle’s object is ‘to provide an agenda from which further exploration can be made’, and he cannot be expected to answer all the questions of detail that are likely to crop up in the course of pursuing this enterprise. But it must be confessed that there are some more general questions on which the reader looks for guidance and finds very little. If Mr Bowle were among those who have unlimited faith in power and believe that all that has hindered human happiness is an insufficient concentration of power to achieve it, his position would be more easily understandable. But he is not. He knows that even small amounts of power are apt to corrupt those who wield them, and he understands the main problem of politics as the problem of the control of power. Consequently one wonders at his confidence that a single world political authority, without partner or competitor, would be so easily capable of control. And his glib condition that its powers must be ‘revocable’ and that it should be ‘responsible to mankind’ exposes rather than fills a serious gap in his argument. There is,
in fact, next to no analogy between such an authority and the authority of any known ‘constitutional government’. Moreover, if Mr Bowle believed that the office of government is to be the referee of collisions of interest, the chances of operating a world government would be greater than if he believed its office to be the substantive management of human activity by an élite of experts. But ‘We are all Saint Simonians now,’ he says and that, in so far as it is true, transforms what might have been a rational programme back into a dream which most of us would recognize as a nightmare. A world authority, operating ‘un plan général de travaux’ would be more than we at present know how to control. And the very moderation of Mr Bowle’s argument leaves its residue of puzzles. He understands well enough that there is much in our present situation—not only the bogey of national sovereignty, but our experience of ‘mass democracy’—which must qualify our confidence in the possibility and the beneficence of a world political authority, but he does not take account of difficulties which he makes a great show of recognising. His position constantly resolves itself into a not very convincing thesis that ‘in spite of enormous obstacles’ we are moving inevitably towards the development of a world political authority at once Saint Simonian and ‘democratic’ in character, and that it is this or ‘destruction’.
Mazzini Review of Gaetano Salvemini, Mazzini, tr. I.M. Rawson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), first published in Spectator, 197 (1956), 459–60. The thoughts and enterprise of Mazzini illustrate in a nineteenthcentury idiom more than one plausible generalisation about human conduct: the superiority of what Conrad called a ‘blessed fog of ideas’ over precision and coherence if what you want is followers; the advantage of self-deception if you wish to impose your will on others; the dividends paid by single-minded obstinacy; the convenience of ignorance; the manner in which, aiming at an eagle, we usually manage to hit a crow. For Mazzini’s impact upon the world, which was more considerable outside than within Italy, sprang chiefly from his faith in himself and the appearance of having something to offer everybody except the practical man who bases his conduct on experience. He stood for ‘freedom’, but rejected both the current devices of freedom in his time—federalism and the separation of Church and State; he stood for a collectivism in which education and art were both to be assimilated to so-called ‘social policy’, but he was the opponent of the most celebrated collectivists of his day; he was at the same time the apostle of the sacred principle of nationality and the no less sacred principle of ‘humanity’ as a single unit; he believed ‘the people’ to be divinely inspired, but was disappointed when they did not behave as he thought proper; he was religious without being Christian. Nevertheless, this equivocation is not to be counted in Mazzini as subterfuge to win support. The interesting thing about him is his character as the meeting place of the three moralities which have come to compose our current moral temperament: the morality of communal ties, the morality of individuality and the morality of collectivism, the last of which owes most of its allure to
its deceptive similarity to the first. And in consequence he seemed to have something to suit every taste. There was nothing original in his thought except his obstinacy and his ability to combine where more rigorous minds observed distinctions. Indeed, he scarcely knew what was in his bag, having never packed it for himself. The melodies from which his syncopated compositions were composed were for the most part St Simonian fantasies; he added only the belief that Italians (then perhaps the least unified people in Europe and about whose condition he was pathetically ignorant) had been entrusted by Providence with the mission of proclaiming European emancipation, of teaching the nations of Europe how they should behave and of leading the Council of Humanity. Like St Simon he had a scheme for the reconstruction of Europe which took less account of the facts than perhaps any other of such schemes. His ideas were never the fruit of an effort to understand; they were merely instruments with which to impose his dream upon mankind: he never understood that what you have spent on one thing you cannot spend on another. Set beside him, Gandhi (who is the comparison which springs most readily to mind) was a hard-headed, practical man. Mazzini counted himself to have achieved abouta fifth of what he set out to do; butI think he is most justly remembered as one of the chief progenitors of the rhetoric of liberalism, whose activities illustrate how unprotected this liberalism is against metamorphosis into its opposite. This study of Mazzini was first published fifty years ago, and it has been very little added to or revised. In its day it was a pioneer work of distinction by a great liberal, and it is still fresh and interesting. Salvemini’s attitude to his subject is perhaps ambivalent rather than critical; but in the preface to the book he makes the profound observation that it depicts only the inflexible Mazzini whose doctrines had achieved their final form, and that what is missing is the far more fascinating Mazzini, the man in process of becoming what he became.
The Chatham Administration, 1766–1768 Review of John Brooke, The Chatham Administration, 1766– 1768 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1956), first published in Spectator, 197 (1956), 746. Writing history in modern times has become an activity in which a more or less familiar story is perpetually revised and modified. The historian begins with a current interpretation; and his task is one of criticism and reconstruction. Sometimes it is hitherto unused material that provokes the new turn in telling the story and the new assessment of the relative importance of its components; sometimes it is a fresh hypothesis brought to bear upon already well-thumbed material, or a new technique of investigation. Sir Lewis Namier, in two volumes published some years ago, began to rework the constitutional history of eighteenth-century England. It was a great enterprise, in which, independently, Professor Pares and Professor Butterfield and others have taken a hand. And in this work many of the old myths and exaggerations (which were often the product of ‘political’ rather than historical thinking) are gradually being dissolved: something much more like genuine history is emerging. Mr John Brooke, an early collaborator of Sir Lewis Namier, has made his first contribution to this enterprise with his study of the rise and fall of the Chatham Administration, 1766–68. It is a remarkable book. The story is told, in minute detail, of how this ill-starred ministry, designed to bring to an end a period of unstable governments, was constructed and precariously held together and governed the country; of the opposition it had to meet; and of how and why its dissolution came about. In telling it, Mr Brooke is concerned to display the exact parts played by the participants in events, the King, Chatham himself, Grafton, Conway, and the leaders of the various groups in opposition, Rockingham, Grenville and Bedford. And, bringing to his task not
only a great knowledge of the intricacies of the situation, but also admirable powers of lucid exposition, he has succeeded in telling a story in which the old absolutes—the ambitions of George III, the strategy of Whigs and Tories and so on—give place at every turn to precise assessments of the persons or combination of persons whose words and actions composed this course of events. Eighteenth-century politics acquired the posthumous notoriety of being boring, insignificant and disreputable: from all this Mr Brooke rescues it, not by telling us that it is significant and interesting, but by displaying it as it actually was. But there is something more and something of exceptional interest to anyone concerned to discover how this country is governed. For our manner of being governed is a pattern of activity composed, not by an architect, but by the footprints of statesmen as they went about their day-to-day business, by Walpole’s courage, Chatham’s intransigence, Rockingham’s feebleness, Townsend’s instability, Conway’s hypersensitiveness. And in this respect, the most significant part of Mr Brooke’s story is the behaviour of those in opposition, the manner in which the opposition to Chatham’s ministry gradually collected itself and was set in motion. For Chatham himself Mr Brooke has the greatest admiration, and considers him to be ‘incomparably the greatest British statesman of the eighteenth century’; and in particular he admires his imaginative grasp of policy. But Chatham is recognised also as a man unfitted (even in the more favourable circumstances when he could bring his oratory to bear upon the House of Commons) for the task of leading an Administration in any but exceptional circumstances. But the general reader, interested in how his country is governed, and on the look-out for the pedigree of much that still has place in our manner of being governed, will find most to reflect upon in Mr Brooke’s more general chapter on Party in the Age of Grafton and Chatham. These thirty pages, in which Mr Brooke steps aside from the narrative of events to sketch the character of eighteenth-century government at a moment when
no great religious or constitutional issues divided the country, are perhaps his most remarkable achievement. A word must be said about Mr Brooke’s style of writing, because it is so admirably fitted to his task. He indulges in no elaborate imagery, metaphor is absent, the construction is simple and direct. But his writing is not at all wanting in qualities of imagination; he is often courageous but never foolhardy; and he is prepared to add to the narrative the telling phrase which sums up a passage and points to the wider entailments of the situations he describes. In short, this is ‘history’ and not merely the collection of material for some subsequent historian to work upon.
Sovereignty Review of Bertrand de Jouvenel, Sovereignty, tr. J.F. Huntington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), first published in Crossbow, 1 (1957), 43–4. Bertrand de Jouvenel, in a series of books published during the last ten years, has made a distinguished place for himself in the contemporary literature of political reflection. They reveal a disposition similar to that of his great countryman, Alexis de Tocqueville; a disposition to observe, to reflect, to accept what is afoot because it seems for the moment inescapable and yet to retain that sense of its all being the product of human choices (and not some inevitable process) and therefore eligible to be found good or evil. He does not disdain political conflict, but he is concerned with the strategy of modern politics, whose problems have changed little during the last four centuries, and not with the skirmishes in which parties from time to time seek power. This book, like his others, is meditative rather than didactic; his thoughts play round a central theme, taking it up and putting it down again, recognizing it in different circumstances and transposing it into a variety of idioms. The theme is authority in human affairs, and (more specifically) that appearance of authority we call government. Most political reflection, he thinks, has revolved round the question of the constitution of authority and the warrant under which it acts. This is an important question because nothing matters more to the well-being of an association than firm agreement about the identity and character of its sovereign; but it is not the only question. And here he directs our attention to another, not less important question, namely, that of its office: what is the proper office of government? What is the specifically ‘political’ good of an association? This he holds to be a genuine question because, while its answer is not self-evident or a matter of mere opinion, it
is a question which is not inherently unanswerable. Moreover, it is a question not to be answered merely by reference to the manner in which the authority is constituted: no manner of constituting a sovereign authority automatically endows its decisions and actions with ‘goodness’; a democracy and an oriental despotism each, in this connection, provoke the same question. Authority, which may be temporary or durable, is the faculty of winning the assent and confidence of other men; the auctor is one who makes communal activity possible by vouching for the rightness of a course of conduct or for the success of an enterprise. Obligation is the child of expectation. There are, however, two species of this faculty. First the authority of a dux, which is apt to be temporary and is appropriate to an action-group devoted to a specific enterprise, like victory in war or success in business; and secondly, the authority of a rex, which is more durable, is placatory rather than commanding, and is appropriate to associations whose members have common interests but are engaged in a variety of enterprises and have no single or limited achievement in view. These two species of authority are apt to appear in every association, but the proper image of the ‘ruler’ is rex and not dux. And the answer to our enquiry: ‘What is the proper office of government?’ may be sought in an exploration of the persona of the rex and the discovery of his characteristic activity. Rex and dux constitute the two poles of authority in every durable association; they represent different activities which cannot be combined in one person. The virtue of the leader is to inspire movement and enterprise, that of the king is to maintain stability. When the office of rex is approximated to, or confused with, that of dux—when ‘leadership’ is demanded of the ‘ruler’ and the rex uses his sovereignty to impose a single direction of activity upon his subjects—what should be a profitable tension turns into a struggle in which all the benefits of authority are lost. A view such as this has to contend with one of our strongest current dispositions in politics—the disposition to take the actiongroup as the model of a political association and to understand
governing as the activity of a leader rather than a ruler; and it is, perhaps, a shortcoming in de Jouvenel’s argument that this disposition appears only as an error, a confusion of categories, fatal to good government, and that little attempt is made to account for its appearance. But this is a small defect, and we are given something much more important—help in construing the ambiguity which this disposition has imposed upon our political vocabulary. There is, then, a specifically ‘political good’ which it is the office of government to care for: it is the social tie itself, the conditions of confidence and friendliness which make profitable, and even possible, the activities of the countless duces and their associates who compose a society. In a modern society the performance of this office is peculiarly difficult, for the stability required must be at once firm and favourable to change and devoid of propensity to impose a single direction of change. ‘Rex the Stabilizer’ must be alert to forestall collision and tireless in repairing the damage done by the innovations of enterprising subjects. But it is a limited office, requiring for its performance both the power and the ‘fortunate powerlessness’ appropriate to it. And ‘while this task of adjustment and stabilization is the essential duty of the sovereign, there are many factors and processes in society which contribute to the adjustment and stabilization and so take a large part of the load off the sovereign’s shoulders. Society offers in fact an intricate texture of duces and reges. It is the sovereign’s business to see that the reges operate to repair the insecurity caused by the initiatives, and not to preclude them.’ Such is the general doctrine which de Jouvenel lays before us, with excursions into the modem history of sovereignty and backward glances which join primitive beliefs about the office of ruler with current conditions. It is not unfamiliar, but it has rarely been argued so cogently or travelled over with such intelligent observation of the features of the landscape. Did not Rivarol say: L’objet de tout gouvernement est le maintien de la société, et le but de celle-ci n’a été et n’a pu être que la garantie de la sûreté’? And he
added: ‘Cette définition claire, précise et complète n’aurait donné lieu à aucune équivoque si on n’y avait ajouté mal à propos et en pléonasme ce mot ambigue de liberté. But our political vocabulary does contain words such as ‘liberty’ and a political theorist may be expected to show how his view of things appears when it is translated into these terms. Thus, de Jouvenel takes up his theme again under the heads of Justice and Liberty; the office of rex is to do justice and to maintain liberty. But here the ambiguity which Rivarol unaccountably missed in sûreté lies on the surface: both ‘justice’ and ‘liberty’ mean different things according to whether dux or rex is taken to be the image of the ruler. In an association where dux has usurped the place of rex, justice becomes an ideal share-out of the profits of the enterprise and liberty is identified with power; but when the sovereign is recognized as rex with the office of reconciling the activities of many duces and their associates, justice is a quality, not of social arrangements, but of the human will, and liberty is identified as ‘dignity’—the opportunity of formulating one’s own obligations. We should not expect a work of intellectual exploration, such as this is, to answer all our questions. It pretends only to set us thinking in a certain manner and to provoke in us the questions which belong to its idiom of thought. That it provokes many such questions is the measure of its success.
The English Woman in History Review of Lady Doris Mary Stenton, The English Woman in History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957), first published in Spectator, 198 (1957), 459–60. Men in England for so long (though perhaps a little less blatantly than elsewhere) appropriated for themselves the more interesting occupations and the more impressive rights that I suppose it is unavoidable for a book on the history of English women to be largely the story of the legal position of women in relation to men, of the slow emancipation of the sex from subjection to men, and of those women who by strength of character or by intellectual ability from time to time broke for themselves the bands of this subjection. These, at any rate, are the themes of Lady Stenton’s history. And yet it seems to leave something to be desired— not in detail so much as in conception. What is man (except for the privileges he has arrogated to himself) that he should be made the model to be copied? Why is his status reckoned to be ‘emancipation’? Lady Stenton brings before us the lives and activities of many memorable women, notable for intelligence, character and achievement, but the undercurrent of it all, the suggestion that notability is to be connected with being (as the chronicler said of Hawisa, Countess of Aumale) ‘a woman almost a man’, seems to carry us away from so much else that might have been said. Why, for example, should the opportunities open to a middle-class girl in the late fifteenth century be considered only in relation to those of a boy and not in relation to the total circumstances? Of the three themes that are somewhat unevenly explored in this book, the first is the best managed; and it is most successfully explored in respect of Anglo-Saxon England and the Middle Ages. Indeed, the first chapter is perhaps the most interesting of all. For there is set before us a situation, before the Pauline doctrine of
the subjection of women became reflected in English law and before the military preoccupations of Anglo-Norman England added their quota of suppression, in which women (at least of some classes) enjoyed an independence not immediately lost but not again achieved until recent times. But the legal subjection which overtook women from the time of the Conquest was not shared by all alike: it was a subjection of wives to husbands rather than of women to men. The femme sole, whether widow or maid, enjoyed rights and could engage in activities denied to those who were married; and of these the widows (especially if they had inherited some property) had the best of it. The legal status of women remained relatively unaltered from the Conquest to the Restoration; and thereafter change was slow, the reflection of circumstance and opinion. The second theme, the story of the emancipation of women from the social conventions which confined them to few and boring occupations, which restricted their opportunities of education and hindered their enjoyment of what the world offered by way of enjoyment, is more familiar, having often been told before. It also is a slowly moving story, with many halts and setbacks, and there is a certain whiggishness in Lady Stenton’s telling of it. But the merit of her account is that she carries it back into the sixteenth century and thus puts the nineteenth-century ‘pioneers’ of the ‘movement’ of emancipation in a truer perspective. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Somerville and Frances Buss were great women, but they had their pedigree. The third theme is the lives and activities of memorable English women from Anglo-Saxon time to our own. And here, beside the well-known figures, appear many who have been resuscitated by Lady Stenton’s learning. There are queens and warriors, women of property, of wit and intelligence, scholars a nd politicians, eccentrics and those with more conventional abilities, some with charm, many formidable, all with character. It is, and it is intended to be, the story of the ‘achievements of English women in
history’. And the only criticism to be offered is that ‘achievement’ is sometimes somewhat narrowly interpreted. These themes are explored concurrently through the centuries of English history, and as might be expected from so distinguished a mediaevalist, it is the earlier chapters which are the more impressive. After the eighteenth century the account of each becomes sketchier and more selective and finally peters out in an epilogue devoted to J.S. Mill’s writing on the subject. The whole story is written, without arrière-pensée, as a story of ‘success’, often hardly won, but blessed with a gathering momentum. One could wish that its author had been both a little less whiggish and a little more ‘sociological’ in her outlook.
The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes Review of Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957) first published in Spectator, 199 (1957), 198. The writings of Thomas Hobbes have never failed to provoke attention; from the beginning he imposed himself as a writer whose thoughts might be unpleasant but could not be neglected. His commentators, however, have more often been concerned to examine and refute his premisses and his conclusions than to construe the argument which joins them; his belief that his ratiocination was ‘solid’ has been more readily accepted than his belief that his conclusions were true. Consequently, it is a welcome occasion when a writer such as Mr Warrender undertakes the task of anatomising and of piecing together Hobbes’s argument on the important question: Why oughta subject to obey the law? And it is all the more welcome when this task is performed with such skill, patience and honesty as are displayed in this book. It is a brilliant performance which even those who remain at some points unconvinced must recognise to be head and shoulders above anything else of its kind. Mr Warrender travels over Hobbes’s argument in a leisurely and relentless manner, he makes his observations with deliberation, he qualifies them with care, he never conceals a difficulty or takes refuge in rhetoric to turn an awkward corner, and at every point he is convincingly master of the situation. Anyone who has himself attempted this climb, who knows the going and some of the hand-holds and who remembers the points at which, in his case, it became an undignified scramble, will have the greatest admiration for Mr Warrender’s skill and resource; and others, less aware of the difficulties, will be delighted with the grace of the performance.
Hobbes’s argument about political obligation merits the care which Mr Warrender expends upon it. It is exceedingly intricate; it abounds in fine discussions; it takes chances and one wonders why; there are two thorough accounts of it (the De Cive and in the Leviathan) as well as several less elaborate sketches; it has some notable obscurities; it is highly original; and there is little doubt that Hobbes regarded it as his greatest intellectual achievement. Its complications are such that when the commentator thinks he has discerned a straight path he is tempted to bend his energies to cutting away the obscuring brushwood and either to neglect or to explain away everything that points in a different direction. And the truth is that, whatever view we take, there will always be something to explain away: Hobbes does make statements which, when all is said and done, cannot be reconciled with one another. Nevertheless, success in construing his argument depends very much on avoiding this temptation and remaining firmly disposed to neglect nothing that appears, and it is confirmed by the fewness and relative unimportance of the pieces for which no place can be found when the puzzle is completed and by the cogency of the explanation why these and not others have been rejected. Judged by this standard, Mr Warrender is remarkably successful: he has very little left over, nothing has been forced into occupying an inappropriate place, and the stone rejected by some rebuilders of Hobbes’s argument becomes the head of the corner. Briefly, Mr Warrender’s view is that political obligation (the obligation of a member of a civil society to obey the laws) is not, in Hobbes’s argument, a special kind of obligation but is grounded upon the moral obligation, common to all men (save atheists), to obey the ‘law of nature’; and the difference (from this point of view) between the state of nature and the civil state is that some of the duties which remain suspended in the one become operative in the other. And he believes that much of the current confusion which has been imposed upon Hobbes’s argument by his commentators springs from a failure to distinguish between the grounds of obligation and the validating conditions of obligation:
the law of nature commands us to seek peace, keep covenants, show gratitude and abstain from cruelty and provocation, but the validating condition (that this conduct shall not prejudice a man’s survival) is present only in a civil society. Mr Warrender is concerned only with the logic of Hobbes’s argument, and what Hobbes finds room for is judged solely by what it contributes to the inner articulation of the theory. It is no part of his design to consider why Hobbes should have chosen these materials, what modification of current ideas the theory represents, or indeed any other aspects of Hobbes’s philosophy except in so far as they have an immediate bearing upon the problem of obligation. Much of Mr Warrender’s success comes from the strictness with which he keeps to his chosen theme, though I am inclined to think that some parts of his argument would call for modification if a more extended account were taken of some other parts of Hobbes’s philosophy. But the upshot of it all is to show Hobbes’s theory of obligation to be less divergent from the current natural law theory than is commonly supposed, and to suggest that most of the opposition, indeed horror it provoked was based upon a very imperfect understanding of its tenor.
The Study of Comparative Government and Politics Review of Gunnar Edvard Heckscher, The Study of Comparative Government and Politics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957), first published in Spectator, 199 (1957), 490–1. The expression ‘comparative government’ has settled itself like a blight upon the academic study of politics. Professors have written huge books with this expression as their title; ‘comparative government’ has become something that scholars and teachers and even students ‘do’; it has raised enormous expectations; it has even been hailed as the guide which will lead political science out of the wilderness into the promised land of a general theory of politics. Because people have been ‘doing’ it for some time it is assumed to be something that can be done, and its ‘findings’ are thought to be in some sense conclusions. But it is confessed that nobody quite knows what it is all about. In 1954 a conference of devotees met in Florence to discuss the problems of comparative government. Papers were read, ideas were exchanged; and this book is the reflections of one of the participants. It purports to consider the nature and profitability of the so-called comparative method in the academic study of politics, and it reviews the questions which might be investigated by this method. Unfortunately, it is a supremely pedestrian performance. The reader who is looking (as we all are) for somebody to resolve the myth of ‘comparative government’ into its empirical components, somebody to tell him what it really means to make a comparison and what sort of conclusions follow, will be sadly disappointed. On nearly every page bright glimpses of the obvious compete for our attention with fantasy and question-begging propositions. What is confidently offered with one hand is half-heartedly taken back with the other. And
what was intended to be an inspiring apologia ends in deplorable confusion. In the first part of the book some of the theoretical problems of comparison are noticed; but on every occasion, after a short and styleless run, Professor Heckscher kicks for touch. He admits that comparison entails abstraction, but he claims for it concrete findings; he asserts (against Quintilian) that unless we make use of comparison the real character of single things escapes us, but he brushes aside the dilemma that to know something in comparison with something else is to know only an abstraction; he recognises that every word in our political vocabulary—party, parliament, revolution, election, democracy, legislation, etc.— covers a multitude of different sorts of activity in different parts of the world, and yet he is resigned to instituting his comparisons in terms of these words; and when, for once, he is on firm ground in noticing the pedagogic value of making comparisons, he confuses this with teaching ‘comparative government’. Comparison, we know, is an old and valued literary device; it may be something more, but nothing in this book establishes it as anything more. The way a man manages his own curiosity is always interesting; he is apt to disclose more of himself in the questions he thinks it profitable to ask than in any answers he may happen to provide. Professor Heckscher is an indefatigable querist; his prospectus of inquiry for the followers of comparative government carries us back in imagination to those proliferating programmes of research composed in the dawn of modern science. Indeed, the book has a Baconian fervour and optimism worthy of a more clearly revealed cause.
Marxism and the Open Mind Review of John Lewis, Marxism and the Open Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), first published in Spectator, 199 (1957), 654. Can it be true that I am alone in finding tiresome the impertinence of these Marxists? They complain of neglect, and they take it as evidence of the degeneration of intellectual standards that we do not give ourselves wholly to the study of their writings. They insinuate themselves as persons to be taken seriously because people whom we respect recommend them (this turns out to be the usual mixture of truth and falsehood, but it gets them into the conversation). Here they reveal themselves as pertinacious bores: if there is anything worse than their whining complaint that they are always misunderstood by those who do not agree with them, it is their self-important demand to be refuted. But when their muddles and equivocations are exposed they complain that this is merely ‘academic’ criticism and takes no account of the noise they have made in the world. Can what millions of Russian proletarians and several British scientists believe be false? What has happened to these Marxists? They used to have some semblance of pride, the cloudy dignity of fanaticism. They used to be as certain of themselves as the man who holds the ace of trumps for the last trick. But now the best of them are like brokendown dissemblers who have failed so often that they go through the formalities of deception with a tired determination and when, once again, the wrong card is turned up, they mumble with clownlike pathos: ‘Oh, well, I knew it wouldn’t work’—and nobody has the heart to ask for his money back. The worst of them, however, have acquired some fresh testimonials, a new set of false teeth and a new line in ingratiating patter; they have done up the old pills in a ‘contemporary’ wrapping and are on the road again. The pride has gone, replaced by a spurious modesty. They have learned that
The look of love alarms Because ‘tis filled with fire; The look of soft deceit Shall win the lover’s hire. Mr John Lewis is a Marxist de nos jours. Marx, he tells us, with a rush of candour, did not say the last word; Marxism is a developing science and it has something to learn from bourgeois thought— not, of course, from ‘reactionaries’, but from the ‘progressive tendencies’ of non-Marxist thought. Let the Marxist show, if not an open mind, then at least a mind ajar to what was formerly proscribed with such contempt. Perhaps, this way, he will ‘enrich’ his doctrine, perhaps he may even succeed in enriching us; but to judge from this book he has a long way to go. Here is a collection of papers in which this adventure is undertaken: Marxism and Liberty, Marxist Humanism, Human Rights, etc., ten of them. In some an answer is provided to critics of Marxism; in others confirmation of Marxist beliefs is sought in bourgeois progressive writers; in all the conviction that ‘nonMarxist thoughts which ignore Marxism become confused’ is preeminent; and none, alas, manages to free itself from the clichés of the Science. Apart from the disfiguring jargon, the rhetoric is candid, but the technique of exposition provokes suspicion—not of Mr Lewis’s belief in what he has to say, but in the openness of his mind. What is one to think when, after eleven pages describing the moral and intellectual confusion, pessimism and despair of Western Europe, interpreted as ‘the dissolution of the existing world order’ (where have I heard that expression before?), he ends abruptly: ‘It is the Marxist analysis of such dark forces that gives both understanding of the present and hope for the future’, plus a quotation from Bernard Shaw! One cannot expect Mr Lewis not to have faith in his master, but one wonders why he should trouble to pretend that it is less absolute than it is.
George III and the Historians Review of Herbert Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London: Collins, 1957) first published in Spectator, 199 (1957), 718. In this new book Professor Butterfield estimates the value of the most recent passage in the historiography of eighteenth-century English politics, namely, the work of Sir Lewis Namier and his well-drilled associates. It is a fascinating performance, admirable in its scholarship, its candour and its liberality. To the would-be historian it offers an education a thousand times more worth while than any abstract instruction in ‘historical method’; and the general reader will carry away from it much that will add to his appreciation of the finished work of historians. Sir Lewis Namier’s work can be cogently criticised because (though it is often incoherent at the edges) it has a hard core of doctrine; and it calls for examination because it is by way of getting itself accepted as the end-all of historical explanation in respect of the themes it covers. Its central idea is that a ‘structure of politics’ may be discerned in eighteenth-century England (and at other points in our history), and that the story of politics can be made intelligible by referring the actions of individuals and the flow of events to this structure. Its defects, in Professor Butterfield’s assessment, are that it takes account only of the manipulative aspects of politics, that it turns human beings (with their individual projects, ambitions and understandings of themselves) into automata, slaves of a situation, that events are recognised only as the counterparts of a ‘structure’, and that it has resulted in serious and systematic misinterpretation of various passages in the reign of George III. These criticisms, no doubt, will provoke reply, and the reader must make up his own mind about them. To me they appear moderate and well founded, though not always well formulated.
And they are all the more cogent because Professor Butterfield recognises in the Namier technique an exaggeration, a narrowing down and an inappropriate solidification of a valuable principle already well known to historians and one that had made its appearance long ago in the historiography of eighteenth-century English politics, namely, the necessity of interpreting words, actions and events in terms of the ‘world’ in which they appeared. In the hands of the Namier school, what others are content to recognise as a set of dispositions and possibilities allowing room for movement and individuality has become a perpetually operative set of necessary and sufficient conditions and is even regarded as the cause of events and actions; with the result that narrative degenerates into nothing more than the ‘structure of politics’ extended in time and turned into a sequence.
The Opium of the Intellectuals Review of Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, tr. T.T. Kilmartin (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957), first published on 10 August in Time and Tide, 37 (1957). The debate about Communism in France has taken a remarkably silly turn during the last decade. Indeed, it ceased to be a debate and became the monologue of a set of ‘intellectuals’ concerned to exhibit puzzles and difficulties entirely of their own making and remote from the current problems of French politics. It was a display of perversely ingenious fireworks which, when it had spent itself, left only the memory of a fascinatingly foolish spectacle. Various circumstances generated the performance: the ingrained prejudice that all situations must conform to the Dreyfus affair; the desire to recapture for France what was originally a French invention (‘the Revolution’) which seemed to have been appropriated and vulgarized by Communist Russia; the inveterate unconcern of the French ‘intellectual’ with anything in the least degree topical or contingent; the impulse to generalize in the highest degree every current situation and to consider it only sub specie aeternitatis; and, least importantly, the existence of a numerous Communist party in France. The Dreyfus model imposed the necessity of finding a simple hero and a simple villain; they were identified as Russia and America. The conduct of the hero, however, left something to be desired. Its divergence from theory was disconcerting, but it was also intellectually inspiring. Could not Marxist theory be simplified and restated so as to accommodate these divergencies? Was there not evidence that they were, in fact, diminishing? And if in the end it had to be admitted that Russia fell short of the pure type, could not the model be found in Yugoslavia or China? In brief, the conduct of this debate was determined by a national pride and a nostalgia for a universal idea, a quixotic longing to
transpose the contingent into the idiom of a set of metaphysical notions, part Marxist, part Existentialist; and it was disfigured by an unusual amount of intellectual dishonesty. At best, in the case of M. Camus (who never properly belonged to the group), it became an attempt to rescue the ‘truth’ of human revolt against the absurdité of the universe from the hands of false prophets, to make it ‘French’ again, and to explore its political implications; at worst it presented the unedifying spectacle of intellectual ingenuity determined to excuse the barbarities of a current régime by rationalizing them. The task M. Raymond Aron has set himself in this book is to expose, not the false sentiment, but the false reasoning of this band of French ‘intellectuals’. At first sight this would appear a work of supererogation, because reasoning is not their strong suit; but since the appearance of reasoning is very much on the surface, he is able to make something worthwhile out of it. At any rate he pays them the compliment of a reasoned refutation. He sees them, in the first place, as the victims of three ‘myths’, all of which they misleadingly represent as ascertained facts: the myth of the homogeneity of the Left, the myth of the unbroken Revolution, and the myth of the vocation of the ‘proletariat’. These writers are not concerned with anything so vulgar as economics, nor even (except from a distance) with the current politics of Communism; they are concerned with Marxism as the only ‘scientific’ explanation of human circumstance and the only cogent secular religion. He has little difficulty in showing that the historic Left is anything but homogenous; its appeal, and its power to confuse, have always lain in its heterogeneity and vagueness. And the ‘eternal’ Left is a metaphysical hypothesis both misleading and unverifiable. ‘Revolution’ is a similarly ambiguous concept; and the redeeming ‘proletariat’ is the invention of theorists with nothing to correspond to it in fact and in any case superseded in theory by the ‘Party’. Indeed, as we well know, the disparity between the world as it would be if the theory were true, and the
world as it is, is covered up only by the equivocal decisions of an interpreter whose only qualification is his power. But the foundation of Marxism as it is understood by these French writers is a teleological interpretation of history in which abstractions are substituted for events, in which optimism is based upon catastrophe, and whose design is to reveal both the character of the condition in which mankind would be finally released from ‘alienation’ and the certainty of its achievement. Consequently, the long central part of M. Aron’s book is devoted to an elaborate critique of this ‘caricature of historical awareness’ and a faithful exposure of its errors. From start to finish he can find nothing whatever ‘scientific’ in it; its idiom is a refined sort of secular millennialism, liberally supported by dogmatic reiteration and circular argument, in which the ‘Redeemer’ (the Proletariat) turns out to be miscast for its role and obtusely refuses to act its part. And the choice it purports to face us with: ‘If this is not true there is no hope for mankind’, is nothing more than a melodramatic prejudice. The secret of the appeal of Communism lies in no single characteristic: to the Christian it offers the reflection of an attractive heresy; to those incapable of moral decision on their own account, a welcome authority; to the ambitious, power; to those in the shadow of the Russian army, an illusory sort of safety; to the French ‘intellectual’ an opportunity to exercise his ingenuity and to wrestle with his conscience in public. What it cannot be supposed to offer anyone is a doctrine capable of verification. M. Aron’s first concern, then, is with les Mandarins, whose writings appear in L’Esprit and Les Temps Modernes and the quality of whose reflections is (we must hope) understated in Simone de Beauvoir’s novel; and it is this that determines the sort of book he has written—characteristically different from, for example, Professor H.B. Acton’s book The Illusion of the Epoch. It is actute, discursive, eloquent, hard-hitting and remarkably patient with its apocalyptic and elusive subjects. But a debate, similar in topic but different in manner, is common to most countries outside the Russian orbit, and M. Aron finds room for some reflections
on its conduct in both England and the United States. He sums up his observations as follows: ‘The art of the British intellectuals is to reduce to technical terms conflicts which are often ideological; the art of the American intellectuals is to transpose into moral conflicts controversies which are far more concerned with means than ends; the art of the French intellectuals is to ignore and very often to aggravate the real problems of the nation out of an arrogant desire to think for the whole of humanity.’ Nevertheless, the English counterpart of the French ‘intellectual’ also has his myths. He has never quite believed in the saving virtues of the ‘proletariat’, but the homogeneity of the Left and the unbroken Revolution are powerful illusions, both serving to obscure the radical difference of kind between the aspirations of, say, Tom Paine and those of the progenitors of the so-called Welfare State. Of the many other topics touched upon, two deserve particular notice. M. Aron believes we are in the process of coming free from the war of ideologies; ideological politics is losing its charm and cogency. I do not myself think this to be so, because I believe the conditions which generated this style of politics are much older and much more deeply rooted than M. Aron supposes. It has never existed alone, it has dominated the stage only intermittently, but it has been with us for more than four centuries and is not likely to vanish suddenly. In this matter we may be in for a temporary recession; but is it not an illusion to interpret the débâcle which has recently overtaken the French ‘intellectuals’ as anything more significant than the puzzles they played with? But what have we to put in the place of the faith, the optimism, and the devotion of the fanatic? A radical rejection, such as that of Bernanos, of modern mass-civilization? M. Aron sees the possibility of a faith purged of the fanatical urge to convert the whole world, and we may hope to hear more about it from him. But he is not deaf to his virtues of scepticism: ‘If tolerance is born of doubt, let us lead everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe. If they alone can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the sceptics.’ It is a conclusion worthy of Pascal.
Documents of Modern Political Thought Review of Thomas Edwin Utley and John Stuart Maclure (eds.), Documents of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), first published in Crossbow, 1 (1958), 42–3. In 1939 the University Press of Cambridge published a volume called The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe. It consisted of a number of passages from books and official documents designed to illustrate current beliefs about the proper constitution and office of government. It contained, of course, sections devoted to the beliefs which centre round the expression ‘Representative Democracy’, to the characteristic modifications of these beliefs which have been developed by specifically Catholic thinkers during the last 150 years, and to Communism. But 1939 was a moment of eccentricity in European political reflection, and the doctrines of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism had also to be noticed; the design was to find a place for whatever was represented in the current regimes of Europe. The volume had one notable defect, the section devoted to Representative Democracy was far too narrowly conceived. Also, the passage of time (and the vigour of the opposition they provoked) removed Fascism and National Socialism from the scene as operative and significant bodies of political belief. Consequently, when in 1956 the University Press designed to publish a revised edition of this book, a complete re-handling was thought to be desirable. This was put into the hands of Messrs Utley and Maclure, and it has resulted in the volume under review. It may be considered first in respect of its success in repairing the defects of the earlier work. In that, the passages chosen to illustrate the beliefs connected with representative democracy were one-sided and too exclusively concerned with what may, in general, be called ‘Liberalism’. The eligibility of so-called
‘democratic’ institutions and of the current political vocabulary of ‘democracy’ to push political activity in a variety of divergent directions and to be interpreted in widely different senses, was concealed. In the new volume this narrowness of view is corrected; the internal tensions of ‘democratic’ thought are recognized. But (perhaps unavoidably) they remain detached from their pedigrees and appear only as differences of opinion; why and how this attitude toward government should have generated these divergences remains a mystery. Moreover, one political doctrine is distinguished from another as much by the questions it assumes to be important as by the conclusions it reaches, but the propensity of ‘democrats’ to ask certain questions and to neglect others is less fully illustrated than their opinions about the most satisfactory arrangement of things. Most of the passages in this section are obviously appropriate, though it must be confessed that some of them appear to be of ephemeral interest; and one may be permitted to regret the absence of anything from de Tocqueville, Acton and Lecky, who, after all, said with so much more weight of consideration the kind of things which (for example) Walter Lippmann is here chosen to represent. Otherwise, there is no great departure from the general plan of the earlier volume. The sections it contained on Fascism and National Socialism have properly been removed, and they have been replaced by a short and somewhat obscure section headed ‘Romantic Authoritarianism’ which notices the current regimes both in Spain and S. Africa. It is to be regretted that the treatment of contemporary Spain is so brief; General Franco, it is true, has never enunciated a coherent doctrine, but the Spanish regime (with its alliance of regnum and sacerdotium) is a unique and interesting survival in modern Europe and is not at all to be interpreted as a mere backwash of Fascism. The section on Communism is fuller and has been brought up to date; and it is to be presumed that what (on grounds of intellectual content) would seem to be the altogether disproportionate extent of this section, is justified in the minds of the compilers on account of the large part
of the world upon which these notions of government have been imposed. The book ends with a collection of passages designed to illustrate a view of things which found no place in the earlier volume. It is called ‘Protestant Political Thought’ and Niebuhr and Butterfield are chosen as its chief exponents. Its aim is to show that a genuine contribution to political thought is being made by specifically Christian but non-Roman Catholic, thinkers; and this section is a welcome complement to the section entitled ‘Papal Political Theory’. Documents of Modern Political Thought is, then, in detail, a great improvement upon The Social and Political Doctrines of Modern Europe, but it lays itself open to one general criticism: its parts appear to be, but in fact are not, in pari materia with one another. It is not, perhaps, misleading to regard, for example, the section on Communism, or that on Papal Political Theory (if the passage from Maritain were excluded) as collections of genuine documents of political thought; but the status of the passages from Locke, from Bentham, from Bertrand Russell, from Sir Alfred Denning and other writers is quite different. If the doctrines which compose the view of things called ‘Representative Democracy’ were to be illustrated by documents in the strict sense, then our proper recourse should be to Constitutions, to Acts of Parliament and to reports of legal proceedings. But as it is, either Locke (for example) is depressed to the level of Khrushchev or Khrushchev is elevated to the level of Locke, and either way the radical difference of kind between the offerings of two such writers is missed. And this is all the more regrettable because the book is designed for students who do not easily perceive these differences for themselves.
Personal Knowledge Review of Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), first published in Encounter, 11 (1958), 77–80. Human beings have a ‘drive’ to make themselves at home in the world. This drive they share with animals, but they are distinguished by their vastly superior equipment (mostly acquired) for solving the problems presented by the world; among which equipment is language and the ability to formulate general concepts and explore the relations between them. Learning about the world is to be understood as seeking to satisfy this primordial drive. Much of it is centered upon contriving material conditions believed to be desirable; but to this has been added a desire for intellectual understanding, an effort to discover the nature of the world or to construct an intellectually satisfying account of it. Nevertheless, this urge to satisfy ourselves intellectually is not purely egocentric. We seek a satisfaction which can win universal assent, and we remain dissatisfied until we have persuaded others of our understanding of the world. What we call ‘scientific knowledge’ is the most remarkable example of this effort and consequently it may be taken as an emblem of the whole enterprise. Some such view as this seems to be the starting point of Professor Polanyi’s book (the outcome of his Gifford Lectures), and its chief aim is to provide a more satisfactory account of scientific knowledge (and thus of human knowledge in general) than we have hitherto enjoyed. It is a book full of side-glances into other matters; it is disordered, repetitive, digressive, and often obscure; as a work of art it leaves much to be desired. There are long passages (some of them among the digressions) which move easily and are unencumbered with the flotsam of extraneous observation, and there are short passages where a proposition is demonstrated with supreme neatness and elegance;
but Professor Polanyi’s ambition to let nothing go by default, to surround his argument with an embroidery, not of qualification but of elaboration, and to follow his theme into every variation that suggests itself, makes the book like a jungle through which the reader must hack his way. Nevertheless, there is a central theme which is never quite lost sight of, a sustained and powerful argument in which a theory of scientific knowledge is elucidated (illustrated and supported by continuous references to the history of modern science) in opposition to what Professor Polanyi believes to be the current and erroneous theory. In this current theory (to which all the ‘critical’ philosophers of modern times have made a contribution) the enterprise of the scientist is understood to be the achievement of a purely ‘objective’ account of the world, an account from which personal judgments and preferences and moral valuations have been rigorously excluded. This ideal of ‘scientific detachment’ in research and achievement is thought to be a noble and not impossible enterprise, a longed-for emancipation from the shifting sands of merely speculative opinion. And it is understood to require the scientist to proceed upon an empirical method of enquiry in which each of his assertions springs from and represents actual observations or calculated probabilities, and in which the virtue of a general scientific theory is found in the ‘simplicity’ or the ‘economy’ with which it comprehends known facts. Professor Polanyi has three important observations to make about this theory of scientific knowledge. First, the empiricism it desiderates has never in fact been the accepted method of scientific research and verification and is misunderstood in this theory: in fact, scientific reflection does not begin with observations or with hypotheses about what might be observed if it were looked for, and ‘it is not the case that a proven discrepancy between theoretical predictions and observed data suffices to invalidate a theory’. Consequently, the representation of general scientific theories as the economical comprehension of verified observations is a misunderstanding of their character. Secondly,
the moral neutrality advocated in this theory has no counterpart in the activity of scientists which has everywhere unavoidably exhibited moral convictions. And thirdly, not only is this theory a misdescription of what in fact goes on in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, but it is more deeply erroneous on account of its neglect of an essential element of the situation: this element Professor Polanyi calls ‘the personal element’. Thus, the expression ‘personal knowledge’ denotes not (as might be hastily supposed) a certain kind of knowledge, but a coefficient in all knowledge; and Professor Polanyi’s enterprise is to exhibit it as a component of what we call ‘scientific knowledge’ (from which the current theory specifically banishes it) and in this manner to elucidate a more satisfactory theory of scientific knowledge. The argument (as I understand it) turns on the recognition of ‘science’, not as a body of information about the world, but as an activity of discovering. It is an historic activity in the sense that its directions of interest and its standards of relevance and achievement are not laid down in advance as the necessary and sufficient conditions of its pursuit, but have been elicited from the manners and practices of scientists at work; they represent a consensus which has come to be accepted and which determines by tacit acceptance what is and what is not to be regarded as ‘scientific’—a consensus stable enough to afford this guidance but never immune from detailed modification. Strictly speaking, scientific enquiry has no premisses, and it operates according to no hard and fast rules. Scientific knowing is a skilful activity; it involves a connoisseurship which may be learned in practice but which is always impossible to specify exactly or to make ‘objective’ in a set of rules. Scientific enquiry begins not in naïve observation of the world but in the current state of scientific explanation; and it consists in exploring the clues and intimations which this situation offers to those whose understanding of it gives them the power of moving freely within it. At the outset, then, a ‘personal judgment’ is required in (out of all those which offer themselves) selecting the clues to follow, a judgment in which the interests
and even the moral values of the scientist are involved. Before he comes to distinguish between the true and the false, he must learn to distinguish between the important and the trivial, between competent and incompetent scientific enquiry; and in doing so he is guided, not by a specific set of precepts eligible for mechanical application, but by his own acceptance of and participation in the unspecifiable consensus of scientific opinion. In short, when the obscuring clouds of empirical theory are swept away, belief and trust (and not doubt and distrust) are revealed as the parents of scientific enquiry: nisi credideritis, non intelligitis. ‘The scientist pursuing an enquiry ascribes impersonal status to his standards and his claims, because he regards them as impersonally established by science. But his submission to scientific standards for the appraisal and guidance of his efforts is the only sense in which these standards can be said to preexist, or even to exist at all, for him. No one can know universal intellectual standards, except by acknowledging their jurisdiction over himself as part of the terms on which he holds himself responsible for the pursuit of his mental efforts.’ But further, a ‘personal coefficient’ is not only involved psychologically in the activity of knowing and the art of understanding, it is involved also, logically, in the structure of the conclusions a scientist reaches and the statements he makes. ‘The meaning of all our utterances is determined to an important extent by a skilful act of our own—the act of knowing … and the acceptance of any of our own utterances as true involves our approval of our own skill. To affirm anything implies to this extent an appraisal of our own art of knowing and the establishment of truths becomes decisively dependent upon a set of personal criteria of our own which cannot be formally defined.’ Moreover, ‘unless assertion of fact is accompanied by some heuristic or persuasive feeling, it is a mere form of words saying nothing. Any attempt to eliminate this personal coefficient by laying down precise rules for making or testing assertions of fact, is condemned to futility from the start. For we can derive rules of observation
and verification only from examples of factual statements that we have accepted as true before we know these rules; and in the end the application of our rules will necessarily fall back once more on factual observations, the acceptance of which is an act of personal judgment, unguided by any explicit rules.’ These are only a small sample of the numerous arguments by which Professor Polanyi hopes to establish the personal coefficient in scientific knowledge. But to call for the recognition of this component is not itself to have formulated a theory of scientific knowledge. And Professor Polanyi understands it to leave him in a dilemma. Absolute ‘objectivity’ has been denied to scientific knowledge at the cost, it would seem, of a threatened subsidence into ‘subjectivism’. Many pages are devoted to extricating himself from this dilemma, but I confess I do not know with what final success. It is, it will be remembered, a problem which engaged the reflective powers of Hegel and which he solved in terms of the concept of the concrete universal; and in this book, although there is no overt reference to Hegel, there are many Hegelian echoes, and its argument might have been improved if these echoes were more explicit. ‘I think,’ says Professor Polanyi, ‘we may distinguish between the personal in us, and our subjective states, in which we merely endure our feelings. This distinction establishes the personal, which is neither subjective nor objective. In so far as the personal submits to requirements acknowledged by itself as independent of itself, it is not subjective; but in so far as it is an action guided by individual passions, it is not objective either. It transcends the disjunction between subjective and objective.’ But, perhaps, Polanyi’s solution to this problem is Platonic rather than Hegelian. He recognises ‘rationality’ as the mark of truth in a scientific theory (in other passages this mark is identified with the intellectual beauty of the theory) and in the end a belief that our thoughts are moved by ‘an innate affinity for making contact with reality’ seems to be the only premiss, properly speaking, of scientific enquiry and the means by which it transcends merely personal conviction. But, be that how it may, we are left in no
doubt that the theory of scientific knowledge with which Professor Polanyi wishes to equip us is as little sceptical as it is positivistic. And, so far as the quality of the performance goes, it may perhaps be said that Professor Polanyi doesn’t do as much scepticism for himself as might have been hoped and as the occasion seems to demand. At the edges of his argument there is a suspicion of philosophical innocence. In short, these Gifford Lectures may be recognised as a passionate and profound attack upon empiricism in its stronghold—the theory of scientific enquiry. The plan of campaign has been deeply reflected, and though it lacks a certain elegance, its details are clearly conceived. Its execution is relentless; Professor Polanyi has lived with his opponent long enough to know him intimately and to make no mistake about the disposition of the forces against him; his demotion of empiricism from a method to a maxim calling for interpretation in application is shrewdly done; but, like Nelson, his object is rather annihilation than an indecisive mêlée. As in all philosophical encounters, exactly what has been demolished and what remains standing is a little uncertain; the slain have a disconcerting way of rising from the dead to fight another action. There are many exciting passages in this engagement which have had to go unnoticed, but in this place it is proper to mention two of them. First, Professor Polanyi believes that there is a ‘civic coefficient’ to the intellectual passions proper to scientific enquiry. Science depends upon an allegiance to the values which have emerged in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, but this allegiance must always be uncertain in a society not disposed to recognise them. The counterpart proper to scientific enquiry he calls a ‘free society’ and by this he means a society which is not static in its moral and intellectual outlook, one which is not ‘authoritarian’ in its structure and operation, and one which is not disposed to assimilate scientific enquiry to technological achievement. Secondly, attention should be drawn to the last chapter of the book. Here controversy is left behind. It is a vision of the natural history of mankind, brilliantly imagined and expressed in sentences of uninflated eloquence.
Realism and Imagination Review of Joseph Chiari, Realism and Imagination (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960), first published in British Journal of Aesthetics, 1 (1961), 198–9. Mr Joseph Chiari is a poet and a critic and he has already done much to interpret the poetry of Symbolisme for us. Here he takes up a question which has long been a favourite manner of posing one of the fundamental problems of aesthetics, namely, the relation of art and ‘nature’. His treatment of this question is discursive rather than strictly argumentative, and is executed in a number of only partially connected chapters concerned with various incidents in the history of modern European painting and poetry, many of them interesting on their own account. This manner of writing has the disadvantage that an idea when it is proposed for examination is never stayed with until it has yielded all that it is capable of yielding; ideas are taken up, turned over, scrutinized and then put by to reappear at some later point in the book. From the point of view of aesthetics it is a book of glimpses rather than a sustained view. However, we should take what is offered us in the form in which it is offered, and if we do so a great deal of good sense is to be found scattered up and down these pages. Mr Chiari recognizes artistic activity as an autonomous activity; he denotes the ‘primary aim of the artist’ as ‘not to say or express something, but to do, to the utmost perfection of its own laws, the work undertaken’; and he concludes that no line can be drawn between ‘imagination’ and ‘creation’, that there are no mute inglorious Miltons, and that a work of art is not to be interpreted in terms of the biography or of the psychoanalysis of the artist. But beyond these and some other clear perceptions about works of art, we are left somewhat in the dark. Art, it appears, is a response to, not an imitation of, nature; and ‘nature’
is itself a response to sense-data, the response of the ‘primary imagination’. In this way of putting things, what we are encouraged to seek is some specification of the ‘secondary imagination’ which distinguishes the artist’s response; but no very clear specification is given, though the part played by memory and recollection is noticed. Instead, something else, namely ‘reality’, intrudes into the argument; and art becomes the product of an imagination which ‘can pierce beyond those conventions, habits, fears and desires which hide the true essence of things or of human experiences’, and springs from ‘an active and disinterested contemplation of what is truly beyond appearances’. From being autonomous, the artistic imagination becomes ‘the highest of the human faculties’. In short, Mr Chiari has an aesthetic doctrine, the main outlines of which he enables us to see but its depths remain concealed. This book, however, raises, incidentally, a small point of general interest in connection with aesthetic theory. Mr Chiari is much more at home in the pronouncements of painters and poets about their work than with writings of philosophical reflection on art. And his use of these pronouncements raises the question of their authority and relevance. Of course, it sometimes happens that an artist is capable of observing himself at work and of commenting intelligently on what he finds (as Wordsworth was capable), and it more rarely happens that an artist is capable of profound reflection upon art (as Schiller, Baudelaire, and Valéry were capable), but in neither case must their comments or reflections be thought to have any special authority because they come from painters or poets. And conversely a genuinely inarticulate artist (such as Turner) who is incapable of connected thought about his activity is not the worse artist for being so. Mr Chiari understands this, and on occasion goes out of his way to point out the discrepancy that often occurs between an artist’s theories and his work: both Zola and Tolstoy are remarkable examples of this. But he is concerned mainly with artists and poets who had theories about what they were doing, and many of the terms and categories he uses (such as ‘realism’, ‘representation’, ‘naturalism’, ‘surrealism’,
‘expressionism’, ‘symbolisme’) are not, properly speaking, terms from the vocabulary of aesthetics, but from the rough and ready vocabulary of artists when they venture into theory. An artist, says Mr Chiari, ‘cannot be committed to any kind of ideology— political or religious’; but this is a general principle which might profitably be carried further—he is not, in fact, committed, as an artist, to his own occasional rationalizations of his work or manner of working; and we are not, in any sense, committed to giving any particular authority to these rationalizations, and certainly not committed to constructing our aesthetic in these terms.
Political Discipline in a Free Society Review of Harold John Blackham, Political Discipline in a Free Society: The Sustained Initiative (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961), first published in Sunday Telegraph (26 March, 1961), 6. If one is satisfied with an attenuated sort of radicalism, H.J. Blackham’s aspiration to ‘write in the radical tradition’ is not unsuccessful. Political Discipline in a Free Society is a long and (as these things are apt to be) rather repetitive extemporary prayer to a god named ‘the Movement of Thought which has made the Running during the past 200 Years’: an unmistakable River God. He takes some trouble to distinguish this god from the less reliable deities of Comte and others, but he declares his to be the god which they ignorantly worshipped. His invocation is designed also to inspire his congregation with self-confidence. He is concerned about the way things are going. We are engaged upon the enterprise of exploiting the resources of the earth in the interests of human happiness. Progress has been immense, but advance is now prejudiced by the danger of discord. ‘The masses’ have risen to political sovereignty, their demands are many, but if ‘their crudest interests’ were to prevail disorder would overwhelm us. ‘Reactionary conservatives’ give way to despair or rely on ‘methods of social control’ invented to contain earlier enemies of social progress. Others, the theocrats of the contemporary world, seek to impose order by force or cunning. And here we lie, between sea and devil. But, in fact, Mr Blackham assures us, our situation is not so desperate. Compared with earlier generations, we ‘the most fateful generation of all history, but also the most privileged’, have ‘unexampled techniques and sources of wisdom’ if we care to use them. Nor are they untried expedients. They are based upon principles announced as long ago as the eighteenth century, and they have
been proved in successful use for more than a century. They comprise the science of ‘informed, democratic social planning’, in which no legitimate desire need go unsatisfied, in which unity emerges without having to be imposed, and which enables us to say ‘Tell me what you want and I will tell you how to get it.’ All this, and much more, is so transparently obvious to Mr Blackham that he has frequently to pause to remind himself of the remarkable fact that it has not won the universal approval it clearly merits. His task is to explain the virtues of informed social planning and to remove certain lamentable misapprehensions which have got about concerning it. An informed social plan is concerned only with specific departments of our activities, such as education, agriculture, wages, and so on. It is essentially ‘creative’, consisting of a ‘threephased cycle of activity’—first, gathering information, ‘consulting’ interests and determining priorities; secondly, legislation; and thirdly, a never-ending process in which the plan is revised and reformed. In short, informed social planning is the ‘social selfdetermination’ of which the philosophes dreamed but which we now have the experience and the technique to achieve. But, it must be understood, this method of social control is not new. The ‘thought-model’ concerned is that which has made the running for two centuries, and there are already shining examples of success in this field of activity: for example, the Education Act of 1944. It is ‘piecemeal social engineering’, and therefore is not to be confused with anything so horrifying as a ‘planned society’. It imposes no social purpose, but it has the virtue of generating a social purpose. And it is utterly different from ‘totalitarian social planning’, which is distinguished by the absence of phase one of the cycle of activity. If one is left wishing for anything that is not provided, it is for a little more openness about what is really being proposed. Why, if
the enterprise is a managed economy, must it be recommended in such a phrase as ‘a managed free economy’? Mr Blackham is an example of that now familiar and ambivalent character, the liberal collectivist. Such people believe that we should be wholehearted social planners because we have become used to social planning and know how to do it successfully. They add that if we do not, ‘the dimensions of human life will be diminished’. They hope to excuse themselves on the ground that the plans, though many, are only small ones, and can easily be changed if they go wrong.
The Story of Fabian Socialism Review of Margaret Isabel Cole, The Story of Fabian Socialism (London: Heinemann, 1961), first published in Sunday Telegraph (5 November, 1961), 6. Part a history of the Fabian Society, and part an explanation of what the author (and others) consider the movement to be, The Story of Fabian Socialism is a spirited book. Margaret Cole’s view is that the Society, founded in 1883, provided an impetus to a certain attitude (something much less tangible than a doctrine) which, in the course of time, acquired a movement of its own less devious and interrupted than that of the Society itself, which had its ups and downs, its periods of stagnation and its moments of ‘aberrancy’. Fabian Socialism may be described as a family of beliefs about the proper organisation of society and about the best manner of moving from what is now to what ought to be. The condition sought is a collectivist or semi-collectivist society in which the collectivities are managed by professionals who are controlled by appropriate representative bodies. The movement towards this condition should be peaceful, gradual, and constitutional. The Fabian Socialist is a ‘democrat’ because he seeks a consensus of opinion on his side (and is confident he can get it) and because he has at his disposal for the management of society some relatively reliable and uncorrupt representative institutions. Indeed, he isa democrat mainly because he is patient, and he can afford to be patient because he is confident that he is swimming with the tide. He is, then, the creature of circumstance and, for the most part, peculiarly English circumstance. A Fabian Socialist may be expected to give his main attention to specific changes, each recognised as a step towards the desired
condition of society. There is a vein of ‘practicality’ in him which was parodied by his opponents as gas-and-water socialism. He is not inclined to engage in dramatic demonstrations or to promote vague general revolutions. He thinks of his opponents as ill-informed, stupid or insensitive rather than malign, and he is concerned that everyone should enjoy as high a level of civilized life as the resources of society can provide. He may be expected, also, to have some thoughts about why the desired condition of society is desirable, and they will be thoughts mainly concerned with the relatively greater efficiency with which he believes a collectivist society will dispose of its human and material resources. And this indicates his alliance to a tradition far older (and more respectable) than, for example, the tradition of Jacobinism: he is a Baconian socialist, and he is engaged in solving ‘the problem of poverty’. I have said something about this character because Mrs Cole’s real concern in ‘The Story of Fabian Socialism’ is with him rather than with an abstraction. I am not certain whether Mrs Cole approves of him (I suspect, not without qualification), but she respects his reputed achievements and she gives a lively and judicious account of his activities. He has many admirable qualities, but he is not a very good political economist: he is so impressed with the reform he is, for the moment, advocating that some very important items in the total cost of it are apt not to appear in his budget. But Mrs Cole is on more congenial ground when she is dealing with the history of the Fabian Society itself. For, at least in its earlier years, it was a society of individualists, eccentrics, personalities, and she has an eye for concrete character and tells the story of its fortunes with charm and brilliance. Moreover, the reader less interested in the play of character will find in it something to account for the oddity of the generation of this not very endearing type—the Fabian Socialist—from the activities of these remarkably diverse personalities.
Of course, the lineaments of the type were there in the disposition not to get involved in ‘politics’, and not to take the front of the stage but to educate the next generation of actors: in the confidence and the patience. But there was something else: a colour, a humour, a lightness, and a capacity for irresponsibility which was not passed on. The original Webb–Shaw combination was unbeatable; each supplied what the other lacked, and what emerged was the product of a tension. And the same is almost as true of the later Webb–Cole combination. Indeed, it often seems that what held these Fabians together was not the comradeship of a common cause, but the drama of personal friendships. With so much liveliness and candour, it seems ungrateful to quarrel with anything in the manner of Mrs Cole’s story-telling: but there is one thing I wish she had treated differently. On more than one occasion she is disposed to judge the activities of these Fabians by the standards of the type, and when she does so she finds their conduct ‘aberrant’ and is inclined to be a trifle disapproving. This is an unfortunate point of view because it fails to recognize fully that this is, in fact, how they thought, and also obscures the interesting observation that all these so-called ‘aberrances’ were thoroughly in character. Tract 70 (a provocative Shavianesque statement of the Society’s policy) was a masterpiece of self-explanation and not just a naughty jeu d’esprit. No less in keeping was the side-tracking of Shaw’s proposed republican manifesto in 1917 into a discussion on ‘Empire Reconstruction’; the negative attitude to the General Strike; and the lunacy of the Webbs in relation to Russia and of Shaw in respect of Mussolini and Hitler. These were no less the defects of the virtues of those concerned than was the pathetic belief that ‘planning’ in war had been such a huge success that its value in peace was now beyond dispute, or Webb’s view that a recital of ‘facts’ could demonstrate the superior value of a collectivist society.
Two Treatises of Government Review of John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), first published in Historical Journal, 5 (1962), 97–100. The best part of ten years ago Mr Laslett began, in this Journal, to open to us his discoveries about John Locke and his writings; and this edition of the Two Treatises of Government, with its text, its collation which analyses the text and lists the variations from it appearing in earlier texts, its editorial notes, its introduction, its two appendices and its bibliography, collects together his conclusions. His enterprise here is to provide us with a text as near as may be to what Locke (on the evidence) would himself have liked it to be; with a critical history of the composition of the work; with a reading of the text which takes account of this history; and with some interpretation of the doctrine. It is so notable an achievement that it may be assumed to be by this time already in the hands of those interested, and they will have decided for themselves what modification of their understanding of Locke it entails; consequently, I need waste no time merely recommending it. It has many virtues, and even the least of them, namely a generously printed text of the Treatises, will not be despised by any who, like myself, was brought up on the 1884 edition in Morley’s Universal Library. But some account of what is to be found in this volume, and a few observations about the reading of Locke it recommends, may not be out of place. (1) The Text. For a variety of reasons the early history of the text of the volume first published, anonymously, in 1690 under the title Two Treatises of Government was a history of corruption which Locke himself (in spite of some effort but hindered by his secretive disposition and in particular his anxiety to conceal the fact of his authorship) failed to arrest. But after the third printing (1698), the last to appear in his lifetime, he tried to ensure that
posterity should enjoy a text which coincided more nearly to his own thoughts than any his printers had hitherto succeeded in producing. He wrote into a copy of this third printing a thorough correction of its errors and a not inconsiderable amendment of its wording and punctuation; and he caused his amanuensis, Pierre Coste, to make a copy of this corrected and amended text. How soon these corrections and amendments had their effect upon subsequent printings of the work must remain uncertain, although Mr Laslett conjectures that the first text (1713) to be printed after Locke’s death (the first to acknowledge his authorship) reflects them in some measure. What, however, is certain is that the copy of the third printing corrected (it is supposed) in Locke’s own hand was lost within a few years of his death and has never been recovered, but that round about the middle of the century, the copy corrected in the hand of Pierre Coste, came into the possession of Thomas Hollis, who used it to produce the sixth edition of the Treatises (1764) and then deposited it in the library of Christ’s College, Cambridge, where it has remained ever since. Hollis’s much more authentic text was followed (with varying degrees of accuracy) in subsequent printings of the work for the best part of a century when a degenerate text, which went behind Hollis to the corrupt and uncorrected texts of Locke’s lifetime, began once more to be printed, and it is upon this, for the most part, that we have had to depend for nearly a century. In these circumstances, and in order to provide a text as near as is now possible to that which Locke himself would have approved, Mr Laslett has printed that of the Christ’s corrected and amended copy of the third printing (itself rediscovered by chance some fifteen years ago), modified only where the manuscript corrections fail to take up printing faults and where they fail to reproduce other and earlier corrections made by Locke himself in his own copy of the first edition. And further, Mr Laslett has provided a collation which shows where and in what respect the manuscript corrections and additions changed the text into which they were written, and the variants from this copy text displayed
in all editions of the work down to the sixth (1764). Clearly, this has been a most exacting piece of work which has been carried out with admirable care. And if Mr Laslett is himself obliged to recognize that its chief interest lies not in the detail of the alterations it lists (which are often disappointingly unimportant) but in a cumulative effect which displays the manner and direction in which Locke’s thoughts moved, this is no reason to consider the time and care misspent. At all events, this text is greatly superior in completeness and accuracy to anything we have had before, and it is a text whose ground is fully disclosed. For myself, it has been the first opportunity I have had of reading Locke’s not unimportant Preface to the first edition which was so frequently omitted from later printings. (2) With regard to the composition of the Treatises, Mr Laslett has a fascinating story to tell, part of which he revealed in an earlier publication. It is a story which he pieces together with great acumen from a variety of sources and which he has set out lucidly and convincingly in an account which only at one point resorts to guess work. It is, as it should be, told as a coherent story; but for most people its main interest lies in the points at which it diverges from what has hitherto usually been accepted to be the case. From this point of view Mr Laslett arrives at four conclusions, none of which can be said to be unimportant: (i) that the Two Treatises as sent to the printer in 1689 had a pre-history of some ten years during which Locke was cogitating their main themes, and that they were written between 1679 and 1681 (or perhaps 1683) and therefore (in so far as they may be regarded as a livre de circonstance) they should be thought to compose an ‘Exclusion’ tract and not an ex-post defence of the Revolution, but that when what had been written earlier was being prepared for publication in 1689 certain identifiable passages were added relevant to the current situation; (2) that the work was designed as a whole and that what appears as the Second Treatise was written (except for what was added in 1689) before the First; (3) that the whole was designed as refutation of the position of Sir Robert Filmer, and
that Locke did not have Hobbes or Hobbism significantly in mind; (4) that the work as we have it is incomplete, not because Locke had intended to write more and failed to do so, but because what more he had written (which if printed would have doubled the length of the work) had been destroyed on Locke’s direction in 1686–7 while he was abroad and on account of its ‘dangerous’ political opinions. (3) Nobody who accepts these conclusions and to whom they are new can properly deny that they entail some revision of his understanding of Locke’s work. But though it is true thata work believed to be designed asa justification of one revolution must take on a new appearance when we are persuaded that it was designed as a demand for another, this change is less significant than some of the others which Mr Laslett’s conclusions suggest. In spite of the legendary connexion of the Two Treatises of Government with 1689, the work long ago lost its character as defence of any historical situation and acquired a character, not indeed timeless, but less directly connected with a specific incident or a specific moment. Consequently, it may be held that Mr Laslett’s other conclusions about the Treatises are of greater permanent significance: his belief that they compose a single whole and are not two works of which the first is so boring and dated that it has often been left out of modern editions; his belief that the whole is concerned with the position of Filmer and therefore not with Hobbes; his view that its central theme is the structure of the family and its relevance to social and political authority. On these topics Mr Laslett argues with great forcefulness and the direction in which he points, but which he is a little nervous of following to the end, namely, that this cannot properly be understood as a work against Hobbes because there is far too much Hobbism in its own argument, is one that I cannot dissent from. The minor arguments—that in controversy Locke was not accustomed to leave his opponent unnamed and unquoted, and that (if Locke’s reading list is anything to go by) it was some years since he read
Leviathan, if indeed he ever did so—merely buttress a position which when stated unambiguously needs no additional support. (4) Mr Laslett opens what he has to say by way of interpretation of Locke’s Two Treatises by considering the question of the notorious so-called discrepancy between some of the central doctrines of the Essay concerning Human Understanding and those of the Treatises. He answers it in what I take to be a very sensible fashion, admitting the difference but denying the discrepancy. In the Essay Locke may be understood to write as a philosopher; on Government he writes as a man of some political experience, but of no great originality, concerned to persuade his readers of the propriety of certain arrangements and to give them the confidence to make a revolution if the situation could not be resolved without one. If true, I take this to be a not unimportant observation. But Mr Laslett somewhat obscures the position by praising Locke’s attention to policy instead of merely observing it and its entailments for the interpretation of his writing. For what this entails is a view in which the Treatises are understood to be not explanatory in design but prescriptive, and that (for example) we mistake the expression ‘natural law’ if we impose upon it an explanatory character. In short, what we have here is not a work of political philosophy, like Leviathan, but a work of ‘political theory’—the questionable enterprise of recommending a political position in the idiom of general ideas. And yet this is not true without qualification: if Locke was entirely unconcerned with explanation he would have found less to criticize in Filmer and less to appropriate from Hobbes. The truth is that Locke, like many other writers, recognizes no firm distinction between explanation and prescription; he moves, often inadvertently, between these two disparate worlds of discourse, giving a spurious air of principle to his recommendations and a false suggestion of practical applicability to his explanations—exactly the sort of work to make a profound impression upon mankind. Mr Laslett’s interpretation of Locke’s doctrine begins, then, with an identification of the sort of book the Two Treatises is and
therefore with a view of what should and what should not be expected from it and what should and should not be said about it. This is admirable. And although I do not think he would go all the way with what I have just written about the character of the work, he certainly wants us to recognize it as a work which will be misconstrued if it is expected to be a work of philosophical explanation. What more he has to say in detail about the doctrine of the Treatises is often marked by acute observation and is always interesting, but it is marred here and there by exaggeration: he claimsa profundity for Locke which is difficult to substantiate, he is not content to recognize him as a writer as capable of being muddled as any other writer on these subjects, and he is not above asking us to approve Locke’s opinions merely because they have become the accepted commonplaces of a certain political attitude. With so much provided it seems ungrateful to ask for what is not here, but I believe Mr Laslett’s very great talents would have been better employed if the twenty odd pages he gives to his interpretation of Locke’s doctrine had instead been given to exploring a theme which he mentions only to put on one side, namely, the doctrine which eighteenth-century writers (chiefly continental and American) imposed upon Locke’s Two Treatises— the fortunes of Locke rather than the meaning of Locke.
Montesquieu Review of Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), first published in Modern Language Review, 57 (1962), 442–4. During the last ten years or so students of Montesquieu have had at their disposal (besides the earlier critical editions of some individual works) two critical editions of the Oeuvres Complètes. The conditions for a new study of his life and writings are, therefore, more favourable than ever before, and Mr Robert Shackleton has provided such a study on a scale and with the care, judgment and learning which constitute a remarkable achievement. For a long time he has been known as a leading Montesquieu scholar and now he has gathered together and put in order the research and reflexion of many years. The reader will find here, in the first place, a biography, more complete than any other I am acquainted with—a study of the man, his family, education, friends, connexions, movements about the world, activities, temperament and character; secondly, an account of how each of the three major works came to be written, of the manner in which each was composed, of the materials used and of the debt Montesquieu in each case owed to his contemporaries; thirdly, an examination and interpretation of each of these works and an account of their reception and the contribution each made to the literature of its theme; and lastly, a consideration of the minor pieces (published, abortively printed, unpublished or fragmentary) and their place in the Montesquieu canon. Mr Shackleton has brought to his task a comprehensive knowledge of the life and literature of eighteenth-century Europe which he uses not as a frame but as the context of his subject. It is ready knowledge, easily carried and brought to bear aptly and unpretentiously. Within and beyond this Mr Shackleton has been led by Montesquieu himself, and wherever the Président pointed
his biographer has followed and made himself at home: from the château de La Brède to the Parlement and the Academy of Bordeaux, to the salons of Paris and the Académie Française to Italy and to England; from Montesquieu’s published works to his note books, his manuscripts and his library; from his excursions into philosophy, politics, religion, Roman history and law, the early history of France and the theory of historical causation, to the work of his contemporaries and predecessors in these fields. The questions and puzzles (bibliographical and interpretative) which Montesquieu’s writings provoke are answered and unravelled here with a mixture of research and reflexion, of tracing things back to their sources and of argument, a mixture of patience and intelligence, which is always carried to a precise conclusion. Indeed, if there is a fault here, it is the fault of overprecision. Perhaps, for example, the question, Was Montesquieu a Spinozist? is not to be answered quite so simply and inescapably; perhaps, the dilemma between governments ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and governments good and bad of their sorts is not a dilemma which Montesquieu himself felt, or is not to be resolved in quite this way; perhaps, a little more allowance should sometimes be made, even in so careful a writer as Montesquieu, for ends left loose and for cracks papered over. It is to be expected that anyone who undertakes so large an enterprise will be more successful in some parts of it than in others. The biographical thread which runs through the book is managed with the greatest skill and sympathy; the information Mr Shackleton provides about Montesquieu’s friends, colleagues and acquaintances is always apt; the study of his library and his Belesenheit is most enlightening and its importance is not exaggerated; the accounts of the manner in which the major works (especially the Esprit des Lois) came into being, of Montesquieu’s method of composition and habits of work, are excellently done; what is said about Montesquieu as an historian and of his place in eighteenth-century historiography, is admirable; and there is often an exciting and conclusive neatness in Mr Shackleton’s
narrative when he succeeds in tracing one of Montesquieu’s ideas to its exact source in some other writer, when he pauses to notice an extension of meaning which Montesquieu has given to a word, or when he is contrasting Montesquieu’s use of an expression (like ‘natural law’) with that of others. All this is what Mr Shackleton is supremely good at: well-considered attention to historical and verbal detail which never degenerates into niggling or loses sight of its larger purpose. If one expresses oneself sometimes less satisfied and, less enlightened, when Mr Shackleton turns to the analysis of philosophical ideas, it must be understood that this is not because he is neglectful in this respect or fails to make up his mind and give an answer to the questions which he sees call for an answer, but because here one becomes aware of questions being passed over. Two points may be mentioned. First, I am not sure that Montesquieu’s debt to Aristotle is as fully recognized as it should be. It is too abrupt a view of Aristotle’s classification of régimes to say that it depended solely upon the number of persons who wield political power; his distinction, for example, between ‘kingship’ and ‘tyranny’ was in terms not of the number of rulers but the manner of ruling, the one by law and the other without law, and in this respect it corresponds very closely to Montesquieu’s distinction between Monarchy and Despotism. Further, although Mr Shackleton notices the distinction Montesquieu makes between governments in terms of moderation, he does not recognize this as a piece of Aristotelianism. And again, one is left without guidance in trying to answer the question, particularly important at that moment in the history of European political thought, Where does Montesquieu stand on the question of political authority in distinction from political power? Secondly, surely it is a great understatement to say that for Montesquieu ‘monarchy’ has ‘a degree of actuality greater than any other form of government’. Is it not pretty clear that both Despotism and Republican government are, for him, pre-eminently ‘ideal types’ of government? And if one takes this as one’s starting-
point one is provoked to consider whether Montesquieu was not concerned with them solely in order to elucidate the nature and propensities of what he understood to be the only genuine form of government in modern Europe, namely, monarchy. At all events, there is enough suggestion of it in Montesquieu to make it worth while considering the view that, for him, Despotism and Republicanism are two ‘ideal’ extremes, both (though in different ways) characterized by lawlessness, which, standing on either side of monarchy, represent no more than the two directions in which monarchy has a propensity to collapse.
Political Laws and Captive Audiences ‘Political Laws and Captive Audiences’, first published in George Robert Urban (ed.), Talking to Eastern Europe. A collection of the best reading from the broadcasts and background papers of Radio Free Europe (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), 291–301, first broadcast on Radio Free Europe, December 1963. Thinking and talking about politics are activities which are concerned with things that have to be done, and things which have to be done in situations which are recognized as political situations; that is to say, thinking and talking about politics, as I understand it, are practical activities. They occur on certain occasions. Four of the possible and most usual occasions for them to occur are, (i) when a response to a political situation has to be devised, (ii) when a proposed response has to be recommended to someone else as being an appropriate one, (iii) when a proposed response is criticized as being inappropriate, and (iv) when what has already been done is being defended as having been well done or criticized as having been ill done. The situations concerned may be very narrow indeed or very wide. The narrowest simply require a specific and immediate response. The wider ones we normally talk of as requiring a thought-out policy over a number of years. The discovery of long-range missiles in Cuba or the Yalta agreement were political situations of the narrower sort. The eastern question in the late nineteenth century, a proposal to collectivize agriculture in Russia, a disastrous slump or a runaway inflation are situations of larger dimensions. All these are examples of what may be called political situations, in the sense that they are situations, which appear as questions and demand that something should be done about them.
Thought and utterance about them appear in public speech, in the advice that a vizier might give to his master, in the observations that an ambassador might make to a foreign secretary, in an extended study of a large situation such as might appear in a State Paper or a memorandum. Or such utterances may be much more extended studies of even larger situations, like Karl Marx’s Manifesto of the communist party. And, in the extreme case, I think they may be in the character of a sketch of an ideal society, such as appeared in Campanella’s City of the Sun, or Bacon’s New Atlantis. Political thought, then, is deliberation to devise a policy, to determine action, to consider how a proposed policy or action may be recommended, or to consider how a policy might be defended or criticized. This distinguishes political utterance, whether it is talk or writing, as argument designed to persuade—to persuade to action or to dissuade from action. Pericles tried to persuade the Athenian Assembly. A vizier tries to persuade or dissuade his master from some course of action. An ambassador tries to persuade a foreign government to which he is accredited not to do or to do something. An adviser tries to persuade a ruler about what policy shall be pursued. And Karl Marx tries to persuade his audience that his diagnosis of the total, contemporary situation is a correct one. Even the author of a ‘utopia’ tries to persuade us that his vision of a new society is one that we should accept and work for. Persuasion, then, is the purpose of political argument: persuasion to act, or persuasion that what has been done has been correctly or appropriately done. Utterance which is designed to persuade is a peculiar sort of utterance or argument, because it is governed by the nature of the audience even more than by the nature of the theme. The first requirement of a political argument is that it shall be capable of persuading the audience it is addressed to. In this respect a political argument or discourse is utterly unlike the proof of a
theorem in geometry. The constructor of a geometrical proof is not required to consider his audience at all. He does not have one proof for one audience and another for another audience. He is not, in fact, trying to persuade anybody of anything; he is trying to prove something. He is not trying to persuade anybody of anything in the same sense as Pericles tried to persuade the Athenian Assembly to oppose Sparta; or Pitt or Fox tried to persuade the British House of Commons to take a certain attitude towards Napoleon; or in the same sense as a candidate at an election is trying to persuade people of something or other; or even in the same way as Marx tried to persuade us that the end of capitalism is at hand. This feature of political argument (that is to say, argument which is designed to persuade and therefore designed with a view to a particular audience) has led to two general criticisms of it— the second of them very much more radical than the first. In the first criticism, it is accepted that a man who recommends a policy genuinely believes that his proposal is superior to any other alternative proposal for dealing with a particular situation. And it is agreed or accepted that he has reached this conclusion by reflecting about the situation itself. But when he comes to argue his proposal, he has to consider how he can make it convincing to a particular audience. It is probable, and in many cases unavoidable, that his argument and his real reasons for selecting this policy part company. For his argument, it will be much more important that he enlists the prejudices and the sentiments of his audience, than that he should disclose his real reasons for following this policy— the considerations which have convinced him. Thus, all political argument, because its purpose is to persuade, may become suspect. This suspicion does not attach itself merely to the words of a demagogue, though this is the most obvious case of a person who may have very good reasons for pursuing a policy, but never divulges them because all he is thinking of is, ‘How can I get support from other people who may not be convinced by my reasons?’ The suspicion may also attach itself to the words of any
man who undertakes to persuade any other man. A vizier, who really believes that certain proposals are those which ought to be followed, may have to play upon the prejudices of his master in order to get the authority to follow them; and, if you remember, the Platonic guardians, in order to persuade their inferiors, were advised to recount a persuasive story or a myth because their real reasons would not be intelligible to their audience. Political argument is, then, governed by its design to induce agreement or concurrence. Its master is the audience and not the theme. It is argument designed to enlist support and it can only do this by appealing to the beliefs of the audience and not simply by revealing the beliefs of the speaker. In short, as argument, it is a counterfeit activity. It is only genuine if you regard it as simply a device to persuade. That is the first criticism and it was made, of course, long, long ago. This is, so to speak, the unrespectable side of political talk. However, there is a very much more radical criticism of political discourse. It is said, that the falsity of the argument may infect the proposals themselves. Politics itself, and not merely talking about it, is unprotected against the liability to degenerate into the art of persuasion. That is to say, it is liable to cease altogether to be the art of making appropriate responses to emergent political situations and to become the art of persuasion. This was Plato’s criticism of the political education offered by Callicles and his fellows. This education, he said, was designed not to teach politicians how to respond to political situations, but merely to teach them how to enlist support for proposals. These proposals themselves were counterfeit, because they were chosen simply in order to enlist support. Political activity was making proposals in order to get power, not in order to deal with situations. Winning and retaining power is the whole point, not only of political talk (which is plausible because you want to persuade people to agree with you), but even of political deliberation and of political action.
This second criticism, of course, is radical. If you recognized that this might be true—that argument in politics is simply argument designed, not to persuade and induce concurrence with a proposal to respond to a situation in a particular manner, but to acquire power—the whole thing becomes intellectually a counterfeit activity, or at best it has no real defences against becoming so. Compared with this defect, all the other defects which might be recognized in politics (such as its imprecision, its uncertainty and so on) are of very small account. Let me give you an example of how this would appear. Let us consider a politician, in England, for instance, considering whether he will, in fact, make the proposal that there shall be a comprehensive national health service. In the first case, we agree that this man promotes a proposal for a national health service because he really believes that this will bring fundamental benefits to the whole society. He is then faced with the problem of how to persuade people to join him in this belief. It is a sincere belief, but he may doubt whether anybody else really believes this as much as, or for the same reasons as, he does. So, he has to think of some other reasons that he can put forward to suggest to these people why they should support him in this proposal. One of the most obvious may be to say: ‘This is free.’ And he might say this to an audience whom he believes will be impressed by something that is free. That is to say, the arguments he may use may be quite remote from the actual proposal which, in his case, is a perfectly sincere one. But, in the second situation the proposal for a health service is made solely because it is judged to be a proposal on which the proposer can ride to power. That is to say, the proposal itself does not matter at all, it is merely a means of acquiring power. Now, this is obviously something that can happen and has happened a million times. No politics is completely protected against this being the case. And, in these circumstances, it is not at all surprising that people have tried to devise manners of thinking
and talking about political situations which are not infected with what may be called this ‘disease’. The earliest attempt was a strange sort of enterprise of modelling political deliberation (that is, thinking about political situations) and political talk (trying to persuade other people to agree with you) upon geometrical proof. The geometrician is not corrupted by having to convince people by arguments which perhaps do not convince himself—arguments which are not his real arguments. His arguments are governed solely by the considerations which spring from the theorem he has to demonstrate. Why should not deliberation about political situations be as immune from corruption as the demonstration of geometrical theorems? Why should it not have the cold severity and probity of a geometrical demonstration? This model of geometrical proof offered itself and axioms were sought in terms of which political argument might appear to have the character of proof; argument not distracted by the purpose of having to persuade anyone, but designed to prove the ‘correctness’ of what was being proposed, as a response to a situation. These axioms were either absolute moral values, or natural or human rights, or a natural law—something that could be regarded as axiomatic and from which you could argue. To cut a very long story short, this attempt to transform political argument from persuasive argument into proof or demonstration can, I think, be said to have failed altogether. That is to say, it was found to be incapable in fact of addressing itself to any actual circumstance. However, the important thing is that its failure left behind a most important legacy. What it left behind was a new rhetorical or persuasive device. Having failed to emancipate political argument from its design of having to persuade somebody, it offered a new manner in which persuasion might be achieved—persuasion by purporting to prove. What is important is that this rhetorical device, like other rhetorical devices, may be expected to have an effect when
there is an audience which is likely to be influenced by it or to recognize it, namely, an audience whose prejudices are enlisted by an argument which purports to prove something; an audience which has a certain sort of education and which really does believe that you could prove the political proposal you are making is the ‘correct’ one. This audience could be of two different sorts, and two different sorts of audience like this have existed. What is required is an audience which believes that political proposals can be proved to be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ in the same sort of way as a geometrical theorem can be proved to be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’; or an audience of ‘liberals’ which cannot bear to think that this is not possible. During the last two or three centuries audiences of this sort have not been difficult to come by and therefore we have many examples of political discourse in this character. At all events, the notable outcome for European politics of this very laudable and intelligible attempt to emancipate politics and political argument from this servitude to mere persuasion is not the recognition that the attempt has either succeeded or been frustrated, but the acquisition of a new rhetorical device and an audience that is susceptible to it. The failure of this geometrical model to emancipate politics and political argument from its servitude to persuasion did not end the matter. It cannot be said to have failed completely, because there are some people who believe in it; but on the whole something else has become much more important. This enterprise was pursued in terms of another model, namely, that of what was reputed to be ‘scientific’, as distinct from geometrical, argument. Here, the project was to deliberate and to argue about the responses to be made to political situations in terms of ‘laws’ of human behaviour or ‘laws’ of social change or development. Briefly, it was believed that such ‘laws’, when they had been ascertained—and, of course, had been ascertained by an entirely respectable, wissenschaftlich, activity of inquiry—would provide the information necessary for making ‘correct’ responses to
emergent situations in the world of political activity. This was the enterprise—the perfectly sincere and genuine enterprise—of Karl Marx and his associates, among many others. It was, in fact, a fresh and genuine attempt to rescue politics from its scandalous servitude to mere persuasion and the corruption which is always liable to go along with such servitude. I cannot here (and I do not propose to try to) go over the arguments which convince me at least that this enterprise of Karl Marx’s, and that of anybody who engages in a similar sort of enterprise (many people have, of course), must meet with unavoidable frustration; the manner in which these ‘laws’ of social change may be shown to be no ‘laws’ at all, or, alternatively, the manner in which it may be shown that even if they were ‘laws’ with the explanatory force which attaches to scientific ‘laws’, they would nevertheless fail to provide us with the sort of information we would require in order to make ‘correct’ proposals about emergent political situations. The point I want to make is that this frustration is not the end of the matter. If political deliberation and argument which depends upon these alleged ‘laws’ of social change is in fact incapable of generating ‘correct’ decisions, because these ‘laws’ are no ‘laws’, and is incapable of proving the ‘correctness’ of these decisions, this is not the end of the matter. Having failed to emancipate political discourse from its character as persuasion, it nevertheless offers a new manner in which persuasion may be effected, namely, persuasion by purporting to prove by reference to ‘laws’ of social change. Karl Marx wished to persuade us that political activity should, in current circumstances, be directed to the achievement of an end which he considered to be the pre-eminently desirable end: his method of persuasion was to represent this end as an injunction derived from inescapable ‘laws’ of human behaviour and social change. Stalin wished to persuade his subjects that the policy that he was pursuing in respect of the collectivization of agriculture was the ‘correct’ policy, and that all the consequences of it were not only those which were to be expected, but those which must have
ensued, and that they were also ‘correct’: he did so by showing that the policy is prescribed by inescapable ‘laws’ which govern human circumstance. The word ‘correct’, with its implication that there is something which may be proved or demonstrated, when it lost its categorical meaning, survived as a rhetorical device. It is the rhetorical device of the politics of a large part of the human race at the present time. Now, this device may have the desired persuasive effect if there is an audience which already believes that there are such ‘laws’, that the particular ‘laws’ referred to are true, and that the particular ‘laws’ referred to in fact prescribe specific policies and actions. However inappropriate these policies may seem to be, and however unpleasant their consequences, such an audience will always be reassured about them and may be persuaded to acquiesce in them, not by the sort of vague liberal nonsense of ‘a good time coming’, or by being persuaded that ‘in order to make omelettes you have to break eggs’, but by being referred to an inescapable ‘law’ which has dictated these policies and their consequences—as Stalin in fact referred them in his paper called Dialectical and Historical Materialism, which was a precise defence of a piece of policy. The immense power and control which has been acquired by a government such as the government of Russia rests, not upon the truth of these alleged ‘laws’ of social change, but upon its subjects’ belief that they are true and effective. For, beside all else, this belief has the advantage of relieving the ruler, the adviser of a ruler or whoever it may be, of any responsibility for his actions or recommendations. Policy, for an audience of this sort, may be represented as having been prescribed by a law of social change and not by a person. The person who transmits the prescription has no responsibility for it or its consequences. Indeed, to appear to demonstrate the unavoidableness of what you have done or what you wish to do, is a rhetorical device second to none for generating power. It has often proved itself to be powerful when the only evidence for the inevitability is simply
prophetic utterance. However, where the evidence is a ‘law’ of human circumstance or social change, it is unbeatable if your audience really believes that such ‘laws’ exist, that the ‘laws’ that you tell them about are true ‘laws’ and that they have dictated this policy. The more rigid and compact this system of ‘laws’ is, the more powerfully it can operate as a persuasive device. And the fact of the matter is that, since the eighteenth century, audiences have emerged, first of all in Europe, ready to accept this kind of argument. Marx’s chief claim to fame is his part in manufacturing world-wide audiences susceptible to this particular rhetoric. We do not need, then, to pre-judge the question of whether, in fact, these ‘laws’ are true or whether they can be discovered. The point is that, even if they are not available, this rhetoric is likely to be decisive if you have an audience which believes in them, or which cannot bear not to believe in them. As an idiom of political discourse, this kind of alleged demonstrative argument (though of course it lacks the ‘elegance’ of the Platonic idiom) is intelligible, in spite of its demonstrative powers being entirely illusory, as I, at any rate, believe them to be. And, of course, it need not be disingenuous; that is to say, the declarer of these ‘laws’ of social change may believe them as fully as his audience. There is a lot of evidence that in many cases this is so. However, there is another question to ask. What we are considering here is not only a way of talking about political decisions which may be used to persuade certain audiences to accept these decisions. This is also a way of thinking about or deliberating what decisions shall be made. If we assume, and I think we must, that the information contained in these so-called ‘laws’ of social change is in fact misinformation, or at any rate that it does not give the sort of guidance which it is said to give; if we assume that it gives what Marx would have called a ‘false consciousness’ of the world— it would seem that anyone who deliberated about political situations in these terms would, sooner or later, find himself
pursuing policies which were bound to be defeated. If you believe in a ‘law’ of social change which in fact is untrue, and if you base your policies on your belief in that ‘law’, it may be supposed that some time or other you will be brought up short, not simply as a political talker (because then all you would require would be similar beliefs in your audience), but as a political actor, by the lack of a world in which these beliefs operate. If your policies are all chosen because they are required by what you believe to be an inescapable ‘law’ of social change, and if this ‘law’ in fact is no law, but a mere piece of superstition, what may be expected to happen? I think one of three things. First, this kind of political deliberation is capable of itself generating a closed real-imaginary world of political situations corresponding to itself. So long as this world of real-imaginary political situations is completely insulated from the world outside (which of course it cannot control) there is no reason why it should not continue for a very long time undisturbed. This deliberation will certainly ‘work’ because it creates the situations it seeks a response to and creates no situations which cannot be responded to according to the believed-in ‘laws’ of social change. This, I think, was the condition of Russia for quite a long time during the regime of Stalin. If, however, the insulation breaks down, then everything is liable to disintegrate. Secondly, nobody supposes that these pretended ‘laws’ will yield injunctions automatically. Thus, there is no room for choice of policy, but there is room for argument about what these ‘laws’ of social change require to be done. But if there is room for argument, there is room for fallacious argument; and it is well known that true conclusions may emerge from false premises. Thus, decisions which sprang from this kind of deliberation might never suffer from the fact that their premises were false, so long as the deliberation was sufficiently incompetent. Appropriate decisions might always be made, but always for the wrong reasons. The Marxist axiom of the primacy of matter and the ‘laws’ of social change it is alleged to reveal, though they are without a shred of
validity, might not mislead a politician if he made, so to speak, the compensating mistakes in his deductions about what he should do. Thirdly, when political deliberation in these terms seems to point to decisions which, on other grounds (if you can imagine a person thinking that there were other grounds and I think you must always imagine that this is possible) seem to him to be likely to be disastrous, what can we expect then? We can expect that the terms themselves will be subjected to what is called ‘revision’; ‘revision’, here, being the adjustment of the reputed ‘laws’ of social change so that they appear to yield injunctions which it is believed, on other grounds, will be more appropriate to the situation. And since these ‘laws’ are, in fact, no ‘laws’ at all and are therefore likely to reveal their emptiness, this sort of revisionism may be expected to appear whenever the belief that there must be ‘laws’ of this kind remains unshaken. There is, however, a fourth situation, when deliberation in these terms seems to point to no decision in particular, as of course it very well may; or to none which may be even plausibly pressed into the form of an injunction derived from a general ‘law’, and nevertheless (as in politics always happens) a decision has to be made today or tomorrow. In these circumstances, we may expect that this whole idiom of deliberation about what shall be done will be discarded in favour of deliberation which makes no pretence whatever at reaching decisions which are ‘correct’. Lenin, for example, undoubtedly believed that there were inescapable ‘laws’ of social change and he undoubtedly believed that they should provide injunctions about what to do in all important political situations. But, even the most tortuous argument could not make these ‘laws’ of social change support a policy which, on a momentous occasion in the revolution, he believed to be essential if the revolution were to maintain its impetus: namely, his assumption of absolute personal authority. Nevertheless, the current vocabulary of communist politics did provide him with the materials from which he could construct
a formula which seemed to meet the situation: ‘All power to the Soviets’. He did not mean it—what he meant, of course, was, ‘I am assuming personal authority’. But, by saying ‘All power to the Soviets’, he constructed a formula which would be understood by his audience. This formula, of course, he could not derive from any of the more general ‘laws’ of social change he believed in; they had left him flat at that moment. In short, he construed this situation (as he did many other situations, because he was a very good politician) in exactly the same way as Pericles or Machiavelli would have construed it, and made a rhetorical gesture towards ‘laws’ of social change. A politician, then—if he can be found, and there are some— wedded to an idiom of political deliberation and discourse which, if he keeps to the letter of it, is either silent or misleading on important occasions, has always other resources and he may be expected to use them. So long as he has a captive audience which believes in these ‘laws’ of social change, he will have at his disposal an almost infallible rhetoric in terms of which he can recommend and defend his decisions. But if this audience begins to be sceptical, or if the ‘laws’ of social change seem to be an inadequate or misleading guide on certain important occasions, then what is interesting to observe are the occasions when such a politician amends the book, revises the laws or adds to the vocabulary, when he improves a little on what he has read there, and the great occasions when he shuts the book.
The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy First published as the ‘Introduction’ to Reginald Bassett, Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy, 2nd edn (London: Frank Cass, 1964), pp. xxi–xxiv. The author of this book was a man of some remarkable qualities. Born at the turn of the century, politics was in his blood, and he owed his first political education to his mother with whom, as a boy, he used to attend political meetings. He acquired strong political beliefs which led him to join the I.L.P. at an early age. But to his partisan persuasions was added the temperament of a scholar; and on leaving school and entering a solicitor’s office (where business was not very brisk) he set about educating himself in earnest. A scholarship at the age of twenty-five took him first to Ruskin College and then to New College, Oxford; and for fifteen years he was a lecturer under the Extra-Mural Delegacy of the University of Oxford, working mainly in his native Sussex. When, in 1945, under the inspiration of the late Professor Tawney and Mr Evan Durbin, the London School of Economics started a course for students drawn from the Trade Unions, Bassett was made Tutor. Academic life suited his disposition; he soon made his mark as a teacher and in 1961 he was appointed to a Professorship in the University of London. His great intellectual passion was for the political history of his times, to the study of which he brought a powerful memory for events, persons and occasions, an acute political sensibility, a profound knowledge of the history and conduct of parliamentary government in Great Britain and a care for detail. For him, political history was composed, neither of the sweeping movements beloved of the ‘intellectual’, nor of the fortunes of ‘systems’ of government, but of the footprints left by those who engaged in
political activity, each a moment of significance to be recognised, reflected upon and interpreted in its context. Circumstances had something to do with the slackening of his partisan activities (in 1931 he was a MacDonaldite and ceased to be a member of a political party); but it was characteristic of him that the only cause which held his unwavering allegiance was that of Parliamentary democracy, which he understood to be a noble and historic manner of conducting politics, reaching decisions and digesting the differences characteristic of a modern European society. In other circumstances, Bassett might have written a remarkable history of the politics of his own time. In talk he could unfold the political realities—in Westminster and in the countryside—of the last sixty years in fascinating detail. But as it was, he engaged himself in a different project. The ambition never to appear to have deserted one’s principles, the desire to discredit one’s opponents, and the normal course of human forgetfulness, have imposed, during the last four decades, a remarkable stock of legends upon some of the passages in our politics, and Bassett undertook to put the record straight in respect of some of the more notable of them. Democracy and Foreign Policy (1952) was a study of what had been thought and said during the Sino-Japanese Affair, 1931–33, and in Nineteen ThirtyOne: Political Crisis (1958) he sought to disentangle historical truth from the various partisan legends. These were controversial works; but the motive which inspired them was his attachment to what he understood British parliamentary democracy to be. The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy, here reprinted, was his first book. It has for some years been out of print and (with some reluctance) he was, at the time of his death, engaged in revising it. His intention was to add an epilogue in which the later fortunes of parliamentary government in Great Britain were to be considered, and to bring it up-to-date in other respects. But, since he never completed this work to his own satisfaction, it has been
decided to reprint the book with only some minor alterations, chiefly in the foot-notes. The book was written in the summer of 1934, and it bears the marks of its time. From some points of view, Bassett himself was content to regard it as something of a period-piece with a certain historical interest for students of British politics. But, without claiming for it more than it can sustain, it may be recognised to have qualities of a less ephemeral kind. There are books (of varying quality) which purport to give an account of the working of the institutions and arrangements which comprise what is called the British Constitution. With these, this book does not compete. It should be read as an essay on British parliamentary government; its mood is interpretive. The truth is that Bassett was a Whig and he had the Whig’s pious attachment to our institutions of government. He did not, indeed, believe that the British Constitution had descended from heaven, nor did he believe it to have the symmetry of perfection; but he did believe it to afford a method of dealing with differences which had emerged in the contingencies of human choices, which was both tough and responsive to change, and which possessed preeminent practical virtues. And what he was concerned to do was to interpret its character, recognising its not negligible defects as anomalous survivals rather than as divergencies from an ideal model. Part I, concerned with British parliamentary government as an organisation of beliefs and practices, is as durable a piece of writing as its subject can support. But Part II, which deals with a specific passage in British political history in the early ’thirties, may be thought to be of less permanent interest. This, however, is not the case. Bassett read in this passage a threat to British parliamentary government. In considering it he was obliged to notice opinions (many of them of passing interest) which were being aired at the time, and as a commentary upon a contemporary political situation it is admirably judicious. But he was not so much concerned to defend British parliamentary
government against attack, as to understand it and to consider the resources which this manner of government could dispose in its own defence. And in identifying this attack upon parliamentary government as what is apt to appear (and has frequently appeared in our earlier political history) whenever attachment to a hope, an enterprise or a policy is deeper than attachment to the manner of governing and being governed which parliamentary democracy has come to signify, he discovered a matter of permanent interest in what might otherwise be regarded as an ephemeral occasion. In short, this is the book of a man by no means without partisan engagements, but whose deepest conviction was that politics is not a matter of imposing what one believes to be desirable, or even just, but of doing this in a manner which does not outrage those who hold different opinions. And he understood what is called British parliamentary democracy, not as an approximation to some ideally ‘democratic’ system of government, but as an instrument of remarkable refinement and responsiveness, thrown up in the course of our political history, capable of digesting the enterprises of zealots.
Rationalism in Politics: A Reply to Professor Raphael Oakeshott’s response to D.D. Raphael, ‘Professor Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics’, Political Studies, 12 (1964), 202–15, was first published in Political Studies, 13 (1965), 89–92. The editor added the following note: ‘This text was received as a letter but appears as a Note since the journal does not normally publish correspondence’. In his review, Professor Raphael has taken great pains in sorting out some of the inconsistencies he finds in my book; his syllabus of infelicities is impressive. But he will forgive me if I do not argue with him about them, and also if I pass by such grotesque misrepresentations as that I confuse questions of historical cause (sic) with questions of logical ground, that I ‘do not seem to think of any close connexion between the political and the moral’, that I have ‘an extravagant distaste for normative reflection’ etc. etc., in order to take up two important and related themes: philosophical explanation and practical recommendation, and the logic of practical discourse. (1) The view I ventured to suggest was that explaining conduct (whether philosophically, historically, psychologically etc.) is a different activity from recommending that a certain action should be performed or from approving or disapproving of an action which has been performed. This, of course, does not mean that reasoning is foreign to practical discourse; it means only that the reasoning will be of a different sort from explanatory reasoning— it will be of the sort appropriate, for example, to diagnosis, prescription and justification, none of which is itself explanatory and all of which are directly connected with practical activity. As a refinement, I think, also, that the logic of an argument designed to recommend an action is significantly different from that of an argument designed to justify an action. And further, I have
suggested that reasoning is an open-ended activity and therefore argument concerned with practical activity cannot be prevented from extending itself into explanation, but that, first, there will come a point when it ceases to be relevant to practical activity, and, secondly, the process cannot be reversed—we cannot descend from explanation to practical argument in the same manner as we may ascend from practical argument to explanation. I did not think these to be particularly eccentric views; indeed, I supposed that only a Platonist or a pragmatist (from their different standpoints) would be likely to find them unacceptable. Professor Raphael, however, won’t have it—at least he won’t have it in respect of philosophical explanation. I do not think he wishes us to recognize no distinction between philosophical explanation and practical advice (e.g., between a philosophical analysis of the concept of obligation and the advice that you ought to speak now or for ever hold your peace), but he seems to be sure that, at least on some occasions, there is something he calls a ‘practical as well as explanatory activity’, a philosophical explanation which is itself a recommendation about conduct or from which such a recommendation necessarily follows. He gives two reasons why we should agree with him about this: (1) because most philosophers of the first rank ‘had a practical as well as a theoretical [? explanatory] aim’; and (2) because to recommend an explanation of conduct is surely to make a recommendation about what should be thought, and to recommend a man to think in a certain way is surely to recommend him to behave in a certain way. The first of these propositions is plausible, although I doubt whether it would be easy to find in the works of these writers many examples of recommendation about what should be done in any actual situation (which is what Professor Raphael and I mean by practical discourse). But it goes no distance at all towards establishing an activity which is at once explanatory and injunctive, and certainly it does not show that such an activity is capable of reaching valid conclusions. To assert that Aquinas
(or any one else) is to be found writing in both the explanatory and the injunctive mood does not suggest to me either that he has ‘misjudged his task’, or that there is something properly to be described as an explanatory-cum-practical activity; it merely suggests that, like most of us, he was both a philosopher (sophos) and a preacher (phronimos). That Professor Raphael should find this an admirable tradition, does not disturb me. What I find disconcerting is that he should think evidence of this sort has any relevance to the question and that he has not considered it worthwhile to pursue the argument to some deeper level. Professor Raphael’s second proposition is merely equivocal: of course, a writer who offers us an explanation ‘recommends’ it to us—but he ‘recommends’ it to us as an explanation. If Professor Raphael wishes us to think that this necessarily carries with it injunctions about how to behave in (?hypothetical) situations, or that it is impossible to reach a decision about what to do and to recommend (or defend) it in argument without calling upon a philosophical explanation of conduct, he must, I think, lay some other considerations than these before us. (2) Professor Raphael agrees that practical discourse (of which political discourse is an example) is concerned mainly with reflecting upon proposals about what to do and with recommending or justifying them in argument. And he appears to believe that it ‘cannot even begin’ unless we have ‘principles’ which tell us what we should do. Rational practical discourse he thinks is always the reference of a proposal to do something to a ‘principle’ or set of ‘principles’ which are of such a character that they deliver to us an unequivocal injunction. He calls this ‘normative reflection’—the reference of an act or a proposal to a norm designed to reach a demonstrative conclusion. And he believes (incorrectly) that he has found two examples of this discourse in the writings of Gunnar Myrdal and Lord Devlin. Some part of my book was devoted to arguing this to be a misdescription of practical discourse, and although I found several different ways of elucidating this view, I evidently failed
to convince him that there was any sense in what I wrote. Let me, briefly, try again. It must be brief, neglecting many complications; and without making them responsible for my views, I am not ashamed to say that I have learnt most of it from Aristotle, Hegel, and Dilthey. In reflecting upon a response to a practical situation, or in justifying a response proposed or made, what we bring with us is a variety of beliefs—approvals and disapprovals, preferences and aversions, pro- and con-feelings (often vague), moral and prudential maxims of varying application and importance, hopes, fears, anxieties, skill in estimating the probable consequence of actions, and some general beliefs about the world. These beliefs, in so far as they are normative, are not self-consistent; they often pull in different directions, they compete with one another and cannot all be satisfied at the same time, and therefore they cannot properly be thought of as a norm or as a self-consistent set of norms or ‘principles’ capable of delivering to us an unequivocal message about what we should do. (We believe, for example, that the administration of justice should be speedy, careful, inexpensive, public, as little onerous as may be upon those absolved from offence, capable of reaching a definite conclusion etc., etc.) Even to think of them as a ‘creed’ gives them a character they have not got. Aristotle called them the ‘admitted goods’ and recognized them to be incommensurable. I called them a ‘tradition’, meaning to indicate that these beliefs were not a selfconsistent set of ‘principles’, that although they might be expected to be relatively stable they were not incapable of change, that they were not axioms but maxims which we believed ourselves to have learnt from experience, and that they did not all appear before us in the form of propositions but often in institutions and practices. Practical discourse is the process in which (among other things) we elicit from this ‘tradition’ decisions about what to do and justifications of acts or proposals to act. To the ‘rationalist’, who insists upon getting a straight answer, this multi-voiced creature seems to be a most unreliable oracle.
How can conduct be assimilated to a norm while there remains a variety of often circumstantially conflicting norms all demanding to be taken into the account? And, in order to get his straight answer, he proceeds, by a process of selection, abridgement and abstraction and guided by his own prejudices, to construct a permanent, stable, universal, self-consistent ‘creed’ or set of ‘principles’ out of this somewhat miscellaneous material. This makes him feel more comfortable, and it induces the illusion that having acquired a self-confident guide he will never be led astray. And he tells us that unless we get ourselves into this situation we shall be incapable of making (or giving any rational justification of) any practical decisions whatever. Shall we? Now, it is true that we cannot expect a straight answer from our somewhat miscellaneous beliefs, preferences, approvals, disapprovals, etc. They do not provide a single, unambiguous norm. Perhaps, then, it is not too fanciful to say that what we receive from our ‘tradition’ is a number of ‘intimations’. Certainly, what we receive does not point in a single direction: there are many messages, but no categorical injunction. Indeed, what we received may be described as a number of aids to reflection to be used in deciding upon and in justifying our responses to practical situations. Our task is never that of judging conduct or a proposal by referring it to a unique and undeniable norm; it is always that of determining the relative importance, in the given circumstances, of the numerous, competing normative and prudential considerations which compose our ‘tradition’. What is sought is a decision which promises the most acceptable balance in the circumstances between competing goods; and what we expect in justification of a choice is argument to persuade us that what was sought has been achieved. The connexion between this and the belief that whatever is, is right, I must leave Professor Raphael to elucidate. Professor Raphael’s question is: How do we choose between the various messages we receive? And he seems to be inclined to
answer: We can make no such choice unless we have a Norm by which to judge our conflicting norms. The desiderata in respect of this Norm are that it must not itself be one of a number of competing norms, and that it must be capable of judging between genuine competitors—that is, goods which on account of their incommensurability cannot be reduced to different amounts of one Good. Let us seek such a Norm; let us go at once to the plausible highest in politics: salus populi. But with salus populi we are back again where we started; it is not a Norm to judge all lesser norms, it is nothing more than the alleged most acceptable balance between our competing admitted goods which the circumstances will allow us to achieve. Nevertheless, Professor Raphael thinks he has found two examples of writers who have been successful in the enterprise which he says must be our enterprise. Gunnar Myrdal, we are told, has explored the intimations of American political tradition; and doubtless he has found the usual miscellany of competing beliefs. But he is represented as a man who, because he has ‘principles’, is able to tell us which of these many voices Americans should follow. These ‘principles’ he has put together into what he calls ‘the American creed’. And setting the conduct of Americans in a certain connexion against this creed he observes a discrepancy. He thinks that Americans should live up to their ‘creed’. So far there is nothing remarkable in this, except perhaps the suggestion that beliefs are to be found in propositions and conduct is something else. He has a norm, he judges by it, and we are not surprised when Professor Raphael sends him to the top of the class. But if Myrdal is to be drawn into Professor Raphael’s argument, what has to be elucidated is not how Myrdal uses this standard (‘the American creed’) to criticize American conduct, but how this standard itself has been composed, because the cogency of his criticism depends upon the character of the standard. And if, as it appears, ‘the American creed’ is a coherent set of ‘principles’ which Myrdal has constructed, in a process of abridgement and
generalization, out of all the competing beliefs current in America (otherwise, why call it ‘the American creed’), does he not require, according to Professor Raphael, some Norm by means of which to choose what shall go into ‘the American creed’ and what shall be rejected—that is, a Norm to distinguish the good and the bad among the intimations of American political tradition? But the unprofitableness of this way of thinking is revealed (for me, at least) by noting that any Norm which might serve this purpose (e.g., personal approval, or what most enlightened Americans believe, or the HCF of American belief, or what a good liberal is apt to believe) would itself require justification in terms of another and higher Norm. What Norm or Standard, or Principle, I wonder, determined the rejection of the Arian doctrine of the Person of Christ from the orthodox Christian creed? I was long ago taught that simple talk about criteria will not get us very far in these matters. Practical reasoning is not measurement. Professor Raphael admires Lord Devlin’s argument about the unanimity rule in trials by jury; but I think he misunderstands it. Lord Devlin solves his problem, not by appealing to some universal ‘principle’ or self-evident axiom, but by invoking one of our common beliefs about the administration of justice, and by suggesting that this belief, rather than any other (of which we have many), should weigh with us in this matter. He is not pointing to an inherent difference between civil and criminal proceedings as such; he is pointing to something we are apt to believe, and it is not difficult to imagine a society in which it would be considered more important to have stringency in civil than in criminal verdicts or one in which no such distinction was observed. Lord Devlin does not appeal to an incontestable ‘principle’; his argument is persuasive because the principle (that is, the current belief) he invokes is familiar to us and is appropriate enough to be capable of engaging our sympathy while we listen to him expounding its bearing upon the proposal being considered. Like all argument about what to do, it cannot be refuted; but it may be rebutted by showing (for example) that some other belief,
pointing to some other conclusion, provides, in the circumstances, a more relevant aid to reflection, or that, in spite of its merits, the probable consequences of the proposal would be other than those intended and plausibly undesirable. Professor Raphael’s scorn of the suggestions I made about what I considered to be a relevant argument in favour of votes for women might have been somewhat abated if he had not (unaccountably) excluded the current approvals and disapprovals from the ‘intimations’ to be taken into the account, if he had recognized that what I called a ‘tradition’ is not static but has a propensity to move in some directions rather than others, and if he had not missed the main point, namely, that practical argument is circumstantial, that it revolves round the contingencies of an occasion, that it is not designed to reach universal conclusions but to recommend or to justify a proposal about what to do now, and that if it appeals to a ‘principle’ its main concern must be to show us the bearing of this ‘principle’ upon the occasion, which cannot be done demonstratively. I recognize that this would not satisfy Professor Raphael: his need for what he calls a ‘principle’ seems to spring from his reluctance to recognize an argument which is incapable of being demonstrative. What attracts him in Myrdal is the demonstrative manner in which the discrepancy between ‘the American creed’ and American conduct is shown; what he misses is that this carries with it no recommendation whatever about what to do. But it might have given a more profitable turn to his argument; and it might have suggested to him that I have no horror of principles— only a suspicion of those who use principles as if they were axioms and those who seem to think that practical argument is concerned with proof. A principle is not something which may be given as a reason or a justification for making a decision or performing an action; it is a short-hand identification of a disposition to choose.
The Conservative Opportunity Review of The Conservative Opportunity: Fifteen Bow Group Essays on Tomorrow’s Toryism (London: B. T. Batsford, 1965), first published in New Society, 6 (1965), 26–7. Of the two great themes of practical political reflection in modern times—the constitution and the activities of governments—the first is, in Britain, for the time being, sufficiently settled for only the edges of it to be currently debated; it is the second which absorbs our interest. And in this matter we have acquired, over the centuries, characteristically ambivalent expectations and attitudes: we imagine a government charged with a managerial task and responsibility (‘telocracy’), and we imagine one which conforms to a judicial analogy (‘nomocracy’). The extremes of telocracy and nomocracy give us little satisfaction, and give that little not for long; we prefer a middling condition, and we have invented a political rhetoric of double meanings in which to recommend it. As individuals, caught in this ambivalence, we may sometimes feel ashamed; and as rational individuals we may escape it by recognising in ourselves, not a divided political character, but one capable of responding to different circumstances appropriately: roughly, telocracy for war, and nomocracy for peace (when we are allowed it). But in political parties and the policies they recommend we may expect only an inclination in one direction or the other. There is little doubt about the direction in which these essays on Conservative policy are, for the most part, turned. They imagine a government as the custodian of a system of law designed to allow the maximum freedom of choice among its subjects, designed to push them in what are believed to be desirable directions of activity by offering opportunities of satisfaction or profit, and designed to play providence to those who suffer special misfortune or who are reluctant to make choices for themselves.
This view of things is most explicit in Mr Geoffrey Howe’s essay called ‘The waiting-list society’, but it appears also in Mr Philip Ashworth’s reflections on pensions, in Mr John MacGregor on ‘Strategy for housing’ and in the slighter essay of Mr Christopher Chataway on ‘Education and the parent’. The assumption of these writers is that there are people, in significant numbers, who want to make choices for themselves and that there are ways of allowing them to do so without prejudice to the general condition of things believed to be desirable. But these writers all face a common difficulty. The departments of activity they are concerned with have had imposed upon them, by legislators of a telocratic turn of mind, monolithic characters of various dimensions; and the task of these writers is to persuade us, not only that their proposals are inherently preferable to any alternatives, but also that the major changes they entail are worth while. How easy is the task of a reformer confronted with ‘the mess of ages’ compared with one who confronts the monolithic designs of social engineers. For example, Mr Howe recognises that the Peacock–Wiseman proposal for educational vouchers, to be used in respect of each child, which could be exchanged either for education in a state school or for the same money’s worth of education in a private school, is a proposal which allows for what he wants and a proposal of which he may be able to persuade us of the advantages. But he has also to persuade us that the major and costly changes entailed in introducing it should be contemplated with equanimity. And so on—with university education, with housing, and with pensions. But if this is the general direction of the thought of these writers, there are some disconcerting divergences. These appear particularly in what is said about economic policy and about educational policy. Mr David Howell on ‘Managing the British economy’ has some shrewd remarks to make about methods of management, and he is appropriately suspicious both of ‘management by Appeal’ and of the ‘national plan’, providing a criterion by which sections of the community can be judged to be
helping or hindering and blessed or cursed accordingly, which is apt to go with it. But he commits himself to the view that ‘the growth of productivity’ is not only a desirable aim but ‘the prime object of policy’. This is disconcerting because it is the language of telocracy: on his own view, one would have thought, the ‘prime object of policy’ would be seen as the protection of the society from the barbarism which a near-exclusive concern with productivity portends. No doubt the reader has been prepared for this by the title of his essay which at least intimates a managerial conception of government, but it seems discordant. This note is heard, also, elsewhere, particularly in Mr Ralph Smith’s essay on education. Not only is a policy recommended in which education in this country is far more closely integrated than it is at present, but one in which what is taught and how it is taught is to be conditioned, if not determined, by the needs of a society (understood to be a society ‘based upon scientific achievement’) whose telos is growth in productivity. And the suggestions made about how unwilling students (whose unwillingness one might think deserves some respect) may be urged, without being drafted, into supplying ‘the national need for more engineers’ etc, are, like some other suggestions in this book, designs merely to get by the offer of incentives what others would achieve by cruder methods. ‘Educational research’ becomes inquiry into manpower needs. Indeed, what appears at this point is, perhaps, the most characteristic belief of the telocrat, namely, that his subjects are to be regarded as ‘resources’, to be trained and managed so that they play their part in the pursuit of a single purpose. The Bow Group is a society for political research and reflection, less pretentious than the Fabian Society and nearer to practical politics than its continental counterparts, like Futuribles and Synthèse-Avenir. It has what may be called a political disposition, but no official doctrine; and it is not to be expected that these essays should speak with one voice. It is, however, interesting that the main divergence of view to reveal itself should be that which
has embedded itself in our political character. Together with the conviction that the task of government is to rule and not to manage, and some clear-sighted proposals about what ruling may profitably do with some of our current problems, there are these brief glances over the shoulder towards an integrated society relentlessly pursuing an ever higher level of productivity with government as the agent. Political discourse is a difficult art: the art of persuading others to conclusions and actions which cannot be proved to be ‘correct’. The writer must consider his audience and what it may be expected to find convincing, and he must do so without losing his own integrity. Regarded as pieces of political discourse, these essays are of a superior quality. They have got the idiom right in that they recognise it as persuading without being able to prove (and this is something of an achievement). They make the occasional perfunctory bow to current gibberish, like ‘private’ and ‘public’ sectors of the economy. But there is little mere polemic and they seldom give way to the slogans which are the current clipped coin of political exchange. Their rhetoric is civil (with occasional lapses into the commercial), not the military rhetoric of the telocrat.
Philosophy, Politics and Society Review of Philosophy, Politics and Society (Second Series), ed. P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), first published in Philosophical Quarterly, 15 (1965), 281–2. One may, perhaps, be forgiven for being puzzled by this conjunction of words in the title of the book—even a book of essays by different hands which gives no expectation of unity of theme or treatment: a word which stands for a certain sort of intellectual enquiry, a word which stands (according to context) for a practical activity or for a variety of different sorts of intellectual enquiry connected with it, and a word which one is tempted to think is the most ambiguous in our language but one which has not yet been extended to cover any sort of enquiry. What sort of a volume is it going to be? The editors’ design is that it should be a collection of essays, each concerned with a specific theme and treating it in an appropriate manner (philosophically, historically, prescriptively, etc.) and all illustrating what they take to be a modest renascence of interest in ‘political philosophy’, and indicating the direction in which further advance may be expected. Their taste is commendably eclectic; and, while no two of the essays constitute a head-on collision of views about a single theme, the reader is given the opportunity to observe many oblique connexions and disagreements. But their ‘Introduction’ shows, also, the sort of carelessness about distinctions which often goes with the sense of being on the move. For who cares very much about how one thing stands to another when the productiveness of intercourse is manifest? Yet it is, perhaps, odd to find the word ‘recommendation’ used indifferently for ‘telling us what we ought to do and why’ and for explaining a concept of justice. However, so many of the essays are illuminating that anything but gratitude
to the editors for having brought them together and (it would appear) in some cases requisitioned them, would be out of place. There are ten essays. I shall call attention to only five of them, not because the others are all negligible, but because each of these five is an unusually powerful piece of work which (whether or not the reader is convinced by the conclusions reached) undeniably transforms the theme it discusses. I will begin with Professor Rawls on ‘Justice as Fairness’, which has some claim to be thought the most brilliant essay in the book. He is concerned with the concept ‘justice’ and to say something about it which will explain our beliefs about what is just and unjust in human conduct. In short, his purpose is philosophical; he is not concerned (if I understand him correctly) to tell us how we ought to behave, or even to provide us with a ‘criterion’ of just conduct. He confines his argument to the concept ‘justice’ in connexion with ‘practices’, and he limits himself to the statement and elucidation of a theorem which he thinks could be proved but does not here attempt to prove. Briefly he contends that what we ordinarily mean by ‘justice’, within the structure of a practice, is the absence of arbitrary distinctions and the establishment of a proper balance between competing claims. This makes sense (he suggests) in terms of two principles: ‘first, that each person participating in the practice, or affected by it, has an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all; and secondly, inequalities are arbitrary unless it is reasonable to expect that they will work for everyone’s advantage’. The theorem which embodies these principles is ‘that when mutually self-interested and rational persons confront one another in typical circumstances of justice, and when they are required by a procedure expressing the constraints of having a morality to jointly acknowledge principles by which their claims on the design of their common practices are to be judged, they will settle on these two principles as restrictions governing the assignment of rights and duties, and thereby accept them as limiting their rights against one another.’ Thus, ‘a
practice is just or fair when it satisfies the principles which those who participate in it could propose to one another for mutual acceptance.’ Professor Rawls, contrasting this conception of justice as fairness with what he calls the ‘utilitarian conception’, in which justice appears as merely a greatest satisfaction of desires, finds it more capable of accounting for our beliefs about a just practice; and he sees in it a rediscovery of some neglected virtues in a ‘contractualist’ explanation. Perhaps it is niggling (though I don’t think so) to suggest that when he says that ‘where the conception of justice as fairness applies, slavery is always unjust’ he is guilty of a minor confusion. ‘Slavery’ is a word which stands for a great variety of different practices; and what in fact follows from ‘justice as fairness’ is not that slavery is always unjust but that injustice is characteristic of a practice where the claims of all parties are not settled on principles which apply equally to all parties. Less needs to be said about Professor Hart’s piece called ‘Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment’ because it is already well-known. It is a brilliant review which, in a brief space, identifies and clears up a remarkable number of the inconsistencies and confusions which have haunted reflection on this topic. Among its more memorable achievements is the observation of the distinction between ‘Retribution in General Aim’ and ‘Retribution in distribution’ of punishment, and the indication of the wider significance of this distinction. Mr Alasdair MacIntyre’s essay, ‘A mistake about causation in social science’ tackles the relation of beliefs to actions in a fresh and illuminating manner. Rejecting the not uncommon view that this relation is to be understood as that of Humean causes to Humean effects, he goes on to elaborate and illustrate a more fruitful way of understanding it. It is a most accomplished piece of work. I could wish only that Mr MacIntyre had considered whether his thesis extends to all kinds of ‘belief ’ or whether there are not some kinds of ‘belief ’ whose relation to actions (if any) requires to be understood somewhat differently.
Mr J.G.A. Pocock, in his essay called, ‘The History of Political Thought: a methodological enquiry’, is concerned with the multiplicity of considerations which weigh upon anyone who concerns himself with what is called ‘the history of ideas’ and which may tend to make him sceptical about any such enterprise. Mr Pocock observes most of the difficulties very acutely and is not overcome with doubt. And to consider the history of political thought in this connexion is particularly fruitful because thinking about politics takes place at so many different levels of abstraction, each of which calls for appropriate treatment. The problem of the historian is how to follow the fortunes of concepts as they move from one employment to another, recognizing but not scandalized by misappropriations, and not to be inhibited by the instability of the concepts themselves; how to combine, without coming to grief in irrelevance, the analytical activity of the philosopher and the exploration of contingent connexions which is the concern of the historian. Professor Berlin’s essay, which bears the somewhat unfortunate title, ‘Does Political Theory still exist?’, is of a different texture, but not less illuminating. He distinguishes between the kind of enquiry whose questions must be answered ‘by observation and by inference from observed data’, and the kind of enquiry (philosophical) where this is not so; and he suggests that ‘political theory’ belongs to this second sort of enquiry. It requires certain conditions for its appearance (namely, societies in which there is rational disagreement about ultimate ends). These conditions undoubtedly exist in some parts of the world, and particularly among ourselves, and consequently if ‘political theory’ is dying or dead it is not for want of the conditions which make it possible. This is a brisk and bold disposal of crude doubts, and many of Berlin’s other observations about what we are doing in ‘political theory’ are as just and perceptive as we should expect. But I must confess to some dissatisfaction. No doubt, rational disagreement about ultimate ends is (among much else) what makes politics and political thought of a certain
kind possible and to be expected. But it may be thought that what makes political philosophy possible is rational disagreement about the explanation of ultimate ends. And this is a distinction which Berlin pushes to one side without much consideration. He often writes as if the effort to understand the models, paradigms, conceptual structures (and I would add analogies) which have informed political utterances and actions, the effort to provide an intellectual justification for preferences and beliefs, the prescriptive recommendations of ‘values’, and the enterprise of explaining (in various ways) political beliefs, are a single undertaking within which no significant distinctions appear. This may, of course, be so; justification and explanation and prescription may be a single activity. But I would have liked this view—a view which appears when the expressions ‘political thought’, ‘political theory’, ‘political philosophy’ are used indifferently—argued, rather than assumed. It used to be remarked that the ‘moral problems’ considered by some contemporary writers on ethics were oddly trivial, and it would seem from this volume that writers on politics are not immune from this disease. Should we not be less open to the accusation that we live in an imaginary world if the sort of statements we chose for elucidation were those which appear (for example) in the great State Papers of British foreign policy rather than the odder utterances of people who stand on the edge of political activity? And would not the real quality of political utterance appear more readily if we did so?
Magna Charta Review of J.C. Holt, Magna Charta (London: Cambridge University Press, 1965), first published in Government and Opposition, 1 (1965–6), 266–71. The historical understanding of the Great Charter, like that of nearly every important event or occasion, has emerged gradually out of the quite different enterprise of assigning it a significant place in the legend of English life. This enterprise of constructing and confirming a social identity and consciousness by establishing a significant relationship between present moods and past events is a perennial practical necessity, and in respect of the Charter it has been pursued since the fourteenth century. And the ‘retrospective modernism’ (as Maitland called it) of nineteenthcentury historians, in which the Charter appeared as the palladium of English liberty, may now be recognized, not as historical error, but rather as evidence of the imperfect emergence of an historical understanding from the conditions of this practical, political enterprise. But, the task of historical understanding having been embraced, it is not unexpected that it should have revealed itself in a peculiarly determined attempt to detach the Charter from subsequent events and to interpret it severely in its thirteenthcentury context. The first version of this interpretation still contained relics of the legend-making enterprise: the baronial opponents of King John, deposed from their legendary role of champions of liberty, were merely cast for another role, that of self-seeking dissidents and the opponents of administrative efficiency. But that this first version should have concentrated upon the ‘feudal’ and ‘legal’ character of the document was evidence both that a serious attempt at historical understanding was at last afoot and that the enquiry had broken the surface of things at a certain point. Those who, in their early study of the matter, were directed (by such great
teachers as Lapsley and Professor Helen Cam) to Petit-Dutaillis, to Maitland, to Kate Norgate and to McKechnie, will remember the almost dramatic dissolution and reconstitution which what they had learned at school (or even from the indispensable writings of Stubbs) suffered. From this beginning, the story of the historical understanding of the Charter during the last half-century of scholarship, has been one of endless and fascinating elaboration. The last relics of ‘retrospective modernism’ have been detached from it to comprise a history of their own. The ‘context’ in which the Charter is read has been extended and immeasurably deepened; it has been pushed back into early Norman England, it has been enlarged to include twelfth-century Europe, and its convolutions have been tirelessly explored. It has ceased to be predominantly ‘feudal’ and ‘legal’. The Charter of 1215 has been recognized as a political document, its occasion as a piece of politics, and the quality of its thought as that which belongs to men engaged in political discourse and negotiation—imprecise, but with the characteristic imprecisions of an historical situation. Generalities have been replaced by specificalities, actual discontents and their magnitudes have been distinguished. Named persons, with discernible characters, with individual interests and the usual mixture of motives, and named properties, have taken the place of ‘the barons’, their fiefs and castles and rights. A situation composed of complicated tensions has replaced the old simplicities. England has emerged as having a political geography not less significant in the early thirteenth century than in the seventeenth century. And from it all a new outline, composed of more appropriate general statements, has been made to emerge—an outline in which, often, the exclusive utterances of earlier historians are given a new and relative significance. In short, this whole passage of the past has become historically more intelligible, and the process in which this has been achieved is a remarkable example of historical thought. This, of course, has been the work of many minds and springs, in part, from record evidence having taken the place of contemporary
chronicle; and, like all enterprises in historical understanding, it is unfinished—not merely because there are enquiries still to be satisfied, but because its greatest gift is that of making us capable of entertaining and assimilating new representations of it and of the whole period to which this occasion belonged. Professor J.C. Holt has made his own distinguished contribution to this achievement, but his book is also a critical review of how this matter of scholarship stands at present. Its design is admirable, its command of detail remarkable, its argument clear, and the reader is given the immediately pleasurable experience of being in the presence of a first-class historical intelligence. It has something to say about the myth and about the place the Charter came to occupy in the minds of later generations of politicians and lawyers, but its main concern is with the Charter of 1215 itself, with the circumstances which generated it and with the quality of its thought. Professor Holt presents the Charter of 1215 to us, not as a legal document, nor as a treaty, but as a political programme, the product of six months negotiation between the king and the barons. It is a piece of political thinking all the more interesting because it escapes the speculative doctrines about government with which medieval academics were concerned (and which we all too often mistake for the sum of medieval political thought), and reveals practical men grappling with a practical situation with the aid of ideas which sprang directly from their experience. The general conditions of the occasions were common to many of the realms of medieval Europe; they might be said to be the conditions in which political rule emerged from the technical despotism of ‘lordship’. The chief peculiarities of the situation in England sprang from the circumstances of the Norman conquest, the nature of the baronage and the command which John’s forebears had succeeded in establishing—all of which told against the king’s opponents. The immediate circumstances which provoked the barons to initiate the negotiations were the increasing arbitrariness of royal
importunity. Perhaps no item of John’s conduct was identifiably ultra vires, but the exigencies of foreign war had led the king to embark upon a policy of exploiting to the utmost the vagueness of the law (e.g. of descent and tenure) and the sources of feudal revenue, of disposing of his capital assets for ready money and of selling whatever immunities his subjects were anxious to acquire. These, in themselves, were disrupting activities, particularly when they came near to making allegiance a saleable commodity. But what made the situation worse was the absence of any settled rates for feudal aids, scutage, etc., and the absence of any settled price for privileges and immunities. It was government by bargain on the occasion and often bargain with individuals. In short, what provoked the contest was uncertainty, not illegality. And the immediate circumstance which compelled a reluctant king to enter into these negotiations was the need of funds (made desperate by the collapse of his adventures in France) and the perception that he had pushed a not inconsiderable number of his barons to the edge of their loyalty—beyond the point at which they might still be silenced by individual concessions and rewards. Indeed, on 5 May 1215 the negotiating barons formally withdrew homage and fealty. The subject of the negotiations was this whole method of ruling in which the routine exercise of justice and the enjoyment of the rights of lordship had become subordinated to the pursuit of royal policy. They were focused upon specific confusions and uncertainties. On the surface the parties debated administrative practices and even principles of alleged law; underneath, each party was seeking hidden advantages or escapes from the fulfilment of forced concessions. It was all on the borders of an unadmitted political novelty. And the Charter itself? It was ‘nothing but a vast communal privilege for which the King’s subjects paid, not now by the offer of vast sums or the surrender or subjection of their lives and property, but by the restoration of their allegiance upon agreed terms’. Its imprecisions and vagueness made it possible, but they
also made it impossible of application. But if what followed immediately was war and not peace, a beginning had been made in the introduction of a greater degree of law, order, and certainty in the tenurial relationships between Crown and vassal, in the duties of rulers and the obligations of subjects. It was remarkable that the unresolved tensions of the following decade did not destroy the realm. This incident has some interesting features for those concerned with the adventure of governing and being governed. It was an occasion when, with a certain latitude, something which may be called an ‘opposition’ emerged; and it is worthwhile to consider the quality of that opposition and what it was that was being opposed. No government, not even the mildest, can expect to escape the attention of malcontents who believe themselves to be ill-served or who think they could do better; and some governments invite rebellion and overthrow. But ‘opposition’, properly speaking, is something more sophisticated than either mere dissidence or insurrection. It assumes a distinction between ‘ruling’ and ‘opposing’ and it never presumes to the office of ruler. It can exist only where there is a legitimate government recognized to have authority to ‘rule’, and the activity of ‘opposition’ entails an unshaken allegiance to this government. It is possible only when it is recognized to have an authority of its own—an authority to ‘oppose’ but not to ‘rule’. And it will be most useful where it is a standing institution and not merely an ad hoc device provoked by an emergency. It is not surprising that an institution of ‘opposition’ should have been thought a valuable insurance against rebellion on the one hand and autocracy on the other, or that it should have been believed (as Machiavelli believed) that it is a necessary condition of ‘liberty’. But in fact, wherever ‘opposition’, properly speaking, appeared it has first emerged as a residuary office performed by those who by historic circumstances have had the necessary independence and power and who have acquired the authority to
perform it. That is to say, ‘an opposition’ is a political convention (often, but not always, appearing as a surrogate for insurrection) which requires certain conditions for its emergence. In many respects the barons of thirteenth-century England were ill-equipped to rebel against the royal government. Unlike the feudatories of France, they were not great, semi-independent lords of compact territories. Their holdings were compromised by intrusive particles of the royal demesne, and the realm had become an organization, not of baronial fees, but of counties, in which the royal sheriff was superior to the aristocratic bailiff. The time had long passed when they could (as they did in Stephen’s reign) effectively regard their allegiance to the king as terminable if he exceeded whatever they chose to interpret as the limits of his authority. The only centre of powerful independence, and thus of possible rebellion, that remained was the marcher territory. But what they lacked in power to rebel effectively they made up in experience, and their authority to ‘oppose’ was a plausible extension of their right to be consulted and to consent in matters that concerned themselves and their property. There was not, perhaps, very much to distinguish this occasion from the numerous ‘rebellions’ suffered by John’s predecessors, and the situation was colourably one in which rebellions might be justified on the recognized principles of serious royal misdemeanour. But there was something to distinguish it, and the ambivalence of the situation is reflected in the ambivalence of the historian’s language. The resisters of 1215 may be called an ‘opposition’ because they never denied the authority of kingly government; because their intention was not to overthrow John’s government, or even to control it, but to correct it; because what they resisted was not items of conduct but a whole method of governing; and because what they sought for themselves they unavoidably sought for all—their relation to those who owed them duties was inextricable from their relation to the king. But the art of ‘opposition’ was in its infancy, and the conditions of its practice had not fully emerged. Negotiators who had no recourse
but to withdraw their allegiance were quasi-rebels; clubs were trumps. The object of the ‘opposition’ is instructive. The discontents provoked by governments recognized to be legitimate are, commonly, that they are capricious, oppressive, over-demanding, extortionate; that they exceed their known rights; that they fail to protect their subjects from injury; and that they pursue interests which are detrimental to their subjects. And, in one degree or another, all these discontents were felt by those who forced negotiation upon John. Based upon the territorial power established by William I, and aided by an immense increase in administrative skills, the king had done everything that wilful and activist governments are apt to do. He had pressed the sources of legitimate revenue to their limits, he had lived upon the edge of legality, he had controlled his more powerful subjects by putting them into debt, and he had treated his subjects as objects of policy. But the situation was far from clear-cut. There was the confusion about rights and duties characteristic of a community where the intimations of political rule had appeared over the horizon, but where ‘lordship’ remained the familiar authority; there was the confusion between the king as the source of justice and the king as the conductor of policy; and, in addition, there was the confusion which sprang from John’s inclination to govern by individual bargain and to buy allegiance with the penalties he extracted from offenders. The ‘opposition’, no doubt, were averse from paying taxes; but they were not a set of mere poujadists. Their protest was directed, first, against the uncertainty, the undefined character of their obligations and the unsettled price to be paid for the enjoyment of their rights; and secondly, it was guided by the perception that the administration of justice, and the order of the realm (the conduct of which was a major source of revenue to the king), was being corrupted by the king’s need for funds to conduct foreign adventures. That the wealth of a land should be exploited to support policy is something which every land ruled
by adventurers has to suffer; but that the administration of justice should be subordinated to the profits it yields is an intolerable offence to good order. And the difficulty of the opposers’ situation was how to protest against this without involving themselves in a more questionable protest against the rights of royalty themselves.
The Works of Joseph de Maistre Review of Jack Lively (ed.), The Works of Joseph de Maistre, first published in New Society, 7 (10 February 1966), 28–9. The best of some writers is to be found in their incidental remarks and in the germinal ideas they let fall. This is not the case with Joseph de Maistre who, although he was an unsystematic and repetitive writer, was a systematic thinker and needs to be read in the gross. The fourteen volumes of his collected works are, however, a formidable undertaking: and it was a happy thought of Jack Lively to make and to translate this selection in which the six more important pieces of de Maistre’s writings are reproduced. There is, of course, abridgement, and something has been lost—the poetry (the opening scene of the Soirées, for example) and the often fascinating footnotes of this informed but fanciful scholar. But the main lines of the arguments are preserved in all their ingenious detail. It is an admirable piece of work and earns our gratitude. Lively prefaces it with a substantial introduction. The biographical information it contains is adequate; perhaps some fuller bibliographical information would not have been out of place; but for the most part it is concerned to interpret the writings. He is, I think, a trifle over-generous to some of his predecessors in this enterprise: their categories, ‘authoritarian,’ ‘fascist,’ and so on, are notably unenlightening. His sketch of the organizing ideas of de Maistre’s view of the condition and destiny of mankind is sufficient. But what he has to say about de Maistre’s relation to the writers of the Enlightenment is what will properly capture the reader’s attention, for it is here that the debate to which de Maistre was contributing is identified and that his ideas receive their definition in terms of their alternatives. De Maistre believed himself to be combatting what he recognised as the intellectual and moral corruption of the Enlightenment.
But Lively contends that, although de Maistre is, in this sense, ‘strictly a reactionary’ writer, his enemies were, to a significant extent, the creatures of his own overheated imagination, and that the real difference between himself and his chosen opponents was often not very great. This is an interesting view, and Jack Lively argues it with determination and lucidity. But I doubt whether it can be sustained without a good deal of qualification. It is true that de Maistre conjured up a vast and (to him) impious conspiracy against ‘authority’; but (not without some confusion) the main point of his argument was directed, not against a revolt from ‘authority,’ but against a by no means imaginary understanding of the nature of ‘authority’ which he thought to be erroneous and (with less cogency) to be also morally reprehensible. De Maistre’s own understanding of ‘authority’ and the often bizarre arguments with which he supported it, may leave something to be desired, but when he identified his opponents as writers who believed that ‘authority’ derives from the quality of its acts, he had chosen neither imaginary enemies nor disguised friends. De Maistre’s theme is the government of mankind. The occasion in response to which he wrote was the French Revolution and the writings he believed to have brought it on. But he explored his theme at a number of levels and contributed to many somewhat different debates. At one level, his writings were a recognition of that contingency in politics which his opponents denied. Circumstance is everything; even ‘authority’ rests upon contingent current opinion. Political discourse can never be demonstrative; the event never corresponds to the design. At another level, that of secular history, events are recognised as the products of human choices and actions, and civilisations as human endeavours. There is wisdom and folly in this world; responsibility may properly be attributed and praise and blame allotted. Wars are preventable evils, not without their
compensations; to spill blood is a crime; revolution is the villainy of the few for which the many suffer. But, in the end, what interests de Maistre is not the instruments of government, nor the relation of the ruled to their rulers, nor even events as the product of human choices, but the world as it lies in the hand of God: dieu d’Abraham, dieu d’Isaac, dieu de Jacob, et non des philosophes et des savants (as Pascal had said). He is concerned with events from the standpoint of Providence, and human affairs in relation to divine love and justice. Here his writing becomes a theological meditation; his theme is innocence, wickedness, and suffering in the world; and his master is Origen. The French revolution becomes a cosmic event, at once satanic and divinely decreed (or allowed). War is divine punishment; the blood of the innocent is the coin in which the cosmic debt of mankind is requited, and what is thus paid in this world is allowed for in what has to be paid hereafter. It is a somber, even savage, reading of the human condition; but it is not pessimistic; and at least it is a change from the fond pelagian hopes of the Enlightement. And, in de Maistre’s view, this theological perspective is relevant to the government of mankind because the politics of time are intelligible only in the context of the politics of eternity.
Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State Review of David P. Calleo, Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), first published in New Society, 7 (9 June 1966), 28–9. From their emergence, modern European ‘states’ were recognised as a somewhat puzzling political experience. Each was, or rapidly became, a collectivity of human beings of a novel kind, a contingent manifold of diversities on its way to acquiring a peculiar sentiment of solidarity, for which it was difficult to find a convincing analogy. Each was ruled by a powerful government, acknowledged to have the authority necessary to emancipate its subjects from their past (a so-called sovereign authority), claiming the exclusive loyalty of its subjects, and exhibiting ambivalent dispositions— the disposition to generate solidarity by containing diversity, and the disposition to impose uniformity; or (from another point of view) the disposition to rule subjects recognised to be adults, and the disposition to manage the lives of (and perhaps educate) subjects recognised as juveniles. This experience both provided the material upon which the European political imagination has exercised itself during the last five hundred years, and provoked the impressive and variegated reflection of the theorists. Among these Coleridge has a distinguished place. The enterprise of the theorist is to understand what is before him; and in order to appreciate the theorem offered, it is necessary not only to unravel its complexities but also to determine the level of thought it represents. Philosophers, like Hobbes or Hegel, offer us an understanding in which what is before them is related to so much else that it is endowed with a new character; the
understanding of others is limited to knowing ‘how it works’ or what it can be used for. In this respect, Coleridge (like some others—Montesquieu, for example) is a puzzling writer. For the most part, he writes at a middling level of generality, and his understanding of life in a modern state is in terms of the tensions of its historic character which, by his time, had revealed themselves unmistakably: the tension between solidarity and volatility, between civil authority and intellectual freedom, and between the public and the private characters of those who govern. This understanding of a state, sketched in terms of a lex equilibrii, is a brilliant achievement, and in the detail with which he invested it, puts Coleridge among the more notable interpreters of the British constitution. It was the platform from which he launched his attack upon the modish notion (still, regrettably, with us) of a state as an economy. But Coleridge was not content to remain at this level of thought, and the adventures he embarked upon in an attempt to give it philosophical coherence are not so well managed. When he competes with the philosophes, or with Paine or Bentham, he is master; when he puts himself in competition with Hobbes (whom he did not understand), or attempts what Hegel achieved in the Philosophy of Right, his performance is fumbling. But it is important that we should not allow this to distract us from his genuine achievement: he had a profound insight into what life in a modern state had become. David Calleo believes that Coleridge as a political theorist has suffered undeserved neglect, and his enterprise is ‘to present from Coleridge a tolerably complete and coherent theory of the nation state’ and to inquire into its ‘present relevance’. Coleridge’s published writings on politics are tolerably compact and (apart from some verbal eccentricities) they are not difficult to understand. Calleo’s account of them is unpretentious, lucid and historically well-informed. It brings to the surface what Coleridge sometimes left implicit; it displays them in their local context of European and English thought; and it makes all (and perhaps
rather more than all) that can be made of the ‘philosophical underpinnings’ of Coleridge’s political reflections. No reader could fail to learn something from it. Moreover, this account is illuminated at some points by reference to Coleridge’s unpublished Notebooks, and it is claimed that what comes from this source reveals more clearly than the published writings what Calleo calls the ‘psychological dimension’ of Coleridge’s understanding of a state. The inquiry into the ‘present relevance’ of Coleridge’s theorems about life in a modern state is, I think, as patchy as the enterprise itself is doubtful. Calleo seems to me to be over-confident in his belief that some of the tensions observed by Coleridge have now been relaxed or even resolved; to be astray in identifying Coleridge with the ‘pluralists’; to be wrongheaded in his remarks about elitism; and to be muddled in his thoughts on sovereignty. Perhaps it might have been more profitable to examine the impact of Coleridge upon mid-nineteenth century English thought, than to have embarked upon this questionable enterprise. But much of this is redeemed in the last two chapters, which contain much good sense about life ina modern state today— some of it, no doubt, learned from Coleridge, but put down freshly and vigorously.
Nazism First published in Chambers’ Encyclopedia, new rev. edn, 1966, ix. 722–4. Oakeshott acknowledged the following sources: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire, tr. E. Lorimer (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934); Werner Sombart, A New Social Philosophy, tr. K.F. Geiser (London: H. Milford for Oxford University Press, 1937); Hermann Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution of Destruction, tr. E.W. Dickes (London: Heinemann, 1939); Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State, tr. E.A. Shils (London: Oxford University Press, 1941); Alan Bullock, Hitler, A Study in Tyranny (London: Odham’s Press, 1952); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958); William Lawrence Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960). Nazism was the social and political doctrine of the Nazi party, i.e. the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Worker’s party), which flourished 1920–1945. The party and its subsidiary organizations were declared dissolved by the three-power conference at Potsdam, August 1945.
History of the Party The Nazi Party was one of a number of new political parties that sprang from the revolution of 1918. Its birthplace was Munich, its original name was Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Worker’s party) and for the first five years of its existence its influence was confined to Bavaria. In August 1920, when it assumed its full title, it had about 50 members, among whom were three of its future leaders—Adolf Hitler, already accorded dictatorial powers in the party, Rudolf Hess, and Alfred Rosenberg. Its main tenets were anti-Semitism, opposition to the Communist-inspired separatist movement in Bavaria and a policy of non-fulfillment of the conditions of the Versailles treaty. Its party organ (purchased in 1920) was the Munich news-sheet Volkischer Beobachter. Like other political parties of its time in Germany, it early organized a private army which, by 1922, numbered about 800 men. In November 1923 the party, led by Hitler, attempted a coup d’état in Munich. The attempt failed, Hitler was imprisoned, and the party proscribed. From 1925 the party began to be organized on a national scale; Josef Goebbels took charge of its propaganda, and it claimed a membership of 27,000. In 1928 it contested seats in the Reichstag elections, polling 800,000 votes and returning 12 deputies, among them Hermann Göring. Its party membership at that time was claimed to be about a hundred thousand. But its growth had not been accomplished without some internal strains. The radical section of its early members was by this time beginning to be a disappointed element; the party in moving the seat of its operations from Bavaria to Berlin had become more specifically nationalist and its leaders were angling for the support of other nationalist elements in German politics. In the elections of 1930 the party polled six and a half million votes and returned 107 deputies to the Reichstag. In the presidential election of 1932 Hitler polled 13 million votes as against Hindenburg’s 19 million. And in the Reichstag election of the July of the same year the
party returned 230 deputies and had the support of 37% of the electorate. It was at this time the most powerful single party in the Reichstag, and outside it had under its command a private army of about 400,000 men. The election of November 1932 saw the number of Nazi deputies reduced to 196, but there was no correspondent reduction in the actual power of the party, and in January 1933 Hitler was called to form a government. His first cabinet included only four important members of the party; its bias was conservative and it had the support of powerful military and industrial interests. The elections which followed in March 1933 gave the Nazi party (when the Communist deputies had been excluded on the ground of their alleged complicity in the burning of the Reichstag building in February) an absolute majority in the Reichstag, and on 23 March 1933 legislation was enacted giving Hitler’s government plenary powers; parliamentary institutions ceased to have any significance, and Germany became a ‘oneparty state’.
Programme The programme of the party was a re-expression in more concrete terms of this doctrine. It had something for everyone with any sort of revolutionary craving, and something also for those who, having something to lose, desired security. Some of it was determined by the search for popular support, some by the search for patronage, all by the desire for power. Its earliest statement was in the Twentyfive Points, adopted in February 1920; and although some of its proposals were subsequently allowed to lapse, this always remained the only official summary of the party platform. The Twenty-five Points included the demand for: the establishment of a closed national state to include, under a strong central government, all members of the German race, in which citizenship was to be limited to those of German blood, and work should be provided for all and all be compelled to work; the return of the German colonies; the establishment of a national army; the nationalization of large industry and large business concerns; land reform; press control; and measures to promote increase of population. The rest, including the greatly stressed ‘abolition of the thralldom of interest’, was verbiage, calculated to satisfy the diverse desires of every section of the German people. From time to time in the early years of the party this programme was extended to include, more specifically, a policy of non-fulfillment of the treaty of Versailles, the solution of the problem of unemployment and a foreign policy designed to recover all that Germany had lost in the first world war and to expand the frontiers of Germany to include all Germans. In 1933 when the party came to power, the official programme was re-defined in the first four-year plan, the objects of which were national unity (i.e. the abolition of the federal constitution), the abolition of unemployment and equality with the other states of Europe. The subsequent undertakings of the party, when it had once gained control of the country, were determined by the course of events. They involved, among much else, a policy of economic self-sufficiency, which had no place in the original programme.
Revolutionary Aims and Tactics In spite of the elaborateness of the party doctrine and programme, these must be regarded as no more than a facade. The party pursued a policy with the aid of a doctrine which was designed and used solely for propaganda among the masses. The significance of anti-Semitism, for example, lay in its popular appeal (especially to the lower middle class) and in its power to corrupt the moral sense of the nation. The immediate aim of the leaders of the party was to obtain power and then set about the comprehensive organization of the nation to increase that power; their more distant aim was anarchic, the perpetual unsettlement and destruction of European civilization. The pursuit of this aim required only that the acquisition of some power should be used to acquire more power, that the settlement of any specific claims should merely be a prelude to the proposal of further claims, and the avoidance of any slackening in the momentum of events. It cannot be said that war itself was among the specific aims of the party; its aim was destruction by the most economical means. To some extent before 1939 there appeared in Hitler’s addresses to the party the idea of a ‘new order’ in Europe, and between 1939 and 1945 this theme was further explored in party literature. But since no attempt was made to conceal the subordination of the rest of Europe to the interests of Germany entailed in this ‘new order’, it lacked any propaganda appeal outside Germany. This was clearly revealed during the war when dissident minorities in Russia (particularly in the Ukraine), which might have supported the German cause, were in fact alienated. From the point of view of its revolutionary tactics, the history of the party is divided into two periods. Before 1925 the oldfashioned conception of a coup d’état dominated its tactical plans and led to the outbreak in Munich in 1923. But the party leaders learnt from the failure of the 1923 Putsch that the more certain, if slower, method of securing absolute power was by the destruction
of the Weimar regime from within by constitutional methods. From 1925 the plan was to win power in the Reichstag and then to have themselves voted into absolute authority. They pursued this plan relentlessly for eight years, and achieved complete success. It required, first, popular support and the support of other political parties and interests which were persuaded to believe that the Nazi party could be used to further their own aims (monarchists, nationalists and the army); secondly, the severest self-discipline in refusing to participate in any government except on terms of dominance, a refusal that was in 1932 persisted in even to the verge of the dissolution of the party; and thirdly, the steady separation of a complete plan for the seizure of absolute control of the state when parliamentary power had been seized constitutionally. In the event the final stages of the party’s accession to power were a series of deals between the Nazis and the Nationalists, the Centre (Roman catholic) party, the Social Democrats and the army, in which the Nazi leaders outwitted their opponents. The seizure of absolute power was complete in less than six months from Hitler’s becoming chancellor. The second principle was that, besides race, the only other determining factor in the life of a society is its geography; a people is the product of its race and its soil. From these two principles emerged the idea of the racial-national (volkisch) state; the idea of a political society which includes all the members of a single race and in which the chief function of government is to maintain racial purity and (in the case of Germany, as the political organization of the highest race) to carry out a civilizing mission in the world. National (or German) socialism was opposed to international (or Marxist communist) socialism, and meant a planned, single-race state. The internal organization of this state was based on the belief that, as some races are superior to others, so some individuals are superior to other individuals, and the superior, the élite, should rule the inferior. This was called the principle of leadership
(Führerprinzip), and was contrasted with the principle of liberal democratic government. At no time in the history of the party did this doctrine remain a collection of merely abstract principles. It was elaborated by the intellectuals of the party such as Rosenberg (Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1930) and Walter Darré (Neuadel aus Blut und Boden, 1934), and by Hitler himself (Mein Kampf, 2 vols., 1925–27). But its main appeal lay in its connexion with social and political ideas long current in Germany—pan-Germanism, antiSemitism and authoritarianism. It was a doctrine which appealed to the aspirations and the prejudices of a large part of the lower middle class of Germany among whom the party had its first supporters. The state and the party, however, remained separate organizations, although some of the institutions of the party came to have quasi-governmental authority. The annual party rally (Parteitag), held since 1929 at Nuremburg, was often an occasion for statements of national policy. The subsequent history of the party was not without its internal strains and convulsions; on 30 June 1934 dissident radical elements were eliminated by the murder of their leaders or potential leaders. But the initial success of Hitler’s conduct of policy gave his government overwhelming support and fixed the whole country in the grip of the party. The majority of 34 million votes by which Hitler was elected president on the death of Hindenburg in August 1934 was the first of a number of votes of confidence.
Social and Political Doctrine The foundation of the party’s appeal was a set of general ideas about society and government. None of these was new; what was new was their appearance together as the creed of an aggressive political party. The first principle of the party’s doctrine was the prime importance of race in the structure of society. Racial purity was essential to any valuable and healthy society. And further, since of the races in the world some are superior to others, the most excellent society must be that which is composed exclusively of members of the highest race. This race is the Aryan or Nordic race, and the German people belong to it. This doctrine was derived from certain pseudo-scientific writers of the last century and, it need scarcely be said, is unsupported in the present conclusions of biology, ethnology and history. The tactics used within Germany were designed also for use outside. Before the party came to power in Germany it had a foreign department (AuslandsOrganisation) the aim of which was to prosecute the destructive tactics abroad.
Party and State By the law of 14 July 1933 the Nazi party became the only legal political party in Germany, and between 1933 and its collapse in 1945 the organization of the party within the state became all-embracing and exceedingly complex. Its development was governed entirely by circumstance and the desire to reward faithful service with party employment. Nevertheless, though high party office and high office in the state were often held by the same individuals, the party never became identified with the state; indeed, it seems to have been the policy of the party leaders to prevent this identification, so that the party organization could remain as a constant check on that of the government. The headquarters of the party remained at the Brown House, Munich. In some respects the party was a parallel organization, possessing institutions that doubled those of the state; e.g. it had its own foreign office distinct from the Wilhelmstrasse office. In other respects its institutions supplied a national organization which had no parallel in the state; e.g. the Labour Front. The party and the state were held together in principle, though not in detail, by the decree of 1 December 1933 for ‘securing the unity of party and state’. In 1925 Hitler had divided Germany into 32 Gaue (regions) each with its Gauleiter, for the purposes of party organization; and each Gau was subdivided into Kreise (districts), local groups, cells and street-blocks. These party divisions survived the accession of the party to power, but corresponded neither with the governmental divisions of the country nor with the regions of the Hitler youth organization, the military administrative regions or the 17 districts of the state industrial organization. In 1937 the party consisted of seven organizations and eight affiliated groups. The first were such bodies as the S.A. (storm troops), S.S. (protective platoons), N.S.K.K. (National Socialist motor corps)—all paramilitary organizations—the Hitler Youth, the Student’s Union and the Women’s Guild. The second were
professional groups such as the lawyer’s and doctor’s unions, and the Labour Front which was the party organization that took the place of the trade unions and acquired their assets. The purpose of the Labour Front was to reconcile the industrial workers with the aims of the party. Its membership was compulsory; in 1935 it had reached 25 million. The ‘people’s car’ was one of its projects, and the ‘Strength through Joy’ movement, for the organization of leisure, was one of its activities. It was probably the most important of all the party institutions. Membership of the party proper was always distinguished from membership of one of the party organizations, and from 1935, in theory, new members were to be recruited solely through the Hitler Youth. During the war 1939–45 the para-military organizations of the party were incorporated in the army, but the army itself came more and more under the control of the party.
Hobbes Studies Review of Keith Conrad Brown (ed.), Hobbes Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), first published in English Historical Review, 82 (1967), 123–5. In a graceful foreword to this collection of essays by its editor it is claimed that the ‘revolution in Hobbes studies’ which has been in train for something like a generation, has ‘moved into a period of consolidation’. Settled conclusions may be lacking, but the scholars who have participated recognize themselves to be engaged upon a common enterprise in terms of the important questions to be explored. They have come to appreciate each other’s problems and adventures, they await the contributions of their fellows and receive them patiently: there is light, there is warmth, but there is very little of the notorious heat of controversy. This is all well observed: Hobbes scholars are a very civilized lot. And if the editor’s speculations about what provoked this ‘curious post-war surge of interest in Hobbes’ are not very convincing, there can be little doubt that the net result has been to turn the somewhat dim figure in the positivists’ calendar of saints (which is what, roughly speaking, this generation of interpreters inherited) into a vastly more complex and more interesting thinker, and one with an incomparably greater degree of historical authenticity. The amount of recent writing on Hobbes is embarrassingly large, but the editor of this collection has shown admirable discrimination. Thirteen authors are represented, and each of the essays has a specific and significant contribution to make to the interpretation of Hobbes’s writings. The greater number of the pieces are analytical, concerned with Hobbes as a philosopher and with the elucidation of the philosophical ideas and doctrines to be found in his writings. There is an admirably judicial examination by Stuart M. Brown Jr. of what has come to be known as the ‘Taylor thesis’ (the contention
that Hobbes had a genuine ethical theory and that it is logically independent of his egoistic psychology). A.E. Taylor’s original essay is reprinted, and Mr S.M. Brown says just about all that can be said both in its favour and against it. There is a criticism of Howard Warrender’s The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His theory of obligation (1957) by John Plamenatz and Warrender’s reply, the main concern of which is the place of the idea of God in Hobbes’s system of ideas—a theme also explored in another essay by Willis B. Glover. There are essays by J.R. Pennock and A.G. Wernham, both concerned with Hobbes’s conception of ‘liberty’. There is an essay by Mario A. Cattaneo on Hobbes’s theory of punishment, and another by S. Morris Engel on Hobbes’s ‘Table of Absurdity’. And finally, among the analytical contributions, there is J.W.N. Watkins’s attempt to set out Hobbes’s political philosophy as a coherent system of ideas. The discovery of Hobbes’s meaning is a notoriously difficult enterprise. His writings contain more than one account of most of his more important doctrines, there are marginal but sometimes significant differences between the Latin and the English versions of a work, and Hobbes may be suspected of a propensity to think with the wise and to speak with the foolish. All these essays bear witness to the fact that the day of the brisk interpreter is over. The three remaining essays are of a different sort, concerned (in various ways) with what may be called the historical context of Hobbes’s writings. The context explored in the essay by Leo Strauss is that of the history of political philosophy. The essay has all the brilliance of this writer’s work on Hobbes—work to which, with all its exaggerations, its tortuosities and (as some think) its lapses into wrong-headedness, current Hobbes studies owe much of their inspiration and direction. Strauss’s leadership has not always been followed, but it has always offered something to be learned from. C.B. MacPherson, choosing the context of what he takes to be the emergent character of English society in Hobbes’s time, presents him as the prophet and the analyst of ‘bourgeois’ society and suggests that Hobbes’s ‘human nature’ is really the local and
historic nature of man in ‘capitalist’ society. It is an interesting adventure, but it suffers from the vagueness of the terms in which the map which emerges is drawn. Keith Thomas’s essay on ‘The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, a performance of the same kind, is, however, on an altogether higher level of scholarship. Unlike most of the other essays, it appears not to have been already published elsewhere; it breaks new ground and for its display of memorable qualities of critical historical thought it deserves to be regarded as the pièce de résistance of the volume. The concern of Mr Thomas is with Hobbes as a moralist rather than as a philosopher, the context he explores is that of moral and political opinions and sentiments, and his conclusions wave aside the rough generalizations of writers of less historical sense and learning: ‘it seems that no simple formula is adequate to convey the peculiar flavour of Hobbes’s political thought. He lived in an age of change and it is not surprising that he should have subscribed to a variety of what were to some extent contradictory social assumptions.’
The Principles of Politics Review of John Randolph Lucas, The Principles of Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), first published in Political Studies, 15 (1967), 224–7. To elicit the general considerations involved in maintaining a community of human beings, and to elucidate their logical connexions with one another, is so eminently a respectable intellectual enterprise that it needs no apology; and when the level of generality at which the considerations are taken is, for the most part, that at which ideas we are accustomed to use in practical political discourse appear, the undertaking may have the additional value of contributing to the intelligibility and cogency of the discourse itself. Mr Lucas, who has undertaken this task, is a little hesitant about it because (as he sees it) it cannot be expected to have any great appeal to Englishmen, who are apt to take their politics, like their pleasures, in a sadly unreflective manner. Fortunately, however, he has had the courage of his talents, and he has written a book which will convert even the most sceptical reader to the worth of the enterprise. This is political philosophy at its scrupulous and unpretentious best. In form, it is not an easy book. It is composed of seventy-eight sections, each an essay (varying from two to ten pages in length) on a particular theme. Thus, the architecture is somewhat obscure. There is a continuous argument; but if (as I did) one often loses the sense of following it, one is rewarded (and often delighted) with the sagacity with which the separate themes are explored. In his determination to spell out implacably what he has to say on each theme, Mr Lucas does not spare the reader some tedious repetitions; and on occasions his very great ingenuity seems to overreach itself—as when he suggests that it is reasonable to prohibit a forger from ‘engraving five-pound notes, because there are so many other designs he can engrave’.
In substance, perhaps there are some disappointments. It has more to say about the conditions of a ‘civil’ than of a ‘political’ society, more about government than about politics, more about jurisdictio than about gubernaculum, and nothing about the considerations involved in conduct of a foreign policy. There are oddities, such as his treatment of political obligation (in terms of motives for obedience); and there are perversities, like the essay on Toleration. But, whatever the difficulties of the design, and whatever the minor disappointments, it is a book of remarkable freshness in which a writer of very great talent has gone far towards recapturing for moral philosophy and jurisprudence themes which nowadays all too often receive only the sort of attention which so-called political sociologists give them. In default of the detailed and leisurely appreciation and criticism it deserves, I can give only a brief account of its contents and note a few interesting or puzzling features. The book begins by setting out the five contingent ‘characteristics of human nature’ relevant to human community: some interaction; some shared values; incomplete unselfishness; fallible judgment; imperfect information. This is a judicious beginning, avoiding the excessive or defective claims of others who have chosen to start in this manner. The first two conditions are unexceptionable; but I have some difficulty with the other three, the ‘conditions of imperfection’, as Mr Lucas calls them. He says they share a common logical form, each recognizing human beings as ‘sometimes but not always unselfish, right, well informed’. But when he comes to specify them in more detail, differences and obscurities appear. (1) ‘Unselfishness’ is specified both as a perpetual and exclusive concern for the interests of others, and as a constant disposition (willingness) to consider the interests of others. Clearly, I think, it must be taken to be the latter; because a perpetual and exclusive concern for the interests of others, though it may be conceivable in an office-holder in respect of his official duties, is not a possible condition of a concrete and finite personality, and therefore not
a perfect condition. ‘Incomplete unselfishness’, then, should be specified as an unsteady disposition to attend only to one’s own interests. Mr Lucas never says why he prefers to put it this way round; and I think ‘unselfishness’ does not quite represent what he is after. (2) Similarly, ‘fallible judgment’ should be recognized in Mr Lucas’s argument (and often is) as an infirm disposition to embark upon or to listen to rational argument and to abide by its conclusions. But this is compromised when Mr Lucas specifies it also as sometimes but not always reaching ‘the right decision’. Indeed, this expression, ‘the right decision’, scattered up and down the pages of this book in a somewhat disconcerting manner, is one that I would like to know more about. Mr Lucas is confident that if men were much more reasonable than they are there would be no disagreements which could not be resolved by discussion and argument, and that they would agree in the end on how a question ought to be decided; but in view of the ‘dialectical’ (nondeductive) character he attributes to political argument, I do not think he is justified in claiming more for even the most reasonable participants than that disagreement about the considerations to be taken into account could with certainty be expected to be resolved. (3) ‘Imperfect information’, on the other hand, is a different kind of condition; it is not a disposition. But it, also, is obscure in Mr Lucas’s account. Information about what? The human condition he seems to be drawing attention to here concerns information about the facts of current life; the sort of information a Civil Servant needs in large quantities and never has enough of (e.g. about the dimensions of the move to S.E. England). But when Mr Lucas says that the Stoic was a man who believed himself to be ‘perfectly informed’, he is talking about something else, because the Stoic’s perfect information was about his place in the universe. Nor, I think, does Mr Lucas make enough of the important distinction between the impossibility of being fully informed in advance about the consequences of human actions (which Aristotle took to be the most important condition of political deliberation), and the relative lack of information about the world which we usually
suffer from, even though we may not be talking foolishly on some of the occasions when we say we have all the information we need to reach a decision. Assuming the components of human communities to be of this sort, Mr Lucas addresses himself to the question: What, then, will be the principles of the structure and organization of these communities, and particularly of ‘unselective’ communities such as states? First, ‘a common method of deciding [other than by force] questions that may arise among or between them’ will be required; and it must be a method which takes account of the human characteristics (set out above) of those who operate it and which effectively supplies those on behalf of which it is operated with what they need. This is the organization of a ‘civil’ society, and Mr Lucas devotes the greater part of his book to its exploration. It is admirably done. Legal learning and philosophical reflection combine to draw out the conditions of a civil society, and new life is given to worn-down and often misused ideas such as sovereignty, legality, equity, justice, the rule of law, legal liberty and legal privilege, each being recognized as a specific, a limited, and a valuable consideration. Perhaps, it all adds up to the tension between order (rationality) and freedom, but in Mr Lucas’s argument this is a very subtle tension: the reader may expect no platitudes. To the principles of civil order and freedom must be added principles of law-making and amendment; and a civil society is incomplete without some well-understood (and therefore understood in terms of principles) means, other than those built into its procedures, of controlling its order. With this it acquires a political character. And, here, Mr Lucas not only explores the principles of constitutional limitation, constitutional criticism and political liberty, but also the deeper questions of political obligation and the standpoint from which a civil order may be criticized from the outside: Natural Law. Distributed between the essays which deal with these topics (the order is a little disconcerting) are others in which looser
collections of ideas are considered, such as Individualism and the Minimum State, which I find less satisfactory; and others still which are vehicles of opinion, not arbitrary, but less securely anchored to the main philosophical argument. There are arguments in the book which I follow only imperfectly: those, for example, concerned with the relationship between the ‘shared values of the community’ and the doctrine of the moral autonomy of the person, and with the view that the claim to freedom (though admissible as a consideration) is ‘rationally opaque’. And perhaps it is not niggling to remark that Mr Lucas’s few references to earlier writers are (except to those of Plato) often mistaken: Rousseau’s volonté général is not the product of discussion; Machiavelli did not believe that ‘a prince should consider only his own interests’; Hegel did not ‘articulate’ a totalitarian morality; and Hobbes did not think that fear of sanctions and consequences were either the only reasons why authority should be obeyed or even that they were the only reasonable motives for obedience, nor is his Sovereign properly to be described as a ‘tyrant’. No essay in this book is devoted expressly to a consideration of the nature of ‘principles of conduct’ and their use in political argument, but almost every issue illustrates Mr Lucas’s views on this topic. He holds that rational argument cannot avoid reference to principles, but he says nothing about a distinction between principles in virtue of their different levels of generality and he deals only with the most general principles we are apt to use, and this may be recognized as proper in a piece of philosophical writing. Further, he seems (on occasion) to come near to holding that rational conduct is conduct which is defended in rational argument—although, I think, it is more characteristic of his view to hold that to require reasons from, for example, an administrator, is one of the better and readier ways of testing the acceptability of a decision. But he does not hold that all rational argument is deductive, or that principles can be used as if they were axioms. In spite of some odd expressions (conduct ‘exemplifying principles’,
‘obeying principles’ and principles ‘laying down conduct’) his view seems to be that principles are, for the most part ‘extracted from expertise’, and that they are not to be regarded as rules or criteria but rather as ‘heads of argument’, ‘ideals’, maxims, aids to reflection, reasons, considerations. They are not things to be pointed to, but to be used in deliberation and argument. They could never compose a complete account of rational conduct however fully they were formulated; no principle ever stands alone, the single, self-evidently proper, consideration to be taken into the account; each is a specific and limited consideration; and they do not all pull in the same direction. To invoke principles is not itself to justify conduct, it is to suggest that these are the relevant considerations; and the argument (the ‘dialectic’) scarcely begins until we consider the relative merits and importance of these suggestions in respect of the particular circumstance or class of circumstances—a process which cannot itself be resolved into an appeal to principles. Thus, what, in Mr Lucas’s view, we need, is as precise a delineation as we can get of each of our more important principles, and an understanding of their logical relations to one another; and this is what he has provided.
Sovereignty Review of Francis Harry Hinsley, Sovereignty (London: Watts, 1966), first published in English Historical Review, 83 (1968), 441–2. Mr F.H. Hinsley’s Sovereignty is a neat and lively survey of the fortunes of an idea and the conditions of its appearance upon the social scene. In setting out these conditions Mr Hinsley distinguishes between a society, its political institutions or system, the ‘state’ (the recognition of ‘a single, central symbol or instrument of rule’) and the attribution to this ‘state’ of exclusive, final and absolute authority. This is the attribution of ‘sovereignty’, and Mr Hinsley suggests that it is to be connected with a situation in which the society and the ‘state’ are ‘judged to be necessary to each other and sufficient unto themselves’. An exploration of the ancient and medieval worlds reveals this condition not to have been fully satisfied, although its partial satisfaction in Roman politics generated the concept of imperium which is recognized as an approximation to ‘sovereignty’. From the sixteenth century, however, this condition has been progressively more fully satisfied in Europe, and the concept of ‘sovereignty’ made its unmistakable appearance. The chapter on the fortunes of this concept in the history of relations between states in modern times is well-arranged and it is not the worse for containing nothing unexpected. But the chapter on the modern history of ‘sovereignty’ within the community suffers from Mr Hinsley’s identification of ‘sovereignty’ with strong government and his notion of an inherent conflict between ‘sovereignty’ and ‘freedom’, which does not allow him to recognize legislative sovereignty as a release from the authority of prescription and as a device for legitimizing wanted legal innovation. His general conclusion is that the current integration of ‘state’ and community, in spite of its added complexity, reaffirms the value of the concept of
‘sovereignty’ rather than making it otiose—as Laski (whose misfortune it was to confuse sovereignty with the non-liability of the Crown for tort) and others forecast.
William of Wykeham Review of William Hayter, William of Wykeham: Patron of the Arts (Chatto and Windus), first published in Times Literary Supplement, 11 December 1970, 1472. This is a work of piety: the offering of a man who, once a Winchester scholar and then a New College undergraduate, and later (after a distinguished career in the Foreign Service) Warden of New College and Fellow of Winchester College reckons that he owes such an offering to these two great institutions. And as he describes their architecture, or the flight of the swifts in Chamber Court at Winchester, or the New College don teaching philosophy in the sun on the grass of the cloister—or his own predecessor, doing his best with a pail of dirty water (impregnated, so legend says, with cow dung to encourage the lichens) to obliterate the harsh line between old masonry and new—one is again aware of the way the two colleges tug the heart-strings of those who have lived and studied in them. Sir William Hayter’s book is not a work of research but of appraisal, by no means wholly uncritical. Thus he tells us that New College gate-house is ‘wrongly placed; too close to the antechapel to make much effect’. With his love of symmetry he would, perhaps rightly, have preferred the gateway in the middle of the south range of the quadrangle. But we may be less ready to agree when the application of this same canon disturbs him over the setting of the library window out of relation to the arch below; or when it reminds him that in a cloister with an even number of bays on both the longer and the shorter sides, there is no possibility in any side of a central opening. But his comments, arising from an exceptional familiarity with the buildings, are always interesting, and give the book a real originality; and the pictures (including some in colour, of the glass at Winchester and New College, of Wykeham’s splendid crozier and mitre, and
of the famous jewel) avoid that sentimentalizing of the subject to which photographs are so often prone. For the architecture and the wood carvings certainly, they record faithfully and finely the present state of Wykeham’s legacy. What did he achieve with these sumptous benefactions— which, we are told, his architect planned for him, though the large ideas were his? The readiest answer is that he translated into ‘modern’ terms the principles of the monastic life. His colleges were, externally, fortresses, the blank walls offering seemingly no encouragement whatever to the outside world. Benedict, writing in the Rule of the spiritual dangers which a journey outside the monastery may involve, orders that the brother who has made such a journey, throughout the daily services on the day of his return must beg his brethren to pray for him lest haply he may have caught sight of something, or heard or taken part in some idle talk, while outside the monastery … To leave it is in very truth to put the soul in mortal danger. The contagion of the world’s evil was menacing. In Oxford there were indeed physical as well as spiritual dangers for the ‘student’ in the days when Wykeham formulated his plans, when student riots with the townspeople ended, sometimes, with loss of life. What he did was to protect his community from the world outside, and to provide within a society in which life, austere in some ways, was in others (for the time at least) completely satisfying: in the chapel for instance, where they might, as he said, contemplate the images of the Blessed Virgin Mary and many other saints; the sculpture, the windows filled with glass, the divers paintings and many other lovely works of art, all curiously wrought.
He might so well (if men of his generation had been interested in such things) have added, as does Sir William, the cry of the swifts; or the great trees in those peaceful gardens: or the streams and the long water-meadows. His colleges have almost forced on those who lived in them the companionship in beautiful things, have given the setting for quiet reflection and unhurried friendships. Successive generations have treated his legacy with scant respect. Most of the magnificent stained glass is lost. The buildings have been altered, often drastically, almost always for the worse. The sculpture has gone, with only a few pieces or fragments left to attest its quality. But, even so, what remains of his legacy has been, it is no exaggeration to say, of supreme importance to many who have had the luck to enjoy it.
The Aims of History Review of David Thomson, The Aims of History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), first published in English Historical Review, 86 (1971), 597. Books about historiography may range between critical philosophical writings and the parerga of historians, and some excellent works in all categories have appeared in recent years. The Aims of History by the late David Thomson lies in about the middle of this range. It does not eschew philosophical questions (although it may be counted to be philosophically naïve), and it gives a good commonsensical account of the epistemological knife-edge upon which historical thinking balances. Otherwise, it is concerned to explain some of the difficulties and rewards of the historian’s craft and the ‘cultural and educational’ benefits the reader of its products may expect to enjoy.
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Review of Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ed. Joseph O’Malley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), first published in Spectator, 226 (1971), 192–3. In 1843, at the age of twenty-four or so, Karl Marx wrote down in a large notebook his thoughts about some passages of a work known to us as Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. What he wrote was not printed until 1927, but at the time he intended to revise it for publication and in 1844 he wrote and published an Introduction to it. These are the two pieces of writing here published in translation, together with a learned, if somewhat naïve, introduction by Mr Joseph O’Malley. The Philosophy of Right is Hegel’s chief adventure into moral philosophy, but the very small part of it which Marx commented upon is concerned with the institutions of government of a modern European state; and Marx admitted that his purpose in writing was to forward the ‘fight against constitutional monarchy, as a self-contradictory and self-destroying hybrid’. That anyone with such a purpose should cast his thoughts into the form of a critique of Hegel’s thoughts may seem odd; why not examine and expose the defects of the institutions themselves? But it must be understood that Marx belonged to a generation of unfortunates who could not think about anything without engaging in the often tedious business of explaining exactly how their thoughts related to what they took Hegel to have said. This had been going on ever since Hegel’s death in 1831; Marx came to it late. It was first engaged in by some self-conscious young men who had sat at the Master’s feet in Berlin, who had felt the force of his charisma and were genuine students of his writings. But, whereas Hegel was a masterful original thinker, these were epigoni intent upon eliciting from his writings a creed ‘which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved’. Part of
this creed was believed actually to be found in the writings of the Master, but for them the more interesting part was an elaboration of what they took to be the ‘consequences’ of the Hegelian philosophy. There were many such consequences, but first in importance was an allegedly new view of religious belief. As part of an elaborate argument Hegel had said that all deities reside in the human breast; they were ‘thoughts’ and in some respects the most important thoughts ever to be entertained by human beings. From this, these disciples advanced to conclude that religious beliefs were thoughts of a peculiarly corrupting kind, namely, illusory wish-fulfilments indulged in as consolations for the unhappinesses and frustrations of human life; they represented, not the great intellectual and moral achievements Hegel had supposed, but merely a sordid ‘self-alienation’ of human beings. Again, Hegel had said that world history was the self-realisation of ‘Spirit’ or God, achieved in a process of ‘criticism’ or ‘dialectic’; these disciples reduced the process to a formula and concluded that what was being ‘realised’ was the human race: humanity was God. And so on. Such notions, or their like, had long been familiar to esprits forts, but for these they were lessons they believed themselves to have learned from the Master. Thus, in the course of a few years, the ‘philosophy of Hegel’ became a palimpsest in which the original was scarcely to be discerned underneath the ‘interpretations’ of such writers as Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, etc., each proclaiming a saving dogmatic ‘truth’ (about religion, art, history or human activity) purporting to be a ‘consequence’ of Hegel. The mission undertaken by these writers was to release mankind from intellectual error by the ‘terrorism of pure theory’ and to proclaim the agnostic apocalypse of scientific knowledge. This enterprise was well advanced when Marx (some ten years junior to its initiators) joined the circle. The urge to cast his thoughts into the form of a critique of Hegel was irresistible; but the only Hegel he knew was one already reduced to formulas;
not a Hegel to inspire thought, but one adapted for use. And this suited him very well because he and his companions (Moses Hess, Engels, Lorenz von Stein, etc) had other concerns. These philosophers, as he said later, had interpreted the world (Hegel?) differently; the point now was to change it. They had ‘unmasked’ the self-alienation of religion; he was concerned to use their formulas to ‘unmask self-alienation in its secular forms.’ The ‘critique of heaven’ was to be transformed into a ‘critique of earth’. What they had done with Christianity, he was to do with capitalism. Whereas Stirner had announced that every work of art (and, indeed, every recognition of ‘truth’) was a self-alienation, Marx was concerned with the conditions in which homo laborans was self-alienated in his artefacts. The apocalypse descried was not merely a release from error but an emancipation from slavery. All this is briskly set out in the Introduction to the so-called Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Much of it is taken from Bruno Bauer and from Feuerbach, but to everything he took Marx always added a touch of vulgarity and exaggeration: no writer is so adept at turning a possible truth into a superstition. He halfapologises for ‘dealing with a copy’ (i.e., Hegel’s philosophy) instead of ‘directly with the original’—the political institutions of Germany. But, he says, this is unavoidable. The conditions in Germany have already been ‘refuted by history’; they are ‘beneath the level of history’ and thus ‘beneath criticism’. The rest of Europe (particularly France) has passed on leaving Germany a ‘comic ghost’, the last outdated relic of the ancien régime. All that is left standing to criticise and to refute is ‘the German philosophy of the state’, a rickety affair purporting to ‘justify’ the ‘conditions in Germany’. The Critique itself is an odd performance; so far as Hegel is concerned totally worthless. Briefly, Hegel had understood a human community to be persons whose terms of association reflected their characters as rational free agents. The idea ‘state’ was that of a community whose order answered perfectly to their characters. The early part of the Philosophy of Right is concerned
to establish human beings as rational free agents (as ‘wills’); and, among much else, to show that they can be neither persons governed solely by their individual consciences, nor persons joined merely in respect of satisfying one another’s wants, but must be persons ‘organically’ joined in the recognition of the authority of a vernacular language of moral intercourse. And he ended his work by saying something about the institutions of government appropriate to such a community (namely, in his opinion, constitutional government, equality before the law, public trial by jury, popular participation in legislation, a disinterested bureaucracy, freedom of the press, etc) and by considering in what respects some of the current institutions of Prussia answered to what in principle was required. Marx says nothing directly about the starting-plan of Hegel’s argument, and he mistakes its general tenor. Instead of understanding Hegel to be asking the question, What is the character of a society of rational free agents—persons in respect of being ‘wills’?, that is, What is the idea State?, Marx understands him to be offering a demonstration of how the Absolute Idea (regarded as a kind of cosmic demiurge) creates the empirical actualities of political sentiments and relationships. He turns Hegel’s ‘speculative philosophy’ into the vulgarest kind of Platonism to be disposed of by the Feuerbachian formula. And he mistakes Hegel’s not always felicitous attempt to find the quantum of rationality in some of the well-known institutions of European law and government for an attempt to deduce some of the more antiquated of these institutions from the Absolute Idea and thus to justify them. In short, Marx fathers upon Hegel almost everything Hegel himself expressly disclaimed. Thus, Marx’s Critique is an eloquent witness to the havoc wrought by Hegel’s self-appointed followers when they transformed his philosophy into a creed and then, loath to believe him beyond redemption, undertook to convert him (dead) to its formularies or to expose him as an apostate. One wonders why they should bother with the old man; but, somehow, it seems
to have been as important to them that he should believe or be convicted of unbelief as that they should be correct in their own conclusions. Nor, so far as Marx himself is concerned, is it a very significant piece of writing. Ideas are adumbrated which were later to be developed or discarded, but it is impossible to find in it more than the very vague and fanciful beginnings of what he had sought for in vain in Hegel: an account of the order of a society ‘adequate to the social nature of man’. The Critique and its Introduction are, then, birds of inconsiderable feather, but perhaps not totally commonplace: which of us at the age of twenty-four could have collected together a heap of rubbish of such dimensions and variety and displayed it with such confidence?
Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State Review of Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), first published in European Studies Review, 5 (1975), 217–20. This book is a careful and comprehensive consideration of all that has come down to us of what Hegel, from time to time, said and wrote about human association and in particular about that difficult and ambiguous form of association which emerged in modern Europe and which we are accustomed to call a ‘State’. Its plan is chronological and it is concerned to trace the course (I think somewhat unfortunately called the ‘development’) of Hegel’s thoughts on the many different topics and problems which fall within this subject of reflection. While scholars have often sought to read the Philosophy of Right (1821) in relation to what is called Hegel’s philosophical ‘system’, Professor Avineri (recognizing it as Hegel’s last and most complete treatment of the theme of human association) presents it to us as it emerges from writings concerned with the history of human associations and with Hegel’s responses to his current social and political circumstances. Thus, we hear less about the Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia and more about Die Verfassung Deutschlands, the French revolution, German ‘nationalism’ and Hegel’s reflections on the ‘problem of the poor’ in an industrial society. This is a difficult enterprise: the materials are miscellaneous, fragmentary and often obscure. It has been pioneered by the collectors and editors of Hegel’s Schriften (notably J. Hoffmeister), in this country by T.M. Knox and Z.A. Pelczynski and in America by W. Kaufman; indeed, it may be said to be our generation’s particular adventure in the study of Hegel. Professor Avineri’s contribution is to have put it all together for us in a continuous critical narrative of Hegel’s intellectual engagement in respect of
what is loosely called ‘politics’. It is a learned and distinguished performance. Hegel was a man of keen reflective observation, deeply concerned with the political circumstances and dispositions of his time and lively in his response to them; a great reader of political history, of the works of the early economists, of the writings of current publicists and of newspapers; a resilient European who (like many of his contemporaries) recognized the French Revolution and the Napoleonic disturbance of the continent as a modernity to be responded to; and a man ready to put pen to paper in letters to his friends, in unpublished fragmentary pieces and in journal articles commenting upon what was afoot and notable for their circumstantial focus of attention. And so, apart from juvenilia, the story begins in Berne in 1795 with a criticism of the oligarchic government of the Canton, of the tyranny it exercised over the Pays de Vaud, of its lack of a code of law and of defects in its judicial and tax system, and this criticism extended into some more general reflections on representative government and citizenship. It continued with an examination of the constitution of Württemberg, with various fragmentary pieces concerned with the virtues of the ancient Greek polis and the inferiority of the Roman Imperial régime to that of the Republic, with a critical piece on the political condition of Germany, and (at the turn of the century after Hegel had moved first to Frankfurt and then to Jena) with a substantial piece known to us as The German Constitution and the two versions of the Realphilosophie. In all this writing Hegel is mainly concerned with institutions and arrangements but he may be seen to be exploring what may be called a negative identification of a still largely notional association which he usually calls a ‘State’. It is negative because the procedure is one of exclusion, and it is little more than identificatory because the terms are descriptive and concern characteristics. Thus, a ‘State’ is said not to be an association in terms of a religious confession or of a ‘national’ consciousness. Nor is it association in terms of the managerial directions of a bureaucracy. And here
I think Professor Avineri could have done well to call attention to the language Hegel uses to distinguish this kind of association; it is the language of mechanics, of levers and cogwheels, the language of the Cameralists, and what Hegel is here excluding was very much the current conventional German conception of a ‘State’. Nor, again, is a ‘State’ an association instrumental to the achievement of a common substantive purpose, or for the protection, promotion or reconciliation of the ‘interests’ of individuals in their concern to satisfy their contingent wants. And so far as a positive identification of a ‘State’ is concerned, Hegel says little more than that it is an association of persons wedded to the enjoyment of a multiplicity of substantive conduct and to the defence of the association against external attack and internal disruption. He thinks such an association to be but barely intimated in modern European history, but (remarkably enough) to have been promoted by the French Revolution. And he knew that the last place to look for it was among the peoples of what had once been called the Empire of the German Nation—peoples who had hardly emerged from the condition of being tenants and the employees of tenants of the owners of patrimonial estates. Such ‘States’ might emerge in Germany; indeed, they were on their way, aided by the Napoleonic shakeup and hindered by the claims of ‘nationalism’. But Germany was not a ‘State’ and there was no reason why it should ever become one; although its chance of doing so would be immeasurably greater under the aegis of Austria and not Prussia. These, then, were the early ‘political’ thoughts of Hegel; most of them were little more than sympathies or convictions and many of them objections to current political dispositions. In the next stage of this intellectual biography Hegel is concerned with the more thorough specification of a human relationship which was coming to occupy the attention of modern Europe almost to the exclusion of all others; namely, association in terms of the satisfaction of wants, what Hegel was later to call bürgerliche Gesellschaft, an expression which has unfortunately come to be
translated as ‘civil society’. He was convinced that such writers as Fichte and St Simon who thought that this was itself a ‘State’ were mistaken, but his immediate concern was to understand this relationship as it had come to be in an ‘industrializing’ Europe. And he had many interesting and some original things to say about it. He recognized that it had come to be an investment of human energy and inventiveness in an endless proliferation of contingent wants, that the connection between what a man did and the satisfaction of his wants was becoming more and more remote, that it was a cut-throat competitive relationship in which conduct was centred upon the satisfaction of the wants of assignable individuals, that it generated modern poverty as well as modern wealth, that its continuous changes of direction increased rather than diminished the natural insecurities of a human life, that in it human conduct is participation in a process articulated by economic ‘laws’ and that although it might be governed by some man-made rules, these rules were merely instrumental to the success of the enterprise of creating and satisfying contingent wants. The account this book gives, then, of Hegel’s exploration of the political and economic world of his time reveals clearly where his sympathies lay and what he valued in the French Revolution, in the Napoleonic shake-up of Europe and in some of the new constitutions (those of Bavaria, Württemberg and even Prussia), even more clearly his antipathy to German ‘nationalist’ sentiment, religious and educational uniformity and most of the doctrines and practices of ‘enlightened’ government, and it displays his profound misgivings about the industrial engagement to which modern Europe was wedded. So far as his sympathies and opinions go he seems to have been closer to Benjamin Constant, a writer he much admired. But, unlike Constant, Hegel was a philosopher concerned not merely to identify a ‘State’ in terms of desirable characteristics (e.g., religious freedom, ‘representative’ government etc.) but to distinguish an ideal mode of association and to theorize it in
terms of its postulates. And Professor Avineri’s contention is that we are better able to follow him in this engagement if we see it as the culmination of his reflections on contemporary ‘politics’ and industrial undertaking. In what respects can this contention be sustained? There is this much to be said for it: the Philosophy of Right is a dreadfully miscellaneous piece of writing; it abounds in passages (particularly footnotes) which condense or refer to the views and opinions to be found in Hegel’s earlier writings, and unquestionably Professor Avineri’s careful study of these writings makes these passages much less cryptic. Moreover, Hegel allows himself very considerable excursions into matters of contingency, written at the level of what he would recognize as ‘understanding’ not ‘reason’, concerning constitutional arrangements, the organization of corporations, wars, kinds of family structure etc., the meaning of which becomes clearer when we are acquainted with what Professor Avineri has to tell us. In short, if the contention were that the Philosophy of Right, as a piece of writing, ‘cannot be fully understood unless it is related to Hegel’s earlier writings on … religion, society and politics’, then Professor Avineri has sustained it not only in principle but in most revealing detail. But if what is being said is that the design and terms of the argument in which Hegel explores the ideal mode of association he calls the ‘idea state’ require this context in order to be properly understood, then I think a serious mistake is being made. This argument is conducted on an entirely different level of thought. We are told that what emerges from such pieces of writing as The German Constitution and the Realphilosophie is the model of a modern state, free as much as is possible from the shackles of the old absolutism, based upon representation, served by a rationally oriented bureaucracy, allowing ample space for voluntary association and trying to strike a balance—perhaps an
unattainable one—between homo economicus and zoon politikon, and that ‘nationalism has no future’. But these are not the terms in which Hegel explicates that ideal mode of association he calls der Staat, and this is not the relationship he seeks to establish between it and other modes of association—those of love, of virtue and of the satisfaction of wants. What we need to understand if we are to understand this is not what Hegel saw in the French Revolution, what he imagined in Napoleon, what dismayed him in modern industrialism, what he hoped for from Niethammer’s reforms in Bavarian education or, indeed, any of his responses to Zeitprobleme, but what he means by der Geist, by das Subjekt, by der Wille, by Sittlich, by das Recht and by das Gesetz, none of which are merely contingent states of affairs to be preferred. And it is, perhaps, an indication of how poor an introduction these earlier writings are to Hegel’s civil philosophy that in following where they point Professor Avineri (admirably thorough elsewhere) finds little place for an exposition of these concepts when he comes to the Philosophy of Right, that there is at least the suggestion that Hegel understood the ideal mode of relationship he calls der Staat to be a correction of what he found wanting or undesirable in modern industrial enterprise, that the ‘freedom’ inherent in das Subjektive is interpreted as a somewhat banal ‘defence of pluralism’ and that the central concept of der Staat (non-instrumental or ‘moral’ law) is reduced to three pages on ‘the rule of Law’ and trial by jury. There are deep obscurities in the Philosophy of Right—what really is the relation of die bürgerliche Gesellschaft and der Staat?—but no reference to Hegel’s political opinions and sympathies will help to resolve them. But this is a small reproach. What the book sets out to do it does admirably. And on the way it corrects some gross misconceptions of where Hegel’s political sympathies lay.
The Vocabulary of a Modern European State First published in two parts in Political Studies, 23 (1975), 319– 41, 409–14. I am concerned here with the words and expressions used in recognizing the character and identifying the characteristics of a modern European state and its like elsewhere in the world. The somewhat novel associations of human beings which came to be called modern states emerged slowly, prefigured in earlier European history. The manners in which they emerged were as diverse as the local conditions from which they sprang were various; their fortunes were uneven, their durability unequal. They were the outcomes of conquest, the extinction of palatine independencies in feudal realms, the consolidation of fiefs, purchases, the marriage settlements of rulers, multiple treaties, rebellion and secession. Their boundaries were often the lines upon which contingent hostilities came to rest and their human components were determined by the contingencies of earlier territorial settlement. Each was a piece of inhabited territory with a government: land (often ill-defined), people (often miscellaneous) and a ruling authority (usually in the course of seeking recognition). Each was the outcome of human choices to do this rather than that in contingent situations. In some (those of more recent appearance) there has been evidence of a design not merely to do something but to create a ‘State’; in a few there is evidence of a grand design. Even the most substantial was a ramshackle construction and has remained so. But although the differences which distinguished one from another were large and have never been extinguished, they came to be recognized as versions of, or as approximations to an emergent ideal character. From one point of view the history of modern Europe is the story of the emergence and dissolution of these associations; what used
to be called the rise and fall of states. From another point of view it is the story of the emergence of a novel mode of association, of the exploration of the ambiguities of its character and of the reflective engagement to understand it. And in the course of time a state became eligible for the sort of enquiry Aristotle devoted to the ideal character called a polis or that which Maitland devoted to Township and Borough, enquiries concerned with practices and procedures but also with beliefs. In these circumstances, the word ‘State’ (and its equivalent in other languages) was added to the European vocabulary of association and, after some hesitation began to be used alongside older expressions (such as ‘realm’ or ‘principality’) to denote these emergent associations. It began as a metaphor; like the word ‘nation’ in its modern meaning it pointed to an ideal character and identified it only in terms of its similarity to what was already familiar. A state was some sort of an ‘estate’, a tract of land and a condition of its inhabitants. But in order to describe this character, to recognize its most important characteristics, to distinguish between various forms of them, and to specify the beliefs entailed, an extensive vocabulary had to be invoked or invented. Many of its terms were invented and first used in relation to long defunct human associations thought to be in some sense precursors of modern states—an ancient Greek polis, a Biblical nation, a Persian or a Roman Empire, a medieval realm; and although in modern use something of their former meanings survives, they have acquired extended or contracted meanings which have sometimes been reflected in qualifying adjectives. Others of these terms (such as ‘community’, ‘corporation’, ‘partnership’ etc.) have been taken from the vocabulary of other kinds of association, religious or commercial. Words of common discourse (such as ‘constitution’ and ‘constitutional’) have been appropriated, given more precise meanings and put to use in order to specify emergent distinctions. Indeed, the whole European vocabulary of association has been ransacked for suitable expressions with which to describe and to appraise the formal character of a modem European state.
This character was puzzling and has never ceased to excite wonder as well as enquiry. But it was early perceived to have three main characteristics, each of which has acquired a vocabulary appropriate to itself: an office of authority, an apparatus of power, and a mode of association. But for a variety of reasons expressions (often etymologically distinguished) which properly belong to one of these vocabularies have been given a place which they cannot intelligibly occupy in one or both of the others. Commonly this confusion has been the outcome of inadvertence, a failure to observe the categorial differences between these characteristics and a consequent misunderstanding of their relationships to one another: the authority of an office confused with its engagements and with an apparatus of power, and all three confused with a mode of association. Elsewhere it has represented a denial of these differences or a design to recommend a certain understanding of one of these characteristics by using an expression which had come to carry with it respect or approval in connexion with another—for, of course, most of these words have acquired recommendatory or deprecatory as well as descriptive meanings and the discourse in which these vocabularies are used has always been concerned both with identification and with approval or disapproval. On other occasions a scanty vocabulary in respect of one of these characteristics has been enlarged not by appropriate invention but by inappropriate borrowing from another. Some words have acquired two distinct meanings and are thus eligible to occupy a proper place in more than one of these vocabularies, so long as these meanings are distinguished. And since consideration of these matters became a commonplace engagement which anyone may undertake, the terms of these vocabularies have for long enough been at the mercy of often negligent users. The words ‘politics’ and ‘political’, for example, already ambiguous in the Aristotelian vocabulary, are now merely rhetorical expressions, powerless to identify anything in particular. In these circumstances of considerable confusion some attempt to sort out these vocabularies may be worthwhile.
I I will begin with the vocabulary which relates to the office of rule and to its authority. We are concerned with agents, their utterances and actions, and with the considerations in terms of which these are identified, understood and responded to. The most conspicuous of these considerations relate to what is actually said or done. What is said may be true or false and where this is so (as in a statement of alleged fact) it is a pre-eminent consideration to be taken into account in seeking to understand it or to respond to it. What is said or done may be considered in terms of what the agent designs to bring about or of its actual outcome; it may be identified as wise or foolish, it may be approved as being well said or done or disapproved as being ill said or done, and its outcome may be thought to be desirable or undesirable. But besides these substantive considerations there may be another, a formal consideration, in terms of which to identify and respond to utterances and actions. This consideration is not at all concerned with the intended or the actual consequences, with the veracity, with the wisdom or the folly of what is said or done, or with the motives or virtue of the performer, but with the antecedent authority of the agent to speak or to act; that is, with his right or perhaps his duty to speak or act. Here an utterance or an action is not being considered in terms of its intrinsic character but in relation to the agent concerned; and the agent concerned is not being considered in terms of his disposition to do or to say this rather than that, or of his ability to evoke his wished-for response, but in relation to that in terms of which he may be recognized to have a right or a duty; namely the status or the office he occupies. Thus, the expression ‘de facto authority’, where the ‘fact’ is expressly denied the character of a right, is meaningless; and so-called charisma is authoritative only where the mystique alleged is that of an office and not that of the personal magnetism of the agent or the transparent wisdom of
his utterance. To consider an action or an utterance in terms of its authority is, then, to consider it in respect of its subscription to a practice or in relation to its place in a procedure: authoritative utterance, in respect of its authority, is always official. This consideration may be of no or of only secondary importance. A statement of alleged fact appropriately directs our attention to its purported veracity, and a consideration of its authority is invoked only when there is a question of the right of the speaker to divulge the information concerned. An argument is identified and responded to in respect of its cogency. And whether or not the speaker properly occupies the office of Gifford Lecturer is not a matter of deep concern to us who are listening to what he has to say. But its alleged authority is the prime consideration in recognizing, understanding and responding to a prescriptive or a permissive utterance. Such utterances, of course, do not enjoin a substantive response: the nod of the Speaker of the House of Commons does not tell the Member thus authorized to speak what he shall say, and the duty of an umpire to respond to an appeal does not dictate his verdict. But prescriptive and permissive utterances are distinguished in purporting to obligate or exclusively to allow response, and to seek a reason why we should acknowledge this obligation or recognize this licence is clearly relevant and is an enquiry into the antecedent authority of the utterance. And since this enquiry concerns the formal prescriptiveness or permissiveness of the utterance it cannot be satisfied by reasons which relate to such substantive considerations as the exceptional sanctity or exemplary character of the agent, the wisdom or utility of what is prescribed or permitted, or to others such as the power of the agent to enforce subscription to what he has prescribed, or to the recognition that inadequate subscription will incur a penalty. These may be good reasons for responding, but they cannot be reasons for acknowledging an obligation to respond. The word ‘authority’, then, denotes a formal consideration, independent of all others, in which an utterance or an action is
identified, understood and responded to, not in terms of what it prescribes or of the personal qualities of an agent or the confidence he inspires, but in relation to an office, a practice or a procedure, or a rule recognized as such. And where (as in an emergent modern European state) an office of authority was alleged and admitted to exist what was called for was a vocabulary in terms of which to recognize, to examine and to understand it, and to acknowledge its authority: words in which to describe what may be called the quality of its authority, words to denote the identifying marks in virtue of which to recognize its authority, words to specify its constitutive characteristics and the conditions of its proper occupation, and to express the beliefs in terms of which its alleged authority might be acknowledged or rebutted. And such a vocabulary, with which to explore and to particularize the notion of authority, was all the more important in the circumstances of early modern history because the conditions which nurtured the belief of the soldier Bates that ‘we know enough, if we know we are the King’s subjects’ had ceased to exist, and because it seemed that the causa foederis of so contingent and so miscellaneous an association as a state must be the acknowledgement of the authority of an office of rule: agreement about this might be difficult to sustain, but agreement about anything else was manifestly impossible. Many of the words and suffixes used to denote authority in a modern European state (rule, government, dominion, imperium, puissance etc., and words ending in ‘cracy’ or ‘archy’) are confusingly dual- or even triple-purpose words; they carry also an identification of the considerations in terms of which authority may be acknowledged and even contingent identifications of the engagements being undertaken in the exercise of authority; and in these respects they fall to be investigated along with the words expressly devoted to these considerations. But as words signifying the authority of an office they were early seen to stand in need of an adjective to specify the alleged quality of this authority. The quality alleged was that of being independent of the authority of
any other office (such as that of the papal or imperial office) and of being superior to that of any other office within the association (such as that of chef de famille), but not of course, itself engrossing all other offices of authority. An authority of this quality emerged as an aspiration; it was claimed before it was acknowledged and it was first claimed in terms of specific denials: it was not that of an imperial fiefholder, that of a papal agent or that of a primus inter pares in authority. And when, in order to denote this quality in positive terms, the adjectives ‘sovereign’, ‘supreme’ or ‘absolute’ were invoked (none was invented for this purpose), when the office was said to be that of ‘sovereign rule’, and when its occupant (if he were a monarch) was said to be princeps, a modest advance had been made in specifying one of the postulates of a modern European state recognized as a ‘free’ or independent association of human beings: a so-called ‘free’ or ‘sovereign state’ was merely an association ruled by an office or procedure acknowledged to have ‘sovereign’ authority. In short, an answer had been given to the question, What is the quality of the authority to rule in a state? And whether or not it was a satisfactory answer was less important than the perception that some answer was the condition of the wholly different enquiry into the terms in which this authority to rule in a state might be acknowledged. For authority rests upon acknowledgement, and acknowledgement must be in respect of some specification of the quality of the authority. But confusion intervened. The word ‘sovereign’ had been invoked to identify the quality of the authority of the office of rule in a state. It denoted an authority conceptually released or absolved from having to acknowledge certain conditions and one whose prescriptions were uniquely obligatory for those who fell within its jurisdiction. This is how it appears, for example, in the writings of Bodin and Hobbes, the former particularly concerned with the consequential character of sovereign rule and the latter with how such an office of authority might be ‘erected’ and with specifying its conceptual conditions. The accounts they give of ‘sovereign’ rule and its conditions may be wanting in some respects
(e.g. their unfortunate identification of the exercise of authority with the issue of commands), but it was left to others to muddle the enquiry by identifying (or pretending to identify) ‘sovereign’ authority with unconditional, arbitrary, undifferentiated and ‘total’ authority—a confusion from which it has never recovered. The enquiry to determine the quality of the authority of the office of rule in a state was converted into (or read as if it were) a squabble between those disposed to assert its unconditionality and those disposed to stake out circumstantial limits. These expressions (‘arbitrary’, ‘total’ etc.) may, with some allowance for hyperbole, describe the vague aspirations of some rulers, but they cannot qualify ‘authority’ which is necessarily conditional. And the word ‘sovereign’ has suffered other and even more damaging corruptions. Invoked to specify ‘authority’, it has been used to specify the ‘power’ which may partner authority in an office of rule and to specify power in respect of its magnitude. Where the magnitude represented by the word ‘sovereign’ has been identified as ‘limitless’ or ‘total’ power, not only is there an end to any rational consideration of the character of this power (power can never be ‘total’, not even where it is attributed to a socalled ‘first cause’), but the way has been opened to the muddled denial of sovereign authority to any office whose prescriptions and permissions may be responsive to the ‘pressures’ of those obligated, or to one unable to overcome all possible opposition and to secure for them specific performance on all occasions. Power to penalize non-subscription to authoritative utterances may be one of the outcomes of the recognition of their authority, but it cannot be a condition of their authority. Invoked, to specify authority of a certain quality, the word ‘sovereign’ has been used to specify a certain constitution of the office of rule, thus ‘sovereign’ rule is identified with any constitution of authority. The reputed arbitrariness of its shape invites confusion with an alleged quality of supremacy. Invoked to specify a postulate of the office or procedure of rule in a state (the quality of its authority), inadvertent thinkers have used the word ‘sovereignty’ to represent a feature
of the procedure and have embarked upon a nonsensical enquiry designed to locate it among the components of the procedure, as if the authority of a procedure could be identified with some distinguishable part of it. Invoked to specify a quality of the office or procedure of rule in a state, the expression ‘sovereignty’ has been severed from its connexion with the engagement of ruling and has been used to denote one of the considerations in terms of which this engagement may be acknowledged to have authority (for example, the expression ‘popular sovereignty’) or to specify a state in terms of a mode of association. And so on. Promiscuous attachments have almost destroyed whatever virtue the expression ‘sovereign’ once had. I turn now to that part of the vocabulary of authority which relates, not to the quality of the authority of the office of rule in a state, but to the considerations in terms of which the office (or, indeed, any of its contingent acts and utterances) may be acknowledged to have the authority they are alleged to have. Prescriptive and permissive utterances which invoke authority differ greatly in the degree in which they disclose the conditions of the authority they invoke. Indeed, they may be arranged in a hierarchical scale in this respect. The least revelatory are, I suppose, ad hoc commands or instructions issued by an assignable agent and addressed to an assignable agent, and ad hoc exclusive permissions similarly issued and addressed: a traffic controller’s raised hand, a parade-ground order such as ‘Marker, fall in’; or instructions such as ‘Remove that dog’. ‘You are now free to go’, ‘I give you leave to … ’. Prescriptions such as ‘Dogs are not allowed on the premises’ and permissions which take the form of general statements of eligibility may be recognized to occupy a slightly higher place on this scale. And those which purport to be Acts of a ‘sovereign’ legislature come near the top: that is, they disclose more fully the conditions of the authority they invoke. But, no matter what point on the scale it occupies, no authoritative act or utterance is transparent. Reasons may always be sought for acknowledging or denying the authority of a prescription and for
recognizing or not recognizing the authority of a permission or the obligation (as a third party) not to frustrate the enjoyment of a permission by one who is both eligible and wishes to do so. And, although circumstantially we are not always disposed to ask for such reasons or (like the soldier Bates) are not disposed to carry the enquiry very far, the endeavour to identify and to supply them is properly recognized as an important engagement in relation to a modern state and it is one which has never lacked undertakers. Nevertheless, this engagement has not infrequently floundered. First, the enquiry has been botched by being formulated in nonsensical terms. The question, In virtue of what consideration or considerations may an office of rule be acknowledged to be authoritative? has been read as if it were, What is the ‘origin’ of its authority? or, What is the cause of my feeling of being obligated by its prescriptions? Or, What induces me to obey its command? And so on. Secondly, this enquiry about authority is often confused with other genuine, and perhaps no less important, but categorially different enquiries. Considerations are adduced as reasons for acknowledging the authority of an office or of its prescriptive or permissive utterances which are of such a kind that they cannot perform the service required of them. And this confusion has been aggravated because the words and expressions commonly used to specify the conditions of authority have become ambiguous by being co-opted into the vocabulary of power or of preference. Thirdly, because the conditions for the acknowledgement of authority must be of a certain kind (namely, beliefs about authority), it has been wrongly concluded that there must be but one definitive answer to the question: or, alternatively, because the conditions of this acknowledgement must be circumstantially various (that is, actual beliefs about authority), they have been denied a common formal character. To be brief, leaving aside some of the more fanciful contentions. First, a purported office of authority may be equipped with power to hinder or suppress opposition to what it prescribes or licences, to penalize non-subscription or even (within limits) to compel
subscription; but these are not considerations in terms of which it may be recognized to be authoritative, and the absence of such equipment or its ineffectiveness is not a reason for denying its authority. Power may accrue from the recognition of authority, but it is not itself a condition of such recognition; a rule may or may not be subscribed to, but such conformity or non-conformity is not itself an acknowledgement or a denial of a right to prescribe. Secondly, the personal qualities of the occupants of an office of alleged authority (their intentions, motives or dispositions) are not considerations in terms of which its authority may be recognized or denied. Their eloquence, virtue, enlightenment, benevolence etc. are not reasons for acknowledging their authority, and their vanity, shiftiness, depravity, stupidity etc. are not reasons for denying it. Nor is this a merely prudential distinction in which we accommodate ourselves to the sort of rulers we have learned to expect without having to deny their authority; it is a categorial distinction. Authority belongs to the office and to the occupant only in respect of his legitimate occupation of it. And further, attributions of special endowment, such as the possession of reliable information about the inevitable future course of events, or infallible knowledge of a substantive condition of things called human happiness and of how it may be achieved, are not considerations in terms of which authority may be recognized. Nor again, is this merely on account of the inherent implausibility of such attributions; even if (per impossibile) they and their like could be proved to be true they could not be reasons for acknowledging the authority of the persons concerned. Thirdly, the considerations in terms of which the authority of an office may be acknowledged are not anything to do with the substantive character or the expected or actual consequences of the prescriptions or permissions it issues, with their alleged merits or defects, with their reasonableness or desirability, with the needs they answer, the wants or expectations they satisfy, the interests they promote or are designed to satisfy or promote. These and their like are unquestionably important considerations; they may
be the terms in which an agent decides whether or not he shall obey an order, subscribe to a rule or recognize a licence, and they (or some of them) may be considerations which have a bearing upon the enactment or the repeal of prescriptions, but they are merely irrelevant in the reasoning concerned with recognizing or denying a right to command, to prescribe or exclusively to licence. Nevertheless, the recognition or the denial of authority is a matter of reasoning. And since the authority of an office or of any of its prescriptive acts or utterances is an antecedent rightfulness and nothing else, the argument must address itself to this consideration and to no others.77 In relation to a modern European state it has appeared in three different but connected engagements. The first is a philosophical engagement concerned to extricate the ideas of ‘authority’ and ‘obligation’ from considerations of other kinds with which they are apt to be confused and to understand them in terms of their postulates. Much of its attention has been directed to distinguishing authority from power and from the consequences of its exercise, and to distinguishing obligation from obedience and from approval of what is prescribed. And for me its most illuminating adventure has been the exploration of the contention that authority relates to an office and that the authority of an office is the endowment of those whose conduct is subject to its prescriptions, there being (in the words of Hobbes) ‘no obligation on any man, which ariseth not from some act of his own’—that is, an act which acknowledges the authority of an office.78 This philosophical engagement has, of [77] A mere change of circumstance may deprive a rule of its currency but not of its authority. Thus, the logic of authority was breached when an English court declared that the rule of law which required all judgements in damages to be given in sterling had automatically ceased to be a rule because the alleged interest it was designed to secure (namely, the stability of sterling) was no longer important. [78] Hobbes (like the Pentateuch) extended this principle to obligations owed to God, who enjoyed authority over Israel because
course, suffered its own confusions, but what is important here is that an understanding of authority in terms of its postulates is neither a criterion for judging whether or not an assignable office has authority nor is it a recipe for constituting a manifestly authoritative office. Hobbes’s Sovereign is a construction of postulates and therefore lacks the contingency of a shape. The second is a somewhat pedestrian practical engagement concerned to resolve circumstantial doubts about the authority of prescriptive conditions imposed upon conduct. It has to do with the validity of specified prescriptions or permissions and is a procedure of reasoning which may be arrested whenever the doubt is contingently resolved. In its lower reaches it appeals to commonplace considerations. The validity of an instruction (such as, ‘Show me your driving licence’) is sought in the answers to two obvious questions: Is the agent who gives it the occupant of an office which authorizes him to give it? Does the agent addressed come within the jurisdiction of that office? The one may perhaps be answered by pointing to a uniform or by the production of a warrant card; and if the considerations in terms of which the other may be answered are not so immediately specifiable, the reasons for specifying them are usually less urgent because the doubt is less likely. And this may be as far as we are disposed to go on the occasion. But it remains inconclusive; every such answer may be turned into a question. And although this enquiry in which these questions and their answers successively unfold themselves is concerned with exploring the validity of alleged rules by considering the procedures (that is, the rules) in terms of which they may be recognized to be authentic rules, points beyond itself to considerations of a somewhat different kind, the doubts which set it on foot may be resolved without invoking these considerations. Abraham had acknowledged him to have it; where there was no such acknowledgement (e.g. in respect of Egypt or Persia) God enjoyed merely power.
The third engagement is less of an itineration and more of an imaginative moral adventure. It is concerned to consider offices, practices, procedures, rules etc. in terms of beliefs about their authority and, perhaps, to express beliefs about authority in practices. The undertaking here is to formulate beliefs in terms of which an office of government may be recognized to have sovereign authority and thus to provide (what philosophical reflection about the postulates of authority is unable to supply and what the itinerant exploration of the validity of particular rules stops short of supplying) reasons which at once recognize and endow the government of a state with appropriate authority. And since the authority of an office of government is a function of the manner in which it is constituted and the conditions upon which it is legitimately occupied, these beliefs relate to its shape and to the title of its occupants. In short, this is an undertaking to identify an office of government in terms of its constitution and not in respect of its engagements or of its power to fulfil those engagements; to specify a constitution as an expression of beliefs about the authority to rule, to investigate constitutions in terms of the beliefs about authority they are alleged to encapsulate and to present these beliefs as reasons for recognizing their authority; and perhaps also to explore the contention that a particular existing or imagined constitution so exactly expresses and embodies currently acceptable beliefs about the authority to rule that it may be circumstantially identified as the constitution of a manifestly authoritative office of government. This enquiry has engrossed most of the attention devoted to the theme of authority in relation to the government of modern European states and is inseparable from their constitutional histories. It has had at its disposal a considerable vocabulary of descriptive expressions inherited from earlier times denoting ideal constitutional characters, and circumstantial changes in belief and practice have required it to be continuously inventive. This vocabulary contains, in the first place, some general expressions significant mainly for what they exclude: ‘anarchy’,
meaning the notional absence both of an authoritative office and of an apparatus of power; ‘tyranny’, meaning an apparatus of power, used beneficently or injuriously, but with no pretension to authority; a ‘usurper’, meaning one who circumstantially occupies (with approval or disapproval in respect of his engagements) an office of authority but because he does so illegitimately acts without authority; ‘dictatorship’, meaning the temporary transfer of an office of authority to one or more persons believed to be able to occupy it more effectively in an emergency than its normal tenants, as with the appointment of the Decemviri in Rome; and ‘autocracy’, a word which etymologically suggests an office of authority of some particular shape but withdraws the suggestion by identifying it as ‘self-authorized’ and its occupant as ‘selfappointed’. Properly speaking it identifies an office of rule in terms of the quality of its authority (its ‘absoluteness’) and not in terms of its constitution. For the rest, our inherited vocabulary of authority is composed of words each of which qualifies the abstract notion of an office of authority by giving it a shape or constitution in virtue of which it is alleged to be authoritative: monarchy, kingship, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, despotism etc. Thus ‘kingship’ stands not only for a king-shaped office of authority but also for beliefs in terms of which an office of this shape may be acknowledged to have authority. ‘Aristocracy’ and ‘oligarchy’ identify offices of rule in terms of their occupation by a specified ‘few’ deriving authority from that constitution. And ‘despotism’ is rule by one who occupies his office and acquires his authority in virtue of his ownership of property, usually land or persons. Most of these words are compound expressions which etymologically combine the specification of the shape of an office and reference to beliefs about its authority to rule: democracy means rule (kratein) exercised by an office identified in terms of its occupants (demos) and deriving its authority from that occupation. These somewhat vague and simple words reach us from the distant past, from circumstances unlike those of modern Europe
and with meanings modified by centuries of use and misuse. They remained for a long time the stock-in-trade of writers concerned to characterize the shapes of offices of governments in modern Europe: Montesquieu knew no others. But although we still resort to them, they have long since been recognized to be totally inadequate for the specification of the multifarious régimes of modern Europe. Indeed, to be asked to consider ‘the problems of democracy’ is now easily recognizable as an invitation to enter a dimly lit world of fantasy. New expressions have had to be invented and the old have been made more serviceable by the addition of qualifying adjectives. And since the offices of rule which have survived or have emerged in modern Europe have seemed to observers to approximate either to ‘kingship’ or to ‘democracy’ these are the words which have been made the nucleus for adjectival qualification in such expressions as ‘limited’ or ‘constitutional’ kingship, ‘mixed government’, ‘representative’ or ‘parliamentary’ democracy, and a dozen others. Nevertheless, characterizations of régimes even in these more elaborate terms remain mere sketches, and it has long ago become clear that if we are to have any proper understanding of the constitution of an office of government in a modern European state (and thus of the conditions in terms of which it is alleged to have authority) we must concern ourselves with actual practices, with electoral laws, with the exact status of parliamentary assemblies, senates, presidents and kings, with legislative procedures, with rules and customs which specify legitimacy, and so on. Words such as ‘democracy’, ‘republic’, ‘oligarchy’, ‘kingship’ etc. have vacated their places in a scientific constitutional vocabulary and have relapsed into merely rhetorical expressions eligible to be qualified by adjectives of no constitutional significance; adjectives such as ‘social’ or ‘liberal’ which when attached to ‘democracy’ may perhaps mean something, but do not identify the shape of an office. But our constitutional expressions not only characterize the shape of an office of government, they also (and at the same time)
identify the conditions in terms of which it is alleged to enjoy authority; and in respect of a modern European state they are terms in which it is alleged to have that quality of authority denoted by the word ‘sovereign’. Every important proposal to alter the shape of such an office is, at once, an expression of reserve in respect of its authority and a projected modification in virtue of which this reserve is alleged to be abated. The only relevant reason for a notable extension of the franchise of a parliamentary democracy is the belief that the office of government thus constituted will enjoy an enhanced authority. Thus, acknowledgement of the authority of an office of government is commonly expressed, not in terms of general beliefs, but in the words which denote the features of a constitutional shape. And this is so even when, in the constitutional turmoil which has characterized modern European history, recognition of shape and belief in authority have not yet been matched or have diverged from one another. When a new state has emerged, when a ruler occupying a recognized office has acquired new subjects, when a familiar office has been destroyed in a coup d’état, or when some other such shape-destroying or tyrannous condition has imposed itself, the creation or recreation of a recognized office of rule (composed, perhaps, of the remains of what had been destroyed or the relics of what had been cast off, or copied from the arrangements of more fortunate neighbours) and the acknowledgement of its authority have gone hand in hand in a single pragmatic, time-consuming engagement in which an oath of loyalty,79 an argument to rebut a charge of usurpation, or an interpretation of events designed to reduce the magnitude of the disruption80 may have their temporary places. In short, attribution [79] Like the engagement undertaken by all men at the age of 18 years in England in 1650: I do declare and promise, that I will be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without King or House of Lords. [80] Like the Resolution of the Commons and Lords in January 1688 designed to interpret the constitutional outcome of the flight of James II.
of authority and recognition of constitutional shape are not cause and consequent; they are reciprocally related in an engagement of mutual accommodation conducted in a shared vocabulary— an engagement which in relation to modern European states has never been concluded. And it is this consideration which gives significance to the contention that, although the authority of an office of rule is certainly an endowment, it is absurd to look for a definitive act of endowment (such as a warrant of attorney) for which a convincing reason may be given; its authority lies nowhere save in the continuous acknowledgement that it has it, an acknowledgement expressed, not of course in acts of obedience, but in the continuous recognition of the obligation to subscribe to its prescriptions because it has a certain shape. Nevertheless, we are not without some general beliefs about the authority to rule—not philosophical understandings of the idea of authority in terms of its postulates, and not beliefs which find direct expression in the features of a constitutional shape, but beliefs (dogmata) which may be adduced as reasons for attributing authority to a shape and themselves conclusions of reflection. Indeed, modern Europe emerged with two such beliefs, both of ancient lineage: the belief that the authority of an office of rule is an endowment of the grace of God, and the belief that this authority is the endowment of those who are obligated. Neither of these beliefs was designed to specify the shape of an office of rule and neither is capable of doing so, although each has suffered by being annexed to a constitutional shape. They are no less and no more than aids to reflection in considering the authority of such an office. Each has been elaborated in numerous variations and each has suffered contraction into slogans of varying degrees of insignificance: as gibberish, there is nothing to choose between ‘divine right’, ‘majority rule’ and ‘national self-determination’. Their appearance of being antithetical is illusory: from the sixteenth to the twentieth century they have together sustained what they were designed to sustain: faith in authority. Hooker distinguished but did not separate them, and
the authority of the offices occupied by Napoleon III and Victor Emanuel II was described as both ‘by the Grace of God’ and ‘by the Will of the People’; vox populi was endowed with authority in being recognized as vox dei. Their fortunes have been unequal, their meanings have changed and they have become shrouded in confusion, but so long as the authority of an office to rule was recognized as an important consideration these two have been the general beliefs invoked; modern Europe has added no significant third. The exploration of the theme of authority in modern European thought, then, has been conducted at various levels and has expressed itself both in general beliefs and in constitutional shapes, but it has not in itself been confused. There were in it the seeds of confusion. When a writer has used the word ‘consent’ it is not always clear whether he means acknowledgement of the authority of an office or ‘finding good’ (Sir Thomas Smith’s expression) what that office may from time to time prescribe. When writers use the expressions ‘contract’ or ‘covenant’ they are not always as explicit as Hobbes was about what they mean. Is it a covenant, like Abraham’s, to acknowledge authority, or is it some absurd undertaking to comply with rules which they believe to be to their advantage, or at least not to their disadvantage? And, often enough to be disconcerting, prescription is equated to command and obligation to obedience and even to approval of what is prescribed. But Rousseau, no less than Hooker, knew he was addressing himself to the conditions in terms of which an office of rule may properly be said to have authority, and whatever we may think of his conclusions he did not confuse his undertaking with any other. That was the work of some of his readers. This engagement has, of course, continued: there are still writers (a few) concerned with offices of rule in respect of their authority, who recognize constitutional shapes as contingent expressions of beliefs about authority and who continue to think that the terms in which an office of rule is recognized to have authority are not insignificant considerations but the only considerations which,
because they involve no ‘interests’, are capable of being the causa foederis of a state. But it has been overtaken by another categorially different engagement which has not only captured the larger share of attention but has misappropriated the vocabulary of authority. This has generated immense confusion. The consideration of an office of government in respect of the character of its engagements and particularly in respect of the substantive character of its prescriptive utterances, their wisdom, the interests they design to protect or promote, the effectiveness with which they achieve what they design, their likely or actual consequences, the magnitude of the approval or disapproval they evoke etc. etc. has always been a matter of concern. But in the eighteenth century it began to emerge as the matter of prime concern, more interesting than any other and in particular superior in importance to a concern with the authority of governments. This direction of attention is notable, for example, in the writings of Hume who acknowledges it as one of the considerations which distinguish him from the classical republicans whose concern lay elsewhere.81 And it has an intellectual and practical context which serves to make it historically intelligible: some, no doubt, will mistake it for part of the legacy of Machiavelli. This concern was recognized to be of a different kind from a concern with the authority of an office; the considerations attended to (its engagements, the substantive character and consequences of its prescriptive utterances and its efficiency) are categorially distinguished from those in which an office may be recognized to have authority. Even the itinerant exploration of the validity of a prescription is categorially excluded from the conclusion that it is valid by reason of its wisdom, the merits of its consequences or those of the interests it designs to promote. And the notion [81] When Hume says that, whatever their relationship with the rest of their subjects, the Sultan of Egypt or the emperor of Rome ‘at least led his mamelukes or pretorian guard by their opinion’ he did not mean belief in their authority; he meant belief that the game was worth the candle.
of ‘a firm and objective standard—the standard of “the common good”—for the final legitimation of an office of rule’ is absurd. Consequently, it is not unexpected that an engagement which announces its concern with these considerations should express itself, in the first place, as an indifference to the shapes of offices of government: For forms of government let fools contest Whate’er is best administered is best. What Pope’s couplet excludes as a foolish engagement is clear enough: the consideration of offices of government in terms of their constitutional shapes, that is, in terms of their alleged authority. What it recommends is imperfectly specified: it resorts to the ambiguous word ‘administration’ and suggests no criterion (other than efficiency) for determining what is ‘best’. But subsequent writers have made it their concern to remove the equivocation and to make good the omission: they set on foot a serious enquiry into what Mill called ‘the goodness of a government’ in terms of its engagements. Thus an office of government came to be identified as a device for formulating prescriptions to be understood in terms of what they prescribe, the interests they design to promote or restrain, or their actual outcome in this respect. In short, an office of government was recognized as an instrument for allocating and distributing satisfactions. Some of those who have followed this direction of thought, believing that all human conduct is pressure to enjoy a favourable balance of satisfactions, have identified this instrument as one among many such agencies distinguished only by its monopoly of certain resources of allocation and distribution (legislative and adjudicatory) but on that account worthwhile enlisting as a patron of one’s own engagements. And others have confessed themselves unable to find in a modern state any such distinct instrument for allocating satisfactions; they discern only (and that dimly) an agency which, marginally and intermittently, has a
larger opportunity of doing this than any others. These, however, need not delay us; their total neglect of it does no damage to the consideration of an office of rule in terms of its authority; that is, its constitutional shape. Our concern is with writers for whom an office of rule is a distinguishable instrument to be understood in terms of the substantive character of its engagements, for whom a government is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in respect of the interests it promotes and its efficiency in promoting them, but who nevertheless conduct their enquiry in the vocabulary of authority. The reason for this is not clear to me. Perhaps some of them believed that the considerations they were concerned with were considerations of authority; this seems to be the case with the defenders of the current Russian method of government. Perhaps there was no other vocabulary to hand and they failed to invent one appropriate to their enquiry.82 But, one way or another the language of constitutional shapes has been corrupted by being used to describe pieces of machinery. The expression ‘hereditary monarchy’, for example, is shorn of its reference to authority and made to stand for a device designed to reduce the likelihood of an interregnum. But what has happened is best illustrated in the misfortunes of the word ‘democracy’. This word, after it escaped from the Aristotelian vocabulary, for long enough denoted an office of government authoritative by reason of its constitutional shape; a ‘form’ of government for which an alternative name was often ‘republic’. The shape it denoted was vague, but there was no doubt that it meant a shape of some sort. In the pronouncements now to be noticed the word ‘democracy’ denotes an office of rule in respect of its engagements, what is called a ‘method of government’; that is, a device for reaching decisions designed or having the propensity to reflect certain substantive [82] Sir Henry Maine made a notable attempt. Recognizing that he was concerned with a method of governing and not a constitutional shape, with engagements and not authority, he chose the expression ‘popular government’ and rejected as inappropriate the word ‘democracy’. Popular Government (1886), p. 6.
interests. These interests have been described in expressions of varying vagueness or precision, each purporting to be a version of the salus populi or ‘welfare of the community’ assumed to be the engagement of all ‘good’ instruments of government: the Will of the People, the interest of the majority, the common good, the greatest happiness of the greatest number etc. Or, in some more sophisticated versions, the engagement of this instrument of government is said to be that of giving maximum hospitality to a plurality of ideas about what shall be prescribed, of ‘leaving the way open for new ideas and social change’, of reaching wiser rather than more foolish decisions, or even to be ‘the discovery of truth’. And the features of this so-called ‘democratic’ method are designed to correspond with these engagements: an assembly of the People, or of their representatives chosen and mandated in some effective procedure, in which current wishes or interests may emerge in debate or in vote, and this supplemented by other reputedly reliable devices for ascertaining the will of the majority (such as a plébiscite), the lex majoris partis prevailing either because (in default of an unlikely unanimity) there is no other way of reaching a conclusion, or because what is sought is the so-called will or interest of the majority and nothing else. Or this method is described as that in which ‘the surer wisdom of the Many in debate’ prevails. Or again, it is said that the active participation of the Many characteristic of this device of government has no other purpose than that of allowing as many divergent interests as possible to be heard and to exert such influence over decisions as the numbers of their adherents gives them. In short, ‘democracy’ here is, as has been said, ‘a utilitarian device’, a piece of machinery distinguished by its propensity to generate prescriptive conclusions which ‘concur with the will of the majority’ or which reflect the general convictions and the ‘daily passions’ of the majority. The criticisms which have been aimed at this method of government and at purported approximations to it in modern states, criticism concerned for the most part with its vulnerability and its incapacity to accomplish its designs, are not
our concern. But it is worth noticing that one of the commonest of these criticisms—that this method of government is liable to result in ‘a tyranny of the majority’—confirms this reading of it. If what was being considered under the name of ‘democracy’ were an office of rule in terms of its constitutional shape (that is, its authority) it could not be ‘tyrannous’. The exploration of the theme of authority in relation to the government of a modern European state, both as a theoretical enquiry and as a practical concern, has, then, suffered not inconsiderable confusion. The authority of an office of government has been confused with the characters, dispositions and beliefs of those who occupy it, with the alleged merits of its prescriptions in terms of their reasonableness or wisdom, with whether or not they are consented to by those who come within its jurisdiction, with the wants, interests or expectations they design to satisfy or actually satisfy, and with the apparatus of power available to make them effective. And it has been hampered by the misappropriation of its vocabulary for employment in a categorially different enquiry. Indeed, it may be said that the intellectual confusion which has overtaken the consideration of this theme is the product of the current indifference to the enquiry itself combined with the usurpation of the expressions designed to identify constitutional shapes (even the word ‘constitution’ taken to denote a piece of machinery in terms of its output) by those concerned with the engagements and methods of government understood in terms of their designed or actual outcome. And the corruption of the word ‘democracy’ in which it has come to mean a method of rule, not a constitutional shape, has been extended in expressions which do not pretend to qualify an office of government in any respect and are no better than rhetorical trickery: ‘a democratic frame of mind’, ‘a democratic way of life’, ‘a democratic society’. While the word ‘authoritarian’ when applied to an office of government appears to mean, if it means one thing more than another, something like ‘unacceptably managerial’; certainly nothing to do with authority.
II The second characteristic of a modern European state to be considered is the apparatus of governing annexed to the authoritative office of rule; that is, an instrument for implementing, not formulating and issuing, prescriptive utterances. The consideration here is neither authority, nor engagements but power. The word ‘power’ may mean merely ‘force’ (such as that of wind or water), or it may denote the energy a man may intentionally exert to destroy, to manipulate or to overcome the resistance of an object (or of another man considered merely as an object), but in human affairs it stands for the ability to procure with certainty a wished-for response in the conduct of another. It has to do with substantive conduct; and since it is a relationship between human beings and depends upon both the ability and the disposition of the respondent to perform the wished-for action, this certainty can never be absolute and power can never be irresistible. The considerations in terms of which the wished-for response is sought have nothing to do with a shared understanding of the parties concerned as to its worth or its propriety (its character as a subscription to a recognized rule or procedure); they are neither more nor less than the beliefs of the respondent about the consequences to himself of compliance or non-compliance with the demand. Thus, there is a relationship of power between one who makes a demand threatening the respondent with some harmful consequence if he does not comply and a respondent who understands this and nothing else to be the case and who fears the threatened harmful consequence both because of his aversion from it and because he believes that there is the intention and the resources to implement the threat; or, between one whose demand is joined with the promise of a satisfaction to the respondent which he is so far unwilling to forego that he regards it as a need, which he has no other means of obtaining and which
he believes there is the intention and the resources to provide; or, in a situation in which such fear of injury and such want elevated into need are combined. He who neither fears anything nor needs anything cannot be drawn into this relationship. Taken by itself this is a rare relationship which the absence of any conditions save instrumental considerations concerned with the satisfaction of substantive wants identifies as non-moral, or unconcerned with mores. But where it is moralized (that is, where the demand is made by one who occupies an office and is recognized also to have an antecedent right to make it) it may subsist as a subordinate consideration in imposing or subscribing to an obligation. It is often suggested that all human association must be supposed to begin in the relationship of a potentate (or a class of potentates) and those over whom he or they exercise power, this being the only ‘natural’ (biological?) relationship; or that historical evidence goes to show that such a beginning is a not uncommon occurrence, the only alternative being a supposed spontaneous co-operative association. But it is safe to say that, in general, there is little to be said in favour of these speculative suggestions; and as an account of the emergence of modern European states, nothing at all. It is true that the early rulers of many of these states stood in some such power relationship to some of their ‘new’ subjects, and that Hobbes was provoked to consider the possibility of the emergence of a civitas out of the power relationship of conqueror and conquered, but no state emerged in this manner. The conquerors were always the occupants of some office of authority; mere potentates (such as Cesare Borgia whose power derived from the wealth of the papacy) were few and failed to establish themselves as rulers of states. In the total absence of the recognition of authority, power was never enough to create and maintain an association of human beings. Nevertheless, the resources of power at the disposal of an office of rule are a consideration independent of its authority. An apparatus of power cannot, of course, endow such an office with authority; and although a recognition of its authority may
be expected somewhat to diminish resistance to the obligations it imposes (and thus marginally reduce the occasion to exert power), it falls far short of securing continuous and exact subscription to demands of which no subject is required to approve. Machiavelli, believing that there were some simple devices by means of which power might be acquired, explored this consideration in respect of the rulers of the ‘new’ principalities of Italy. Their authority being regrettably minimal, they must make the best use of their also slender resources of power if they were to survive. And the situation of the rulers of the emergent states of Europe was not dissimilar. Their authority was not so considerable that the undertaking to maintain and enhance it could safely be neglected. Indeed, from then until now this has been one of their major (and not notably successful) concerns. And to create an efficient apparatus of power commensurate with their undertakings has been the second of their concerns, entered upon in the sixteenth century and continuously pursued. It constitutes the administrative histories of these states and it has evoked a sparse vocabulary concerned with the identification of the features of an apparatus of power common (for the most part) to all modern states. The formal character of the power of an office of rule in a modern European state is no different from that exercised by any other human agency. A government is powerful in respect of the same considerations as any other human organization is powerful: in virtue of being able to formulate its demands clearly and make them known in utterances which reach and are readily understood by those who are to respond, to enlist their continuous support or to compel their continuous acquiescence, to act rapidly, economically and with the likelihood of achieving the wished-for outcome as little hindered as may be by the intrusion of unwanted consequences; in virtue of being able to collect the revenue it is authorized to collect and to use its resources to employ efficient agents—advisors, directors, secretaries, deputies, administrators, registrars, accountants, inspectors, confidential agents, clerks,
typists, messengers, porters, caretakers, warders, custodians, mechanics and assistants of all kinds; in virtue of having the use of instruments and procedures for collecting, recording, filing, retrieving, disseminating or concealing information of all sorts; and so on. This apparatus, the activities which go on in its component councils, committees, offices, bureaux etc., the expertise and the routines of those employed in them, the filing cabinets, the indexes, the safes, the telephones, the computers they use—none of it is different from what is to be found elsewhere. Indeed, this properly called ‘machinery of government’ emerged from the application of commercial techniques to the rudimentary administrative procedures and instruments of medieval kings and ecclesiastical chancelleries, and it now represents the participation of governments in procedures, instruments and devices of power all of which are at the disposal of anyone who can afford to use them. Nor is this apparatus of governing distinguished in being a notably unconditional exercise of power. Its employment is no less specified than that of a commercial corporation, and while it may enjoy certain immunities and a not inconsiderable opportunity of concealing malpractice, it may be subject to special conditions and the conduct of its officers is not exempt from the obligation to subscribe to the ordinary rules of the association. It is, however, unique in having the authorized monopoly of certain sources of power, the chief of which are military force and the power to execute the judgements of a court of law: a modern European state gives no recognition to private armies or private prisons. This characteristic of a modern state, the authorized apparatus of power at the disposal of its office of government, is, then, a distinguishable and an independent characteristic. Power is not identifiable with authority and it is not even among the considerations in terms of which an office of government is recognized to have authority. The difference is categorial. The contingent features of its apparatus of power are neither formally nor substantively related to the constitutional shape of the office of rule. The continuous expansion of the apparatus of power at the
disposal of all modern governments, in virtue of which the least powerful is better equipped with the means of implementing its designs than the most powerful of earlier times, is not a reflection of constitutional change, it relates merely to the increase in the ability to control men and things characteristic of the five centuries of modern European history. And the multiplicity of constitutional shapes characteristic of modern Europe is not matched by corresponding differences in organizations of power. There are, indeed, differences and what they relate to I shall consider later; but they do not relate to differences of constitutional shape. The apparatus of power annexed to an office of government is, for the most part, understood and spoken about in terms of an appropriate vocabulary of expressions designed to identify its features and to specify its organization. Few of them are unique to this apparatus: factories and even universities, no less than associations recognized as states, are said to be ‘policed’, and a so-called ‘chain of command’ is commonplace. It is true that the only verbal invention of modern times designed to identify an apparatus of power annexed to an office of government is the bastard expression ‘bureaucracy’ which etymologically suggests that it belongs, like ‘democracy’ or ‘oligarchy’, to the vocabulary of authority. But only the already muddled are deceived into mistaking it for the name of a constitutional shape. The genuine and not inconsiderable confusion springs from three, not necessarily related, failures to recognize categorial distinctions. First, there is the common failure to distinguish between power and authority which reveals itself in the belief that there is a positive or negative relationship of identity or correspondence between the constitutional shape of an office of rule and the features of the apparatus of power annexed to it. Thus, it is thought that a lettre de cachet is a characteristically king-shaped feature, or it is said: ‘The year is 1984. England has its concentration camps. Democracy has disappeared.’ This, of course, is contingent muddle. There was nothing uniquely king-shaped about the apparatus of power which Thomas Cromwell began to assemble
in sixteenth century England, and nothing either ‘republican’ or ‘protectorial’ about Oliver’s major-generals. But its fatality so far as intelligible discourse is concerned lies in its being categorial muddle. Secondly, there is the belief that an office of government is itself nothing other than an apparatus of power designed to control human conduct by means of the employment or the threat of employment of physical compulsion. This misunderstanding of an office of government, in order to conceal the nakedness of its error, has evoked the disposition to use expressions which belong to the vocabulary of authority—words denoting constitutional shapes, and particularly the word ‘sovereign’—to identify or to qualify organizations or features of organizations of power, with the consequent intellectual confusion. And, no doubt, both these confusions owe something to that misappropriation of constitutional expressions in which they are used to identify methods of government understood in terms of the substantive character of their prescriptions, the interests they promote or protect and the satisfactions they distribute. When ‘democracy’ means a method of government designed to reflect the will or promote the interests of the majority it is but a small additional perversion to make it mean an apparatus of power with this engagement. Thirdly, there is the categorial misunderstanding of the apparatus of power in which power is denied the character of a relationship between human beings and is understood as a dynamic process in terms of pushes and pulls, pressure and resistance to pressure, friction, velocity of ‘communication’ and causal linkages. In short, the exploration of the theme of power, like that of authority, in relation to a modern European state has been an encounter of considerable confusion.
III The third aspect of a modern European state is its character as an association of human beings. The consideration here is neither the authority of an office of government (its constitutional shape) nor the apparatus of power annexed to it, but the terms and conditions of a human relationship; not the causa foederis but the modus foederis of an association. Human association is always in terms of beliefs and of ascertainable conditions; it cannot be understood in the terms of mechanics or chemistry, and there can be no unconditional human association such as the current use of the words ‘social’ and ‘society’ suggests. Where it is the outcome of a choice to be associated these conditions are at once the understood terms of association and the terms of a self-understanding of the associates; for example, the relationship of persons who choose to be associated in respect of the pursuit of an identified common purpose and consequently understand themselves, in this connexion, as voluntary servants of this undertaking. Where, on the other hand, there is a recognition of being related but without a choice to be related, the persons concerned recognize their situation in terms of a name (both common and proper) identifying the association and themselves in terms of some understanding of what is expected of them: ‘I am a Cherokee and this is what it means’. And if (as in tribal association) the absence of the relationship is an unknown situation, this may be as far as the associates, as associates, are disposed to go in understanding it and themselves. A modern European state in its emergence was for most of the associates both an unchosen association and one of not inconsiderable novelty. Its proper name might or might not be familiar, but the word ‘state’ identified an unavoidable association of almost unknown character and of a character still in the making. Consequently, to explore the character of this relationship, to consider not only what in fact it was but also what
it might become and perhaps what it should be made to become, was an engagement which might invoke the attention of anyone whose curiosity or ambition went beyond a wish to know what might be expected of him from day to day. The resources available for pursuing this enquiry were not negligible. The emergence of a state was not always so abrupt as to destroy the worth of analogy with what went before in trying to understand it. This was particularly the case in England where the character of the communis regni had long been a matter of reflection and where the conviction that lex facit regnum was not only strong enough to mediate the passage to modernity but, surviving some antinomian adventures, remained to distinguish English thought on this subject until well into the nineteenth century. Elsewhere, the past delivered a message which pointed, but without notable conviction, in a different direction, or one so hesitant that it afforded nothing much in the way of guidance. Here consideration of the mode of association identified by the word ‘state’ became a more speculative enquiry. But those who undertook it seriously had at their disposal some ideas and some words in which to do so. Indeed, current ways of thinking may be said to have presented them with an alternative. A state might be recognized as what was known as a societas; that is, human beings associated solely in being related to one another in terms of their common acknowledgement of the authority of rules of conduct (‘law’). Or it might be recognized as what was then known as a universitas or corporation aggregate; that is, human beings associated in terms of their joint pursuit or promotion of a chosen substantive purpose or interest. And here some specification of the purpose would be called for. But although there were writers well aware of a difference between this enquiry into a state as a mode of association and others such as those concerned with the authority of its office of government or with its apparatus of power and who were not ignorant of this distinction between modes of association, the enquiry itself was soon plunged into confusion from which it has never recovered.
The ever-changing features of this confusion are too many to catalogue; I will mention only a few. First, the distinction between a societas (or as it came later to be called, a ‘civil association’) and a universitas (or a corporation aggregate) was familiar, but when it was recruited for use in this enquiry about a state it proved to be elusive. In particular, the erroneous conviction that all human association must be in terms of a common substantive purpose suggested that this distinction, if it specified anything, specified merely a difference between purposes. And the proponents of a state as a societas too often mistook their concern for that of presenting societas as a kind of purposive association. Moreover, the observation that rules of conduct are a feature of both these modes of association, together with the neglect of the difference between the instrumental rules of purposive association and the non-instrumental rules of a societas, reinforced the obscurity of the distinction. And further, the notion of universitas had to be emancipated from certain disqualifying features (its voluntary character and its character as the creature of legal authority) before it could be used in relation to a modern state. Secondly, the significance of this distinction was considerably reduced and the temptation to blur it increased by the observation that a modern European state as it emerged from a medieval realm or from a patrimonial estate exhibited features which suggested both these modes of association; the proportions might vary, but nowhere was it manifestly the one to the total exclusion of the other. Thirdly, the recognition that it was circumstantially impossible for a particular state to survive as a purposive association in one idiom was often mistaken for the conclusion that it could not sustain this character in any idiom. For example, the conviction of the politiques that France could not survive as a universitas in a religious idiom was too hastily translated into the conclusion that it must become and be understood to be a civil association. But the confusion which has overtaken this enquiry has not sprung from the indistinctness, the inadequacy or the inappropriateness of the modes of association canvassed (either
as descriptions or as recommendations) in relation to modern European states. It is a confusion between this enquiry, concerned with a state as a mode of association, and the other categorially different enquiry concerned with the authority of an office of government. And its chief sources have been, first, the disposition to conduct it in words which belong to the inappropriate vocabulary of authority; secondly, when an appropriate vocabulary of its own was invented, the disposition to regard its terms as constitutional or authority words; and thirdly, the intrusion of terms—such as the word ‘nation’—which purport to disclose conditions of association but which specify no mode of association. The categorial distinction between the terms of association and the authority of the office of government has been obscured on account of a confusion between the constitutional shape of an office of government and another quite different aspect of such an office which is necessarily related to the mode of association, namely, the character of its engagement. Thus, governing an association devoted to the pursuit of a substantive purpose, in which the associates are related in terms of the joint pursuit of this purpose, is necessarily a managerial engagement. Its government, however it may be constituted, is concerned with the exploitation of the appropriate resources of the association in the furtherance of its purpose, with the actions and utterances in which the associates shall currently pursue their joint purpose and with rules of conduct recognized to be instrumental to the undertaking. And governing an association which has no substantive purpose, in which the associates are not related in terms of any common undertaking, cannot be managerial engagement; there are no resources to be exploited and no conduct to be directed so that it contributes to the success of an undertaking. The engagement of its government, however it may be constituted, is nothing other than the care and custody of the necessarily non-instrumental rules which are the terms of association. In short, the mode of association and the engagement of its government are necessarily related; to enquire into or to specify the one is to enquire into or
to specify the other. But there is no such relationship between the constitutional shape of an office of government and the character of its engagement, and hence none between the terms in which such an office is recognized to have authority and the terms in which the associates are joined. There is nothing whatever in the character of either a societas or a universitas which requires its government to have a democratic, an oligarchic or any other particular shape. And the electoral rules which may encapsulate beliefs about the terms in which an office of government may be recognized to have authority do nothing to specify the engagements of those who legitimately occupy it. Nevertheless, much of the enquiry concerned with a modern state in respect of its mode of association has been conducted in the language of constitutional shapes. Montesquieu, for example, a writer more consciously concerned than most others with this enquiry, used the word monarchie to denote a state understood as a societas and république for a state understood as a universitas, its substantive purpose being specified as la vertu. Of course, he did not think that a civil association must have a king-shaped office of government or that a state as a purposive association required some sort of republican shaped government, but the confusion is neither unique nor innocuous. Those who now use the word ‘democracy’ to stand for a constitutional shape, a method of governing, an apparatus of power and a mode of association follow in his footsteps; they may not confuse themselves but they are agents of confusion. And the new expressions which have been invented and the old which have been seconded to describe or to recommend a state in respect of its terms of association and a government in respect of its engagement have not been conspicuously successful either in avoiding this confusion or in specifying what they purport to specify. The traditional expressions available to modern writers with which to identify a purposive association and its ruler in respect of his managerial engagement were ‘lordship’ (seigneurie) and ‘lord’ (seigneur). And for a long time the expression ‘seigneurial
government’ was used analogically to identify the engagement of the ruler of a state understood as an enterprise association. No doubt these words owed their place in this European vocabulary to the fact that all kings were also seigneurs, but since no king was recognized to be a seigneur in respect of his kingdom,83 the expression ‘seigneurial government’ was commonly used to describe Turkish or Muscovite rule. Its meaning, however, was soon obscured. A totally inappropriate quality of ‘absoluteness’ (whether of authority or of power was never made clear) was attributed to it, and it was confused with ‘despotism’, that is, with an office of rule in respect of its authority. But in spite of their analogical cogency the words ‘lordship’ and ‘lord’ were abandoned as identifications of a state as an enterprise association and government as a managerial engagement on account of the disrepute into which they fell. The preferred expression came to be ‘enlightened government’. In this expression, beginning as a selfdescription of the engagement of an ambitious king and standing in the end for the management by Baconian or St Simonian illuminati of a state understood as a development corporation, the idea of a state as a universitas declared its modernity. But it did not escape categorial ambiguity. An ‘enlightened’ régime as such was commonly spoken of as a ‘despotism’ (that is, as a constitutional shape), and the enlightenment of the illuminati was recognized, in a supposedly Platonic idiom, not only as a description of their engagement but also of the terms of the authority of their office. Of the subsequent expressions used to identify or to recommend a state as a universitas—socialism, national socialism, fascism, totalitarianism, communism etc. etc.—none have escaped this ambiguity and the cogency of some has depended upon it. Each is connected with an allegedly appropriate office of authority, although it may be suspected that the expressions used to identify this corresponding constitutional shape (democracy, social democracy, the authority of a ‘leader’ or of a ‘Party’ or that of a völkisch or ‘proletarian’ character) are [83]
‘The manor of England’ was never more than a cant expression.
method-of-governing words masquerading as authority words. And it must be confessed that the most recent addition to this vocabulary of purposive association and managerial government, the word ‘teleocracy’, is not an altogether happy invention: it is etymologically unfortunate in suggesting that the end pursued is itself the terms in which its office of government could be alleged to have authority. And this, of course, is impossible. A state understood as a societas and the appropriate engagement of its office of government was obscured and compromised at the outset by its alleged connexion with a king-shaped office of authority, and it was later further obscured in the muddle which related it to a so-called ‘capitalist’ economy. And, for long enough to do it almost irreparable damage, those who explored its character were mispersuaded that it, also, must be purposive association and devoted themselves to a specification of its purpose. But the expressions in which it came to be identified—‘civil association’ and der Rechtsstaat, for example—revealed themselves vulnerable to other ambiguities. What the word ‘civil’ signifies here had lost its precision long before it was destroyed in being equated with ‘desired’ or ‘desirable’ in the common use of the expression ‘civil rights’. The word ‘law’ does not itself disclose the categorial difference between the instrumental rules of a universitas and the non-instrumental, moral rules of a societas, and it is often not made to do so in the writings of those who have explored the idea of a Rechtsstaat. And the expression ‘nomocracy’ may be thought to suffer from something of the same sort of defect in this connexion as ‘teleocracy’ does in the other. Moreover, the enquiry concerning the character of a state as a mode of association has suffered damage in being conducted in empty, irrelevant or ambiguous terms. The word ‘social’ is empty (alleged association without any specific terms of association), and the word ‘liberal’ has been emptied of any exact meaning in relation to the engagement of an office of government; neither is capable of identifying any mode of association. A distinction between modes of association has been sought in the obscure and
certainly irrelevant distinction between a ‘pluralistic’ association and a ‘sovereign’ office of government. And the enquiry has been conducted in such ambiguous terms as ‘freedom’ or the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’, each of which has, or may be alleged to have, a precise meaning in respect of different modes of association but are worthless for specifying a mode of association unless and until that meaning is spelled out and detached from any reference to the constitutional shapes of offices of government. For example, both a universitas and a societas may each be identified in terms of a characteristic ‘freedom’, but not in terms of a distinction between a so-called ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ freedom, and not in terms of the contingent shape of an office of government or the quality of its authority. The ‘sovereign’ quality of the authority of the office has no bearing upon the characteristic ‘freedom’ of a mode of association. To specify a mode of human association in terms of ‘freedom’ is to identify the manner in which it preserves the link between belief and conduct. Thus, an associate joined with others in the pursuit of a common substantive purpose is ‘free’ if and because his situation is one of his own choosing and because he can extricate himself from it by a choice of his own. Freedom here is conceptually tied to the choice to be and to remain associated. And herein lies the main hindrance to the idea of a state as at once ‘free’ association and enterprise association. But where the mode of association is that of societas, the ‘freedom’ of an associate lies precisely in the absence of any common substantive purpose. The terms of association here are the acknowledgement of an obligation to recognize the authority of rules which prescribe, not satisfactions to be sought or actions to be performed, but non-instrumental (that is, moral) conditions to be subscribed to in seeking self-chosen satisfaction and in performing self-chosen actions; an obligation which is not denied in non-subscription, a subscription which is an understanding of the conditions prescribed by the rule and is itself a self-chosen
performance, and conditions of which he is not, as an associate, required to approve. But aside from these difficulties concerned with the specification of alternative understandings of the character of a modern state as an association of human beings, the consideration of this theme has been hampered by other embarrassments. As it emerged, a modern state was beyond doubt an ambiguous association, a strange and perhaps unstable mixture of civil and enterprise association. To make it intelligible in this character was an adventure in historical understanding. But the explicitly political questions were concerned with what it might or should be made to become. At first it seemed likely that these questions would be answered without having been directly asked: a state was destined to become what the ambitions of rulers of all sorts, with their attention turned upon other matters, might inadvertently make of it. Their attempts to grapple with what was known as ‘the problems of the poor’ or their military adventures might inadvertently turn it into a universitas of some sort. Nevertheless, these questions became a matter of serious concern. This concern was somewhat compromised by being ill-distinguished from a concern with the terms in which an office of government might be acknowledged to have authority, but it was more severely hindered by uncertainty and confusion about the considerations in terms of which these questions might be answered. Thus, some time ago, it began to be distracted by the doctrine that the becoming of a modern state was an evolutionary process about which something might be known but little or nothing done, and by the report of those who had studied the process itself and were well-informed about its direction that a state was an association on its way to becoming an unambiguous universitas in the idiom of a development corporation. From this interruption it has not yet fully recovered. And I call it an interruption because human associations are not processes but practices intelligible and acceptable in terms of the self-understanding of the associates.
[We have] considered some of the words and expressions used to identify and explore the character of a modern European state. It is appropriate to end with a brief consideration of the expressions ‘politics’ and ‘political’. These words indisputably refer to human utterances and they purport to distinguish, to identify and to qualify utterances of a certain sort. That both in common parlance and in more considered discourse they have become progressively more imprecise is regrettable; their different uses have ceased to have even familial resemblances. Where this is the outcome of mere carelessness it may be deplored; but where these differences represent genuine doctrinal divergences they must be accepted. The cogency of the doctrine, not the eccentricity of the vocabulary, calls for attention. Beyond this, anyone concerned to make himself understood in this connexion will, of course, hesitate to impose a new meaning upon these expressions, and if he can find in current usage a family of meanings for which we have no other expressions and one which does not conceal categorial confusion within itself, he should be content. At the outset, no doubt, he will encounter a potential source of confusion. Like the word ‘psychology’, which is employed to identify both the scientific investigation of mental or neurophysiological processes and also the beliefs, emotions, etc. of an assignable agent,84 the word ‘politics’ has acquired a dual meaning. For long enough it has been used to identify two categorially distinct engagements: that of Aristotle and that of Cleon, Peter Wentworth or Labouchère. But this is not a difficult distinction to recognize, and since we have other words for what [84] Thus, the distinction between William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) and the personality traits, beliefs, emotional responses etc. of William James called (but miscalled) his ‘psychology’ in the same sense as, for example, ‘the psychology of Madame Bovary’. Similarly, the word ‘rhetoric’ identifies a philosophical investigation (that of Aristotle or Whately, for example) of persuasive utterance and also the ‘rhetoric’ (that is, the individual style of persuasive discourse) employed by Fox in the House of Commons or Lord Abinger in a court of law.
Aristotle may be discerned to be doing (‘philosophy’ or, perhaps, ‘history’), we may perhaps reserve ‘politics’ for the engagement of Cleon and his like. Formally, the word ‘political’ identifies utterances in the active voice, the subjunctive mood, the present tense and (usually) in the first or second person plural (‘Let us … ’, or ‘Do you … ’) which may be responded to in a conditional or an unconditional ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, or with a request for elucidation, ‘For what reasons do you urge me/us to agree to do this?’ Substantively, they are utterances of one who acknowledges himself to be associated with others in terms of understood conditions which are eligible to be changed or added to in some recognized procedure and are thus capable of being considered not only in terms of their authority (that is, as authentic rules of conduct) but in terms of the desirability or cogency of what they prescribe. They are utterances about some large or small part of the acknowledged conditions of association in respect of their desirability or cogency. And they are utterances concerned argumentatively or persuasively to defend their desirability or cogency, or to question it and to propose or to canvass a change in which it is alleged they will become more desirable or cogent, this proposal being supported by reasons which relate to these considerations and addressed mediately to any who are disposed to listen and ultimately to the occupants of an office with authority to institute or to reject the proposed change. ‘Politics’ thus identified, as a concern with the conditions of an association in respect of their desirability or cogency, does not exclude the consideration of the conditions of a projected association (such as appears in the Federalist) or utterances addressed to expected or hoped-for associates. Nor need it exclude those gratuitous advisory utterances in which one who is not a member of the association whose terms of association are being considered may address those who are. ‘Political’ utterances may concern the desirability of the constitutional shape of an office of government or the credibility of current beliefs about its
authority; and they may even be a proposal for the dissolution of the association in an authoritative act. But it does suggest that to use the expression ‘political association’ is to court confusion. For, while persons may be associated for the express purpose of considering, in respect of their desirability, the terms in which they are otherwise associated (e.g. a committee for the revision of rules or, perhaps, a ‘political party’), it is inherently impossible to be associated merely in terms of the consideration of the desirability of the conditions of that association. The members of an association may be much or little engaged in considering the desirability of the terms in which they are associated but this cannot itself be the terms of their association. Further, ‘political’ utterances, concerned with the conditions of association in respect of their desirability, postulate the recognition of the authority of the conditions whose desirability they may question, even where what is questioned is the desirability of the shape of an office of authority or the credibility of the beliefs in which it is recognized to have authority. And where they contain proposals for changing that shape their projected outcome is that change made in an act of authority. But these utterances are not themselves authoritative. This does not mean that they cannot be authorized utterances. An associate may require and may be given permission to speak on a certain occasion, or he may have been given authority to speak on behalf of others or even authorized in respect of the words he shall utter, but his utterance (if it is to be recognized as ‘political’ utterance) is subjunctive not prescriptive. And, of course, ‘political’ utterance can never be unconditional. Nor does it mean that ‘political’ utterance is impossible for one who occupies an office of authority. It means only that utterances concerned with desirabilities cannot themselves be authoritative utterances which neither assert the desirability of what they prescribe nor require assent to the desirability of what they prescribe. Thus, to seek assurance about the authority of a prescription by investigating its validity, to fail to subscribe adequately to a valid prescription, and to refuse to recognize the
authority of a valid prescription are all possible engagements, but none is itself a ‘political’ engagement. The first is not concerned with the desirability of what is prescribed, the second is a wrong, and the third is an act of dissociation indulged for its own sake or as a preliminary to seeking association in terms of other conditions. These considerations suggest that the expression ‘political rule’ and its like are categorially confused. Rulers may deliberate desirabilities, they may make ‘political’ utterances recommending what they have done or are about to do in terms of its desirability, and they may babble; but none of this is ‘ruling’. Rules, which no doubt are conclusions of a consideration of the desirability of what they prescribe, do not, as rules, recommend themselves in terms of the desirability of what they prescribe nor do they require (in order to be recognized as authentic rules) the recognition of this desirability. Lastly, ‘political’ utterances, identified as utterances concerned to affirm or to question the desirability of conditions of association, are not to be confused with utterances approving the contingent substantive satisfactions which may be enjoyed by an associate or group of associates as an outcome of the operation of the conditions of association, or with utterances which urge the change of these conditions so that an outcome of their operation may be a different and an allegedly better distribution of such contingent satisfactions. This does not mean that the operation of conditions of association does not or cannot provide such satisfactions;85 it means only that conditions of association are not instruments for awarding them, that the recognition or nonrecognition of the desirability of such conditions is categorially distinct from approval or disapproval of the distribution of such satisfactions which may be an outcome of their operation, and that the reasons given for approving or disapproving the conditions [85] A complicated Finance Act provides a living for accountants and a system of law provides substantive satisfactions for lawyers. But neither the Act nor the system may properly be recommended for these reasons.
of association cannot be that these conditions provide or fail to provide satisfactions for the current wants of this or that associate or groups of associates. This consideration, which distinguishes ‘politics’ from the pursuit of individual satisfactions, convicts many current expressions of categorial incoherence. Thus far, this specification of ‘politics’ and ‘political’ identifies an engagement and distinguishes utterances which may find place in any association of human beings: the engagement of considering the conditions of association (i.e. its rules etc.) in respect of their desirability. And those who, in exploring ‘politics’ in relation to a modern state, express a determination not to lose sight of a generic character have directed our attention to an important consideration. One regrets only that the generic character they commonly attribute to ‘politics’ is so crudely identified in terms of ‘power’ (‘politics is the modification of the power situation in an association’) and that their attention is so often fixed upon the least articulate of all political utterances—a vote. But be this how it may, there are good reasons for thinking that ‘politics’ in relation to a modern state, whatever mode of association is attributed to it and whatever the shape of its office of authority, has some not insignificant differentia. Here, ‘political’ utterance is concerned with the desirability of prescriptive conditions of peculiar importance; namely, those imposed upon the conduct of an associate who is unable to extricate himself from their jurisdiction without finding himself in another such jurisdiction, and distinguished on account of the quality of their authority. And it is not remarkable that the preeminent example of this generic ‘political’ engagement should have been recognized in relation to a state, a principality or a realm, and that its undoubted appearances elsewhere (in religious associations, in factories, in commercial corporations etc.) should have been regarded as no more than somewhat distant analogues. And this, together with a confusing etymological connexion with the word polis,86 may [86] Confusing, because it has suggested that ‘politics’ may be identified with ‘polis association’ itself (as distinct, for example, from
perhaps explain why a state should have been commonly called a ‘political association’ when, strictly speaking, this is a meaningless expression: associates cannot be joined in terms of their beliefs about the desirability or undesirability of the conditions of association. Nevertheless, the considerations in respect of which we may distinguish the words ‘politics’ and ‘political’ in the descriptive vocabulary concerned with a modern European State and their relation to other words in this vocabulary are mainly supplied by the generic character of the engagement they identify. First, these words do not belong to what I have called the vocabulary of authority. ‘Political’ cannot meaningfully qualify the expressions which specify the constitutional shape of an office of authority, the quality of that authority or the more general beliefs in terms of which such an office may be alleged or acknowledged to have authority. Expressions such as ‘political authority’, dominium politicum, ‘political democracy’, ‘political institutions’, ‘political sovereignty’, ‘political obligation’, ‘political allegiance’, ‘political law’, a ‘political court’, are muddled expressions difficult or impossible to construe. Most of them would make sense if either the word ‘civil’ or ‘corporate’ were substituted for ‘political’, and something important was lost when we began to speak of ‘political philosophy’ instead of ‘civil philosophy’. Thus, a so-called ‘political institution’ is a civil institution or procedure for deliberation and debate, in terms of their desirability, about the conditions (actual or projected) of a state identified as a civil association. To call a court ‘political’ is merely to deny it the character of a court of law. And dominium politicum did not mean ‘political rule’; it meant an office of authority which included a parliament of some sort as well as a monarch. The effect of this confusion is not only to promote, for example, the misconception that there is something to be called ‘political obligation’ distinct from civil or corporate obligation, but to damage the word ‘political’ so as to make it almost worthless. ‘tribal’ or oikia association) instead of identifying it as one of the activities which require ‘polis association’ for its context.
Secondly, the words ‘politics’ and ‘political’ do not belong to what I have called the vocabulary of power. The adjective ‘political’ cannot intelligibly qualify the words which identify the features of the apparatus of power annexed to the office of authority in a state. Indeed, such expressions as ‘political power’, ‘political control’, ‘political administration’, ‘political bureaucracy’, ‘political police’, ‘political army’, merely deny what they purport to identify. Subjunctive utterances (and the reasons with which they may be supported) concerned with the desirability of what is or what it is alleged should be authoritatively prescribed, are recommendations; they may contain warnings about what may be expected to happen if they go unheeded, but they are not themselves notices issued by officeholders about penalties liable to be incurred by failure to subscribe to rules. And the detection of such failures and the infliction of such penalties are not themselves engagements in ‘politics’. Of course, power may be exerted in urging a political proposal (wealth may be devoted to organizing support for it, influential opinion may be enlisted to get it a hearing, menacing crowds may be assembled, voices may be raised, demands and threats may be uttered), but there is no spring or reservoir of specifically ‘political power’. Such a proposal may be urged in illegal acts or even in criminal conduct (so-called ‘civil disobedience’) without ceasing to be ‘political’, although the conduct is not less criminal for being related to a ‘political’ cause. But it at once surrenders its ‘political’ character if it denies the authority of what it designs to change. Civil war, which announces the violent dissolution or destruction of the association, is not ‘politics’. And the expression ‘power politics’, which may perhaps be recognized as ironical rather than spurious, means the pursuit of unspecified satisfactions in a manner not contained by the recognition of authoritative conditions of association. The words ‘politics’ and ‘political’ in relation to a modern European state do not, then, belong to the vocabularies either of authority or of power. They belong instead to the vocabulary of discourse about the engagements of governments. And if,
formally, political utterances are subjunctive utterances invoking considerations of desirability in respect of what is or is to be authoritatively prescribed, their substantive character (like that of the engagements they concern) derives from the mode of association attributed to a state. Briefly, in a state understood as a societas or civil association the occupants of the office of authority are custodians of the non-instrumental conditions (rules) imposed upon the conduct of the associates which constitute the terms of association. And ‘politics’ is identified as deliberating proposals about these conditions in respect of their desirability and making such recommendations of change as may come to mind—deliberation and utterance which reflects current convictions about the conditions of ‘civility’. Those who occupy the office of rule, who may be many or few, may be expected to participate in this deliberation, and there may be an elected or appointed deliberative assembly, but there is nothing in principle to prevent any associate offering his opinion so long as it is offered according to the current rules of ‘civility’ and so long as it is related to what is being deliberated; that is to the desirability of what is or is to be prescribed in the terms of civil conduct. It is inherent in ‘political’ engagement that it needs neither office nor power. But in a state understood as a universitas or enterprise association (a development corporation such as that imagined by Francis Bacon or the Comte de St Simon, or a religious corporation such as Calvin’s Geneva with its common purpose of ‘glorifying God’) what takes the place of an office of ‘rule’ is a board of managers concerned to deploy the human and other resources of the association in pursuit of the common purpose. And ‘politics’ is deliberation and utterance about desirabilities in respect of managerial decisions contingently to deploy these resources in this way or in that. Thus, our use of the words ‘politics’ and ‘political’ is apt to be confused not only because they are often assigned to vocabularies to which they cannot properly belong (those of authority or power), but because they are made to refer indifferently to two categorially
distinct engagements which correspond to two categorially different conceptions of the mode of association attributed to a state. And the fact that all modern states are and always have been ambiguous combinations, in different proportions, of those two modes of association and that the engagements of all governments are an ambiguous mixture of ‘rulership’ and ‘lordship’, does not extinguish the difference or lessen the confusion; it suggests only that we lost something important when we let go the words which used to mark these distinctions without replacing them with others. Lastly, if the words ‘politics’ and ‘political’ are taken to distinguish and to identify the consideration of the conditions of an association in terms of their desirability as conditions of association, this does not exclude the consideration of these conditions in other terms. Not only may they be considered in terms of their authority or in terms of the authorized apparatus of power used to secure adequate subscription to them, but they may also be considered in terms of their contingent outcomes in a differential distribution of substantive satisfactions among the associates or in terms of an engagement of groups of associates to secure such satisfactions for themselves. I think it appropriate that the expression ‘politics’ should be reserved for the first of these engagements (that concerned with the desirability of the conditions of an association as conditions of association), if only because this is an engagement for which we have no other name. But what I am more concerned to insist upon is that these engagements are categorially disparate ways of considering the conditions of an association, and that discourse may and has become fatally confused because the word ‘politics’ is commonly used indifferently to denote not only utterances concerned with the desirability of these conditions as conditions of association but also for the engagement of an office of authority (ruling or managing), for the exercise of power to secure subscription to these conditions, and (what has become the most commonplace focus of attention in relation to a modern State) for the engagement
which seeks to determine who gets what, when, and how as the contingent outcome of the operation of these conditions of association.
On Misunderstanding Human Conduct First published in Political Theory, 4 (1976), 353–67. Oakeshott was responding to four contributions to a symposium on On Human Conduct published in the same issue of Political Theory: Josaiah Auspitz, ‘Individuality, Civility and Theory’, 261–94; Hanna Pitkin, ‘Inhuman Conduct and Unpolitical Theory’, 301–20; Sheldon Wolin, ‘The Politics of Self-Disclosure’, 321– 34; and David Spitz, ‘A Rationalist malgré lui’, 335–52. I am sorry not to have enlisted enough of Hanna Pitkin’s attention and goodwill for her to have been able to open my book with the thought: ‘I wonder what he has to say here; I doubt if I shall like it, but let me try to understand.’ Instead, she treats it as if it were a suit of armour which I have hastily buckled on in order to conceal some prejudices and to protect myself from having to consider some really important questions, and she devotes herself to looking for some chinks through which to thrust her daggers. But the book is not at all like that. It is an almost pathetically ingenuous account of an enquiry followed in an orderly manner, trying not to leave too many gaps in the argument and concerned to explore some distinctions I take to be important and interesting. Who would guess from what she says that what she calls my ‘epistemology’ (it is nothing so grand as that), and to which she attributes the ‘failure’ of my book, is not much more than: all understandings are conditional and are themselves to be understood in terms of their conditions; when you see an assumption, explore it; you will never get anywhere by questioning everything at the same time; and all roads do not lead to Rome. She reports on the book as follows: it is a book about ‘politics’ (or ‘political life’); it purports to be a ‘rigorous and systematic statement of [my] political theory’ and thus constitutes a ‘fundamental methodological reversal’ of my earlier insistence upon the ‘intuitive’ character of political judgments; it displays
my well-known ‘conservative orientation’; it has been influenced by the ‘least profound sectors of linguistic philosophy’; I have now added ‘political thought’ to the modes of thought I distinguished in an earlier work; instead of being concerned with ‘lived human reality’ it is concerned with ‘ideal types’; it clarifies my ‘position’ on the British empire which I had previously left ‘ambiguous’; it denies that human beings have wants or ever seek to satisfy them; it provides a ‘definition of politics’, and so on. It is a puzzling report which does not mention any of the larger matters considered in the book; but since every item in it is either false or misconceived I will say no more about it. It displays, however, her disposition never to attend to what I have written but to mistranslate it into terms of her own and then to deplore it or to accuse me of not considering some important matter because I have not attended to it in terms familiar to herself. For example, she ends her piece with the lament that I have totally neglected the question of the relation of ‘body’ and ‘mind’—indeed, that I have so formulated my enquiry as to make this question ‘invisible.’ How about page 14 and various other passages? But it is no good pointing her to them because she would not recognize what is being said, much less think it worth considering. As for the daggers she pushes through my systematically hardened carapace: the book is not indiscriminately ‘dialectical’; there are only two mentions of Karl Marx; it is ‘abstract’; there is no recognition of the supreme virtue of ‘ambiguity’ in political discourse; ‘this is a common distinction in recent social theory’; ‘this was perhaps worth saying fifteen years ago’; ‘this is familiar to anyone who has sampled the voluminous recent literature on action’; ‘we have heard all about this from Strauss’; ‘neither Aristotle nor de Tocqueville would have said this’, it ‘never has democratic participation in mind’; it lacks ‘ecological awareness’; this ‘would surprise any linguistic philosopher today’; it ‘leaves the status of animals curiously ambiguous’, and so on. I must confess that I do not know anyone who would find these thrusts deeply damaging.
And what remains: a hobby-horse of hers which I am dismissed for having refused to mount, and her grotesque misunderstanding of my account of what I call civil association. The hobby-horse is called the relation of ‘theory to praxis’ and (what appears to be the same thing) of ‘theory to empirical fact’, where ‘theory’ is identified as recipe for praxis and empirical fact as ingredient of theory and the relationship to be considered thus specified as that of ingredient to recipe and recipe to behaviour. And if this looks too like a crude one-to-one relationship, it must be understood that its components resonate dialectically. But when I say (in effect), ‘Is not this a somewhat decrepit animal, hardly able to stand up much less than clear a fence with a rider on its back? Lead it gently to the knacker’s yard.’ The answer comes back: ‘Oh, so you are afraid to get on it lest it carry you where you are loathe to go. Nevertheless, you do get on it—is not what you call societas a recipe, and do you not purport to show the consequences of following it?’ All this is a deplorable muddle which I cannot hope to resolve here. Nevertheless, I do have quite a lot to say about theorizing and doing, and something also about understanding a human action, which may perhaps merit consideration even if it does not claim to be a ‘praxiology’. In the second part of my book I invited the reader to follow an enquiry into the character and postulates of a certain sort of human relationship which was not association for the satisfaction of wants, not a relationship for the satisfaction of a common want, not an hierarchical relationship nor one of love or affection, but which (because all human relationships are abstract and cannot deny one another) did not preclude those related in these manners from this other kind of relationship. I called it a relationship of civility because I was not the first to distinguish it, and this is what some others had called it. I identified it as relationship in terms of non-instrumental rules of conduct. And after saying something about the necessary character of such rules (e.g., that they prescribed, not actions to be performed but conditions to be subscribed to in choosing and acting), I argued that this
relationship must be in terms of the recognition of the ‘authority’ of such rules—acknowledgement, not that what they prescribed was desirable but only that they were authentic rules. I said, further (as others who had considered this kind of association had said), that it postulated that the rules were known to those thus obligated and that there was some authoritative procedure for determining the meaning of a rule in a contingent situation and the adequacy of a purported subscription to it. And I noted also that, unless a divine rule-maker were invoked, such association postulated an authoritative procedure for making rules and thus the recognition of rules and proposals for rules in terms of the desirability of what they prescribed. I said nothing about the constitution of this rule-making authority because no particular constitution is postulated: this constitution will reflect contingent beliefs about what is to be recognized as authoritative. And I said nothing about why anyone should want to be related to others in this manner (that was no part of my business). But I gave my reasons for thinking that if human beings were to be compulsorily related to one another, then this was the only kind of relationship that would not affront their moral autonomy. And what does Hanna Pitkin make of all this? ‘It is a worthless ideal type.’ It is no more an ideal type than the kitchen sink. ‘It is a recipe for what there is no evidence of anybody wanting.’ It is not a recipe for anything. ‘It is abstract.’ Of course; all human relationships are abstract. ‘It is nothing like the state of California.’ Alas, no; but then it does not pretend to be. ‘It is association in terms of obedience to rules. Cives are identified as all good boys.’ Rubbish. I never use the word ‘obey’ in this connexion. I identified the terms of this relationship as the acknowledgement of the authority of rules and the recognition of the obligation to subscribe to the conditions they prescribe; and this, on two counts, is nothing to do with obedience. ‘Cives are defined as litigants.’ They are not. A suitor to a court is not a litigant; he is one who has a court to go to if he needs it. ‘It denies that human beings have wants to satisfy, that they may love or hate one
another or that they are ever concerned with “base or materalistic considerations”.’ It does nothing of the sort. It assumes human beings to be engaged in seeking the satisfaction of their wants and denotes a relationship in terms of non-instrumental conditions to be subscribed to in doing this. ‘Politics is made out to be a secondary consideration and not the all-absorbing effort to win advantage and to enjoy the allocation of good things which we know it to be, and not the heroic adventure it may become.’ Yes; every kind of association has its ‘politics’ (that is, its concern that the conditions of association shall be acceptably authoritative and desirable in respect of what they prescribe). Here, of course, I am concerned not with ‘politics’ in general, or with what it may be in some other kind of association, but what it must be in this kind of association. And ‘politics’ here is necessarily a secondary consideration. It cannot itself be the relationship between cives because association constituted in terms of such rules cannot itself be constituted in terms of considering their desirability or making them more desirable. ‘It forbids democratic participation’. It forbids nothing whatever. Certainly, it does not postulate democratic participation, but then it does not postulate any particular procedure for making law. And so on; good shooting (or at least the gun goes off), but at the wrong target. For Hanna Pitkin my book is a disappointment: someone who many years ago wrote something she found somewhat interesting had gone to the bad; a sad decline. But for David Spitz it is the same old rubbish as before, only worse written; indeed, unreadable. This gives him an opportunity to devote half his piece to an account of these earlier essays. And here he displays himself as a confident but careless operator who prides himself in knowing what’s what and who has never risked confusing himself by looking at anything in the gallery of the world; he looks only at labels. Accordingly, he identifies what he calls my ‘message’ in these essays as an ‘appeal to tradition’, recognizes it as ‘largely derivative from Burke’, labels it ‘Traditionalism’, and finds it ‘aptly summarized by John Stuart Mill in the third paragraph of his Representative Government’, and
passes on to express wonder that anyone who believes in God or Natural Law should ever have taken any notice of it and to specify its absurdities and inconsistencies. A remarkable performance about which I will say nothing save to note that Mill in the passage invoked is considering a certain ‘kind of reasoning’ concerned with ‘forms of government’ (constitutions) and that neither this kind of reasoning nor this concern is to be found anywhere in the essays Spitz purports to be examining. When he comes to On Human Conduct he finds nothing new in it: the same old themes, the same old animosities, the same refusal to answer critics. ‘Throughout, of course, there are the usual denunciations of Rationalism’: in fact the word is never used, and what it stands for is never mentioned; I am concerned with something else. ‘His great enemy, of course, remains Bacon’: this writer is mentioned once or twice (without hostility) as the author of a brilliant vision of what a modem European state might and should be made to become, and he could hardly have been left out of an historical account of the exploration of this theme. But such blunders are as uninteresting as they are numerous (they include the attribution to me of ‘an Anglo-Hegelian organicist conception of the whole’), and I will pass them by as exhibitions of his blithe and boyish disposition to sling what he takes to be mud at random. On the first part of the book he says only that its account of human understanding ‘if applied to the history of political philosophy’ (the mind boggles at this operation) would ‘rule out almost every name but that of David Hume, and now Wittgenstein and his disciples’ (which he finds odd in ‘someone committed to tradition’), but nevertheless it unaccountably ‘retains’ a number of other writers—as, it seems, he thinks of himself as having ‘retained Mill, Green, MacIver and others’ to speak for him on the theme of individuality. However, he does not press this remarkable piece of misinformation (he just slings it and hopes it may stick) and moves on to deal with what he calls ‘two substantive and related doctrines’ of mine.
The first of these doctrines and the reasons he gives for finding it unacceptable are difficult to disentangle in the five breathless and confused paragraphs devoted to them. The most direct statement of the doctrine is in the negative: ‘Oakeshott does not believe there is such a thing as society or community.’ And I think (but I cannot be certain) that he means that I do not believe in something he does believe in, namely, a universal ‘collectivity’ or community of human beings such as ‘the collective thing’ he finds denoted by the expression ‘the human species’, or other unconditional ‘collectivities’ (such as ‘the common life of a people’) which are ‘something larger and inclusive of discrete or atomic individuals’, ‘collective things’ which ‘produce’ individual men and women, teach them their roles and ‘transmit’ rationality and moral sense to them, and are communities within which are situated all such conditional human associations as churches, business corporations, and something he calls ‘the state’. And if all this is what he says I do not believe in, he is dead right; with this verbiage I will have nothing to do. I hold, as I have said, that human beings are endlessly inventive of societies, communities, and associations; that each such invention is a relationship in terms of beliefs, that is, learned conditions of association; that membership of any is conduct which acknowledges and subscribes (well or ill) to its conditions; that if one seeks a theoretical understanding of any such association (that is, an understanding which goes beyond what is required for participation) one must enquire into the postulates of these conditions; and that a modern European state is, even for its members, a particularly puzzling association because it has never ceased to be in the making. But further, detecting that I have no use for his notion of unconditional ‘society or community’, Spitz goes on to assert that, because of this denial, I must and do reject also the possibility of men and women being related in terms of a shared common purpose, of being ‘comrades in at least some common cause’ of ‘recognizing the interests of the community or the public interest’, of considering the desirability of the conditions in which they may
be associated, of composing armies or ‘agreeing to membership of the state’. All this is, of course, a total misrepresentation of what I have written and an absurd non sequitur. It comes from his having confused what I have been careful to distinguish. For after having noticed the sort of human association in which relationships are in terms of shared common purposes and so on, and having agreed that this is certainly the most common sort of human association, I go on to consider another sort of association where relationship is not in terms of doing something together but in terms of the acknowledgement of the authority of non-instrumental rules of conduct. That he should take no trouble to understand what I have said about this sort of relationship, and should even deny it to be worth considering, is not at all surprising in so brisk an operator, but there is no excuse whatever for saying that I confuse the two sorts of association or that in recognizing the second I deny the first. The occasion of the second ‘pernicious’ error is the third part of my book. This is concerned with what has been thought and said about the character of a modem European state considered as an association of human beings: a history of beliefs expressed sometimes in propositions, sometimes analogically, sometimes in the engagements of governments, concerned sometimes to identify the relations of rulers and subjects and of citizens to one another, and sometimes to suggest what these relations might or perhaps should be made to become. It is a brief history of the beliefs, the reasons given for beliefs, the circumstances which nurtured them, and the arguments and the projects which constitute one of the great themes, never exhausted, of modern European political thought. This theme has been explored at various levels of thought ranging from a concern with the sort of understanding entailed in membership to a genuinely theoretical concern, but at an important middle level it was concerned with trying out, in respect of a state, various familiar analogies in terms of which to understand it as an association of human beings. Some of these analogies were too remote or too vague to be serviceable,
but others (like corporation or partnership) seemed to be worth exploring; for example, a late-nineteenth-century British prime minister wondered whether he should think of his state as an organism or as a joint-stock company. But of the analogies available, two seemed to promise genuine enlightenment: that of a universitas and that of a societas. Neither could be made to fit exactly, and each was clearly much more appropriate to some states than to others, but with various modifications they remained the chief dispositions of thought on this theme, tirelessly explored where the question concerned the sort of association a state might be or should be made to become. In this history of beliefs I was concerned throughout with what had been actually thought and said on this theme by Michel de l’Hôpital, Calvin, Bacon, Coke, Petty, von Justi, St Simon, von Humbolt, de Tocqueville, and others; with what writers had written about the state of France, England, Prussia, Spain, and so on; with what rulers had done or projected in Geneva, Austria, Portugal, Muscovy, the Milanese, and so on; and with the present posture of the debate. In all this there was plenty of room for criticism. Perhaps I had misinterpreted the Prussian Landschulregiment of 1763, perhaps Petty did not go all the way in thinking of England and Ireland as landed estates, perhaps Bacon did not quite think that a state should be turned into a development corporation for the Glory of God, perhaps there was no significant difference between states which emerged from ‘lordships’ and those which emerged from ‘realms’, perhaps the assumptions of Thomas Cromwell about the character of a state as an association of human beings are not so different from those of von Justi. But these are matters of so little interest to Spitz that he will not even allow me to have ever been concerned with them. I am said to be heedless of what was actually thought or said by anyone, to ignore the differences between the states of modern Europe, ‘never to attend to what went on in England, France, and Germany’, and to be concerned only with ‘ideal-types’ of association of my own invention, totally remote from anything that has ever existed, thought to exist, or
thought to be desirable. And he crowns this heap of rubbish by mistaking an historical essay for advice on how to do politics and some nonsense of his own about the virtues of a ‘mixed economy’ which he confuses with a ‘mixed polity’. In short, everything he says about my book shows that he has found it unreadable and that he resents having to pretend that he has read it. I was puzzled at first as I read Sheldon Wolin’s piece, and not least by its title. It appeared to start with some account of what I had written from time to time about ‘politics’, supported by some quotations and followed by some general comment. But the account was curiously tendentious and designed to show that what had earlier been merely detached observations about ‘politics’ were now (in this book) the lineaments of ‘an ideal society’ or ‘heavenly city’ (which I found surprising); the quotations were notably indifferent to their contexts; and the comments were not at all to do with the sense or otherwise of what I had written. And then came the revealing sentence: ‘In disclosing his ideal, he has disclosed himself ’; Wolin’s concern became clear. It was not at all with what I had written (with what I had supposed was my argument) but with the persona (as he says) of the writer. And the alleged ingredients of this persona were not left in doubt. They are ‘the political passions which are [the book’s] moving force’, ‘a determination to defend the cultivated life of private pleasures’. Nor, it appears, does Wolin think this manner of reading it to be uniquely appropriate to what I have written; the best he could think of doing with an incompetent writer. He seems to believe that all writing ‘about politics’ is of this character, itself a political utterance disclosing political passions. Moreover, it transpires that this principle of interpretation is not uniquely appropriate to writing ‘about politics’, for when Wolin turns to what I have written about understanding and theorizing he treats it in exactly the same way. Here is a similarly sketchy account of what I have written, the same indifference to the contexts of quotations, and the same sort of comments concerned not with the argument but with the ‘predilections’ it
‘revealed’. And then comes the announcement of the principle of interpretation, expressed here as a view which he correctly takes me to deny: that ‘theorizing may be a symbolic mode of action’. There is here nothing so crude as: ‘Don’t take Zarathustra seriously, he is only a symbol of Nietzsche’s syphilis’; nothing so simple as: ‘All this about theorizing is only a smoke-screen put up to conceal a writer’s indifference to real life’. And although the meaning of the ‘may be’ here is anybody’s guess, (perhaps a device to exempt his theorizing and thus escape the self-defeat inherent in this principle of interpretation), we may pass it by. My enquiry into what it is to understand human conduct is identified as a symbol of my ‘predilection for the formality of conduct’; it is ‘the revelation of a self that is deeply passionate about preserving the subtler expressions of human intercourse’. I shall not stay to consider this (to me) extraordinary doctrine about how to read a book—any book; I will report only that in Wolin’s hands its outcome is a preposterous misreading of what I have written both about ‘politics’ and about understanding. ‘Politics’ I identified as a certain sort of concern with the conditions of an association of human beings, namely, a concern that these conditions or terms of association shall be acceptably authoritative or acceptably prudent and that what they require of the associates shall be recognizably desirable—a concern which is expressed in the activity of imposing these qualities upon these conditions. Where association is in terms of the promotion of a common substantive purpose this concern will, of course, be important and almost continuous: it will be considering and choosing the ‘policy’ in which the purpose concerned shall be pursued and promoted in contingent circumstances. Where, however, association is in terms of obligations to subscribe to non-instrumental rules of conduct in pursuing a variety of selfchosen purposes, ‘politics’ will occupy a somewhat different place in the association. But this (I said) could be determined only after an exploration of the character of this mode of association, which I called (as others had done before me) civil association. I set
about this exploration, and I ended by saying something about the ‘politics’ related to it. That Wolin should have seriously misconstrued what I said about this sort of association (alleging it to be ‘epitomized in adjudication’) is not unexpected: his attention was elsewhere, looking for my persona. That he should have supposed me here to be constructing ‘an ideal society’, a ‘heavenly city’, so far superior to all other modes of human association that they must be considered of no account beside it, is ridiculous. This was not a ‘city’, there was nothing whatever ‘heavenly’ about it, and it had no inherent superiority to other modes of association. That he should attribute what I said about this mode of association to my alleged ‘predilection for the cultivated life of private pleasures’ and for the ‘formalities of conduct’ and adduce it as evidence to account for a denigration of purposive association, which is nowhere to be found in what I have written, is pure fantasy. And as for ‘politics’, he gathers together some sentences, all taken from my essay on civil association and all unmistakably concerned to distinguish the character of political activity relative to this sort of association, and when he has a good collection he says: ‘Look, this is what this poor chap says about “Politics”; he is so far gone that he will not allow it to be concerned with the promotion of a common purpose or to be “a mode of human perfectability”.’ Of course, where association is not in terms of a common substantive purpose, ‘politics’ cannot be concerned with the promotion of such a purpose. His comments on what I have written about understanding, theoretical understanding, theorizing human conduct, and understanding an assignable human action suffer from the same defects of inattention and indiscrimination. The doctrine (if it can be called that) I sketched invoked the notion of understanding as an endless enquiry which at each point generated a something understood and also that something not yet understood: the conditionality of all understanding, the fruitlessness of not accepting these conditions, and an enquiry concerned not to
accept but to question them. And I went on to explore this notion of understanding in relation to human conduct. Gliding over the surface of all this, Wolin observes it to be a concern with the formalities of understanding, with its conditions and proprieties, and that this is unmistakable in much of what I say about human conduct: moral conduct, for example, is identified not in terms of wants but in terms of considerations to be subscribed to in seeking to satisfy wants. And he observes the paradox of an enquiry which continuously yields an understanding but also a not-yetunderstood. But what does he conclude?—not ‘Here is a piece of theorizing of a somewhat Aristotelian cast, let us consider it’, but that it is the self-revelation of a persona composed of ‘predilections’. And in no time at all the persona of the author is identified as that of one who lives in a world of indefinables, who is averse from reaching any substantive conclusions and whose chief concern is to cover his tracks so that he may avoid the imputation of having gone one way rather than another. But, we are told, this author who wishes to avoid authorship has made a silly mistake—he has written a book. If he had kept to writing ‘essays’ he might have maintained his pose of being afoot but not going anywhere, but what Wolin calls ‘a book-length theory’ is all too self-revealing to be comfortable for him. However, this would-be non-author is a self-protective fellow, and he has done something to repair the damage: he has resorted to subterfuge. First, he pretends that his ‘book’ is really only an ‘essay’: the well-worn excuse that ‘it is only a little one’. But this is amateur trickery: an author who writes at this length is clearly getting in a harvest of some sort and he cannot hope to deceive us by saying that he has only been out picking flowers. So this reluctant author tries again: he says he is only an adventurer. Of course he spoils this by calling his enterprise ‘a well-considered adventure’—everyone knows that adventurers never take thought about their equipment. And in any case adventure entails risk and since (unlike Hobbes he does not risk imprisonment or exile and unlike Machiavelli he does not risk torture) this adventurer takes no risks at all, he is not what he
pretends to be. And then (Wolin observes) he calls what he is up to an ‘engagement’; but he does not mean a serious ‘commitment’ (in spite of his having said that this is exactly what he does mean), he means only ‘a social appointment that one might accept or politely decline’. I wonder whom Wolin expects to entertain with this banter. And it is not improved for being interspersed with what, I suppose, are intended to be serious observations, such as, Oakeshott ‘insists that theorizing is story-telling’. A critic who can get that out of my book can get anything out of it. I have left Josiah Auspitz’s essay to the last mainly because I have less to say about it. As an account of what I have been concerned to say, it is incomparably more exact than any of the others, and it has that generosity which any writer (especially one as incompetent as myself) needs from a reader: a willingness to keep going, to overlook trivial blunders, and a determination to understand. Further, it notices correctly various changes of view and vocabulary in which, without being over-fussy, I have sought to make and to mark distinctions which I had earlier only half-appreciated. He notices that I have become much more strict with the word ‘practice’ and that I have abandoned ‘tradition’ as inadequate to express what I want to express. And he appreciates that if such changes are read back into what I had written earlier they make it more exact. He notices how historical understanding, which appeared in Experience and Its Modes as a determinate arrest in experience, appears in On Human Conduct as the theoretical engagement in which we seek to understand assignable actions and utterances of human beings and derives its character as understanding in terms of contingent relations from the inherent contingency of human actions regarded as challenges and responses in the adventure of seeking the satisfaction of wants; a view of the matter which obliged me to explore the notion of contingent relations with more care but with only qualified success. But Auspitz’s essay is not less critical than the others, although it has the advantage of them in being concerned with what I wrote
and not with what I did not write or with what I wrote reduced to a symbolic act. I do not go along with some of his criticisms: he has not persuaded me to doubt my reading of the passage in Montesquieu. But he has convinced me that I would have done better to have made my essay on the Civil Condition even more abstract than it is and thus to have removed all danger of its being mistaken for a specification of a modern state. My difficulty was that my predecessors (notably Hobbes and Hegel) had written of it as if it were the kind of association which a modern state only distantly resembled but which it should be made to become, and their reasons for thinking so. But this way of thinking of it made the use of the ambiguous political vocabulary of a modern state almost unavoidable and encouraged rather than excluded the consideration of contingencies. I recognized this to be a dangerous procedure and did something to avoid it. To the dismay of some of my critics (who took it for pedantry) I abjured as much of this vocabulary as I conveniently could. But had I done more I might have succeeded in distinguishing exactly what I (and I think Hegel) intended to distinguish—non-purposive or moral relationship as a mode of association from the human achievement of in some degree imposing this character upon a state—and thus have left the second of these themes to my last essay. This Auspitz understands very well, but I fear it would not have gone down with my other critics. Pitkin would have found her worst fears confirmed (I had manifestly deserted ‘the real world’), Spitz would have seen it as a subterfuge to avoid what he calls the ‘problem of transition’ (a non-problem if ever there was one), and Wolin would have taken it for the last refuge of a philosophical scoundrel. Finally, when even Auspitz seems to detect in what I have written an ‘animosity to the idea of community’, I must doubt whether I have succeeded in making myself clear on this matter which, for me, has never been more than a minor consideration. So let me end by repeating, in a somewhat abbreviated form, what I have said.
I mean by ‘human conduct’ action or utterance which seeks the satisfaction of some substantive want or promotes some substantive interest in a transactional or a co-operative relationship between agents; and agents thus related may, and usually do, recognize prudential considerations and practices instrumental to their ends and to the transactions in which these are pursued. Where the relationship is co-operative (that is, in terms of a common substantive want or purpose), it is association in terms of agreement by each of the agents concerned upon the common purpose and upon the circumstantial actions and utterances in which the joint enterprise shall be pursued; it postulates agents who agree upon a substantive course of conduct and a procedure for recognizing this agreement; persistent disagreement is an agent contracting out of the relationship or, perhaps, the dissolution of the association. This doing and the relationships (transactional or co-operative) it entails are always qualified by another, a moral, relationship, not in terms of doing but of obligations to subscribe to conditions while doing; these obligatory considerations are not instrumental to the satisfaction of wants, and they do not specify desired substantive outcomes: they are proprieties to be observed in doing. They may or may not be subscribed to, but mere non-subscription is not a denial of them as obligations. Thus, the recognition of moral considerations and subscription to them is not itself seeking the satisfaction of a want, and it constitutes a relationship between agents distinct from the relationships concerned with doing. Further, agents thus related transactionally or co-operatively and morally may also be related in terms of obligation to subscribe to moral (that is, non-instrumental) rules of conduct, which differ from what I have called moral considerations in being subject to enactment, repeal, and alteration in an authorized procedure, in that the conditions they prescribe are narrower, less demanding, and more precisely formulated, in there being an authoritative procedure for determining whether or not an agent in acting has
adequately subscribed to these rules, and in there being known penalties attached to inadequate subscription and an apparatus of power to enforce them. This relationship I have called civil association, and I have explored its postulates in detail. Generally speaking, then, human conduct discloses two categorially distinct modes of relationship: relationship in doing (transactional or co-operative) for the satisfaction of substantive wants, and relationship in terms of obligation to subscribe to moral conditions in doing. Some conclusions follow from this reading of human conduct: no action, want, purpose, or substantive interest can itself be right or wrong, or can be right or wrong in respect of the number of agents who take it to be their common purpose, in respect of their devotion to it, or in respect of the substantive benefits they, or anyone else, derive from pursuing it; it is right or wrong in respect of its subscription to independent moral considerations. A modern state as it emerged was an association in the making, and it has remained so. In some cases (e.g., where it emerged from a landed estate) it might be seen to have in it the makings of an enterprise of some sort. But in most cases it was an artificial construction made of notably miscellaneous human material: a variety of persons and communities of persons, for the most part strangers to one another, without a common past, differing in beliefs, diverse in wants, pursuing transactionally or co-operatively a vast variety of different purposes, and thus conspicuously lacking even the disposition to agree upon any substantive purpose. And they have remained so. Apart from other considerations, the compositions of these emergent modern European states suggested for them the character of civil associations as the condition of their survival as associations, and this suggestion was re-enforced by the compulsory quality of membership. Nevertheless, nurtured by circumstance, by some ramshackle beliefs, and by the ambitions of rulers (and not least when these rulers have been ‘democratically’ elected), many attempts in different idioms have been made to impose
upon them the character of purposive associations. And these attempts will, no doubt, continue: agents whose slavish concern for benefits makes them fit subjects of such an imposition are not wholly absent. But it is an indispensable condition of this kind of association that each and every associate shall have expressly chosen to be joined in its enterprise or shall have otherwise acknowledged its purpose as his own and that he be permitted to contract out of the association if and when he no longer wishes to be thus associated; any obligation he may have to be or to remain a partner derives, not from the alleged worth of the enterprise or from the substantive benefits it may yield, but solely from his choice to be associated. Consequently, the undertaking to impose this character upon a state whose membership is compulsory constitutes a moral enormity, and it is the attempt and not the deed which convicts it of moral enormity. And it matters not one jot whether this undertaking is that of one powerful ruler (or coup d’étatiste), a few, ora majority. Thus the only ‘animosity’ I have ever entertained or expressed towards ‘community’ or association in terms of the pursuit of a substantive purpose is concerned with the attribution of this character to a state or the attempt to impose it upon a state. And, indeed, genuine purposive association can exist only when this character has not been imposed upon a state.
Conservative Essays Review of Maurice Cowling (ed.), Conservative Essays (London: Cassell, 1978), first published in Daily Telegraph (29 June, 1978), 18. We have long since come to recognize that the politics of this country is a tension between two poles which denote, not merely different policies, but different beliefs about the office and the authority of government. One side is tolerably distinct. It is the belief that a State is (or should be) a purposive association, that its members are partners in a common enterprise which should engage all their purposive capacities, and that the office of government is the management of this pursuit. Our political fortunes have for some years circled round this pole and recently the two most important features of the managerial activity of government are inflation and large numbers of immigrants, the one designed to ensure our docility, and the other to extend the ‘plurality’ of our society. It is partnered by a somewhat more sophisticated conception of the office of government but one which, in futile attempts at compromise or by inadvertence, has lost its distinctness and surrendered its integrity. And in recent years several attempts have been made to retrieve this intellectual self-defeat. The latest of these is a book called Conservative Essays, in which fourteen writers reflect on this belief about the office of government and on the policies which a party embracing it should at the present time pursue. In this notion of government a State is understood as persons associated, not in respect of their interests and of the substantive satisfactions they may choose to seek transactionally or co-operatively among themselves, but in respect of their acknowledgment of the authority of certain non-instrumental conditions of conduct; politics is recognized as the deliberation of
these conditions; and government is their maker and custodian. These conditions are laws, rules of conduct which do not represent the demands of interests, are not instrumental to the satisfaction of particular substantive wants, and do not specify a superordinate interest, the so-called ‘common interest’. And a government recognized as the custodian of these rules is not itself participating in, directing or managing the substantive activities of the associates. In order to perform this office it must, of course, make some call upon the resources of the society: it must maintain a judicial procedure; it must provide for the defence of the realm, and perhaps also participate in the charitable activity of looking after the genuinely helpless. But these cannot pretend to be the purpose of the association and there is nothing here which elevates government to the status of manager of the fortunes of its subjects. Such a view of the office of government, which owes perhaps more to the Whigs than the Tories, is deeply embedded in our constitutional arrangements, and it has never had any exact counterpart in Continental politics. But if it now has a home anywhere in our politics it is surely in a Conservative party. The hero of this book of Conservative essays is Robert Cecil, third Marquis of Salisbury, who, together with Baldwin and some account of the recent fortunes of the Conservative party, is the subject of an excellent brief essay by Andrew Jones and Michael Berry. They find in him a ‘posture’ appropriate to contemporary Conservatism—a rural respect for the solitudes of civility, a reluctance to impose anything but rules on the heterogeneity of society and an abhorrence of those who claim for their eccentric political prejudices the sanctions of moral truths and seek through bureaucratic control to propagate social ideals. But the intellectual heart of the book is a remarkable essay by Shirley Letwin ‘On Conservative Individualism’, in which she sets out the principles of this understanding of the office
of government, its assumptions and its implications, with an exactness and a subtlety unmatched either elsewhere in this book or in the literature of Conservatism. The currency of political talk, for the most part, is ambiguous clichés of various levels of generality and hastily affixed labels— Left, Right and Centre, moderation, authority, power, ‘State interference’, capitalism, ‘the common ground’, consensus, law, order, liberal, a mixed economy, democracy, equality, freedom, Christian, ‘the public good’, etc. And perhaps this is unavoidable; democratic political rhetoric has always thrived on ambiguity. But Shirley Letwin’s essay is immediately valuable because it enables us to determine the exact meaning (if any) and the proper home of these expressions in relation to Conservative politics. Elsewhere the touch of these writers can be a little uncertain. They do not all understand that ‘capitalism’ is a supreme irrelevance, that a Conservative government is not concerned with the promotion of substantive interests, that it has no place for an ‘economic policy’ but is concerned with making and maintaining non-instrumental rules of conduct for itself and its subjects, and that it should in no circumstances debase the currency which is its sole ‘economic’ responsibility. If the tensions of British politics are what a Conservative understands them to be, then ‘the common ground’ as a description of a supposed central area where the pulls are reduced is meaningless. ‘Moderation’ may well signify a consideration to be taken account of in deciding on the magnitude and the pace of the changes requiring to be made in order to ‘roll back the frontiers of the State’, but it means nothing at all when used (as it often is) to denote an attribute of a Conservative office of government. Indeed, this phrase about the frontiers of the State, which runs through the book like a refrain, is a near-disastrous blunder. It appears to be a surrender to the old parody of Conservatism as a ‘do nothing’ conception of government, whereas what needs to be emphasised is merely that such a government has no place for managerial activity. The current tension of our politics is not
between more or less ‘interference’ by government but between a patronising, providential, bogusly ‘caring’ government and the rule of non-instrumental law. A spritely essay by the editor, Maurice Cowling, considers what friends or allies it is appropriate for a Conservative to associate with and call upon as witnesses to the faith. He is severe. Solzhenitsyn and Adam Smith get kicked in the teeth. He is suspicious of the intellectual Mafia of ex-Communists who hang around the party and of the ‘Reds under the bed’ alarmists. He is reserved about the Institute of Economic Affairs and Professor von Hayek. It almost seems that one must be safely dead (like Mallock and Maine) to qualify as a reliable friend of Conservatism. Kenneth Minogue, as usual, writes with élan and good sense; John Biffen is judiciously concerned with the current chances of the party; John Peyton is good on the follies of current politics and the degradation of the House of Commons; Peter Utley writes of the current leadership and has (like others of the essayists) words of admiration for Mrs Thatcher, who seems to be more of a genuine Conservative than her predecessors; and George Gale, pretending (as often) to be a lot cruder than he is, advises the Conservative party to forswear the gimmicks of advertising and showbiz and its leaders to say what journalists will think interesting and important. He reduces the current problems of the party to that of finding a programme it can sell to an electorate who are tired of ‘uplift’, who want to make more money and to keep more of what they make, and who may perhaps be got to recognize a policy of ‘rolling back the frontiers of the State’ as likely to satisfy these wants—a gaily sordid ending to the book, but obliquely appropriate: none of these writers has any time for unctuous priggishness in a politician. Unaccountably, some of these writers approve of our membership of the European Market, but none would favour the latest lunacies; a Ministry of Youth and making ‘the arts’ an ‘important franchise’.
In Search of the Constitution Review of Nevil Johnson, In Search of the Constitution: Reflections on State and Society in Britain (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977), first published in Public Administration, 56 (1978), 102–5. The theme of this book is the present condition of politics and government in Great Britain, which the author considers to be a deplorable impasse. It is an ambitious piece of writing, concerned with ‘fundamentals’ and designed to get at the root of our predicament. But it is exactly and temperately written, without either exaggeration or excursions into metaphysics: a scrupulous book which deserves close attention. If the remedies it suggests are more valuable for the contribution they make to the diagnosis of our ‘disease’ than for the benefits they are likely to bring, and if it is more concerned to persuade us of what we should be thinking about than of what precisely we should think, these are merits rather than defects in such an undertaking. Some obscurities remain and some ambiguities are unresolved, but this is only to be expected. The character of a government is made up of three components: its endowment of authority, what is here called the ‘scope’ or ‘sphere’ of its activity (sc. its ‘office’), and its power. The first is expressed in its Constitution, this being understood as the limiting conditions in terms of which it exerts its power to perform its office. Mr Johnson writes of a ‘constitution’ as ‘a kind of corset for us all’, ‘establishing the boundaries for the exercise of power by both office holders and by one citizen against another’. The second is its role as custodian of the ‘common interest’ and is expressed in a particular conception of that interest. And the third is the apparatus of authorised instruments employed in performing its office. Mr Johnson’s contention is that with us there has been a notable enlargement both in the office attributed to government
and in the apparatus of power annexed to it and that, because this has not been matched by any significant ‘constitutional’ change, the current condition of our institutions of government is one of imbalance and disarray. It behoves us to address ourselves to this confusion. The argument begins with the ‘scope’ or ‘sphere’ of governmental activity and with the observation that we have acquired a government which claims, and to which is attributed, an omnicompetent managerial office. ‘We accept like sheep the providential view of the role of Government’. And Mr Johnson has some reflections on when this change came about and on its inspiration: the crucial date is round about 1945, and it sprang from the belief that the management of our resources by such a government would both increase our wealth and distribute it more equally. This belief, however, has proved to be an illusion, partly because our resources were at a low ebb and successive governments have pursued a self-defeating policy of ‘mortgaging the future in order to increase public benefits in the present’ in an ‘unending exercise of political manipulation’, and partly because even the vast increase in public power has been unequal to the engagements of such a government. But his concern is not with the failure of this kind of government ‘to vindicate itself by results’; it is with the neglect of our constitutional beliefs and arrangements which has allowed its appearance. And here the argument broadens out. For, although Mr Johnson finds more to deplore than to welcome in government as the exercise of providential powers and considers our current constitutional beliefs and institutions notably inadequate to control it, he thinks also that these beliefs and institutions are so ill adapted to sustain the authority of any sort of government in modern times that we have almost given up thinking of them in these terms. And he writes to recall us from this error. Our notion of political authority has long been focused upon ‘the idea of parliamentary government’; that is, upon a single centralized political institution whose authority derives from an
electoral law and from the constitution and procedures of the House of Commons. And there was a time, before a providential role was attributed to the office of government, when this Parliament was not inadequately equipped to control its activities and might still be thought of as the ‘palladium of our liberties’. But now it has become very difficult to believe in ‘parliamentary authority’. The House of Commons is composed of two highly disciplined parties, related to one another as ‘adversaries’, irresponsible, without constitutional recognition, unrepresentative of the variety of local political interests and become ‘mere agencies for the competitive production of rulers’; it is dominated by an executive government over which it exercises little control, which is related to organizations outside Parliament in such a way as ‘to render the claim of Parliamentary sovereignty a bad joke’, and which is served by officials who have obligations only to their political masters; and it operates legislative procedures which endow ministers with extensive and often ill-defined powers exercised by their agents and immune from challenge by courts of law in respect of their constitutionality. This indictment of so-called ‘parliamentary government’ is set out in chapters which examine in detail: the character of our political parties, the electoral law which ensures their remoteness from the electorate, and the manner in which ‘the adversary mode of politics’ they entail has eroded their capacity in Parliament to control the activities of government; the notion that Parliament cannot limit itself by binding its successors as ‘a formidable barrier in the way of establishing a genuine constitutional framework for the exercise of powers’; the peculiar character and completeness of the ‘centralization’ of both politics and government; and the uniqueness of British bureaucracy—‘there is in Britain no such thing as a single common public service— no Beamtentum, no fonction publique’. And everywhere criticism is partnered by suggestions for changes designed to increase, not the power but the authority of government: various devolutions and referenda which would give opportunity for ‘creative political
action’ outside the centre and effect a constitutional dispersion of administrative agency; changes in electoral law designed to produce a more variously representative House of Commons and one less subservient to the Government; changes in the character of political parties which would give them constitutional recognition and deprive them of their merely ‘adversarial’ relationship to one another, restore to the House of Commons a sense of being the authority controlling government and recover to them the function of being the custodians of ‘a common good or public interest’; and changes in the relations between ministers and their senior advisers, between policy and administration, which would recognize the unreality imposed by the doctrine of a politically neutral civil service. A better case is, I think, made for some of these changes than for others. I think there is some confusion between the authority of government and approval of what it does, and I doubt whether the accommodation of an alleged desire for wider ‘participation’ in ‘political action’ would generate a government with more certain authority. And I wonder whether we would attribute greater authority to a government which had to depend upon a shifting coalition of parties. But all these suggestions for constitutional change at least serve to bring home to us Mr Johnson’s central contention: that the most serious defect of current British government is its lack of authority to perform the office attributed to it. There follows a chapter called ‘Law and the Polity’ which I take to be the strongest statement of Mr Johnson’s position. Up to this point he has been concerned with the so-called ‘flexibility’ and informality of our constitutional arrangements which has allowed the beliefs and procedures of which they are composed to lose their shapes and characters as expressions of authorization in respect of a now highly centralized government devoted to a ‘providential’ mode of ruling; his point now is that a constitution will be an effective expression of our beliefs about the authority of government only when it has a large ingredient of substantive rules of public law which formulate and protect the rights of
individual citizens. Hitherto we have relied upon the common law for the expression and protection of the bulk of our civil rights, but (in the face of ‘the challenge presented by the expansion of public powers’) this needs to be supplemented in a viable, effective and ‘entrenched’ bill of rights embracing ‘the fundamentals of our condition’ as citizens, a bill of rights capable of subjecting acts of government to a judicial review in which they may be declared invalid. Mr Johnson recognizes the magnitude of the change which this ‘constitutionalising’ of individual rights would entail: nothing less than establishing a new and different relationship between law and politics. And he does not deny either its technical difficulties, its departure from our traditions or the uncertainty of the support it would have from current sentiment which is disposed to accept the benefits bestowed by a ‘providential’ government and not to worry about the costs. But he sees it as a revivification of ‘the flagging notion of the rule of law’ (that is, the authority of government derived from the legality of its powers) and as the only effective way of correcting ‘the imbalance which exists between individuals and the State as a consequence of the expansion of public powers’. Of the contents of this Bill of Rights Mr Johnson is silent; nor does he notice the muddle which we and others have already got ourselves into by awarding rights, in absolute terms, to the enjoyment of substantive satisfactions. The account given here of our situation is, then, in terms of the relationship between the authority and the ‘scope’ of government. The abstract principle of this relationship is: the wider the ‘scope’ the more exact and unavoidable must be the constitutional controls which endow it with authority. Our current constitutional controls were developed (rather than devised) to authorize a government whose office was unpretentious and even ‘negative’, and they were not wholly inadequate when combined with the protection supplied by common law. We have acquired a government to which is attributed an almost unlimited ‘scope’ and it behoves us to devise a ‘constitution’ capable of controlling its activities. And Mr Johnson considers with great care and insight (supplemented
by references to continental and American practice) the details of such a ‘constitution’. Readers may question some of these details in respect of their feasibility and their effectiveness, they may wonder whether an account of the office of government merely in terms of the magnitude of its undertaking is entirely adequate, and they may think that Mr Johnson’s account of the generation of what he calls ‘providential’ government is a trifle foreshortened. But they will be refreshed by his return to ‘fundamentals’.
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought Review of Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), first published in Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 449–53. In this book Professor Skinner is engaged in weaving together two undertakings, each an exercise in historical understanding. The one is to give an account of late medieval and early modern writings on ‘politics’: he ranges from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The other is a design to use these writings ‘to illuminate a more general historical theme’; namely the emergence of ‘the main elements of a recognizably modern concept of the State’. And although these undertakings are continuously related to one another (the chronological boundaries of the book were chosen because it was during this period that the shift was made to the new concept of the state), they are distinct and must be considered separately. The first is modestly described as that of giving ‘an outline account of the principal texts of late medieval and early modern political thought’; but of course it is very much more than this. Intentionally, it is not exclusively concerned with the so-called ‘classical texts’, and it is an exercise in historical understanding as exact as may be. Each of these pieces of writing is an utterance which has survived from bygone times: our attention is directed to a recorded past. And each is recognized here as a res gesta, an intellectual performance in response either to a situation brought about in human action or to an imagined and wishedfor condition of things. Since these situations are performances or projects (not natural happenings) they invoke reasons, not causes. Those to which Skinner’s authors are responding are, for the most part, claims in respect of the office of ruler, of its authority and
of its occupation by a person or persons of a certain kind, which occasionally spilt over into claims in respect of the character of the association ruled. And the reasons (or those of them that interest Skinner) which compose their responses belong to that peculiar sort of half-way reason known as justifications or rebuttals of these claims couched in moral, theological or legal terms. This comprises a well-defined subject of historical enquiry: writings (which Skinner bravely calls ‘ideological’) concerned to declare and to elucidate the propriety of what rulers have done or projected and of the claims made by or on behalf of those who aspire to rule, or concerned to rebut the propriety of such actions, projects or claims, or (more generally) to give advice to rulers about the character of their office and the performance of its duties, or to reflect upon the proper education of rulers. A very extensive literature of this kind appeared in the centuries with which Skinner is concerned and he devotes some illuminating pages to showing why this should have been so. But it would be going too far to suggest that reflexion of this kind, on these topics, comprises the whole of ‘political thought’. It leaves out of account both the instrumental reflexion devoted to administrative invention and philosophical reflexion concerned with reasons of a different kind from mere justifications or rebuttals of the circumstantial claims of rulers. As it happens there are two authors in this period to whom Skinner gives considerable attention— Marsiglio and Bodin—whose writings sometimes rise above the level of mere justification to that of philosophical reflexion; but rather than assimilating these arguments to their author’s ‘ideological’ commitments he wisely prefers to neglect them. Skinner’s enterprise, here, is to discern the historical meaning of the ‘ideological’ utterances of his authors. What does this entail? In answer to this question he points to two clearly appropriate considerations. First, each of these utterances (of Marsiglio, of Gerson, of Bartolus, of Beza, etc.) was designed to solve a circumstantial problem; how to justify an action performed or projected, how to rebut the claim that it is improper.
And to understand it historically calls for an understanding, as comprehensive and exact as may be, of the situation to which it is addressed and of the circumstances in which this situation came to be (or was thought to be) problematic. Secondly, at any given time there is a certain range of considerations (Skinner calls it a ‘normative vocabulary’) of currently recognized validity available for use in these justificatory or advisory enterprises. It may of course be added to, but it is difficult for an entirely fresh consideration to win recognition; even a Heath Robinson construction (such as some of these writers invent) will be found to be composed of familiar parts. The stock of ideas available to these writers was various but limited. It was drawn from Justinian’s law books, the traditions and institutions of Roman Republican government, Cicero, Stoic philosophy, the Old and New Testaments, Augustinian theology, Aristotle’s Politics, imaginary ‘ancient constitutions’, legends of a ‘gothic’ past, etc. Skinner gathers and marshals these sources into a small number of idioms or schools of ideological resource: Roman-legal, Augustinian, Scholastic, classical republican, humanistic, etc. There was no exclusively ‘Protestant’ idiom. And his contention is that an historical understanding of these writings calls, not only for a precise identification of the situations to which they were addressed, but also for an appreciation of their idiom, the consideration of the why and the wherefore of the ideological weapon chosen on any particular occasion and the recognition that the dance being performed, however novel it may appear, is composed of a selection of familiar steps. And he goes on to suggest a kind of feedback in which the claims of rulers or would-be rulers will often be found to be tailored to an available ‘normative language’ which will vouch for their propriety. In short, an historical understanding (like any other) is conditional, and this seems to me a good account of the provenance in terms of which these writings may be understood historically. But to suggest that an historical understanding is the only mode of understanding would, of course, be ridiculous. It is not, for
example, the understanding that these writers had of one another’s writings. The picture we are given of the political thought of these centuries is, then, that of ingenious and resourceful writers, some actually engaged in political innovation and seeking to justify their adventures, but more often writers retained to defend the projects of clients, or belonging to a freelance intelligentsia concerned with the proprieties of current political conduct, and all this understood in terms of the stock of normative ideas available to them and the details of the politically footloose disposition of the times. Their situation was certainly more complicated, but it was not unlike that of a practitioner in a court of common law: an engagement to do your best for your client (be he a prince seeking to divest himself from the claims of an Emperor or a Pope, or a republican or Huguenot faction seeking relief from a burdensome obligation to a prince) in an enterprise of persuasive and often unscrupulous argument. Just as a practitioner in a court might reflect: the rules of property are getting me nowhere, let me try Obligation; or contract does not work, try tort; so here, ‘Let me suggest that the magistrates of La Rochelle (fortunately Huguenot) should be regarded as holding the independent office of Tribune of the People, or of a Spartan Ephor’, or, ‘let us suppose that the Church or a principality is a Corporation, what then are we to conclude about the office and authority of Pope or Prince?’ And so on. Jaw, jaw interrupted by such episodes as the French invasions of northern Italy, the Massacre of St Bartholomew and the Schmalkaldic war. Of Skinner’s achievement in this undertaking I will not say much in detail. In general, it is superbly confident and thorough in its determination to make historical sense of these writings, to show why the often (to us) far-fetched analogies with which they were encrusted and their flights of fantasy were persuasive to those to whom they were addressed, and to show how changes in intellectual front sprang from changes of circumstance. Every reader will come across passages which puzzle him (why,
for example, does the rather scrappy chapter oddly called ‘the forerunners of Luther’ come after one on ‘the principles of Lutheranism’?), or an interpretation about which he may be doubtful, an under- or an over-exposed picture, a writer omitted about whom he would like to hear (Francis Bacon), or a theme incompletely handled (‘reason of State’). And why must the word ‘virtue’, wherever it appears (in Machiavelli or Bodin, for example), be read as the intrusion of the Ciceronian, ‘humanistic’ idiom? But I at least am disposed to take what I am given and there is plenty to be grateful for; some of it already well known, some of it novel, and all of it well digested and lucidly expressed. If the gift of historical understanding is that of the opportunity of seeing a passage of the past in terms of hitherto neglected relationships and of being able to imagine it freshly and more perspicuously, then this is a notable historical achievement. Skinner, however, has another engagement which gives the book its starting place and its shape and which is expressed in its title. It is an undertaking to infer from these surviving utterances a past which has not survived: to discern an overall character or direction in the intellectual adventures of these writers. This is, or may be, an authentic historical engagement; it depends upon how it is done. Skinner is concerned with the emergence of a ‘concept’ of the state, which I think he would distinguish from what used to be called ‘the birth of the modern European state’. And one of his suggestions in the writings with which he has been concerned is evidence of a ‘shift’ in political thought which by the end of the sixteenth century had produced ‘a recognizably modern concept of the State’. This shift is described as that from ‘the idea of a ruler maintaining his state’ to that of the state as ‘a form of political power separate from both the ruler and the ruled and constituting the supreme political authority within a defined territory’. Of this suggestion I can say very little, because I do not quite understand it: I am puzzled both by the starting place of this alleged ‘shift’ and by what it is alleged to produce. No doubt there
are writers in these centuries who think of government as ‘a ruler maintaining his state’ (Machiavelli in The Prince?), but surely this is too eccentric an idea to be made the point from which political thought in the thirteenth century set out on a new adventure. And while some such abstract idea of the sort described did no doubt appear much later in French and particularly German writers it also remained somewhat eccentric. It never, for example, found a comfortable home in England, owing perhaps to the absence of a distinct notion of constitutional law and the late appearance of anything like a beamtenstaat there to inspire this notion of a state as an impersonal apparatus of power. I am doubtful whether it may fairly be called ‘the modern concept of the state’. But he has what I take to be another suggestion which is easier to come to grips with; namely, that these writers were ‘laying the ideological foundations’ of a concept in which the state is understood and justified as an independent association of persons related to one another, not in virtue of common religious beliefs or in the pursuit of any common substantive purpose, but in terms of a law of its own, ruled by a government (constituted in some acceptable manner) whose office as the custodian of this law is to maintain the ‘peace’ and security of the association, and whose authority in respect of this office is ‘sovereign’; that is, subject to no superior authority within or outside the territory of the association. And the ‘shift’ in political thought suggested here is that from the idea of a ruler ‘maintaining his State’ to this alleged ‘modern concept of the State’. Now, it is not to be doubted that a ‘concept of the State’ of this kind did emerge and has floated round modern Europe. And something of the sort was entertained, somewhat reluctantly, with qualifications and argued for prudentially, by the politique in the sixteenth century as a solution to the problems of France. Nor may we doubt (particularly after what Skinner has written) that it is to be found in a rather more considered and shapely form in the brilliant and discriminating imagination of Bodin. But is it not ‘unhistorical’, anachronistic, to think of it as a construction erected
upon ‘foundations’ laid by Marsiglio, Bartolus, Machiavelli, Beza, etc.? These writers were not laying foundations; they were casuistical moralists and lawyers fumbling for circumstantial arguments to support their clients against claims, old and new, which stood in the way of or threatened their independence. Is there not some confusion here between the analytical components of a concept and the devious and often logically irrelevant historical circumstances which mediated its emergence? Such concepts are, no doubt, the products of an engagement to formulate them; but historically they are the by-products of a variety of local encounters of ideas not all of which pull in its direction. And is there not something historically eccentric in beginning this story with the fourteenth-century situation of the cities of the Regnum Italicum and in saying that ‘Bartolus and Baldus together constructed the entire legal foundations on which the modern theory of the State rests’? No doubt their rebuttal of the already antiquated imperial claims in respect of these cities is an incident in the story, to be set beside the various ideological rebuttals of papal claims, but these writers laid no foundation stone. They floated an excessive and rather implausible notion about Roman law of no great interest to most of the rest of Europe, but one which was circumstantially useful to their clients. Should not this story begin with the earlier disposals and partial disposals of imperial and papal claims in France, England and Castile? Secondly, in important respects many of these writers—Luther, Calvin, some of the humanists and the technocrats—did little to promote the emergence of this alleged recognizably modern concept of the state. Certainly, they were all concerned to justify the claims of rulers and would-be rulers to ‘sovereign’ authority and like everyone else their views on constitutional matters were whatever might serve their purposes. But in respect of the office of government their utterances were various, though united in demanding a more extensive office than that of maintaining the mere peace and security of the association ruled. This office might be that of ‘commanding for truth’ (their truth) or the imposition of
‘godliness’ or of ‘virtue’, and the associates might be thought of as related to one another in pursuit of a variety of different purposes and enterprises—as a ‘holy community’ of ‘covenanters’, as rebels to be coerced into at least an outward conformity to divine will, or as persons united in a God-ordained co-operative exploitation of the resources of the earth: anything but a non-instrumental ‘peace’. In short, the upshot of these centuries of political thought was not the emergence of a single ‘recognizably modern concept of the State’ but a variety of disparate conceptions, continuously resuscitated and reformulated in later times. In this variety Skinner’s ‘concept of the modern State’ (which is to be found intimated in Marsiglio, but also in much earlier writings; Augustine, for example) had its somewhat uncertain place. But there was no ‘shift’, nothing disappeared beyond recall and nothing was established beyond peradventure—not even the requirement that the authority of the government of a state should be ‘sovereign’. And, of course, the states of modern Europe have themselves remained as various and as ramshackle as those of the sixteenth century and as the realms, principalities and republics which preceded them.
Preface to ‘The Form of Ideology’ ‘Preface’ to David Manning (ed.), The Form of Ideology: Investigations into the Sense of Ideological Reasoning with a View to Giving an Account of its Place in Political Life (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980). Some ten years ago a friend of mine, Dr David Manning, a lecturer in politics in the University of Durham, embarked upon an adventure: he designed a year’s course of study for graduate students in politics. It had some conventional features, but its central concern was to be an inquiry. And anyone who succeeds in engaging graduate students in an inquiry is, I think, doing something worthwhile. The inquiry here was to distinguish and characterise a certain aspect of political activity, namely, beliefs which, without specifying a programme of political action, express a political commitment and may be recognised as reasons for acting. Nowadays, such beliefs are often called ‘ideological’, and consequently the inquiry to be embarked upon was identified as the investigation of the form, or perhaps the meaning, of ideological discourse. Students in the politics departments of universities are often invited to study current allegedly ideological doctrines (liberalism or socialism, for example) and are perhaps urged to consider the merits and defects of their constituent beliefs, but without even troubling their heads about what sort of beliefs they are, and without considering ‘ideology’ as a distinguishable mode of thought and argument. But here what was to be considered was just this, the logic of ideological discourse. It was a severe undertaking. But, almost from the beginning, the seminar in which it was pursued attracted some remarkably able students who not only readily took to what was afoot but became adept explorers on their own account. And among its (usually) eight or ten members there was, in some years, a particularly distinguished student who, later embarking upon a
research degree in Durham, remained behind to help to initiate newcomers. Thus, the seminar enjoyed an unusual intellectual continuity. My connection with it, and the reason why I am writing this preface, is that, from the beginning I was appointed the external examiner of the work the members of the seminar submitted each year for the master’s degree awarded by the University of Durham—answers to examination questions and a dissertation. I held this office for ten years. It entailed visiting Durham each autumn to discuss the work of those who were passing out (to use a military expression) and to meet and converse with the newcomers. I knew them all by name and nature, and I had the opportunity of observing, over the years, the gradual formulation of some findings about the character of ideological discourse. To follow a well-trodden path, to begin with the word ‘ideology’ and to ask how it had been used, was found to confront the inquiry with an anarchy of linguistic differences which promised no prospect of illumination. Indeed, the only conclusion to be drawn from the classical use of the term was that it is, or has become, a worthless concept. A starting place had to be found elsewhere. The focus of attention was to be politics; that is, practical activity concerned with the institutions and arrangements of an association of human beings. And it was plausibly assumed that ideological discourse (whatever else it might be) was a specific form of discourse related to that engagement. And further, it was assumed to be a form of discourse, not concerned with making proposals for political action, but having to do with general beliefs which might relevantly be invoked in justification of such proposals. Thus, the task was identified as that of distinguishing among the various forms of discourse concerned with or used in political activity one which answered to this general description, and then to specify its character as exactly as may be and to understand not only that it is different from (for example) philosophical, scientific, technological, moral, or historical discourse but why this must be so and why these cannot take its
place. The consideration that it might turn out to be an ideal form of discourse, no more than a coherent possibility, and not to be found uncorrupted or unqualified in any piece of writing, was not to be dismissed. And the appropriateness of calling this mode of discourse, when it had been specified, ‘ideological’ had to be considered. But these were matters of no theoretical significance. This, then, was the task. And this book is a performance of the task. Its contributors have all, at one time or another, been student members of the Durham seminar. They are joined in a single enterprise, but each has undertaken to explore in his own way the aspect of the matter which most interested him. And the reader who does not expect a definitive doctrine but some modest enlightenment will not be disappointed.
Conservative Thoughts and Conservative Thinkers Review of Roger Scruton (ed.), Conservative Thoughts: Essays from the Salisbury Review (London: Claridge Press, 1988); and Roger Scruton (ed.), Conservative Thinkers: Essays from the Salisbury Review (London: Claridge Press, 1988), first published in Spectator, 261 (9 July, 1988), 60. The Salisbury Review, named after the Third Marquis, describes itself as a quarterly magazine of conservative thought. It is edited by Roger Scruton and has been going for five years. It contains critical comments on the current antics of the world’s governments (including our own) and on what it regards as dangerous or eccentric political opinions. And it often has wellinformed articles about what is happening in such places as Poland, Romania, Turkey or Mozambique. But its central concern is to explore the character and implications of a certain attitude or intellectual disposition in the engagement of politics. This disposition is called ‘conservative’, but considering the corruption and ambiguity which has overtaken our political vocabulary it is best not to pay too much attention to the name: Stalinists in Russia are now commonly called ‘conservatives’. This disposition is presented as a composition of presuppositions. It is not an ideology and it cannot determine the engagements of a government: it is, rather, a set of general considerations in terms of which to reflect upon and appraise such engagements. It runs something as follows. Everything is what it is understood to be and here human beings are understood to be intelligent, mortal persons whose conduct is composed of chosen responses to their circumstances and who recognise and respect one another in this character. We are, in general, related, by design or extemporally, as competitors or partners in seeking the satisfaction of our contingent desires
which may include benefits to others. But we have come to be joined in local and historical associations, invented by ourselves, in terms of conditions imposed upon substantive conduct. These conditions range from conventional considerations such as decency or propriety to beliefs about moral right and wrong and include religious beliefs in which we seek to accommodate ourselves to the fortuities of a human condition. This manner of association, in terms of a culture (handed on in an education and always unfinished) is pre-eminent human relationship, the counterpart of our mutual self-understandings and the soil from which tears and laughter and relationships of love and friendship may spring. But it is itself part of the endless adventure of being human and is apt to be precarious. It requires to be sustained (not replaced) by something less subtle, less demanding and less equivocal; namely a relationship in terms of rules (laws) which impose obligations to observe certain simple conditions (as unambiguous as may be) while performing our self-chosen actions and which impose penalties for failures to comply. The authority of these laws derives from the recognition of the procedure in which they are made or announced, and their content (their ‘justice’) reflects the character of the culture from which they spring. They are designed to express, in a simplified manner, those items of a cultural relationship which, if not generally and consistently observed, threaten its dissolution. Governing is having the care and custody of this rule-ordered manner of association, and the engagement of politics is considering these terms of a civil order in respect of their adequacy to perform their function in the circumstances of ever more extensive and complicated human discoveries and adventures. Here, politics is not concerned with the satisfaction of interests, or with the pursuit of some ultimate goal, or with the virtuousness of conduct, but with an order composed of simple, non-instrumental duties. The first of these volumes, called Conservative Thoughts, is composed of twenty-four essays each concerned to elucidate some aspect of this ‘conservative’ disposition and to argue its
implications in respect of some particular engagement or suggested engagement of governmental authority. Their tone is reflective; they are all carefully and honestly argued and some display notable qualities of intellectual imagination. Thus R.R.D. Grant, in a piece on ‘The Politics of Sex’, after considering the intricate character of sexual relationship, including homosexual experience, concludes that in this connection the concern of law should be the control of the destructive engagement of pornography. And Joanna North, in an essay on ‘The Politics of Gender’, is concerned with male and female as legal categories. There are three essays on education and three concerned with so-called ‘economic activity’. The volume includes Hayek on ‘The Weasel Word “Society”’, Enoch Powell on the language of the Prayer Book and a remarkable piece by the Czech writer Václav Havel on ‘The Politics of Conscience’. There are two essays in which the view that a stable legal association presupposes a single homogenous moral culture is considered and the limits within which the notable diversities of our current condition (language, race, religion etc) might be accommodated. The second volume, Conservative Thinkers, contains nineteen essays each concerned with a writer who is alleged, closely or distantly, argumentatively or poetically, by design or circumstance, to exhibit this disposition. Thus Sisson on Hooker, Paul Heim on Hume, Grant on Burke, Scruton on Hegel, and Ian Crowther on Voeglin are to be expected and are all excellent brief studies. Grant does his best with Shakespeare and Jane Austen, Diana Spearman with Scott, and Michael Tatham with Goldsmith, but of course what there is to say about such writers in this respect is of a more equivocal character, although by no means less interesting. There is a notable essay by John Gray on Hayek which points out that the reason Hayek denies that he is a ‘conservative’ is his conviction that we have destroyed or lost the required moral-linguisticcultural consensus. The essay on Ruskin I found unconvincing, and those on Newman and Bradley not much to the point. At the end of the volume there is a list of seventeen writers who deserve notice in respect of the character and history of this ‘conservative
disposition’: I was surprised that the names of neither Montaigne nor Pascal appeared. Also those of Benjamin Constant and John Grote might profitably be added. But there is no doubt that the Salisbury Review is a sane and serious journal and that it has acquired some exceptionally good and intelligent contributors: sharp without being sour, imaginative without being fanciful and confident without being bland.
Lectures in the History of Political Thought
Michael Oakeshott Edited by Terry Nardin and Luke O’Sullivan
Preface This second volume of Michael Oakeshott’s Selected Writings comprises the previously unpublished lectures Oakeshott gave at the London School of Economics and Political Science during the late 1960s, shortly before he retired as Professor of Political Science. Oakeshott had begun to prepare the lectures for publication, then abandoned the project. Among his papers, now in the Oakeshott archive at the LSE, was a photocopy of a typescript that he had corrected by hand and parts of which he had evidently had retyped. Copies of a slightly earlier typescript were circulating privately. We have used the LSE copy of Oakeshott’s revised typescript, but we have checked it against copies of the earlier typescript and relied on the latter when the revised typescript was incomplete or unclear. We have not been able to find the originals of these typescripts. The volume is a joint effort. Terry Nardin prepared a working transcript from the typescript in circulation. Luke O’Sullivan revised that transcript in the light of the revised typescript and other material in the archive. Both editors worked on the Introduction, with Nardin revising O’Sullivan’s draft. The indexes were prepared by O’Sullivan. Keith Sutherland at Imprint Academic did much to improve the physical appearance and layout of the text. The editors are grateful to the LSE for consenting to the publication of material from the archive. We are also grateful to those who have supported the project, including Kenneth Minogue and Timothy Fuller, whose gift of Oakeshott’s papers established the archive, and the many well-wishers at the Michael Oakeshott Association, who helped publicize the Selected Writings. We want to thank the staff of the LSE archive, particularly Sue Donnelly and Anna Towlson, for their help. Thanks, too, go to David Boucher, James Cotton, Robert Grant, and John R. Parr for sharing their copies of the lectures and other information.
Finally, we are grateful to Imprint Academic, whose support for Oakeshott scholarship has been central to the growing interest in Oakeshott’s thought during the last few years.
Editors’ Introduction Michael Oakeshott was appointed Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1951. Soon thereafter he established an annual course on political thought. We do not know what topics he took up at first. Teachers of political thought often focus on canonical works, and Oakeshott may have begun this way. His course was aimed at undergraduates new to the subject, and for such students the most suitable materials are the ‘classics’—texts that have, for one reason or another, outlived their original contexts. Such texts, Oakeshott at one time thought, are especially suitable for teaching how politics can be understood historically or philosophically.1 Oakeshott’s lectures, we are told, ‘laid bare the subtleties of Hobbes and Hegel, Mill and Green’ and ‘were packed with students from all disciplines’ across the LSE.2 ‘Running from Plato to John Stuart Mill’, the course soon ‘became more or less the centre of gravity in that vast school’.3 But later the focus seems to have shifted from texts to contexts. The last version of the lectures, which we present here, is a study of ideas in relation to their contexts, not a study of texts. Nor is this study of contexts a continuous story; it is an exploration of four particular contexts, the political experience of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, [1] Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Study of “Politics” in a University’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. T. Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991). [2]
Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990), p. 19.
[3] Noël O’Sullivan, ‘In the Perspective of Western Thought’, The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott, ed. Jesse Norman (London: Duckworth, 1993), p. 105. John R. Parr, who attended the course around 1960, records that Oakeshott gave separate lectures on Plato, Aristotle, St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Locke, Burke, Bentham, and Mill.
the medieval Europeans, and modern Europeans—‘different peoples, at different times, in different intellectual and physical circumstances, engaging in politics in different ways and finding different things to think about it’.4 The result is a study of the political thought of these peoples, not a tour of the classics. Those who attended the lectures remember their intellectual substance and vivid presentation. Oakeshott had something to say and could say it well. ‘The course showed with what sureness of touch he married a commanding vision of the various styles of doing politics in the Western world, their vocabulary and idiom, with the requirements of an undergraduate audience, generally new to this kind of subject’.5 A former student describes Oakeshott as a ‘polished, stylish lecturer’ whose ‘lectures (delivered from very full notes) were invariably well constructed, and interesting’.6 Others confirm that he preferred lecturing from a detailed script, which he would then abridge or embellish as the occasion required.7 ‘He raised his voice sufficiently to be heard by everyone’ but ‘he did not project it forcefully or vary his tone very much; perhaps he disdained any oratorical devices’.8 Maybe so, but he knew that lectures are performances. ‘A particular feature was the opening of the lecture. Other lecturers traditionally walked down the centre aisle of the theatre, but Oakeshott had found a mysterious back entrance that enabled him to appear through the curtain behind the lectern, greeted each time by a storm of applause’.9 Reading the lectures, one can imagine Oakeshott at his [4]
‘Introduction’, p. 33.
[5]
Elie Kedourie, ‘A Colleague’s View’, in Norman, pp. 99–100.
[6]
Russell Price, ‘A Choice and Master Spirit’, in Norman, p. 29.
[7] Grant, Oakeshott, p. 19; Kenneth Minogue, Introduction to Morality and Politics in Modern Europe: The Harvard Lectures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. xii. [8]
Price, ‘A Choice and Master Spirit’, p. 29.
[9]
Noël O’Sullivan, ‘Perspective of Western Thought’, p. 105.
podium and enjoy, vicariously, the experience of being among his audience. For Oakeshott, that audience was emphatically one of listeners, not readers. During his lifetime, Oakeshott would not agree to publish the lectures. But the typescript shows evidence of revision with an eye to publication. Several of the medieval chapters, for example, break from the pattern of short paragraphs crafted to be spoken, and seem to have been done after Oakeshott retired in 1968. That he allowed the lectures to survive amongst his literary remains is further evidence that he was not decisively opposed to their surfacing posthumously.10 Fortunately, they are a pleasure to read—crisp, cogent, clear, and engaging. Although they do not contribute directly to current scholarship, the lectures fully merit inclusion in a series of his selected writings. Oakeshott’s readings of the historical scholarship and classic texts offer views on Greek, Roman, medieval, and modern political thought that students and teachers will find illuminating and stimulating. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly in the present context, they shed new light on Oakeshott’s own thinking. They do so not least because they enrich our picture of his self-conception as a teacher as well as a scholar of political thought. The aim of this introduction is, therefore, not only to give some idea of the content of the lectures, but also to indicate how they relate to the rest of his work. The first lecture is particularly worthy of close attention, after which we shall look in turn at each of the four periods he discusses.
[10] Oakeshott ‘put no restrictions on what was to be done with his papers when he bequeathed them to Shirley Letwin’. Timothy Fuller, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. ix.
Oakeshott’s Introduction (Lecture 1) Oakeshott declared in his opening address that the course was intended as ‘an historical study’. Coming from a man with an abiding interest in the nature of historical inquiry, those words were more loaded than usual, and it will pay us to attend to them. Since the 1920s, Oakeshott had been revising his view of history as a distinct mode of theoretical understanding, and we are entitled to see this view as presupposed in his description of history as ‘a mode of thought in which events, human actions, beliefs, [and] manners of thinking are considered in relation to the conditions, or the circumstantial context, in which they appeared’.11 This was a subtle way of alerting his audience to what we might call his ‘one-damn-thing-after-another’ view of the historical process. His philosophy led Oakeshott to conceive of historical events as related to one another only by other events. Any attempt to reveal the overarching unity in historical events, anything like Hegel’s argument that the whole human past was the story of the development of freedom, lay beyond the remit of historical knowledge. Hence his remark to his students that ‘I cannot detect anything that could properly correspond to the expression “the history of political thought”’, an expression that he mercilessly dissected at length elsewhere.12 It is also worth underlining that Oakeshott was challenging any version of the belief that a clear direction of ‘progress’ was visible in the history of political thought, aiming thereby to cut across traditional distinctions between ‘left’ and ‘right’ in the interpretation of the history of political ideas. Hegelian, conservative, liberal, Christian, socialist, and Marxist thinkers [11]
‘Introduction’, p. 31.
[12] Michael Oakeshott, ‘Political Thought as a Subject of Historical Enquiry’, What is History? And other essays: Selected Writings, vol. I (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), pp. 403–21.
have all entertained a belief that history was necessarily moving in a certain direction, but this was not the kind of view that Oakeshott thought a historical analysis of politics could support. Such beliefs were usually inspired, in Oakeshott’s view, by the assistance such grand narratives offered in furnishing justifications of particular courses of political action. They were part of the subject matter facing anyone concerned with political thought, but the aim of historical inquiry was to study them, not engage with them on their own terms. And in these lectures, Oakeshott’s approach was anything but partisan. Anyone coming to them expecting a blast of polemic on the issues of the day will be disappointed; it took over two-thirds of the course to get to the modern world, and the first half was devoted entirely to Greece and Rome. Oakeshott was equally keen to impress upon his students that he was not offering a ‘scientific’ history of imagined ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. ‘The geographical conditions of ancient Greece, or the institution of slavery, or their religious beliefs, did not cause the Greeks to think about politics in the way they did’. Such considerations he described as contextual, not causal. That is to say, he thought of historical relations as carrying mutual implications rather than strict entailments; hence the analogy of the dry stone wall that he used to characterise them elsewhere.13 This is entirely consistent with his long-held view that history could make no claim to be ‘scientific’ in the manner of the natural sciences. Another important qualification concerned the meaning of the adjective ‘political’ in the expression ‘political thought’. This should not be taken to mean, Oakeshott emphasised, that there was a special kind of thought with an exclusive subject matter, ‘politics’. Politics, like other human activities (Oakeshott instanced bringing up children, building houses, and banking as examples), could itself become a subject for discussion. When [13] See Michael Oakeshott, On History and other essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 94.
and if this happens, the questions people ask could either be directed to devising ‘appropriate courses of action’ and ‘reasons for recommending them’, or aiming ‘to understand, to make more intelligible, to interpret, or to explain’. So far as Oakeshott was concerned, there was a clear distinction between practical and theoretical approaches to politics. He was presupposing a certain conception of political activity in which politics are not natural to human beings but pretty much a necessary feature of any complex society not ruled in an entirely arbitrary fashion. For politics to appear, however, certain conditions must obtain. The existence of societies of language-using humans that provide the rudiments of existence but yet have no politics worth speaking of was perfectly intelligible. Put simply, politics was not a ‘primordial’ activity like eating or sleeping, but something that emerged gradually and imperceptibly over a long period. Not only did ‘politics’ need a community of human beings, then; it also needed a community in which there were differences over ‘common customs or rules of conduct’. Societies must have some way of dealing with disagreements over their arrangements before ‘politics’ could appear. This had the further consequence that politics required that the rules of a community ‘must be understood by the members … to be capable of being determined by human deliberation and action’. This was vital, Oakeshott thought. If it were really believed that ‘the ruling authority itself, the law and the instruments of government, are all utterly unalterable—not merely difficult to change, but by their nature incapable of being changed’—there would be nothing to talk about. It is the essence of politics to be ‘concerned with deciding between alternative courses of action and with instituting change … and persuading or inducing those who have the authority to act to make certain choices and not others’. If these things are held to be impossible, there can be no politics. Behind these beliefs lay something like the view (and here Oakeshott may have learnt from Hegel) that humanity was unique
in being able to acquire a ‘second nature’ through history and education. Only this could explain how political communities were brought into being. He shared, in other words, Hegel’s sense of the historicity of human experience, and it indelibly coloured his view of how politics should be studied.14 Even the philosopher would be unwise to ignore history, on the view Oakeshott was putting forward. The relevant period was roughly the last three thousand years. Only during that time, Oakeshott claimed, had ‘associations which provide in a significant degree the conditions for political activity’ been in existence. Furthermore, he was explicit that ‘politics’ was ‘in the main, a European invention’. No doubt accusations of Eurocentrism cannot be entirely forestalled on this point, even allowing for the qualificatory ‘in the main’, but Oakeshott was not tub-thumping: he immediately went on to describe politics as ‘Europe’s somewhat embarrassing gift to the world’. Moreover, he did not see anything like three thousand years of continuous European political history, as he explained elsewhere. Politics had emerged but ‘often been submerged, or half-submerged, again’ in European history. Oakeshott’s division of his subject into four ‘relatively selfcontained’ eras of political thought was partly intended to reinforce this point. He wanted to emphasise the discontinuity between these ‘memorable passages’, as he called them; to his mind, for example, Greece and Rome had been very different, and labelling them both as examples of something called ‘ancient’ politics without further qualification was simply misleading. This attitude mirrors the historiography of the 1960s at large, which was increasingly sceptical in tone; in the history of science, for example, a similar insistence that the transitions from ancient to modern science were not part of a single story of progress, that Aristotle was not to be understood simply as an erring Galileo, was becoming widely accepted. [14] For Oakeshott’s account of Hegel’s political theory see On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 256–63.
Oakeshott’s attention to language also reflected wider historical and philosophical trends, such as the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy and the humanities that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. There was no set of words that was inherently ‘political’, no political language simply as such. Moreover, one always had to ask whether the words one was interested in were uttered ‘in the service of political decision and action’ or whether those who used them had in mind an ‘explanatory’ enterprise not directly connected to some practical course of action. In either case, one is usually dealing with words belonging to a complex vocabulary. One reason Oakeshott singled out the periods he did was that he believed that each had produced its own distinctive complex of political words, and he devoted considerable time to identifying the terms he felt were most characteristic of the period in question. When he turned his attention from these constituents of practical speech to ‘political theory’, he made clear that he was not discussing theories of how to act more effectively in politics, but suggesting historical and philosophical explanations. In his philosophical writings Oakeshott always argued for a categorial difference between practical and theoretical (scientific, historical, philosophical) activity, and it was this insistence that lay behind his admonition that ‘we should do well to avoid confusing practical political beliefs and arguments’ with ‘attempts ‘to explain political activity, either historically or philosophically’. To help his students grasp the difference, he offered the distinction between religion and theology, between ‘beliefs, sentiments, and longings’ and ‘a system of abstract ideas’. The analogy is not perfect, because theology, in the end, remains the servant of religion, while Oakeshott did not see history and philosophy as shackled to practice. The main point was to warn students that they should distinguish between ‘a writer like Machiavelli or Locke and a writer like Hobbes or Hegel’. In subsequent lectures, however, Oakeshott gives surprisingly little attention to individual writers. Indeed, those lectures compose a history of political thought remarkably free of political
thinkers; only Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas are deemed worthy of lectures of their own (Plato and Aristotle each get two). No modern thinkers, not even Hobbes or Hegel, probably the modern political thinkers Oakeshott most admired, got their own. Perhaps this was because he felt that the contributions of modern political thinkers largely reformulated ancient and medieval ideas in the face of new problems, amounting to little more than old wine in new bottles. However that may be, even those thinkers he did discuss at length individually were always presented as philosophers whose political thought was part of a more general world-view embracing religion, ethics, science, and much else. As we shall now see, for Oakeshott the key to the history of political thought lay in the contextual approach.
Greek Political Thought (Lectures 2–10) In referring to the ‘political experience’ of the ancient Greeks, Oakeshott distinguished between ‘what actually happened’ and ‘what the Greeks themselves came to believe had happened’. These things might coincide, but they by no means always did so, even though Oakeshott believed the Greeks were right to recognize themselves, as he believed we must still recognize them, as ‘the inventors of “politics”’. It did not matter for his purposes whether or not the Greeks’ ‘awareness of their own politics’ coincided with the truth; the important thing was that this awareness had provided a ‘myth or legend’ that sustained their ‘confidence in themselves’. As he saw it, the emergence of the polis around 1000 BCE was followed by the emergence of a narrative in which the Greeks told themselves a story of a union of tribes, the result of which was not itself a tribe but a self-consciously novel form of association. All the features of the tribe—customs, gods, a chief or ruler— were transformed in becoming part of the polis. Just as ‘Hellas’ was the community of Greek-speakers, and not merely an area of the Mediterranean, so the polis was more than just a place. A polis offered protection, worship, and lawfulness, the ‘justice’ that Plato was to examine. Most of all, it offered the ‘life of talk’ that the Greeks believed made them ‘superior to all other peoples’. This life was centred in the agora, the scene of ‘the endless palavers which constitute half of Homer’s Iliad’, where the demos, the people, or more accurately, those of the demos who were politai, citizens, came to settle their own affairs—a privilege they believed was denied, for example, to the Persians. Aristotle described the relationship between citizens as a kind of ‘friendship’, a relationship between equals, in contrast to the hierarchy of tribal and family relationships. Oakeshott emphasized that the equality under consideration here was an artificial one; notoriously, Aristotle was anything but a believer
in natural equality. The significance of the artificial equality of the polis was that it was produced and maintained by persuasion, not force. Greek ‘politics’ consisted in precisely this process of mutual accommodation through discussion. This was true, Oakeshott argued, even in the early days of the polis, when a king or basileus ruled. Even though ‘the right to speak on public occasions was confined to the king and his immediate counsellors’, an assembly of citizens was still called ‘to listen to deliberations about policy and about legal judgments, and they were participants in so far as they were there to be persuaded’. In later times, the Greek cities famously came to know a variety of forms of government. So precarious was Greek politics that the belief arose that ‘political forms and arrangements were essentially unstable’, in a fashion that was, at best, cyclical, and certainly not progressive. There were, however, characteristic political forms, beginning with aristocratic oligarchies in which noble blood was claimed as a title to rule, but later often involving the dominance of the wealthy. There also emerged democracies in cities like Athens, where the original assembly had been ‘transformed into the ruling authority’ (always restricted to male citizens, a minority of the inhabitants). And from time to time there were tyrannies, which Oakeshott was careful to distinguish from despotisms. Where a despot was regarded as having no right to rule, the rule of the tyrant was autocratic but regular. The tyrant ‘was a man, often a successful magistrate or military commander, who was pushed forward and endowed with authority; either by a shaky oligarchy, as a defender of its threatened privileges, or by a democratic faction intent on dislodging an oligarchy’. He differed from the despot, according to Oakeshott, in that he did not rule for his personal gratification and ‘rarely subverted the ordinary laws of the polis’.15 The insistence on this distinction reflects Oakeshott’s belief that constitutional issues had an important part to play in understanding politics; the phrase ‘power politics’ he would [15]
‘The Political Experience of the Ancient Greeks’, p. 58.
doubtless have found very under-determined. Not only were power in the sense of force and power in the sense of right distinct from one another, he told his students, the sources of the right to rule had changed many times in the periods he was considering. Sensitivity to such distinctions was crucial to historical and philosophical understanding. Oakeshott has been criticized for ignoring the violence of ancient history, particularly in the case of the Romans; his admiration of Roman law, for example, is said to have blinded him to the destruction wrought by Roman armies in Gaul and elsewhere as they extended imperial rule.16 And superficially, it is true that his synthetic style can make things appear so neat and coherent that he is in grave danger of oversimplification. But if one reads carefully, one sees that Oakeshott in fact placed war absolutely at the centre of political history, especially in the modern world. He told his students quite clearly and unambiguously that ‘preparing for war, fighting a war, or recovering from a war’ had been the norm in modern Europe, and that ‘modern governments owe their extraordinary power more to war than to any other single circumstance.’17 We should not underestimate the radicalism of a view that declared, in a fashion similar to Marcuse at the time, that the technology of power in the modern world could transform the modern state into a police state. Greek politics was faced with a stark choice that Oakeshott himself was inclined to regard as inescapable, the choice he once described as between ‘jaw jaw’ and ‘war war’. The Hobbesian in him regarded either talk or violence as the only means available of resolving human disputes, and the very existence of politics was at least a victory for talk. He admired the Greeks for having brought into precarious existence a concept of government by persuasion.
[16] See Perry Anderson, review of Rationalism in Politics, 2nd edn., London Review of Books, 24 September 1992, pp. 7–11. [17]
‘The Generation of a Modern State’, p. 373.
Oakeshott may have regarded the assumptions he found reflected in the Greek distinction between political life in the agora and the life of the worker in the household or oikia as sound, but he did not hide from his students the fact that those fortunate enough to be accepted into the political sphere as self-determining agents were always a minority. His lectures were conventional in their view that neither Plato nor Aristotle had wanted to defend anything like what we know as modern democratic citizenship. The lectures were eccentric, however, in dealing with Aristotle before Plato. One reason for this lies in Oakeshott’s view that Aristotle had established a ‘hierarchical map of human activity’ which ‘with a few amendments scribbled on it by later thinkers’ had provided the ‘context of all European political thought for two thousand years’.18 At the base of this Aristotelian scheme was ‘a place for getting a living and carrying on the human species’; next came a ‘place for politike (the activity of making and sustaining a polis)’; and at the summit lay ‘the activity of understanding and explaining’. Another reason for treating Aristotle first was that his thinking lay closer to the mainstream of Greek political experience, which it sought to categorize and rationalize, than Plato’s effort to reshape that experience in the light of radically different ideas. Whatever attachment to the Aristotelian framework Oakeshott may have had, it did not prevent him from recognizing that classification, because it ‘entails the choice of a principle’, is always ‘an ambiguous and somewhat arbitrary activity’. For example, Aristotle had arrived at his influential categorization of constitutions into monarchies, aristocracies, and polities by combining the principles of there being one, or few, or many rulers, and of ruling as being either for the benefit of the rulers or the ruled. Aristotle’s Politics, Oakeshott cautioned, was not to be read as if composed entirely of this sort of logical analysis. Using a phrase he also applied to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he described it as a ‘supremely miscellaneous’ work, sometimes philosophical [18]
‘Aristotle (2)’, p. 129.
in its use of ideal types, sometimes empirical or quasi-historical in its use of examples, sometimes practical in its effort to diagnose the causes of political failure. Although Oakeshott is slightly inconsistent about the details, it is clear he saw Aristotle as engaged in several different kinds of inquiry.19 All this is entirely consistent with Oakeshott’s own theory of modality, which recognized different forms of knowledge. If it is possible to discern traces of Oakeshott’s own thought in his remarks on Plato and Aristotle, it is harder to do so in the treatment of stoicism and epicureanism with which he concluded his lectures on the ancient Greeks. This might seem odd; after all, epicureanism was notoriously associated in the early modern world with scepticism of the sort espoused by his beloved Hobbes, and Oakeshott himself attributed an ‘ironic’ character to philosophical thinking in On Human Conduct. Furthermore, in his personal life, Oakeshott was a rather epicurean character, preferring in his retirement a quiet retreat in the countryside and the company of friends to the bustle of London. Yet there was nothing unusual in his argument that both stoicism and epicureanism were responses to the increasing dependence of the Greek cities on external powers. We might, however, note his suggestion that circumstances to which stoicism was an intelligible response had arisen more than once in European history. Whether this was true of epicureanism, he did not say; perhaps he considered it, like stoicism, a permanent possibility.
[19] Compare ‘Aristotle (1)’, p. 113, and ‘Aristotle (2)’, p. 116, where first three and then four Aristotelean approaches to politics are distinguished.
Roman Political Thought (Lectures 11–15) Oakeshott gave only half as many lectures on the Romans as he had on the Greeks, probably because he regarded their achievements in political thought as more practical than speculative; by common agreement, there were no Roman political thinkers of the stature of Plato or Aristotle. He was, however, keen to stress that the phrase ‘the ancient world’ involved ‘one of the most misleading generalizations ever made’ insofar as it implied that the Greek and Roman political experiences were indistinguishable.20 Where the Greeks never really discovered how to secure political stability, the Romans excelled at the art of maintaining their state. It is not hard to discern admiration in the description of them as ‘a conservative people supremely capable of learning from experience’,21 or in his claim that if the Greeks were the inventors of politics so far as Europe was concerned, it was the Romans we must thank for our conception of ‘law’. Singling out the transition from republic to empire, Oakeshott argued that the Romans were supremely good at exploiting the ambiguity inherent in all political speech. It was because of their skill in this that the empire took root, though one may convict him of exaggeration in saying that it did so ‘without opposition or serious misgiving’. This belief in the importance of language in politics ensured that an interpretation of Roman history in which socio-economic class was the governing principle found no favour with Oakeshott. Revealingly, given his admiration for Roman politics, he drew the comparison with eighteenth-century England, which, he believed, had also been ruled by ‘family connections’ and which he elsewhere implied had been the highwater mark of English political achievement.22 To see Roman [20]
‘The Political Experience of the Ancient Romans (1)’, p. 176.
[21]
‘The Political Experience of the Ancient Romans (2)’, p. 206.
[22] See Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, p. 109.
politics as simply the struggle between plebeians and patricians was to ignore the extent to which ‘organizations of opinion about policy’ cut across such divisions, just as they had in England. The great Roman families had also been ‘organizations of interests’, but they had never, in Oakeshott’s opinion, been only that. This emphasis on family separated the Romans from the Greeks, for ‘all that is most representative of Greek thought expressly rejected the understanding of the polis on the analogy of a family or a household’.23 But the principle uniting this extended Roman family was not ‘engagement in a common enterprise’ (for example, the mission of world domination with which Rome is often associated); it was ‘respect for the mos majorem, ancient customs, and respect for the law’. Much of the strength of this principle was derived from its religious character; for Oakeshott, ‘the populus Romanus was a curia (a religious society) composed of curiae (religious guilds)’, and Roman politics ‘never ceased to have an element of religious ritual.’24 In his account of Roman government, Oakeshott emphasized the distinction between res publica, the ‘public concern’ in which all Romans shared, and the civitas, or the Roman state. The belief in a Roman res publica, ‘the destiny or fortuna of the Roman people’, had made Rome not only, like Athens, a political community, but also a civil or legal community, ‘a community which recognized itself as private individuals or families joined together in the enjoyment of rights and duties in respect of one another’. This notion of civil community, he claimed, had not emerged so clearly in Athens as in Rome, but it was essential to ‘the sort of community we should be at home in’, for the distinction between private and public communities was also crucial in modern political thought.25 [23]
‘Roman Political Thought (1)’, p. 211.
[24]
‘Roman Political Thought (1)’, p. 213.
[25]
‘Roman Political Thought (2)’, p. 224.
The key term as far as Oakeshott was concerned was lex. This ‘positive and historical’ conception of law emerged from older ideas of fas, law as imposed by religious duties, and jus, law as a kind of moral rule. The significance of lex was that it ‘stood for a law known to have been made at a certain time and a written down law’, the equivalent of a modern statute. In this sense the Romans could be said to have arrived at a conception of sovereign authority that never fully emerged in Greece. ‘A “sovereign” authority is not merely one that has no contemporary superior, but one which is emancipated from the past.’26 Roman thought also differed from the Greeks in understanding government as a combination auctoritas (‘authority’) and potestas (‘legal power’, which blended ‘leading’ with ‘administration’, in other words, the executive power). Etymologically, auctoritas and auctor were derived from the verb augere, meaning to increase, augment, ‘add lustre to’. The auctoritas of the auctor, then, was that of a founder: Romulus was the auctor of Rome, and his auctoritas was believed to have been passed down through all subsequent generations. It was, however, the authority of a teacher or adviser, not a commander, and it was, so far as the institutions of Roman government were concerned, located chiefly in the senate, which was thought of as ‘composed of patres, the “fathers” of the populus Romanus’.27 Commanding or ruling required potestas, power not as sheer force (potentia) but legal powers distributed amongst the various offices of state, each of which bore ‘the right and the duty to do certain things’. Not only could ‘all the rights and duties which pertained to all the different current officers of state’ be subsumed in the concept of the total potestas available to government, the potestas of an office could be distinguished from the office to which it belonged. ‘Thus, Augustus was successively endowed with the potestas of a consul, of a proconsul, of a tribune and of [26]
‘Roman Political Thought (3)’, p. 245.
[27]
‘Roman Political Thought (2)’, p. 227.
a censor’, even though he was legally barred from holding those offices. The significance of the principate, according to Oakeshott, was not just that an unprecedented amount of potestas was concentrated in the hands of a single individual, but that potestas and auctoritas were for the first time combined. The consequence of this development was that the distinction between the two was blurred; ‘the later jurists tended to ignore [it], regarding the will of the imperator as supreme, and not worrying to consider very much how he became endowed with this supremacy’. Even then, however, a Roman emperor did not automatically become a despot exercising what the Romans called dominium, rule based solely on ownership; Caligula’s declaration that ‘I can treat anyone exactly as I like’ was ‘a desperate departure from the traditions of Roman government’ that was not typical of a Roman emperor.28 Whatever one makes of this reading of the Roman political vocabulary, it is significant for understanding Oakeshott’s own thought; in particular, the words we have been discussing were crucial to his mature political philosophy. The reader of the essay ‘On Civil Association’ in On Human Conduct will immediately notice that it uses many of the same Latin words to denote key ideas, and there is certainly a monograph waiting to be written by someone suitably qualified on their importance in Oakeshott’s thought. Roman politics was decisively altered not only by the end of the republic but also by the emergence of Christianity. This ‘introduced a tension between religion and politics which had never before existed’ in Roman experience, and was, Oakeshott thought, an ultimately victorious challenge to the foundational ‘myth’ sustaining that experience. In his introduction to an edition of Leviathan some years before, Oakeshott had argued that the Christian myth of the fall had fuelled the imagination of thinkers from Augustine to Hobbes, and he makes that argument again in his lectures on medieval political thought. The notion that a [28]
‘Roman Political Thought (2)’, p. 236.
society requires such a myth if it is to have the cohesion necessary for civil association, however, is one that he never really worked out in detail; it is the source of some unresolved tensions in his thought. In the modern world, as Oakeshott’s theory of modality implicitly recognizes, an irreducible plurality of viewpoints is the norm, but this plurality precludes the shared background he believed the Roman and Christian social myths had provided in ancient and medieval times. Hence, the possibility of maintaining the practical analogue of civil association, that is, government through the rule of law, is also adversely affected insofar as this depends on the existence of such a shared background. Yet in his theory of civil association, Oakeshott remarked only that it required the existence of some shared values, without ever really giving his attention either to the means of their generation or the form they ought to take. Oakeshott could have replied that these were contingent, historic matters beyond the strict remit of political philosophy. But if one seeks outside his strictly philosophical writings for anything like a new ‘myth’ appropriate to modernity, one finds only the negative view that contemporary societies are united mostly by their acquisitiveness, as in his retelling of the Tower of Babel story.29 Modern nationalist doctrines were similarly incapable of providing the right kind of ‘glue’ for civil association, as these lectures make clear.30 Again, however, although he appears to have believed (unlike Carl Schmitt) in a form of patriotic sentiment that did not rely for its viability on excluding others, he never worked out this belief in detail. To return to the lectures themselves, Oakeshott argued that the end of the Roman world could not be precisely dated, but that the universal extension of Roman citizenship throughout the empire [29]
See ‘The Tower of Babel’, On History, pp. 165–94.
[30] ‘The Authority of Governments and the Obligations of Subjects (2)’, pp. 444–6.
marked a significant stage in its decline. The smaller the personal connection with the myth of the original foundation, the harder it became for individuals to experience it as a motivation for action. The Roman world ended, he seems to have thought, because its inhabitants lost the will to defend it—a conclusion reminiscent of Collingwood’s remark that civilizations ‘die in the night’.
Medieval Political Thought (Lectures 16–22) Oakeshott extensively revised the medieval lectures around the time he retired, perhaps with an eye to publication, adding a lecture on ‘The Medieval Theory of Empire’ and considerably expanding his treatment of Augustine and Aquinas. That his respect for medieval political thought matched his admiration of the Romans will not surprise those familiar with his published writings. This respect registered the unpromising beginnings of the medieval world, which emerged from the ruined fragments of the western Roman empire. The connection between the Roman and medieval civilizations was never entirely sundered, however, and in the lectures Oakeshott can be found emphasizing the linguistic and intellectual survivals. The Latin language and the Christian religion were, to his mind, two important bases on which medieval Europe was raised. Oakeshott saw Christianity as supplying a sustaining ‘myth’ on which virtually all Europeans could draw for their selfunderstanding, and from the Latin language those who were literate gained ‘a past-relationship with a Roman civilization in terms of which they came to understand themselves’. Oakeshott had made clear at the start of his lectures on Greece that the subjectivity of historical actors was not decisive in deciding what had really been going on at a particular time in history. Nevertheless, what people believed they were doing was still a component of whatever may have been going on, and we must attend to these beliefs when evaluating the place of institutions in the history of political thought. For Oakeshott, institutions were ‘patterns of conduct, manners of behaving’.31 Early medieval politics characteristically lacked such settled patterns. Oakeshott believed that unlike Greek and Roman politics, medieval European politics began not from tribal associations but from [31]
‘Medieval Political Experience’, p. 265.
an anarchic host of competing claims to rule advanced by rival ‘noble’ families. Medieval history was in a sense the history of the formation of institutions, like parliaments, which had no exact earlier equivalents. Despite the chaotic situation that followed the collapse of Roman authority, Oakeshott had no sympathy for the idea that the medieval centuries were the ‘dark ages’: ‘the view that this was a period of European history of even comparative stagnation has nothing whatever to be said in its favour’, he flatly declared.32 A foundational medieval belief was that the right to rule was God-given, in the sense that ‘for men to be in subjection to other men, was so remarkable a situation that it could be justified only by supposing that this right to rule came from God.’ Christian belief acted, in other words, as a limiting force in medieval arguments about the authority of governments. For Oakeshott, the ideas of absolute monarchy and divine hereditary right are characteristically early modern, not medieval: ‘the belief in a hereditary right to rule is one of the signs that medieval politics has come to an end.’33 He also argued that medieval authority was no more directly linked to ownership than Greek or Roman beliefs about authority had been. Though medieval monarchs were usually amongst the greatest landholders in their kingdoms, it was not because of this that they were considered legitimate rulers. It was a ‘great achievement of medieval political thought’ to have grasped the distinction between dominium, authority in virtue of the lordship that came from ownership, and potestas, authority derived from a ceremony of investiture and exercised over vassals acknowledged to have privileges of their own.34 [32]
Ibid.
[33] Oakeshott deleted this remark in the lecture on ‘Medieval Government’, but see p. 268. [34] ‘The Authority of Governments and the Obligations of Subjects (3)’, p. 462.
Discussing the Romans, Oakeshott had emphasized that ‘the most fundamental of all distinctions in political thought is the distinction between “force” or “violence”, and “authority”’; between potentia, which is physical, and potestas or auctoritas, which is mental; between “might” and “right”’35 He claimed that, even in its earliest days, the medieval world was never without some kind of law, but that it underwent a process analogous to that which occurred in ancient Rome and which Athens had never quite completed: the creation of a positive law in which the societies concerned emancipated themselves from the binding force of custom. This process was assisted by ‘the penetration of medieval Europe by Roman legal ideas’, which Oakeshott described as having an ‘ambiguous’ quality. While those ideas ‘seemed to proclaim an autocrat’, they also suggested that the ruler ‘owed his position to popular approval and authority’. Moreover, while attributing to government the power of ‘remoulding the law of a community’, they invoked ‘the more familiar notion of rulers owing their authority as lawmakers to their subjects.’ That is not to say that medieval government was democratic in the modern sense, any more than Greek or Roman government had been. Oakeshott saw the primary activity of medieval government—the means by which a medieval polity was maintained—as providing justice through a hierarchy of courts, not pursuing policy under centralized direction (one of the distinctive features of modern government). Parliaments, which acted as both ‘assistants and critics of royal government’, provided ‘the medieval answer to the problem of how to reconcile the belief in the fixity of law with the need for legal innovation’. Parliaments not only gave advice, Oakeshott claimed; they also embodied the principle of consent. This is obviously a controversial point, but a very important one given the tendency of political theorists to regard consent as an early modern, usually Lockean, concept. In arguing that ‘the feudal principle that a man’s [35]
‘Medieval Law’, p. 294.
rights may not be altered without his consent’ was ‘already there in the organization of a feudal society’, Oakeshott was detaching consent from its exclusive association with modern liberal democratic thought. Indeed, he claimed that it was often derived by medieval thinkers themselves from their reading of Justinian’s Institutes, for example in the statement that quod omnes tangit, ad omnibus approbetur, or ‘what touches all must be approved by all’. Similarly, ‘representation’ becomes not a modern notion, but a medieval one; thanks to the feudal hierarchy of reciprocal obligations, ‘the possibility of one man “representing” others and both speaking and consenting on their behalf presented no puzzles or difficulties. Men “represented” others long before anyone began to think about “representation”, or to talk about a principle of representation’.36 Before we leave the medieval lectures, we should note how Oakeshott handled the two thinkers in this period to whom he devoted entire lectures, Augustine and Aquinas. As Christian thinkers, both believed in a ‘natural law’ that was in fact divine in origin and ‘absolute in its authority, above kings and emperors’. Refined by successive generations, it became ‘much more speculatively satisfactory than the older notion that made law must not conflict with the ancient customs or that what was Roman was good.’37 Christian natural law, being theologically inspired, also departed from ancient, particularly Aristotelian, thought, in regarding political community as by no means ‘natural’ to human beings. In early Christian thought, government was no more than a regrettable expedient, necessary only until the imminent onset of the last days. Augustine, writing when this particular apocalyptic expectation had begun to subside, provided a ‘sanctification of the imperial Roman government’, of the ‘pax Romana seen sub specie aeternitatis’, which saw some positive virtue in civil order, even if it [36]
‘Medieval Parliaments’, p. 315.
[37]
‘Medieval Law’, p. 294.
was only a shadow of heavenly justice. The Hobbesian inspiration for Oakeshott’s reading of Augustine is visible in his description of the pax of the earthly city as ‘an unmistakable mitigation of the war of all against all which would otherwise spring from the unhindered self-preference of each man.’38 Augustine, as a man with urgent practical problems to solve, was engaged in a different kind of thinking than Aquinas, whose main aim was to reconcile Christian and Aristotelian thought in the light of Aristotle’s rediscovered writings, which provided ‘an explanation of human character, human activity, human virtue which seemed to conflict radically with the accepted Christian one’. To bring Christian and Aristotelian thought together, Aquinas had to modify the relationship between grace and humanity’s earthly existence so that the two were no longer sharply opposed in the manner that Augustine had described. Political life could once again be seen as in some sense ‘natural’ to human beings. Though not the ‘total’ activity it had been for Aristotle, it ought nonetheless to be free from ‘ecclesiastical control or supervision’. The education necessary for salvation was a matter for the church, but the care of subjects, ‘the protection of their rights and the custody of their laws’, was in civil hands. Oakeshott’s interpretation of Aquinas’s writings on the lex civilis reveals once more his ability to find his own political philosophy reflected in the ideas of earlier thinkers. He not only read Aquinas as arguing that ‘the relation of civil to natural law … is the negative relationship of a rule which lays down what seems to be convenient in the circumstances toa principle which gives no specific guidance but must not be rejected’—an argument analogous to his own account of the relationship between law and a broader moral code—but saw the positive conclusions of Aquinas’ prudentia politica as very much in line with his own. We may conclude this section by quoting Oakeshott’s summary of Aquinas’ political creed. That ‘not all sin can conveniently be made punishable as crime; that what cannot be abolished [38]
‘Medieval Political Philosophy (1): Augustine’, p. 335.
except at too greata cost must be tolerated; that the expectations of subjects (even if they are not manifestly just expectations) must not be peremptorily overridden; that the lex civilis is not an instrument of “salvation” but only of civilitas and bene vivere; and that to correct an evil in a manner which may destroy the fides (mutual trust) and the amicitia utilis (bonds of affection) which hold society together, is political suicide’ were all Thomistic conclusions compatible with his own views on civil association and the rule of law.39
[39]
‘Medieval Political Philosophy (2): Aquinas’, p. 358.
Modern Political Thought (Lectures 23–33) Enough has been said to support the view that modern Europe, to Oakeshott’s mind, was best understood as following the often divergent paths laid down in the medieval period. Although he acknowledged that the modern state enjoyed a ‘sovereign’ combination of exclusive secular and religious authority in a way no medieval monarchy had ever done, Oakeshott nevertheless saw it as built ‘of materials got from the ruins of a medieval castle and a medieval abbey’.40 Rather than emphasize the discontinuities between medieval and modern politics, he preferred to stress the continuities; rulers of modern states were just ‘thinly disguised prince–bishops’ or ‘godly princes’. The Reformation in particular had allowed earthly monarchs to acquire the authority previously wielded by the church. In the forging of this new combination, there slipped in a confusion between jurisdictio and gubernaculum, the activities of ruling and of pursuing policy, first in legislation and then in ‘specifically judicial processes’, that made the modern state an ambiguous entity and explains why the modern ‘policy’ state continually threatened to become a ‘police’ state. The confusion was fueled by the exigencies of war, warfare being the arena of policy in which the end is most easily taken to justify the means. These conflicting tendencies at work in modern European politics were already obvious in the attitude of early modern rulers to the diversity that Oakeshott believed had been typical of medieval societies. Both ‘the disposition to generate solidarity by destroying diversity’ and ‘the disposition to generate solidarity by containing diversity’ could be seen at work, but the former was more usual; guild, ghetto, and gypsy alike felt its impact. Persecution was, in other words, nothing new; the goal of a racially homogenous state, like the mono-confessional state, [40]
‘The Generation of a Modern State’, p. 375.
was at least as old as the sixteenth century. There was, Oakeshott implies, continuity between Spanish efforts to purge the kingdom of Muslims and Jews (1492, which marked both the fall of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews, is a symbolic date) and Hitler’s Aryan project. There was class persecution too: ‘The aristocrat exiled because he conflicted with the desired solidarity of a state is a familiar figure in modern European history, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century.’41 Why, then, did the sovereign state, which had the potential to produce a singularly repressive form of government, draw so much support? Oakeshott’s answer was that only a ‘sovereign’ state offered emancipation from the hindrances of medieval society. Given the obvious dangers of such a state, compounded by the ever-increasing material power it could wield in addition to its legal sovereignty, an urgent question quickly became ‘How can a government be constituted so that it may safely be trusted with “sovereign” authority?’ It could not be answered, Oakeshott argued, without some view of the kind of institution a state was. Manifestly, it was nota ‘natural’ one. ‘A modern European state was so empirical a construction, was so manifestly a contingent collection of human beings, that to seek a “natural” unity in it would seem to deny its most notable feature’.42 But if the state were admitted to be in some sense artificial, a variety of responses were still possible. For some, it was like a joint-stock company; indeed, the popularity of the very term ‘association’ as a description of a human community gathered under the aegis of a state indicated that the medieval world was ending. The influence of economic analogies was far reaching, to the point that Oakeshott thought it had ‘come to supersede all others in importance’. The dominant view was that a state was an association united in ‘the exploitation of the natural resources of [41]
‘The Generation of a Modern State’, p. 380.
[42]
‘Interpretations of the Modern European State (1)’, p. 414.
the world’—an ‘economy’ or a ‘factory’. Arising first in a religious context in the writings of authors such as Bacon, only the materialism had survived. It is easy to see how this understanding of modern European political thought was transposed into the scathing metaphor of the Tower of Babel mentioned above, but in the lectures Oakeshott avoided breaking into a tirade, only noting that a third understanding had become increasingly widespread: one that took the state to be neither natural, nor artificial (in the sense of being entirely the product of design), but the historic product of innumerable choices. Thinkers such as Ferguson, Hume, Burke, Vico, and Hegel viewed the state as, like the European landscape itself, ‘a blend of “nature” and “art”, a blend of the “necessary” and the “chosen” … in which the “given” and the “made” are indistinguishable.’43 Oakeshott clearly felt himself closest to this strand of thought, describing as it did a state that is ‘neither a god to be worshipped nor a formless chaos to be merely endured’ but ‘something for which we are conditionally responsible’.44 It is therefore worth examining his remarks on how such a state had been thought to generate authority. He argued that questions like ‘Why ought I to submit?’, ‘What would absolve me from my duty to submit?’, and ‘By what authority does a ruler rule?’ employed ‘the logic of right’ rather than ‘the logic of fact’. The searches for an original contract or divine endowment that were so prominent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at least recognized that questions like these must be answered with reasons that point to an ultimate source of the right claimed.45 The answers may make reference to a shared framework of legal rules, but they must not be reducible simply to the existence of sufficient [43]
‘Interpretations of the Modern European State (2)’, p. 426.
[44]
‘Interpretations of the Modern European State (2)’, p. 427.
[45] ‘The Authority of Governments and the Obligations of Subjects (3)’, p. 466.
force to ensure compliance. Oakeshott summed this up succinctly by saying ‘Power does not have “reasons”; “right” does not have a cause’.46 That is, the questions have to do with why I ought to obey, and to force me to obey without also having the right to use force would violate their terms. Although, as Hume had long ago remarked, lawful government supervened on force, it was not the product of force; although authority tended to generate power, the reverse was not the case. A qualitative shift was required for the move from might to right. A cogent argument in terms of right can always be rejected, even if it cannot be refuted, but at this point, as Hobbes also believed, civility has broken down and we are in imminent danger of violent confrontation. Authority was so important because it was the only possible ‘cohesive’ belief about government. Oakeshott’s argument admits that everything governments do is controversial, but insists that for there to be government at all, it must be possible to disagree with a policy but still acknowledge the government’s right to carry it out. The confusion between power and authority, Oakeshott felt, lay at the heart of the direction modern politics had taken. Until ‘quite recent times’, most claims to authority were in religious terms, but Europeans had ceased to share a Christian worldview that made them tenable. More modern claims to rule—for example, by virtue of membership of the proletariat or of an ‘enlightened’ elite—nevertheless used the same narrative structure in the speculative philosophies of history they created for themselves. For both Marxist and philosophe, the past was oppression and the future deliverance. The belief in ‘progress’ could be said to share this structure, and it has sometimes been regarded as a characteristic liberal belief. But that a regime is ‘progressive’, cannot, on Oakeshott’s view, confer authority (though it may win approval), for authority cannot stem from anything government does. This is why he [46] ‘The Authority of Governments and the Obligations of Subjects (3)’, p. 456.
told his students that ‘what is called “Liberalism”, in its general or European sense’ had ‘systematically obscured’ the problem of authority.47 The remark is all the more striking because Oakeshott himself can, as he acknowledged, be read as locating his own political philosophy in the liberal family. The lectures, then, reinforce the view that the complex theory of civil association in On Human Conduct is best understood as an effort to dispel this obscurity for the benefit of liberalism. It is certainly true that he persistently singled out the writings of English Whig and liberal authors like Locke, Bentham, and J.S. Mill as suffering from it. For Oakeshott, a more promising liberal answer to the problem of authority, one that observed the ‘logic of right’, was that authority derived from popular consent. That left undetermined what was to count as consent or how to assess it, but it was at least an answer couched in the correct terms. The logical incoherence of merging the discourses of authority and policy had not, however, prevented episodes of despotism. In the French and Russian revolutions, for example, governments had used their authority to pursue some goal—overthrowing feudalism or destroying the bourgeoisie—in which all were obliged to participate. Insofar as governments had imposed such goals, however, they suppressed the identity of a modern European state as an association in terms of the rule of law, one in which individuals were to be left to their own devices unless these caused a disturbance of the peace. The final lectures were devoted to this subject, focusing on the confusion between a government confined to ‘providing the conditions in which its subjects may pursue their own chosen and various ends’, and one dedicated to ‘organizing its subjects in the pursuit of a single, premeditated end or purpose’. This is the distinction presented in On Human Conduct as an omnipresent and definitive tension between ‘civil’ and ‘enterprise’ association. In the lectures Oakeshott spoke of ‘telocratic’ and ‘nomocratic’ forms of government, but the distinction is the same. [47] ‘The Authority of Governments and the Obligations of Subjects (1)’, p. 433.
In a telocratic, goal-oriented state, activities are ‘permitted only in relation to the chosen end and only in so far as they contribute to this end’. Even art becomes ‘an adjunct of policy’. This view finds, at bottom, no difference between communism and fascism, and one must acknowledge that asserting the fundamental identity of these supposedly starkly contrasting ideologies of ‘left’ and ‘right’ remains controversial. Oakeshott’s reply was always that ‘left’ and ‘right’ were categories of practical politics wholly inappropriate for detached theorizing; one of the virtues of his approach is its ability to cut across them. Oakeshott focused in particular on what happened to law in a government undergoing a telocratic drift. Legality ‘is recognized to have no independent virtue, but to be valuable only in relation to the pursuit of the chosen end.’ It is subordinated, that is, to the pursuit of whatever is held to be the ‘common good’ or ‘social purpose’, which is always ‘a substantive condition of things’. Ceaseless technological and industrial advance had only encouraged the faulty inference that because a government had the power to pursue an overarching policy, it therefore should. Oakeshott saw this view of government as an ultimate explanation of European colonialism and imperialism, even going so far as to say that ‘in Europe, it may be recognized as governing a European “state” as if it were a colony.’48 He also thought that in the twentieth century, the telocratic perspective had continuously infiltrated the notion of the ‘welfare state’, a confusion made possible because the nomocratic view he favoured also acknowledged an obligation to provide for those unable to provide for themselves. Standing in the way of a complete victory for telocracy was the continuing pluralism of modern European states. Communities holding ‘a variety of religious and moral beliefs, and ‘engaged in multifarious and rapidly changing activities, occupations, and enterprises’ were not promising material on which to impose a single ‘condition of things’. Since attempts to interfere with ‘the freedom to make choices for themselves’ were likely to antagonize [48]
See ‘The Office of Government (1)’, p. 477.
European citizens, none of the unmistakably telocratic regimes that the twentieth century produced had survived. We should note that Oakeshott’s ‘nomocratic’ government is not to be simply identified with the ‘minimal’ or the ‘noninterventionist’ state; the distinction he was driving at did not concern the size of government or the frequency of its actions, but their character. A government could employ many people and be vigorously active without forsaking its adjudicatory and peacekeeping role. Historically, governments had often been driven in a nomocratic direction by the clash of two or more telocratic perspectives; the only way to escape the ‘civil war of telocracies’ which he thought had characterized the seventeenth century was to move towards a ‘substantively neutral legal order’ that shied away from explicitly promoting one or the other conception of godliness. This view may perhaps be taken as a reworking of what is sometimes called the history of toleration, underlining the essentially liberal nature of Oakeshott’s account. The readings he presented in his closing lecture of Kant, Bentham, and Adam Smith in the light of this history of nomocratic ideas on government only reinforce this impression. Nevertheless, he remained insistent to the end on the ambiguous character of the modern European state, and never resorted to arguing that the nomocratic perspective, which he transparently preferred, would, could, or even should win the day. It may, to borrow a phrase, be easy to conceive of a better series of lectures on the history of political thought, but it is probably not so easy to write one.49 Oakeshott’s effort shows him to have been as aware as any Marxist or Foucauldian of the importance of material factors like land ownership or technology, but to have persistently rejected the belief that these were necessarily decisive in favour of an historical perspective to which agency and [49] See John Passmore, review of Roger Scruton, From Descartes to Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 1981), Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1982, p. 182.
contingency were ineliminably important. Overall, the lectures are the most successful sustained piece of historical thinking of all his works, in the sense that they stick to the explication of the key terms and institutions of the period in their contexts. While he often drew parallels with later eras in his accounts of the Greek, Roman, and medieval periods, it cannot be said that his treatments of them were mainly concerned with their significance for us; their relevance as the source of much of our own political thought and vocabulary is taken for granted, and the focus is on understanding them in their own right.
A Note on the Texts During his own lifetime Oakeshott made these lectures available to colleagues and friends. It appears that he initially consented to their publication, and then changed his mind, for the photocopies in the Oakeshott archive of the lectures dated 1968–9 on which this volume has largely been based (LSE 1/1/21, folders 2–5) had clearly been prepared with this aim in mind. Each page had been numbered, and a title page and table of contents supplied. However, it was clear that the version at LSE 1/1/21 could not be published just as it stood. This first effort at publication left some pages absent or misplaced, and there were numerous autograph sheets and marginalia not integrated into the main body of the text. While this volume of the Selected Writings was in preparation, a more legible but incomplete set of photocopies of the lectures (covering Greece and Rome only) was deposited at the Oakeshott archive (LSE 19/1). In addition, the editors had access to some slightly earlier versions of the lectures dated 1966–7 which remain in private circulation. In the cases where there were gaps, deficiencies, insertions, etc. in the version at LSE 1/1/21, then, we sought guidance from the alternate versions. The main source of each text is given in a note at the end of each lecture. It is unknown whether the original MS of the 1968–9 lectures from which both LSE sets were taken survives, but this final series appears not in fact to have differed greatly overall from the versions given in the three previous years, though there are often significant differences of detail. Oakeshott altered the whole of the first lecture extensively, for example. He also entirely rewrote other important parts of the series, including the first three sections of the first Aristotle lecture, the account of Plato’s myth of the cave, and the first section of the lecture on ‘Medieval Government’ (previously given the more specific title of ‘Medieval Kingship’). The 1968–9 version also included three lectures on medieval
political thought which were either not present in the circulated versions (’The Medieval Theory of Empire’) or appeared in a much more condensed form (those on Augustine and Aquinas) as ‘Medieval Political Philosophy’. In most cases, Oakeshott worked on the 1968–9 version simply by making additions and deletions to the typescripts he had used for the 1966–7 lectures in his own hand, though in case of the ‘Introduction’ he had an entirely fresh typescript made. In some cases, however, the 1968–9 version contains copies of autograph sheets that were obviously intended to replace sections of the typescript, even though these had not been crossed out. Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear in all cases exactly where the revisions were to begin, and the only solution has been an educated guess based on the context, as in the section on Plato’s early life. Moreover, in all the versions of the lectures, some passages were placed in brackets, the significance of which is not entirely clear. They cannot always be assumed simply to be deletions, as there are also plenty of crossings-out which unmistakably do signify deletions. It seems most likely that the brackets sometimes indicated passages to be omitted if the lecturer was running short of time. Such bracketed passages have therefore been retained here unmarked, on the grounds that the text as it now stands is to be read, and not heard. The deletions themselves have generally been treated as authoritative, as there is no reason to think they were not made by Oakeshott himself, but in a few cases, where the final version of the lectures omitted some passages from the earlier versions that gave a more extended discussion of the same point, these have been retained as they seemed to expand rather than alter the thought involved. As in volume 1, the aim was to make a good text publicly available rather than attempt a fully annotated critical edition. Transcription was generally unproblematic; some portions of the lectures were in manuscript, others in typescript, but Oakeshott’s handwriting remained good throughout his life, and
the intentions of his amendments were usually unmistakable. In a few cases, some of the marginalia proved illegible, usually either because the original photocopy had been taken with insufficient care, or because of the poor quality of the copy. Once more, the general layout of Oakeshott’s original text has been retained as far as was consistent with presenting it in an editorially coherent manner. Throughout, where Oakeshott used section numberings, or inserted section breaks, these have also been retained, but with a consistent and simplified format to produce a more readable text. Oakeshott’s own footnotes and the small number of editorial notes have been kept separate, with the latter appearing as endnotes. These are restricted to giving the location of the version used. In the few cases in which it proved impossible to see exactly where Oakeshott meant to place corrections, additions, or notes, this has been noticed while inserting such emendations amongst his footnotes. In the main body of the text, obvious mistakes in punctuation, spelling and grammar have been silently corrected. The use of capitals for offices (King or king) in the text was inconsistent, and lower case has generally been preferred here, except for titles held by specific individuals; the popes, but Pope Innocent III. Abbreviations have also been expanded, so that, for example, ‘xvii century’ becomes ‘seventeenth century’. Ampersands have been replaced by ‘and’, and superscripting has been ignored. The underlinings in the text were so extensive that they have usually not been replaced by italics, except in the case of double underlinings or other instances where emphasis was clearly intended. Double quotation marks have been replaced with single quotation marks except for quotations within quotations. Words and phrases in languages other than English (chiefly transliterated Greek and Latin) have been placed in italics to make them stand out in the text.
Introduction 1 What I have to offer you in these lectures is best described as a study of political thought, or aids to the study of political thought. In the main, it will be an historical study. First, we shall be concerned to find out what has actually been believed and thought and said about politics, or in the idiom of politics, from time to time and from place to place, among some of the peoples of Europe during the last three thousand years. Secondly, we shall be trying to understand and account for these beliefs and ways of thinking by relating them to the circumstances of their appearance. And this is what I mean by an historical study. History I take to be a mode of thought in which events, human actions, beliefs, manners of thinking, are considered in relation to the conditions, or the circumstantial context, in which they appeared. This circumstantial context, however, is composed of other events, actions, and beliefs, just as the context of a word in a sentence is composed of other words from which we gather its meaning on that particular occasion. That is to say, history is not a mode of thought in which we understand events, actions, and beliefs as examples of the operation of general laws, but one in which we understand events, actions, and beliefs in relation to things of the same kind—namely, other events, actions, and beliefs. The question the historian is out to answer is: What is the significance of this event, or action, or belief in the context of events and beliefs in which it appears. Now, I have described what we shall be doing in this way because I do not want you to think that I am suggesting anything so specific as a relationship of cause and effect between the conditions or the circumstances in which a belief appeared and the belief itself.
For example, the geographical conditions of ancient Greece, or the institution of slavery, or their religious beliefs, did not cause the Greeks to think about politics in the way they did. These are merely part of the context which helps to make ancient Greek political beliefs more intelligible to us. An historical study of political beliefs cannot, then, supply anything like a final explanation, or even anything that could properly be called a ‘justification’ of these beliefs. We must be content if, in the process, these political beliefs and thoughts become a little more intelligible to us, and a little less mysterious, than they often are. The point of view here is that nothing which men have thought or done is intelligible except in its own context of circumstances. And the enterprise here is to make one event or belief more intelligible by seeing it in a context of other events or beliefs.
2 But, although this is to be an historical study, I want to avoid the appearance of putting before you anything like a continuous history of European political thought. Adventurous books have been written in this style, but I do not think that any of them is really satisfactory. Some people have believed that there is something to be called ‘the history of political thought’ which reveals a kind of cumulative achievement of European peoples gradually acquiring a ‘truer’ (or at least, a less erroneous) understanding of politics, or even a progressively more intelligent manner of considering and answering political questions. It has even been believed that the history of political thought may be understood as the story of the ‘mistakes’ the human race has made in thinking about and practicing politics. And that in studying this history we may learn ourselves to avoid these mistakes. I do not, myself, think this is so. I cannot detect a history of political thought which reveals a gradual accumulation of political wisdom and understanding. Indeed, I cannot detect anything which could properly correspond to the expression ‘the history of political thought’. What I think I can see is different peoples, at different times, in different intellectual and physical circumstances, engaging in politics in different ways and finding different things to think about it. And sometimes I think I can see some sort of an explanation for these different peoples having had the thoughts which they did have. And that is about all. Consequently, I am inclined to direct your attention away from anything like a continuous story of European political thought, and towards the study of the political thought directly connected with some of the different and more memorable passages of
political experience which the histories of European peoples have to show. I will tell you later which these passages are. Each of them I regard as a relatively self-contained political culture, and therefore as the proper context for political beliefs.
3 Now, a certain amount of unnecessary mystery has gathered round this expression: ‘political thought’. Some people speak and write of it as if it were a special kind of thinking; and in this way they make it more difficult to understand than it really is. Others are disposed to include in it everything that has ever been thought or said or written about the human condition; and in this way they make it appear less specific than it really is. But as I understand it, ‘political thought’ is not a special and mysterious kind of thinking with standards and manners peculiar to itself; and it is thinking about something quite specific, which should not be confused with anything else, namely political activity. Most human activities are capable of being thought about and reflected upon; and in certain circumstances they are apt to be thought about. We think about bringing up children, building houses, breeding horses, about fishing, and about banking. Each of these activities provokes questions peculiar to itself, but in every case the common objects of thought are being pursued. We think in order to devise appropriate courses of action and in order to find reasons for recommending them. We reflect in order to understand, to make more intelligible, to interpret, or to explain. Political thinking is people pursuing these common objects of thought but in connection with a specific activity, different from any other; an activity called politics.
4 We begin, then, with an experience, the experience of a political life and political activity. Without this there can be no political thought. Consequently, in order to be able to recognize political thought, we should have at least some provisional ideas about the political activity which is its necessary condition. There are, of course, a great number of different kinds of human activity. Some of them are primordial, like eating and drinking. Others are more sophisticated, like writing poetry, travelling in foreign countries, buying and selling, and curing diseases. Political activity is, in the first place, to be understood as one among the numerous activities which have become characteristic of human beings. Moreover, it belongs to the more sophisticated rather than the primordial activities. It is an acquired, rather than a ‘natural’, activity. Everybody, in order to live, must somehow get a living; but there have been many peoples who have had no ‘politics’, and who are consequently innocent of political thought. Now, every kind of activity requires certain conditions for its appearance and practice. And normally these conditions do not appear suddenly and complete. They emerge gradually, and at a certain point the activity appears unmistakably with the emergence of the conditions which make it possible. In order to be an accountant, you need a manner of doing business which uses accounts, which uses ledgers and account books, and you need to be familiar with certain invented mathematical techniques. At what point in the emergence of all this does the man we now call an ‘accountant’ appear?
In order to be an astronomer you need not only the stars but also questions of a certain sort to ask about them, and instruments and techniques to help you find the answers. At some point, not exactly to be discerned, the activity of mere star-gazing turns into astronomy. It is a question of the emergence of the necessary conditions in a sufficient and significant degree. Our question is: What are the necessary conditions for the emergence of the activity we call ‘politics’? What are the conditions required for the appearance of ‘politicians’? I think we may distinguish three important conditions for the appearance of a political experience. Forgive me if I verge upon the obvious. (1) Political activity is possible only where there is a plurality of human beings. The solitary inhabitant of an island might write poetry, he might be a farmer or a geologist; the conditions for each of these activities are present. But he could not be a politician. But political activity requires more than a mere plurality of human beings; it even requires more than a number of human beings living in close proximity to one another. It requires an association of human beings. Now, what constitutes an association is the recognition of common customs or rules of conduct. It is these rules of conduct which give the singleness or unity to an association which makes political activity possible. But, on the other hand, an association of human beings in which there is no diversity of feeling, sentiment, belief, attitude, and activity could not generate a political experience. This is why we are apt to think that a genuinely tribal society, which certainly has rules and customs, is not one in which politics is likely to appear. Such a society may have the necessary unity, but it rarely has the necessary diversity. And this is why societies which admit a large variety of beliefs and activities among their members are apt to have a large place
for political activity. And that is why associations capable of politics are apt to be, like the states of modern Europe, artificial associations which bring together in a single society people of diverse origins and cultures. Politics, from one important point of view, may be said to be the activity in which a society deals with its diversities. And, consequently, a society without diversities is apt to be a society without politics. (2) The second condition for the emergence of political activity is the presence, within an association of the sort I have described, of some authority recognized to be the official custodian of the law of the association and the official director of the common affairs of the association. In short, a government of some sort; a ruling authority. From one important point of view, political activity is itself concerned with the government and the instruments of government of a society. For these instruments constitute the recognized means by which a society deals with its diversities. And politics is deliberating on how, and upon what, to set these instruments to work. As we shall see, it is quite possible to have government without politics, but it is impossible for there to be politics without government. Another way of stating this condition for the emergence of political activity is to say that it is possible only in an association which has recognized a distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ and has acquired a specific authority whose office is concerned with ‘public’ affairs. (3) But before political activity can appear a third condition must be satisfied. Either the ruling authority itself, or the common law of the association, or the public policy being pursued, or all these, must
be understood by the members of the association to be capable of being determined by human deliberation and action. In other words, political activity is concerned with government, the instruments of governing, and with public policy. And it can appear only when what it is concerned with is understood to be amenable to human choice and decision. This is, perhaps, the most important of the conditions of political activity. It means that there is no place for ‘politics’ in an association whose members firmly believe that the ruling authority itself, the law and the instruments of government, are all utterly unalterable—not merely difficulty to change, but by their nature incapable of being changed. And it means there is no place for politics in a world believed to be wholly determined by natural necessity. If choice about human conduct is, for one reason or another, believed to be impossible, if there were no imaginable alternative to what is happening, and if that alternative could not be chosen by human beings, then politics would be impossible. Politics, then, is an activity between human beings. We do not do politics with gods (unless we imagine the gods to be just like human beings), and we do not do politics with animals. And the chief assumption about human beings which ‘politics’ entails, is that they are capable of determining their actions by taking thought. Now, although politics without government is impossible, there is a distinction to be made. Ruling itself is not doing politics. A ruling authority may engage in political activity either in relation to other ruling authorities, or in relation to its own subjects; but when it does so it is doing something other than ruling. The reason why politics presupposes the possibility of alternative courses of action, and the possibility of change, is because it is an activity precisely concerned with deciding between alternative courses of action and with instituting change.
Politics is not ruling; it is thinking about what should be done and persuading or inducing those who have the authority to act to make certain choices and not others. Thus, although a society may have certain rules and conventions about who should be listened to in deciding about its public affairs, or may suppress the utterance of opinions about its public affairs, in principle, ‘politics’ is not an activity confined to rulers, and it is an activity different from that of ruling itself. These conditions, which must be satisfied if there is political activity at all, tell us, then, that there are certain intellectual and historical situations in which politics cannot appear. But they tell us something more. They tell us not to expect political activity to be merely present or absent, but to expect it to appear in varying degrees of significance. They tell us to expect it to be a gradually emerging activity whose appearance anywhere cannot be exactly dated or assigned to any universal cause. They tell us that political activity is like other activities in that it emerges imperceptibly with the emergence of the conditions which make it possible. And lastly, they tell us to expect political activity not only to appear in varying degrees of significance, but also (according to circumstance) in varying degrees of intensity; and to expect it to be either a continuous activity or a merely intermittent activity.
5 Now, associations of human beings of this sort, associations which provide in a significant degree the conditions for political activity, have existed for about three thousand years. This sort of association of human beings has been more common in some parts of the world than in others. In many parts of the world, during these three thousand years, human beings have lived in communities of one sort or another in which there was no recognizable form of political activity— not because it was arbitrarily forbidden, but because the current beliefs about law, government, and the world in general allowed no place for it. But the part of the world where associations of human beings capable of political activity have been commonest is what, generally speaking, we now call Europe. ‘Politics’ may be said to be, in the main, a European invention; it is Europe’s somewhat embarrassing gift to the world. But even in Europe, during the last three thousand years, there has been no continuous history of political activity. It has emerged here and there, and it has often been submerged, or half-submerged, again. The best that can be said is that, in this part of the world, politics have never been allowed to lie submerged for any great length of time. Political activity has been as constantly rediscovered and reinvented as it has been lost or allowed to lapse. For the most part, in the history of Europe, political societies (that is, associations of human beings which provide the conditions necessary for political activity) have emerged out of tribal societies. But there has been no uniform pattern in this emergence. Some tribal societies have transformed themselves and have acquired the character of political societies by having to deal with changes forced upon them from the outside. But the commonest
occasion for the emergence of a political society has been when a number of tribes have united to compose a new association. And this has been not only the commonest occasion but also the most characteristic and the most decisive occasion. For a union of tribes is manifestly not itself a tribe, its law cannot be a tribal law, and its rulers are not tribal rulers: it is an association which provokes, almost inevitably, a new attitude to law, to government, and to the activity of governing and being governed, an attitude favourable to the emergence of political activity. Such unions of tribes have, on some occasions, been the result of the choice of the tribes themselves (this was often the case in ancient Greece); on other occasions (in ancient Rome, for example, and in Scotland) it has been imposed by a conqueror. But wherever it has taken place it has been not only a momentous event, but also an exceedingly difficult achievement often taking many generations to accomplish. Nor do we need to go to far distant times to observe the difficulty and the uncertainty with which a political society emerges from a union of tribes: the counterpart to what happened in ancient Greece and ancient Rome has been happening with an increasing momentum for the last sixty years in Africa and is taking place before our eyes.
6 Now, the relevance for us of these remarks about the conditions in which political activity and a political experience can appear is that they are also the conditions for the appearance of political thought. There are, as we shall discover, many different levels of political thinking, but political thought may be said to appear, first, as deliberation directly connected with political activity: thought, that is to say, in the service of political decision and action. And just as nobody acts unless he believes that the world is such that it may be acted upon and changed, so nobody deliberates about what should be done unless he believes that there are alternative courses of action open and that he is capable of making a choice. In short, the assumption of political deliberation is that what goes on in the world is not determined solely by natural necessity, but is amenable to human choice. Now, when political thought appears as deliberation in the service of political action, the appropriate expression of this thought will be in words of a certain kind. They may be words which simply express an opinion or a belief about what choice should be made; or they may be words which compose themselves into an exhortation, an advice, a warning, or an argument designed to recommend or to persuade or to justify. In short, it would not be unreasonable, in looking for ‘political thought’, to look for it first in political speeches and debates and in the utterances of rulers, statesmen, and their advisers. Many of these political utterances are directly concerned with decisions about what to do in specific political situations; and their vocabulary is often the vocabulary of ordinary practical activity. The words used are the ordinary words we use whenever we recommend a certain course of action or predict its consequences—whenever we advise, warn, admonish, or restrain.
They are words which are not by any means peculiar to political thought, discourse, or argument. But wherever ‘politics’ has established itself as one of the current activities of a society, wherever a significant political experience has emerged, a specifically political vocabulary has also emerged. Sometimes the words in such a political vocabulary are new—invented in the course of political thinking—and have an exclusively political reference: words like ‘state’ or ‘citizen’ or ‘empire’. Sometimes they are the ordinary words of practical discourse which have been given a specifically political meaning: words like ‘freedom’, ‘power’, ‘right’, revolution’, ‘tyranny’—none of which were, in the first place, political words. Now, this practical political vocabulary is of the utmost importance. It is these words which express political beliefs. It is these words, and the way in which they are used in political argument or in the expression of political opinions, which tell us how a people thinks when it thinks about politics. Every significant political experience has its own political vocabulary. To be able to use that political vocabulary is the first of the political arts. And, in the end, the only means we have of coming to understand any political experience, our own or that of another time and people, is by listening to the political utterance and by getting to know its political words and how they are used. But all these political vocabularies, besides containing comparatively simple words, words which they are apt to share with the general vocabulary of practical discourse, contain some words which stand for larger and more generalized political thoughts. Words, for example, like ‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’, ‘nationalism’.
• Sometimes, they are collective words, which stand for complicated beliefs which may be taken to pieces and their components examined. • Sometimes, they are used as if they were specially compelling reasons for pursuing a recommended policy, or specially compelling justifications for having done what has been done. But, what is important, is that they all belong to this practical political vocabulary, used whenever political matters are discussed, debated, or argued about. What we have to try to discern is their place and their significance in the arguments and utterances in which they appear. The study of political thought may, then, in the first place, be understood as the study of political deliberation, discourse, and argument. And what is to be studied is not only deliberation, discourse, and argument about matters of greatly varying dimensions— ranging from what shall be done tomorrow, through (for example) master-plans for the British economy, to questions such as: what is the ground of a ruler’s authority to rule. What is to be studied is also the different kinds of argument which are apt to appear in political discourse. And the object of the study is to understand the thought embedded in this practical political deliberation and discourse, and to discern the assumptions it reflects, by putting it into its context of beliefs about the world and human beings. In studying political thought, what we are seeking is something which may perhaps be called the intellectual organization, the organization of ideas, arguments and methods of argument, of a political experience. What we are seeking is to understand political utterances in their place in what may be called the political culture of a people. A history of thought is a history of men thinking, not a ‘history’ of abstract, disembodied ‘ideas’.
7 Now, if it is reasonable to look, first, for political thought in the utterances which exhibit deliberation about practical political matters, and in the utterances in which practical political beliefs and policies are argued about, this is not the whole of the matter. Not all thought is the servant of action. And, besides the practical political thought—whose design is to diagnose political situations, to recommend responses to be made to them, to choose and to decide what shall be done or to defend or justify in argument what has been done—besides all this, there is another kind of thinking whose design is to understand and to explain. In order to distinguish this kind of thinking about politics from the practical kind, it has often been called theoretical thinking: and so we have the expression ‘political theory’. But unfortunately this word ‘theory’ has become deeply corrupted, especially in connection with politics; and I prefer not to use it. I shall call it, instead, explanatory thinking. No significant political experience has appeared in the world without having provoked thought of this explanatory kind about politics. And in connection with politics this impulse to understand and to explain has appeared in two different modes: historical and philosophical. I do not propose, now, to explore further the nature of this explanatory thought about political activity. My main point is to warn you that in this study of political thought we shall come across writers and pieces of writing which are not concerned to recommend or to defend practical political beliefs or policies, but which are concerned to explain political activity, either historically or philosophically.
And I want to suggest that we should do well to avoid confusing practical political beliefs and arguments with these other explanatory political theories and arguments. They belong, I think, to two different histories.
8 Now, this distinction between practical political sentiments, beliefs, ideas, aspirations; and theoretical, or explanatory, thinking about politics is important. To have it in mind enables us to recognize the difference between different sorts of ideas, arguments, utterances. It enables us, for example, not to mistake an argument designed to defend or justify a policy or a recommendation for an argument designed to explain or make it intelligible. It enables us to distinguish between, for example, a writer like Machiavelli or Locke and a writer like Hobbes or Hegel. It is a distinction more or less parallel to the distinction between religious beliefs, sentiments, and longings, and a theology in which these beliefs are transformed into a system of abstract ideas. And what we are concerned with in this study of political thought is both the explanatory ‘theories’ which have emerged (and which correspond to a ‘theology’), and the sentiments, beliefs, and aspirations which belong to practical political thought, and which correspond to the sentiments and beliefs of a popular religion.
9 Now, I have said that this study of political thought is to be, mainly, an historical study. That is, we shall be trying to understand political beliefs and utterances as components of a political culture, and trying to understand political cultures as components of more general cultures—beliefs about the world in general, moral, religious, and social beliefs. And I have said, also, that this study is not to be a continuous history of European political thought. The view I am taking is that political thought (both practical and explanatory) takes place always in relation to a particular political experience—that is, belongs to some specific political culture. And I design to concentrate this study upon four different political experiences or cultures, each highly developed, each with a vocabulary of political ideas of its own, each exhibiting its own characteristic political sentiments and beliefs, and each profoundly reflected upon. • The city-states of ancient Greece. • The ancient Roman republic and empire. • The feudal realms of medieval Europe. • The states of modern Europe which began to emerge in the sixteenth century and which constitute our own political experience. Each of these constitutes a specific political culture different from the others. And if you are more interested in our own political culture than any other, I think you will find some interest and profit also in exploring and trying to understand these earlier political experiences.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 2, fos. 1–15. Photocopy of a typescript with autograph corrections.
The Political Experience of the Ancient Greeks 1 I have said that our study of political thought is to be a study of the sentiments, beliefs, habits of thought, and ideas which compose the intellectual organization of each of four great European political experiences. It is to be a study of the way in which the peoples concerned in each of these four political experiences thought when they thought about government, the instruments of government, and public affairs.
2 I want this morning to begin by saying something about the political experience of the ancient Greeks. This, so to speak, is the subject and the immediate context of Greek political thought. By this I mean two things, which coincide with one another on some points, but which do not necessarily or always coincide. • What actually happened to the ancient Greeks: the story of their politics. This, of course, has been pieced together by later scholars. It is what present-day historians of ancient Greece write about. • What the Greeks themselves came to believe had happened to them; their own view of their political experience. This may properly be called the myth or legend of Greek politics— not because it is necessarily untrue, but because the important thing about it is not whether or not it is historically true, but that
it represents the Greeks’ own awareness of their own politics. It was one of the means by which they understood themselves and expressed their confidence in themselves. Every people awakened to political self-consciousness constructs a myth, an imaginative interpretation of how this came about. The myth of modern English politics, for example, began to be constructed in the seventeenth century, and it is something to which our current political arguments and attitudes are always returning, and which is always in a process of enlargement and revision. Like ourselves, the Greeks constructed a legend of their own political fortunes, and to understand it is an important part of understanding what they thought about politics. Indeed, the construction of this legend was one of the most notable achievements of their political thought. And in considering it we shall be considering one level of their political consciousness. It must, however, be recognized that these ancient Greeks, when they came to live in specifically political societies, gave remarkably little thought to their past. The legend of Greek politics is, in fact, remarkably thin and unelaborate. They kept few records, they had no official historians, and they were unimpressed by precedent. They rarely looked to the past for the authority for current conduct. They never thought of themselves, as we sometimes think of ourselves, as borne along on a stream of events which flowed towards a better condition of things. What we have to consider, then, is a mixture of history and legend, of fact and myth.
3: The Land We are concerned with a people of mixed descent who lived in the Mediterranean peninsula we know as Greece, in the islands of the Aegean archipelago, and in some parts of Asia Minor. Later the Greek world (the world of Greek-speaking peoples and of Greek political institutions) included settlements on the Mediterranean coast as far west as Marseilles. The mainland peninsula is a little smaller than Scotland. It is a land of rocks and mountains; it has few plains and no considerable rivers. It has a hard, poor soil, from which the Greeks spoke of themselves as ‘tearing their living’. Herodotus: ‘Poverty has always been the foster-sister of Greece.’ For the Greeks, the sea was as important as the land: it was a coastal, island civilization, exposed and full of movement.
4: The People The earliest identifiably ‘Greek’ inhabitants of this land are called Achaeans. They were reputed to have come from the East; Asia Minor. They were clans or tribes (genos) of semi-nomadic shepherds who gradually settled down and took to agriculture. Each of these tribes was (or believed itself to be) the descendant of a single progenitor: the tie of the tribe was the tie of common blood. A tribe was an extended family. When they settled, a tribe became a tribal ‘household’. One has to think of a civilization not unlike that revealed in the Scandinavian Sagas—households, possibly living in hutments, but living a genuinely ‘communal’ life. And to the tie of kinship were added: • the sharing of a common roof, a common hearth, and a common table; • a common ‘law’ (which may be supposed to have emerged from more primitive taboos); • a common religion; a ‘family’ religion, the worship of ancestors. There were also tribal chiefs. And attached to each tribe there were probably domestic slaves, men of other races, and often prisoners of war. These tribes were often at war with one another; but it was not beyond their skill to make temporary alliances with one another. And in the course of time there emerged some more permanent local unions of tribes. Reputedly, the purpose of these unions was defence. And where such unions appeared there was often a fortified stronghold of some sort, a military organization, and some subordination of chiefs to a chief of chiefs.
But, about the year 1100 B.C. this land, occupied in this manner, suffered an invasion from the north. The invaders were a relatively barbaric people, known as Dorians. The immediate result of this invasion was the destruction of the emerging organizations of Achaean tribes, and a relapse into separate and often hostile tribal units. The later result was a mixture of the Achaean and Dorian peoples. The ancient Greeks, as we know of them, were largely a mixture of these two peoples. They became a highly individual people, very unlike their neighbours. They were unusually tolerant, they escaped the exaggerations of authority and servility common among their oriental neighbours. They were a curious, restless, sociable people—above all fond of talk. Many centuries later there emerged a legend in which the different characteristics of the Greeks were attributed to the different strains—Achaean and Dorian—of which they were composed. The Achaean element was believed to supply the restlessness, the instability, and the curiosity of the Greek character; its easy fascination with what was new and its delight in change, its sense of humour. The Dorian element was believed to supply the dour, more severe and disciplined, and conservative element. Athens was reputed to be a predominantly Achaean settlement; Sparta a mainly Dorian settlement. The one supremely loquacious; the other, of the opposite disposition, who added the word ‘laconic’ to the vocabulary of Europe—Sparta, Lacadaemon— dour and brief of speech—like the Scots.
5: The Early Polis These ancient Greeks believed that their political experience began with a momentous change in their manner of living. Upon these patriarchally governed tribes or village-households, whose unity was one of kinship, whose law was tribal custom, whose religion was a family religion, there supervened a new idiom of life: permanent unions of tribes. These permanent unions of tribes were recognized as something new. Each of these unions was composed of a diversity of tribes, and consequently it could not be understood on the analogy of a tribe. Its laws were something different from tribal custom; its religion could not be a family, tribal religion, and government could not be tribal, patriarchal government. The unity of each was not the blood and ‘milk’ unity of a tribe. The name the Greeks gave to these new social and religious communities was polis. It is a word somewhat misleadingly translated ‘city’ or ‘city-state’; but by calling it polis they recognized it as the beginning of a political life. The process in which these poleis emerged is, of course, obscure and was slow. But in the course of six or seven centuries they became the common feature of the Greek-speaking world. Spread from Asia Minor to the western Mediterranean, there emerged about 1,500 of them, each with a character of its own, each with a passion for independence which was never broken down, but each recognizing itself as ‘Greek’ and later as a particle of what came to be thought of as ‘Hellas’—perhaps in somewhat the same manner as we think of ourselves as sharing in something more than merely geographical, called ‘Europe’. But ‘Hellas’ was, above all, the world of those who spoke Greek. Of some of these ‘city-states’ we know only their names and their locations. Others, like Thebes and Corinth, had long and
famous histories. But the two we know most about are Athens and Sparta. You may read in Book I of the Politics of Aristotle an account of how he thought these ‘city-states’ had emerged, and the reasons he found for their emergence. Or, here is Plato’s poetic, mythical description of the beginnings of Greek politics, a description which perhaps may be taken to reflect a dim memory of the first Achaean attempt to form unions of tribes, an attempt destroyed by the Dorian invasion. He says that in ancient times the tribes which inhabited Greece strove to congregate and for mutual protection to live together in poleis. But when they first began that sort of life they ‘lacked the art of living together in a polis’, and consequently disputes arose between the component tribes and they dispersed again. But Zeus (that is, the chief god of the Greek pantheon), fearing that the human race would perish, sent Hermes to teach them ‘the art of living together in a polis’. This art Plato describes as ‘the art of resolving differences’, the ‘art of being just to one another’. The art of taking account of one another. For Plato, the polis and ‘justice’ were counterparts of one another. And we shall see later what this association of the polis with ‘justice’ meant to the Greeks. A polis, then, began as an association of tribes, and its tribal composition was only very gradually modified. It was a very long time before people began to forget their tribal loyalties. But, from the beginning, the Greeks recognized a polis as a new creation, and a creation peculiar to themselves. In the end, what distinguished the Greeks from all other peoples was polis-life. Polis-life was ‘political’ life, and they thought of themselves as the inventors of ‘politics’. The first words of the Greek political vocabulary were the words they used to describe the unique features of this new kind of life. Let us consider them.
6 The tribe had originally been a self-sufficient householdcommunity, what the Greeks called an oikia. It has a law and gods of its own, a chief who was at once father and ruler, and lands of its own. It was a community in which there was no distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’. Now, when these household-communities associated with one another to compose a polis, they did not disappear; they changed their character. The oikia, the household-community, was transformed into a ‘private’ family community, engaged in getting its living by cultivating its lands. And this transformation took place because the ‘public’ life of a polis had been superimposed upon the old, self-sufficient oikia. In short, in the polis the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ appeared for the first time: henceforward every man had two lives—his ‘private’ life as a member of his family household community, and his ‘public’ life as a citizen of his polis. The word polis itself has several connotations. It was a fortified place. In Homer, the adjectives applied to it are ‘high’, ‘well-walled’, or ‘well-built’. Often it had a citadel, like the Acropolis of Athens. It was a holy place. Religion moved out of the oikia into the polis: it was a ‘public’ activity. A polis was guarded by divine powers, worshipped not on the family hearth, but in the ‘public’ temple. And the gods of the hearth and home, often without changing their names, changed their character and became gods of the polis. But a polis was not only something geographical; it was recognized as a number of households (and later as a number of ‘private’ individuals) associated together under a common law. ‘It is its citizens, and not its walls, that make a polis’, said Pericles. Law, like religion, had moved out of the oikia into the polis, and,
in doing so, had changed its character. The customs of the tribe were superseded by the law of the polis. Situated in every polis was an open space, called an agora. This was a market-place, a place of worship, of social intercourse and of public meeting. It was at once the emblem and the situation of the ‘public’ life of a polis. Indeed, agora-life, ‘public’ life, polis-life, and political life were, for the Greek, all expressions signifying the same thing. It was in respect of having an agora-life that the Greeks believed themselves to be superior to all other peoples: the Persians, for example, governed by despots, were recognized to have no agoralife—that is, no politics. For the moment, we may understand this agora-life as essentially a life of talk. The agora was the place where public affairs, polisaffairs (as distinct from ‘family-affairs’) were deliberated and discussed. And an agora was so essential to the Greek way of life that even the camp of a Greek army in the field was laid out to have an agora where, for example, the endless palavers which constitute half of Homer’s Iliad took place. In later times, in Athens, the agora became so intimately connected with ‘public’ life that its use as a mere market-place was resented. Buying and selling corn and wine were similar activities to ‘politics’, but vastly inferior. The next important word in this early political vocabulary of the Greeks is the word demos. A polis, with its agora, was the centre of a tract of land. And this countryside (the cultivated land of the family-households) was known as the demos. The adjectives applied to it were ‘plump’, ‘well-covered’ (referring to the covering of the soil over the rock) and ‘fertile’. From being this ‘countryside’, the word demos came to stand for those who inhabited it and worked on it—the peasants—as distinct from the urban population of shop-keepers and citizens.
And later still, demos came to mean the ordinary, non-noble, people, wherever they lived. It is with this meaning that it appears in the word ‘democracy’—the rule of the ordinary people; what medieval England called ‘the commons’. There is one more word to be noticed at this point—the most important of them all. The word politai: ‘citizen’. With the emergence of a polis there had emerged a new sort of human life—the ‘public’ life of the agora contrasted with the ‘private’ life of the oikia. But with the polis there came also a new sort of man: with the ‘city’ came the ‘citizen’. A ‘citizen’ is a man who knows himself, not as a member of a family-household or of a tribe, but as a member of a polis. The ‘citizen’ is a man in respect of his participation in agora life, the public life of a polis. Every polis, even until near the end of this civilization of Greek cities, had rules which defined the qualifications of being a ‘citizen’. And ‘citizens’ were distinguished from those too young to have any life outside that of the family-household, those who were resident foreigners in the polis, slaves, and generally speaking women—none of whom were, in any strict sense, ‘citizens’. But ‘citizenship’ was recognized as something much more important than a mere status. A ‘citizen’ was a new sort of person who had come into being with the polis; but what had also come into being was a new sort of human relationship—the relationship of ‘citizen’ to ‘citizen’. Clearly this relationship is different from the relationship of tribesmen to one another; it was not a ‘family’ relationship. What is it? Centuries later, Aristotle, reflecting upon what the emergence of polis-life had brought with it, came to the conclusion that there were two essential characteristics of the ‘citizen’ to ‘citizen’ relationship: it was a relation of ‘friendship’ and it was a relation of ‘equals’. And in saying this Aristotle believed himself to be pointing out important differences between polis and tribal or family relationships. Let us consider what he meant.
(1) ‘Citizens are friends of one another.’ Now, in saying this Aristotle did not mean that citizens do, or should, love one another deeply; what he meant was that, unlike the relationships with a family, the relationship of ‘citizen’ to ‘citizen’ was one of choice. Family relationships—those characteristic of the tribal household—the relationships of husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister, cousin etc., are relationships based upon kinship. Except in the case of husband and wife, choice does not enter in. And the other relationship of the family-household (that of master and slave), though it is not a relationship of kin or blood, is certainly not a relationship of mutual choice. ‘Citizens’, then, are not blood-brothers to one another; they are free associates of one another. And just as the tribes which associated with one another to compose a polis did so by choice, so the relationship of citizen to citizen was to be recognized as a social and not a biological relationship; choice, not necessity. This relationship of ‘friendship’ characteristic of the citizens of a polis was said by Aristotle to be ‘watery’ when compared with the blood and milk ties of a tribe or a family—at least ‘watery’ in the early history of a polis. But, weak or strong, it was a relationship which distinguished a polis from a tribe. It was, as Aristotle understood it, a supremely human relationship. (2) ‘Citizens are equal’. What did Aristotle mean when he recognized the relationship of ‘citizen’ to ‘citizen’ to be unique because it was a relationship of ‘equals’? Here, again, what he was trying to do was to distinguish the specifically polis relationship from family or tribal relationships. The structure of a family or a tribe is hierarchical. There is not only the hierarchy which gives precedence to the head of the family, there is also the hierarchy of the ‘generations’. Sons, perhaps, have precedence over daughters, elder brothers over younger; and so on.
But, outside the family-household, in the polis, in the agora, all this disappears. Fathers and grown-up sons meet, not as fathers and sons, but as something else—as citizens. In the agora all are contemporaries of one another. Deference may be paid to age or to reputed wisdom; the holders of certain officers may have specific authority; but all this is quite different from the hierarchical structure of a family. Of course, Aristotle did not believe, and no Greek was disposed to believe, that men were literally and naturally the equals of one another. What he discerned was that, with polis-life, and in the agora, there had emerged an artificial, or conventional equality, in which those who might be subordinates elsewhere (in the family, for example) ceased to be subordinates.
7 This, then, was the incipient vocabulary of political ideas in the emergent polis: agora, demos, polis. And to them we may add now some traditional beliefs about how a polis emerged from tribal societies—beliefs which reflect an appreciation of the need for some creative act to produce so unprecedented a way of living as polis-life. It was believed that each polis had a founder, often thought of as a semi-divine person. But what was more significant than the mere fact of a ‘founding father’ was the work attributed to this founder. The essence of a polis was to be a real union of tribes and not merely a temporary alliance. And Aristotle voiced the common belief when he said that the activity of the founder of a polis was that of ‘introducing’ the tribes to one another and ‘making them acquainted with one another’; making them ‘at home’ with one another. The work of a founder was like the work of a good host. In the imagination of the Greeks the polis emerged, not in an activity of violence or conquest, but in an activity of persuasion. Polis-life was a sort of life in which ‘persuasion’ had superseded the violence of tribal life, indeed, the violence of ‘nature’. And, of what had the host to persuade his guests? He had to persuade them to live together as a single community; he had to persuade them to surrender their tribal autonomies; he had to persuade them to compose or to resolve their differences; to accommodate themselves to one another. A common law of the polis had to be elicited from the customs of the component tribes; a religion of the polis had to be elicited from the ancestral religions of the tribes. And it was only by ‘persuasion’, by ‘agreement’, that a durable polis could be established. In short, as Aristotle understood it, the task of the founder of a polis was to teach the tribes who were to compose it, not how to
impose themselves on one another, not the arts of violence, but the art of accommodating themselves to one another, the art, as he says, of ‘being just to one another’—in short, the art, as the Greeks understood it, of politics, politike. A polis, you will notice, had the essential ingredients of political activity: unity and diversity. The diversity was at first tribal diversity; and the unity was only slowly acquired.
8 The political experience of the ancient Greeks was, then, in the first place, the experience in which a political community was constructed out of communities of a different sort; an experience in which the potentialities of this polis-life were explored; and an experience in which this polis-life spread itself over the whole Greek-speaking world. This experience of creation entered deeply into the Greek political imagination, and it was profoundly reflected upon by historians and philosophers. But, secondly, this political experience of the ancient Greeks was an experience of governing and being governed, and experience of variation and change in the constitutional structure and arrangements of a polis. This part of their experience also received what may be called an imaginative interpretation and entered into the legend of Greek politics. And this also generated a vocabulary of political words and ideas relating to the structure and organization of government. (1) The earliest kind of polis we know anything in detail about is the city-state of which Homer writes, round about 1,000 B.C. It is a polis which shows very clearly its tribal origins and constituents. It was an organization of families; an organization in which there was the ‘private’, domestic world of the household; and the ‘public’, political world of the agora. It was ruled by a king—a basileus. The office of king was usually hereditary; and his business was to be the pivot round which the whole ‘public’ life of the polis revolved. He was leader in time of war; he was the interpreter of the unwritten customary law of the polis; he was the judge who heard and decided legal disputes; he was the chief actor in the religious
activities of the polis, making the communal sacrifices to the gods of the polis. In all this he was supported and advised by a council of nobles (boûle): they were, probably, the heads of the constituent tribes, the patriarchal chiefs of household-communities. They were the first ‘men of the agora’. They met the king in public council in the agora, where all the public life of the polis took place. Homer’s Iliad is full of descriptions of this agora-life, with its councils of war and councils of judgment. In addition to this council of nobles, there was an assembly of citizens (ecclesia). This was usually called together by the king when he had some important public announcement to make, or on the occasion of religious ceremony. It, also, met in the agora. In earliest times, it would appear, the right to speak on public occasions was confined to the king and his immediate counsellors. The ordinary citizens were an audience. But they were an audience there to listen to deliberations about policy and to legal judgments, and they were participants in so far as they were there to be persuaded. Here, then, in this earliest kind of polis were already the three features which, throughout their history, the Greeks considered to distinguish themselves from others: an executive head, a council, and an assembly of citizens. (2) This monarchical structure did not last very long, although naturally it lasted longer in some cities than in others. What supervened upon this primitive polis, ruled by a king, was (usually) an aristocratically governed polis, in which the heads of the noble families shared between them the duties of the king. It was a gradual change, although in some places there may have been revolutionary moments. Kings retained their religious functions longer than any others; and before the office of basileus disappeared altogether it often became an elective and an annual office.
(3) But in some of the cities of Greece there was no extensive landed aristocracy to succeed to the kingly office. And in others, such as Sparta, which was preeminent for its ethnic divisions, the group who superseded the king was determined by race. Aristocracy, strictly speaking, was the rule of a polis by those who were of noble blood. But even where a genuine aristocracy established itself, it soon had to defend itself against those who claimed a share in ruling on account, merely, of their wealth or by reason of some other qualification which singled them out. Aristocracy, in short, opened the door to a great variety of oligarchical governments, the most common of which was what the Greeks called a timocracy—that is, the rule of the wealthy. In all oligarchies, the council of oligarchs was the supreme magistracy. It might be relatively numerous, or it might be a very select number of citizens: Athens was ruled at different times by a council of 1,000 and by a council of 400. Under an oligarchical constitution the assembly of citizens often survived, but it usually became less important than it had been under kings and aristocracies. (4) The only other regular constitutional form known to the Greek cities was called a democracy. In a democracy, that original assembly of citizens (which in the monarchical polis had been little more than an audience) was transformed into the ruling authority. In this assembly all the important questions of policy were argued; and it ruled through committees and magistrates appointed or elected from among its members. No citizen above a certain age was excluded from the assembly, but in every polis the citizen body was never more than a small part of the total population. For example, Athens as a democracy had a population of about 170,000. But of these, only about 40,000 were citizens, only about half of them played an active part in politics.
Nevertheless, the records that have come down to us of the meetings and the details of the Athenian assembly are the first great records of European political talk. (5) These, then, were the regular forms of government known to the Greeks. And there were few of the Greek cities which did not, at one time or another in their history, have governments in each of these forms. But there was one other kind of government which, from time to time, made its appearance in a polis. It was recognized to be irregular, and it never lasted very long. It was called a tyranny. A Greek tyrant was an autocrat, but he was not a despot. He was a man, often a successful magistrate or military commander, who was pushed forward and endowed with authority; either by a shaky oligarchy as a defender of its threatened privileges, or by a democratic faction intent on dislodging an oligarchy. During his period of rule he usually depended upon a body of personal retainers; he was apt to live in some magnificence; but he rarely subverted the ordinary laws of the polis. In short, a tyranny was the sort of government which was apt to intervene between periods of oligarchic and democratic government.
9 The Greek political experience, so far as the forms and instruments of government were concerned, was an experience of frequent, often revolutionary, change. Of the cities of Greece, Sparta alone enjoyed constitutional stability for more than an insignificant number of years. This experience of perpetual change became reflected in the legend of Greek politics in the belief that political forms and arrangements were essentially unstable. There is a belief which belongs to our own legend of politics that political change may be regarded as in some sense progressive— that the movement of political change has a direction and that it is pointed towards something that we call ‘democratic’ government. The ancient Greeks had no such belief. What they believed was, rather, that every polis might be expected to go through an endless cycle of constitutional change. And that, for example, the achievement of democratic government was only a prelude to the reappearance of an oligarchy of some sort.
10 In the fifth century B.C., Hellas, the world of the Greeks, was, after a history of about 700 years, composed of numerous city-states. Some were more powerful than others; some more adventurous and expansionist; some even acquired what were thought of as ‘empires’. Among them, from time to time, there were alliances, leagues, confederacies, and hegemonies. They were often at war with one another. They were surrounded by enemies against whom they combined with great reluctance. They managed, however, to defeat their most powerful enemy, Persia. What would have happened if these city-states had been left to themselves for another century or so is impossible to say. Perhaps just one more century of ringing the changes on the various forms of government. But, in fact, they had no such opportunity. In the middle of the fourth century there was emerging in the north of the Greek peninsula a military power which in the course of fifty years was to conquer the whole Greek world, and to transform this civilization of independent city-states into a civilization of dependent and insignificant municipalities. This military power was the armies of Philip and Alexander of Macedonia. And whatever independence survived the conquest of Greece by the Macedonian armies was later destroyed by the armies of Rome. Thus came to an end the political experience of the ancient Greeks and its most notable achievement, the politics of the Greek polis. These Greeks, who were later to be recognized (as they recognized themselves) as the inventors of ‘politics’, so far as Europe is concerned, were in some ways less successful than any other people we know of at accommodating themselves to one another. It seems almost as if they were so enchanted with what they had invented—‘politics’, agora-life, politike—that they did not think of
it (as others have thought of it) as a means to an end, but as itself an end. They cared much more for ‘politics’ than for government; and much more for political discourse and debate than for devising durable arrangements and institutions. They were rather like the French of modern times; a loquacious people who would rather be defeated than stop talking politics.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 2, fos. 16–31. Photocopy of a typescript with autograph corrections.
The Greek Image of the World 1 We have considered, very briefly, the political experience of the ancient Greeks; both what happened to them, and that aspect of their interpretation of what happened which they expressed in what I called the legend of Greek politics. Now, what a people thinks of any of the experiences which come its way, and the intellectual organization which it gives to those experiences, is usually profoundly conditioned by its feelings, beliefs, and ideas about the world in general. And I want this morning to say something about the way in which the Greeks thought of the world in which they lived, and their relation to that world, in so far as it is relevant to understanding their thoughts about politics and government. Part, at least, of the unique character of their political thought derives from the peculiar way in which they thought about the world in which they lived. I will begin by saying something about the way in which they understood what we ordinarily call the ‘natural’ world.
2 The word they used to indicate this world, in the most general sense, was the word cosmos. And they used this word in very much the same way as we use the expression ‘the material world’. It stood for the aggregate, the sum of ‘natural’ things. Now, one of the most remarkable things about the Greeks is that, from very early times, they came to understand this cosmos as a self-contained, self-moved order of things. For them, it was not an order which had been created by a god, and whose components, and the movements of these components, represented the will of a creator. The cosmos, to them, was a world of things which had come into being by itself, and which moves and changes according to its own internal and necessary laws, and for which nobody could be thought to be responsible. Thus, the cosmos had nothing which could be called a ‘ruler’ or a ‘government’. And thus, also, it offered to the Greeks no analogy by which they could understand the political world, or the activity of governing a polis. In the later history of European thought, peoples were often accustomed to think of the universe as ‘governed’ by a God who had created it. Christian thinkers acquired this belief partly from the Old Testament. And consequently they could think of human rulers on the analogy of God, and of God on the analogy of a human ruler. The Greeks had no such beliefs. But, if they did not connect the cosmos with government, they did make a connection between the cosmos and the social order. A great scholar once wrote: ‘The relationship between Greek thought about the cosmos and their thought about politics was always a reciprocal one: the cosmos was understood in terms of justice, law and fate, and the political order was thought of in
the same terms.’1 As we shall see, the words justice, law, and fate had, first, a cosmological meaning and only secondly a social and political meaning. Nevertheless, although they thought of the cosmos as a selfcontained, self-moved order of things, the Greeks never though of it as a mechanical order—like a clock, or a system of weights and pulleys, or an engine. They never used the analogy of a machine in trying to understand the cosmos. Nor did they use it in trying to understand anything else, like a political constitution, or a system of government. The expression ‘the machinery of government’ would have been entirely foreign to them. This, I suppose, was because they had no experience of machines of any degree of complication. The analogy, so to speak, was not available to them. For them, the cosmos was alive; it was an organism, like an animal or a plant. An organism in the strict sense; that is, a whole which has no ‘government’ because its vitality is distributed in all its parts. Its most obvious feature was the change and movement it displayed, and where the Greeks saw movement they understood there to be life. The cosmos, then, was understood to be itself a living organism, composed of living organisms. It consisted of things which were generated, lived, decayed, died, and disappeared from the scene, or were transmuted into other things, in an endless, purposeless, circular movement according to its own inherent and necessary laws. But, in the course of time, they came to make an important distinction, which Aristotle and other philosophers explored and greatly elaborated. The cosmos was understood to consist of two parts, specially separated. [1] W. Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 140, cp. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 151.
There was, first, houranos, the ‘sky’. This was a world of permanent, changeless bodies, which neither came into being nor passed away, and which moved according to absolutely fixed and changeless laws. We may call it, perhaps, the world of the astronomer. A world in which nothing new ever appeared, and in which nothing irregular ever happened. Secondly, there was the earth itself, the world (as they thought of it) ‘beneath the moon’. This sublunary world was a world of contingency and of uncertain happenings, in which entirely new things could appear. It was not ruled by fixed and absolute laws. Indeed, almost anything could happen in it. This world was the world of human life. And many of the happenings in it could be recognized as the results of human choices and actions. Others have believed there to be a close connection between these two worlds, what went on in the ‘sky’ determining what went on in the human world: the Greeks were disinclined to recognize much of a connection here. Now, this belief about the world inhabited by human beings gave the Greeks the feeling that they lived in a world which, so to speak, allowed them initiative and freedom of movement. And (in the end) they came to think of ‘politics’ as the supreme example of ‘free’ human movement, movement which sprang from human deliberation and choice. Thus, we may say that they imagined the world in which they lived as a world in which ‘politics’ was possible, because it was a realm, not of necessary law, but of contingency. It was a world, not of examples of the operation of changeless laws, but of ‘events’, ‘happenings’.
3 Now, besides this word cosmos, the Greeks had another word which they were apt to use somewhat differently: the word phusis. We translate it ‘nature’; and our words ‘physics’ and ‘physique’ are derived from it. It was a word which came to be incorporated in the Greek political vocabulary itself (as, of course, the word ‘nature’ belongs to our own political vocabulary in such expressions as ‘natural law’ and ‘natural rights’). Consequently, there will be a lot more to be said later about its political meaning. But, before it became a political word, it was a word with a more general meaning. The cosmos consisted of things (ousia), all of them alive, and each having a specific character of its own; and the specific character of a particular thing they called its phusis, its ‘nature’. Thus, a ‘man’, a ‘horse’, a ‘tree’, and a ‘stone’, each had a ‘nature’ of its own, which distinguished it from all other things. We often use the expression ‘human nature’ in just this way—attributing a specific character to human beings as such. Each thing, therefore, had its own individual ‘nature’. And if you wished to understand any of the things which composed the world around you, the question you asked yourself was: What is its phusis? What is its nature? The Greeks understood that this question could be answered in various different ways, some of which yielded more important information than others. It could be understood as, for example, the question: ‘What is it made of?’ But they (or their philosophers) reached the conclusion that, since each of these individual ‘things’ was alive and moved and changed, the most important form of the question: ‘What is its nature?’ was ‘How does it behave and move?’ What is the principle of its behaviour? What constitutes a thing is the way in which it behaves.
When Aristotle asked himself the question: ‘What is the nature of the polis?’ or ‘what is the nature of justice?’ what he was seeking was the specific character of a polis, or the specific character of ‘justice’. The cosmos, then, was a mixture of law and contingency, necessity and freedom; and in that part inhabited by human beings, the contingency was more significant than the law. This allowed human beings considerable freedom of choice and action, and permitted politike, political activity.
4 There was, however, according to Greek belief, a set of beings who did not belong to the cosmos at all, a set of beings wholly free from the laws of natural necessity. These were the gods. We are not concerned with the earliest religious beliefs of the Greeks. Like most other primitive peoples, they worshipped their ancestors, and their gods were tribal gods. But in the course of time, the Greek-speaking peoples acquired some common beliefs about what they called ‘the divine powers’. And although these beliefs changed with changing circumstances—the rural gods of the trees and rivers became the urban gods of the polis—their main outlines remained relatively unaltered, and in the course of time they were organized into what may be called a ‘popular theology’. The gods of the ‘public’ or common religion were many, and they composed a kind of family or ‘household’. They lived on Mount Olympus. The head of the ‘household’ was Zeus—‘the god’. And his subordinates bore some, perhaps vague, relation to him: they were his sons or daughters, his wives, brothers, brothers-inlaw, etc. In short, these gods were understood to be in many respects not unlike human beings. Human passions and emotions, virtues and vices, were attributed to them. But they lived in a different sort of world. They lived, remote, on Mount Olympus. They had not made the cosmos, they were not responsible for what went on in it, and they could not in any proper sense be said to rule or control it. But they were concerned with human beings and their conduct; and the destinies of individual human beings were, in some respects, in their hands. They constantly interfered in the lives of men, sending them good or ill fortune, helping or hindering human enterprises. But
their most important power was to dictate what the Greeks called ‘the fate’ of each man. A man’s ‘fate’ was though of as a thread or cord (spun, cut off, and tied by appropriate gods) which ‘bound’ him. The imagery of ‘fate’, for the Greeks, was the imagery of spinning and weaving. Once Zeus had ‘bound’ a man, he could never be unloosed from his ‘fate’. But this belief was, in fact, less ‘fatalistic’ than it seems. Not all things in a man’s life belonged to his ‘fate.’ Nothing contrary to his ‘fate’ could happen to him, but there was much in his life which was ‘loose’, ‘beyond what is fated’, huper mellon. A man’s fate chiefly concerned the time and manner of his death. To be ‘fated’ was rather like being condemned to die at a certain time and in certain circumstances. What happened in the interval between birth and death was by no means ‘fated’— although a great deal of it might spring from the temporary goodwill or ill-will of the gods. Human beings, the inhabitants of the sub-lunar world, were then, subject to natural necessity and to the ‘law’ of their fates, but they remained, to a significant degree, ‘free’, masters of their own conduct. With respect to human beings, then, the main office of the gods was to provide them with their ‘fates’. Beyond this, the gods were thought of as powerful, they were believed to understand the cosmos better than human beings understood it, to be wiser, and to have some knowledge (but by no means complete) of the future. Consequently, tribes, cities, and individuals sought the protection of the gods, worshipped them, invoked their goodwill, and sought the enlightenment of their wisdom. Each polis had a special tutelary divine power, worshipped in its temple. The gods would sometimes visit the human world, disguised as men; and sometimes they would speak to men in their dreams or as a voice from a cloud. But their home was remote from the
abodes of men; they did not, like the gods of the Romans, inhabit the temples where they were worshipped. The relationship of human beings and the gods was rather oddly understood. The gods were not awful beings, to be feared. But, they were certainly not to be trusted. Human beings were often thought of as the playthings of the gods, who could be malicious, and who would sometimes go out of their way to make human life difficult. This reflected itself in a characteristic feeling of despondency and pessimism; but there was very little resignation in the Greek temperament. Their ‘fates’ they knew would catch them up in the end. But they had a great urge to try their luck, and to live dangerously. Their heroes were men who did not submit tamely; they were men of ‘revolt’, whose enterprise was to outwit the gods. The supreme human hero was, of course, Prometheus, who defied the Gods and tried to steal their wisdom. The gods of Greece, then, were not part of the cosmos. They were immortal. They were not subject to the endless process of change, nor was their conduct governed by inflexible laws. They were ‘free’; free from death and free from natural necessity. Nevertheless, they were not exactly capable of politike, ‘political’ activity. It is true that they made speeches to one another, it is true that they deliberated and made choices and performed actions. But they knew too much about the future for them to be comparable to human beings. The essence of politike, as the Greeks understood it, was deliberating, choosing, and acting in circumstances where no more than a rough guess could be made about the consequences. And this the gods could not do because they knew too much about the future.
5 There was, then, for the Greeks, a cosmos composed of things each with its own ‘nature’ or ‘way of behaving’. The law of this cosmos was the law of natural necessity: an endless cycle of unavoidable, purposeless change. And there was the world of the immortal gods. Between these worlds lay the world of human beings. What were human beings understood to be like? Aristotle said that human beings were neither gods nor beasts; and from one point of view, this saying contained all that the Greeks believed about human beings. That they were not gods was obvious. And, as we shall see, it was believed to be very important that human beings should not mistake themselves for gods. In one respect they were undeniably like beasts. They belonged to a world ruled by natural necessity. As a race, they were part of this endless cycle of procreation, birth, life, growth, and death. But, in another respect, they were more like gods. As individuals they were capable of choice and action, and thus (to that extent) emancipated from the law of natural necessity. In short their situation was strangely ambiguous. In the world ruled by natural necessity, and therefore not like the gods. But above the world of natural necessity (in virtue of being able to choose and to act), and therefore not exactly like beasts. Now, the emblem of human freedom from natural necessity, freedom from having to obey the inexorable laws of the cosmos, such as it is, was recognized to be the power of ‘artifice’. The distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’, ‘nature’ and ‘art’, was one which Greek philosophers often reflected upon; but the distinction itself was recognized in popular thought. The Greeks never quite rationalized this human power of ‘artifice’ in a doctrine of the freedom of the human will. They merely understood human beings to be capable of a kind of
activity which was determined neither by the laws of natural necessity, nor by the ‘fates’ imposed upon them by the gods. This activity was seen to be the power of interrupting the natural order of the cosmos, and of imposing themselves on that order. The power of using the cosmos and the things which composed it in order to achieve chosen human purposes. The power of artifice appeared in two main forms: It was the power of making artefacts, of fabricating things out of the materials provided by the cosmos: they could make things such as ships, ploughs, temples, and weapons, which did not exist in the ‘natural’ world. These artefacts represented human designs, chosen purposes, or the means to achieve chosen purposes. This human power of fabrication immensely impressed the Greeks. They saw in this world of artefacts a world created by human beings, evidence of at least a partial emancipation from ‘natural necessity’, a release from having merely to accept the world as they found it. But this freedom from natural necessity appeared, also, in a much more significant activity than that of making things—things which, after all, were made out of materials of the ‘natural’ world and which were, therefore, half ‘natural’, so to speak. Fabrication represented only a partial release from natural necessity: the artist or the workman had to accept the material and conform himself to what could be made out of it. A much more complete release was understood to be displayed in the activities of speaking words, making choices, taking decisions and performing actions. Here there was no limiting material, and no interruption—one action was the spring of another in a continuous process of living as a human being. In speaking and acting human beings were seen unmistakably to step outside the world of natural necessity and into a world of freedom which comes from choosing and acting. And this is why the Greeks believed that politike, ‘political activity’, was the supremely and uniquely ‘human’ activity. ‘Politics’
is choosing and acting, not choosing and making. Politics is doing actions, not making things. As they understood it: 1. Political activity emerged when human beings, by choice, superimposed polis-life upon life in the family-household. • The relationships of life in the family life were ‘natural’, ‘biological’, relationships of blood, and not of choice. But in polis-life men thought, chose, decided and acted for themselves. Moreover, they contracted a new relationship with one another, that of the ‘free’ relationship of citizen to citizen. 2. Political life took place in the agora, outside the world of the ‘household’. The ‘household’ is ‘nature’; the polis is artifice. 3. Political life consists of speaking—expressing opinions, engaging in argument designed to persuade, taking decisions and performing actions. It consists, not of responses dictated by natural necessity, but of actions which were chosen because there was always an alternative to them. Fabricating, speaking, choosing and performing deeds, then, were understood as the uniquely human activities. In respect of these, men could be recognized as higher than the beasts. And if they lacked the ‘wisdom’ and the ‘prescience’ of the gods, this very lack was part of the specification of politike. ‘Politics’ is choosing and acting when there is an alternative, and when the outcome of action is always in some degree uncertain. In ‘action’, two things have to be chosen: the purpose or end aimed at, and the means to achieve it. Politics, in respect of its being the exercise of choice, is something of which animals are incapable. In respect of its uncertainty it is something of which the gods are incapable. In respect of both it is uniquely human.
6 Human beings, then, endowed with certain unique powers, find themselves in a world governed in part by natural necessity, but for the rest, full of contingencies and opportunities for choice and action. Taking this view of things, the obvious questions to ask are: How can we control these contingencies? Are they mere contingencies, or is there some regularity in them? What do we know, or what can we learn, about the world in which we live which will reduce the uncertainty of it? The Greeks did think they knew something about the world of contingencies, and therefore something about how human beings should behave if they were to choose and to act in a way that was likely to be successful. What did they think they knew about the world and themselves which would be some sort of guide to making choices and performing actions? For our information on this we will go to the Delphic Oracle. At Delphi, on the gulf of Corinth, there was a famous and ancient temple of Apollo. And men in difficulties, with practical puzzles to solve, men who did not know quite what to do for the best, went to consult the priestess of Apollo. They went from all over the Greek world. In the course of time some of the pronouncements of the priestess became famous: they were regarded as true (though often obscure) precepts about human conduct, based upon a profound knowledge of the human condition. These sayings were, of course, reputed to come from Apollo himself; but they may be regarded as the wisdom the Greeks had acquired for themselves, in the course of their experience, about what to do and what not to do in this puzzling world of contingencies.
The most famous of these Delphic pronouncements was gnothe seauton: ‘know thyself.’ This precept was understood as a moral precept addressed to the race of human beings. It meant: ‘Each of you, understand that you are a man and nothing more than a man; and behave accordingly’. Know your ‘nature’. It was a precept chiefly designed to point out the difference between men and gods: ‘Know that you are a man and not a god’. Men, the Greeks knew as well as anyone else, are sometimes apt to believe that they possess divine powers: we are acquainted with aberrations of this sort, and we call it megalomania or paranoia (both Greek words). It happens in ordinary life; and it happens in politics. And it is the greatest mistake that a man can make. This precept, then, pointed out, not only the illusion of believing you are a god, but also that whoever has this illusion will only spread disaster and unhappiness all round. It expressed a profound suspicion of anyone who set himself up to be more than a man, and the belief that the conduct of anyone who did this was out of touch with the realities of human life. The second, and hardly less famous, saying of the Delphic oracle carried this piece of practical wisdom a step further. It was a cryptic saying: meden agan; ‘nothing too much’, or ‘Do not attempt what it is beyond human powers to achieve’. From one point of view, it was a precept enjoining ‘modesty’ and ‘humility’: ‘Do not run to extremes’; ‘keep the middle way appropriate to human beings who are neither gods nor beasts’. And this virtue of ‘modesty’ (sophrosune), ‘unpretentiousness’, was one of the most highly regarded of all human virtues. At first, no doubt, this feeling that extremes were to be avoided in human conduct sprang from a superstitious fear of the jealousy and the contempt of the gods for a man who tried to be either more or less than a man. But later it became a rational suspicion of all excess in human life. Excessive pride in human beings the Greeks called hubris: it was the pride that portends a fall. And the belief that it spells
disaster in practical affairs was the heart of the moral attitude of the Greeks. Let me illustrate its bearing upon ordinary and in political life. In the story of Croesus as it appears in Herodotus, Croesus was the richest man in the world. He came to a bad end. And the moral of the story is that excess in any direction is something to be avoided because it portends disaster. The Greeks didn’t believe that the downfall of Croesus was caused by his excessive wealth, they believed that his excessive wealth was a reliable sign that he would fall. Xerxes, a prince who for a time enjoyed overwhelming power and success, was overtaken by Nemesis—disaster. He was too powerful for a man. Don’t make an alliance with him; he will fall. Compare this with Machiavelli: don’t ally with one more powerful than yourself; he will swallow you up. The essence of Greek tragedy is a ‘revolution’ in which a man in a seemingly impregnable position of wealth, honour or happiness is overthrown. Oedipus, from the height of happiness, is hurled, through no fault of his own, into indescribable suffering. He was just too happy. Thucydides ascribed the political disasters which overtook Athens to the hubris of the Athenians—to their trying to do too much, to their having ‘imperial’ pretensions. Great power, great pride, great happiness, great riches or great good fortune—all these are foreign to the human condition and intimate a cataclysm to follow. This, of course, does not mean that the Greeks always lived up to their own standards of moral wisdom. No people has ever done this. It means that this is what they thought about the human condition in their calmer moments. The legend of Prometheus is the legend of a man who sought divine wisdom and had in consequence to suffer a fate worse than death—punishment. As the Greeks understood it, then, human beings inhabit a world of contingencies, of events and happenings which are not
governed by necessary laws, but in which some rough regulations can be discerned. Human beings lack the wisdom and the foreknowledge of gods. But, unlike beasts, they have powers of reasoning, speech, choice, and action; the power of designing and making things and doing things for themselves. They will be successful (or are more likely to be successful) if they understand the sort of world they live in and the sort of beings they are themselves, and conform their conduct to their condition. ‘Politics’ is their unique capability because ‘politics’ is making choices and performing actions in a world whose structure and operation allows this sort of activity. But it is wise to know yourself and the world in which you have to act.
7 The Greek image of the world and of the human condition was one that contained a strong element of pessimism, or at least despondency. Their gods were not notably friendly; and the world was not notably reliable. But the gods were many, and you were very much down on your luck if they were all, all at once, unfriendly or malicious; and the world did display some rough regularities; it fulfilled some expectations. The proper business of human beings in the world was to use whatever skill, cunning, or cleverness they had to outwit the malice of the gods and to make themselves at home in the world. ‘Politics’ was the supreme example of human beings doing just this, using whatever freedom from natural necessity they enjoyed in order to make a recalcitrant world conform to their notion of a ‘good life’. And, in this respect, the greatest achievement which the Greeks credited themselves with, was the invention of polis-life. They recognized it as the sort of life which men were uniquely qualified to live; the sort of life which employed all that distinguished men from both gods and beasts; the pursuit of the human good by making choices and performing actions.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 2, fos. 32–44. Photocopy of a typescript with autograph corrections.
The Political Thought of the Ancient Greeks (1) 1 So far, we have been concerned with two main topics: • The political experience of the ancient Greeks. • Some of the beliefs current among the Greeks about the world in general, about their gods, and about the human condition. These beliefs supplied the context and a large part of the intellectual apparatus of their political thought. This is where they found the general ideas and the analogies to be used in giving an intellectual organization to their political activity. These beliefs were often vague and ambiguous; they slurred over difficult questions—and there is incoherence at the edges. But these are common characteristic of all political beliefs and sentiments. It does not make them less useful. Indeed, a belief which has ceased to be vague and ambiguous has lost most of its practical usefulness. In politics, beliefs need to be persuasive, not necessarily coherent. As we shall see, it was these beliefs which were later sifted, criticized, and given a greater degree of coherence by such philosophical thinkers as Plato and Aristotle. We are concerned with a people who, in a remarkably short period of time, passed from a mythological manner of thinking to a highly sophisticated and rationalistic way of thinking about these things. But even the sophistication of fifth-century Athens reflected the earlier mythology. It is as impossible to understand how Pericles and Cleon thought about politics without understanding the earlier mythology, as it is impossible to understand seventeenth-
century English political thought without knowing something about the Old Testament from which it drew so many of its ideas. ‘The cosmos was understood in terms of law, justice, and fate, and the political order was thought of in the same terms’ (Jaeger). So I propose to begin with the ideas of law and justice.
2 Law is a certain manner of regulating human conduct. And in most societies its forerunner is ‘taboo’. ‘Taboo’ is the belief that wrong or anti-social conduct will be followed automatically by an inescapable penalty. To perform the act is to incur the penalty; the passage from one to the other is a natural process. The act itself, if it is bad enough, kills, as if it were poison to the doer. But where the regulation of conduct in a society is by ‘law’, a breach of the law is followed not by an automatic and inescapable natural penalty, but by the declaration, in a court of some sort, that the law has been breached, a declaration that the penalty will be such and such, and the execution of the decision of the court. Here, if the penalty is death, it is the sentence of a court or a judge—human decision has been interposed between the act and suffering the penalty. We are concerned with the ancient Greeks when they had arrived at the notion of the legal regulation of conduct: the beginning, so to speak, of the history of Greek law. The word used by the Greeks to express their first notion of law is themis. Now, in the religious mythology of Homer, Themis is a goddess. She is the daughter of Uranus and Ge (Heaven and Earth). This girl (of the most ancient and respectable lineage) became one of the wives of Zeus, the chief god of the Greek pantheon. By Zeus she became the mother of Dike, justice. Zeus, like other Greek gods, was a multiple personality; he had many powers, many different appearances, as well as many wives. But as the consort of Themis, he is the god of the social order, and their offspring is Justice. But even as early as Homer, the word themis had acquired another and much more material meaning. Indeed, nearly all the
abstract words in Greek—words like ‘law’ and ‘justice’—began life as concrete things, and they never quite lost their concreteness. According to Homer, there was in the agora of the primitive polis something which he calls ‘a themis’. It was an object of some sort; a pillar of stone, it has been conjectured, inscribed with some precepts about human conduct. And from meaning this inscribed pillar of stone, the word themis came to mean the fundamental laws and customs of a polis. Such inscribed stones were a common feature of a Greek polis until quite late times. It was from them that the Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries learned the law which they administered in the Heliaea. Often enough, in early times, the word themis was used, not as a noun, but as an adjective. Homer, for example, says: ‘It is themis to be hospitable to strangers.’ Themis, then, stood for what is right and proper in human conduct. Now, the questions we must ask ourselves are: Where did these early Greeks think that themis came from? How did a society acquire its laws and customs? And, what was the authority of a themis? Every polis had a divine patron; and themis was understood, in the first place, to be ‘a voice or utterance of the gods’, as Homer says. A society does not make its own laws; they are a divine gift and an expression of divine wisdom. But, in what manner did the gods speak? How did human beings come to know and to understand these divine utterances? Now, part of the paraphernalia of the Homeric king was a sceptron, a scepter. It was, of course, a staff of office, distinguishing the king and representing his authority. Like the mace in the House of Commons, or the seal of the Lord Chancellor. But it was also recognized as a source of inspiration, a magic wand. And it was by possession of this scepter, perhaps even by holding it in his hand, that the king was able, as Homer says, to ‘extract themistes from Zeus.’
The process of law-acquiring, then, was thought of somewhat after this fashion: • The god, or Zeus, utters a ‘voice’; makes a general pronouncement about human conduct. Sometimes he is asked to do so, sometimes he does so gratuitously. • A man, a king, qualified by birth and office, and the magic power of the sceptron, hears this utterance. • The king publishes or pronounces it to the people. In this process what had been a wise observation extracted from the gods becomes a rule of human conduct. Themis, then, is an indication of right or proper conduct for human beings which represents divine wisdom. It is a divine law in so far as it emanates from Zeus; it is a human law in so far as it reaches a community through a human agent and in a process of ‘hearing’, ‘understanding’, and ‘declaring’. And it is on account of this human agency that error may creep in. The interpreter of divine wisdom may make a mistake; he may mishear the ‘voice’ of Zeus. If he does so, what he declares will be, not a ‘true’ themis, but what Homer calls a ‘crooked’ themis. Thus, even the earliest Greeks had an explanation for what is in the experience of all men—a bad or an unworkable law. Now, it is important to understand that, as the Greeks thought of it, themis was the expression, not of an arbitrary divine will, but of divine wisdom. The gods were not powerful beings; they were wise or intelligent beings who were credited with knowing a bit more about the world than human beings. Their word was not itself law; it was wisdom. And, in this respect, what these early Greeks thought about law contrasts with what another people—the ancient Hebrews— thought about it. Law, for the Hebrews, was a divine command, the command of the creator of the world: ‘thus saith the Lord’, disobey at your peril. Here no mistake is possible; you did not hear in order to understand, but only in order to obey. (Though even
here there wasa human agent and there might be a counterfeit agent—a ‘false prophet’.) Law, for these Greeks, was much more like a divine insight into the way in which the world works than a divine command. The gods, of course, had not made the world; but they often understood it better than human beings. Human conduct, then, is ‘right’ when it conforms to this divine insight. And how marginal the difference between this early Greek notion of law and ‘taboo’ is, may be seen in this: Themis may be accepted or rejected by those to whom it is given. If it is a ‘true’ themis and is accepted and followed, the conduct of human beings will accord to the ‘nature’ of the world, and they will automatically prosper and be happy. If they reject it, they will be living in a make-believe world, their conduct will conflict with the ‘nature’ of the world, and they will automatically be frustrated and suffer misfortune. Nemesis will overtake them, not as the ad hoc punishment of a god who has been disobeyed, but as the inevitable consequence of being out of touch with the world they inhabit.
3 These early Greeks, then, knew that they had a law, and they had some not inadequate beliefs about its ‘nature’ and where it came from. Themis was not something that had been made; it was something which had been discovered, understood, and declared. This earliest word for law in a polis harked back to the more ancient law and custom of the tribe. Themis was, so to speak, a tribal word, carried over into the polis, but never quite at home there. Consequently it was not long before another word for law, another understanding of law, emerged which was more appropriate to the conditions of polis-life. This word was thesmos. It was a word which, from being a colloquial expression meaning a ‘custom’, or ‘use’, gradually acquired the specific meaning of a formal ‘law’. Now, the change from themis to thesmos entailed no fundamentally new conception of law. Thesmos was still understood as a rule of conduct which, if followed, would make for prosperity, peace, and happiness, because it represented accord with the way the world worked. And thesmos still retained the connection between law and divine wisdom. What was new about it, what made it more appropriate to the facts of polis-life, was that it pointed to a new notion of how law was acquired and declared. Each tribe which, in association with others, went to compose a polis, brought with it its own themistes, its own tribal law. No doubt there were similarities; but there were differences also. And the law of a polis, if a polis were ever to acquire a law of its own, had to be a common law which had somehow to emerge out of this diversity of tribal themistes.
And thesmos was this, so to speak, first law of the polis as such, a law which never itself had been a tribal custom, but had emerged out of diverse and conflicting tribal laws. And our question is: How did these early Greeks of the polis understand the process in which a polis-law, thesmos, emerged from a diversity of tribal themistes? As the Greeks understood it, this process was one of ‘doing justice’ to the various tribes and their tribal themistes who entered the union of a polis. No doubt, the most venerable, the most generally acceptable, the most useful of these tribal themistes became the thesmos of the polis: a selection, because it could be nothing more. This, if you remember, is the manner in which the common law of England emerged from the local customs of Anglo-Norman communities. But the profound idea which emerged from this understanding of the process was the idea of a law emerging from a judicial activity, from the activity of ‘doing justice’ to the different tribes and their different tribal laws. We shall have to consider later what the Greeks thought about ‘justice’ and the process of ‘doing justice’. But it is clear at once how this idea of thesmos gives meaning to Aristotle’s conception of the role of the ‘founder’ of a polis. The ‘founder’ of a polis was an oikistes, a host, who ‘introduces’ the tribes to one another, who makes them ‘at home’ with one another, who ‘does justice’ to each of his guests, and teaches them the art of ‘doing justice’ to one another, the ‘give and take’ of social intercourse. A polis, then, was understood to emerge, not in acts of violence, not as the stronger tribe imposing itself upon the weaker, but under the guidance of a man, practiced in the art of persuasion, whose office is not exactly that of a ‘lawgiver’ but rather of a ‘judge’ who ‘does justice’ to the claims of rival tribal laws for recognition in a polis. This is the significance of thesmos. It is tribal themis made appropriate to a polis by being subjected to a judicial process.
The ‘founder’ of a polis ‘does justice’, not so much to persons, as to tribes. And to ‘do justice’ to a tribe is finding a way of assimilating its customs to those of other tribes. The result is thesmos. And, perhaps, very imperfectly, there is hidden in this idea of law as thesmos, the idea that law is something which human beings establish for themselves. This law is elicited, not so much by ‘prophets’ from the ‘gods’, as by judicious human beings from the customs of men. But if there is something dramatic in the movement of thought from tribal themis to the thesmos of a polis, it must be understood not merely as an achievement, but as the beginning of a long process. For law, even in the most conservative societies, never stands still for very long. Any society which is to understand itself must have an understanding of legal change. And this has often proved the most difficult aspect of human association to understand. There will, of course, be small adjustments to take account of new circumstances. And these may be thought of as ‘doing justice’ to the emergent circumstances, recognizing and providing for them. There is, usually, great reluctance to believe that genuinely ‘new’ law is being made: the laws are too important to the stability of a society to be thought of as being merely at the disposal of each succeeding generation. Nevertheless, there come times in the history of most societies when their law gets into a muddle; when it becomes obscure or inapplicable. This, for example, was very much the case towards the end of the fifteenth century in England; and in responding to it some new ways of recording law were invented. And in the history of most Greek cities, and notably in the history of Athens, there came times when their law had got into a similar sort of muddle. In operation, over the years, the meaning of the simple precepts inscribed in stone in the agora had become obscure. They had
been subject to ‘interpretations’, and it was only ‘lawyers’ who knew what the law was. In these circumstances there is often a general demand that the law shall be taken out of the hands of near-priestly interpreters and custodians and published. And such a demand was made in Athens and other Greek cities—as it was made, as we shall see later, in Rome. In response to this demand, the task of putting the law in order and writing it down was assigned to a commission of trustworthy men, or even to a single man. Such a man was called a thesmothete—a settler of thesmos. Originally thesmothete signified a ‘judge’, one who settled cases under the law; but here it signified a man who was to ‘judge’ the law itself—to adjudicate between the divergent interests which the law either represented or neglected and thus to restore peace and unity to the polis. The most famous of these thesmothetai was Solon in Athens; but he had his counterpart in many other cities. The qualities which a thesmothete was recognized to need were (1) ‘wisdom.’ Divine inspiration was required for success; and (2) disinterestedness. He might be radical, like Draco; but, if he is to be successful, he must ‘do justice’ to all the interests involved. The appointment of a thesmothete, then, assumed the conception of law which was contained in the word thesmos: law comes into being by ‘doing justice’ to divergent current rules. The office was clearly a ‘judicial’ office. But it brought the Greeks nearer to the belief that ‘laws’ could be made, and a belief in human responsibility for law.
4 Themis and thesmos, then, represented two important stages in the history of Greek thought about the law of a polis. But, about a couple of centuries after Homer, a new word for law appears in the Greek political vocabulary: the word nomos. Now, when nomos became the current word for ‘law’, it carried with it two relatively new ideas. 1. Law as nomos was essentially man-made. It was the product of a ‘legislative’ process rather than a ‘judicial’ process. • Nomos is a decision about what shall be required and expected from citizens, and a direction to the magistrate to enforce certain conduct by imposing a penalty for the breach of it. The decision is made by men making or agreeing upon a rule. 2. The human response embodied in nomos was understood to be a response of reason. Nomos is a rational solution of a social problem in terms of a rule of conduct. Nous and logos (intelligence and reasoning) were always clearly connected with nomos. To make nomos it was not enough to will that people shall behave in a certain way and to have power to make them do so. The maker of nomos had to have knowledge. Thus, when nomos replaced themis and thesmos as the ordinary word for ‘law,’ an essentially human, rational, almost secular idea of ‘law’ had replaced an essentially religious idea. Now, the declarer of themis was recognized to require ‘knowledge’ to perform his office: he required to be divinely inspired. The declarer of thesmos must have knowledge; something not far removed from divine inspiration. What sort of ‘knowledge’ does the maker of nomos require?
The Greeks were in no doubt about the answer to this question: the legislator required a knowledge of phusis—‘nature’, ‘the natures of things’, ‘the principles according to which the things of the world moved and behaved’. Polybius, for example, has this sentence: ‘Lycurgus established his laws [in Sparta] because he was able to foresee by the light of reason the course which events normally take and the principle of their movement.’ The ‘normality’ of nature is turned into a ‘normality’ for human conduct. But what the ‘legislator’ needed to know was not merely something in general about the things which compose the cosmos, he had to know, understand, and take account of the ‘natures’ of those items in the cosmos which were immediately related to his polis. Solon’s laws for Athens, for example, were based upon the observation that Attica was good land for olives and vines but bad land for corn. Here was a piece of essential information about the ‘nature’ or ‘physique’ of Attica. But further, the ‘legislator’ must not only know the geographical and economic circumstances in which his laws are to operate, he must know something about ‘human nature’. And not merely about ‘human nature’ in general, but about the particular ‘nature’ of the people of his own polis. Herodotus, for example, says that each ‘people’ has a phusis of its own. And it is not to be expected that laws which will be appropriate for Egyptians will be appropriate for Greeks. Nor, indeed, are all Greeks alike. Aristotle said Greek laws are no good for Scythians. When Solon was asked by a flatterer whether he had given the Athenians the most perfect laws, he replied, ‘No, but those most suited to their phusis.’ Thus, when ‘law’ was recognized as nomos it appeared as something closely related to local circumstances, and as something that men make for themselves and for which they are responsible. ‘Every nomos,’ said Demosthenes in the fourth century, ‘is an invention; it is a resolution of well-informed and sensible men.’
5 Now, the emergence of ‘law’ understood as nomos, though it was a considerable intellectual achievement, brought with it some disadvantages and difficulties. • Unavoidably it had a tendency to diminish respect for law. If law is recognized as a man-fabricated convention designed to meet certain local circumstances, it inevitably becomes something less imposing than a reflection of divine wisdom. • The connection it recognized between nomos and phusis, ‘law’ and ‘nature’, had hidden in it ambiguities which puzzled Greek political thought for generations to come. The justification of ‘law’ in terms of its conformity to ‘nature’ was a theme which proved itself to be the source of endless confusions, and first raised the question of the connection or lack of connection between ‘ought’ sentences and ‘is’ sentences; between value and fact. Nevertheless, the Greeks were never eager and intrepid lawmakers. They would often make subordinate decrees about the conduct of citizens; but ‘laws’—even when they were thought of as nomoi—were never easily or hastily made or changed. They were a people who could with confidence inscribe their laws in stone.
6 Now, any understanding of ‘law’ has as its counterpart some beliefs about ‘justice’. The Greek word for ‘justice’ is dike. But dike was not in the first place an abstract noun: it stood for something that people did, for a kind of conduct. What we want to know is, not so much, the meaning of the word ‘justice’, but what Greeks meant when they recognized a man to have ‘acted justly’. In the mythology of ancient Greece Dike, like Themis, was a goddess. Indeed she was the daughter of Themis and Zeus. And her character appears in the company she kept. She had two sisters: Eunomia, the goddess of orderliness or harmony, and Eirene, the goddess of peacefulness. We know what being ‘orderly’ is, and what being ‘peaceful’ is; what sort of conduct is being ‘just’? Originally, it meant something very informal; namely, behaving appropriately, doing the sort of thing which belongs to one’s ‘nature’. The phusis or ‘nature’ of a man is the ‘principle’ of his conduct; it is what makes him behave in a ‘human’ manner. The dike or ‘justice’ of a man is the conduct itself, the particular actions which are appropriate to his ‘nature’. For example, if it is the phusis of a lion to be fierce, then it is the dike of a lion to exhibit fierceness in its behavior: to roar, to snarl, and to paw the air. If it is the phusis of a man to be rational, then it is the dike of a man to act deliberately and thoughtfully, because deliberateness and reflectiveness are exhibitions of rationality. ‘Justice’, then, was a word which stood for the particular ways in which a thing’s ‘nature’ properly expressed itself.
Thus, it was a word available to describe a particular aspect of all actions—namely, their relation to the ‘nature’ of the actor. Actions which conform to the ‘nature’ of the actor are ‘just’ actions. But it was a word available also for describing a particular activity, the activity of considering particular cases—the activity of ‘judging’ actions. For ‘judging’ is concerned with eliciting the propriety of a particular action; and what appears in ‘judging’ is a pronouncement about the ‘fitness’ or ‘justice’ of a particular action. And its ‘fitness’ is its appropriateness to the ‘nature’ of the actor. Now, a ‘judge’, in the narrow sense, is a man who sits in a court of law, who considers particular cases, and deals out ‘justice’. His task is to consider particular actions in relation to a law, and to decide upon their propriety in relation to that law. Here, a specific nomos, a ‘law’, has taken the place of the less specific phusis as the criterion to be used in judging. But if the nomos, the specific rule of law, is itself understood to be a reflection of phusis, to judge an action in relation to a ‘law’ is to judge it in relation to ‘nature’. Dealing out ‘justice’ in a court of law is, then, to be recognized as only a special instance of the more general activity of considering particular actions or situations and pronouncing upon their propriety. The activity of a judge is concerned with a particular case; and it is a threefold activity. • He knows and states what the law is. This is the criterion by which he is to judge. • He indicates, or points out, the divergence from the law which has happened in the particular case before him. He identifies the ‘act’ as an act of ‘injustice’. • He does something designed to restore the situation to normal, to what it ought to be. He does something to undo the injury perpetrated. This he does by imposing what is believed to be the appropriate penalty.
Thus, ‘punishment’ is not thought of in any of the difficult and complicated modern formulas of ‘deterrence’ or ‘reform’, but simply in terms of putting right what has gone wrong. Dike, ‘justice’, consists of finding out the appropriate restitution in a particular case. It is giving the disordered situation its ‘due’. And to sue for ‘justice’ in a court is to ask for some wrong or injury you have suffered to be redressed. Now, if ‘justice’ is understood in this manner, it is not difficult to see why the Greeks thought of the union of tribes who composed a polis as having been achieved in an activity of ‘doing justice’— the ‘founder’ of the polis being recognized as a ‘judge’. Every polis began in disorder—the disorder of multiple and conflicting tribal laws, customs, religious cults, and interests. The process of making a single community out of this disorder and diversity could be recognized as a process of ‘doing justice’ to each item of this diversity. It was a process of reconciliation. This is the significance of Aristotle’s statement that: ‘it is dike which draws men together and makes a polis.’ And ‘justice’ might almost be called the father of that family of beliefs which made the experience of polis-life intelligible to the Greeks. In short, it is not going too far to say that, as the Greek thought of it, polis-life, ‘political’ life, agora-life, was a continuous activity of ‘doing justice’. And in order to participate in polis-life, the art which had to be learned was the art of citizens being just to one another. It was dike that transformed tribal themistes into the thesmos of a polis; it was dike which above all else distinguished a polis from a tribe. It is a polis-word; a word appropriate to circumstances in which men who recognize themselves as citizens arrange their relations with one another. Consequently, it cannot surprise us that, when Plato came to set down his reflections on polis-life, he should have done so in a work called Concerning Justice—for this is the proper title of the work we call the Republic.
The political experience of the ancient Greeks was, first, an experience of creating a political community, what they called a polis. Secondly, it was an experience of governing and being governed—an experience of variation and change in the constitutional structure of a polis. The government of the earliest city states was monarchical: a king, a council of nobles, and an assembly of the demos. These early monarchies were succeeded by what the Greeks called aristocracies: the rule of a nobility. There were two other regular constitutions known to the Greeks: • Oligarchies—the rule of a select number of self-appointed citizens, mostly determined by wealth. • Democracies—the rule of a polis by its assembly of citizens from which only those too young to participate in politics were excluded. Although it has to be understood the ‘citizens’ in a polis were, in later times, only a minority of its total population. Besides these regular constitutions, there was one other kind of government known to the Greeks. They called it a tyranny. A Greek tyrant was an autocrat, and usually the representative of an oligarchic or a democratic faction. He never lasted very long. It was the sort of government which was apt to intervene between periods of oligarchic and democratic rule. From this point of view, then, the Greek political experience was one of perpetual change, and this reflected itself in the belief that all political forms and constitutions were essentially unstable and non-durable. By the end of the fifth century B.C., Hellas, the Greek-speaking world, was composed of large numbers of these independent citystates. By soon after the middle of the fourth century B.C., this whole civilization of city-states had been destroyed, first by the invading
armies of Philip and Alexander of Macedon, and later by those of Rome. The independent cities of Greece were reduced to municipalities in a vast military Empire. Greek ‘politics’ came to an end. The ancient Greeks, then, present themselves to us as the inventors of politics, so far as Europe is concerned. And it sometimes seems that they were so enchanted with what they had invented—politike, agora-life—that they regarded it as itself an end. Certainly they cared very much more for politics than for government, and much more for political debate and discourse than for devising durable arrangements and institutions.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 2, fos. 45–62. Fos. 45–59 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections; fos. 60–2 are photocopies of autograph sheets.
The Political Thought of the Ancient Greeks (2) 1 I have said something about the sentiments, beliefs, and ideas which the ancient Greeks connected with what they understood as politike, ‘political activity’: the nature of polis-life and the central place occupied by notions of ‘law’ and ‘justice’ in their understanding of a polis. I want, this morning, to begin by considering what they thought about ‘government’. They were much more interested in keeping up the momentum of change than in enjoying stability. I said that they were a people who gave a good deal more attention to ‘politics’ than to ‘government’; nevertheless, they did have some interesting and characteristic thoughts about ‘government’.
2 We must begin by excluding two words which, although they are Greek and were used to describe something like ‘government’, were never used in connection with the government of a polis. The first of these words is despotes. This, for the Greek, meant not a ‘ruler’ in the proper political sense, but a ‘master’. It was used in two allied connections. It stood for the relation between an ‘owner’ and his property or his slaves. A man was never a ‘despot’ in relation to another man unless that other man was actually or metaphorically his ‘slave’. Thus, despotes referred to the internal arrangements of an oikia, a ‘household’. And even there it was restricted. The head of a
household was despotes only in relation to his property and his slaves, not in relation to his wife and children. Now, many peoples have tried to make sense of the activity of ruling a state by seeking an analogy for it in the activity of managing a family or a household. And some peoples have incorporated the word ‘father’, ‘head of a household’, into their political vocabulary and have used it to indicate the character of a political ruler and his relation to his subjects. Pater patriae, ‘father of his people’, was one of the titles of Roman emperors. ‘Patriarchy’ is a bastard word we use for ‘fatherly rule’ outside a family. And papa, long before it became changed into ‘pope’, was a word for ‘fatherly rule’. But it is safe to say that the Greeks found the analogy of domestic rule unenlightening when they came to consider the character of a political ruler. And they indicated their rejection of this analogy by refusing to use the domestic word despotes when referring to the ruler of a polis. Even a Greek tyrant was not despotes. But, secondly, the Greeks observed around them peoples among whom the ruler-subject relationship seemed to be very like that of an ‘owner’ or ‘master’ to his estate and slaves. This appeared to them to be so in Egypt and in Persia. Consequently, they used the word despotes to indicate this sort of ruler. What they meant was that he was not a ruler in a political sense at all. By calling the king of Persia despotes they meant that he was quite unlike a basileus (the king of a polis), and that he was really a man who owned an estate and slaves, and that he controlled them, not in an activity of ‘ruling’, but by ‘violence’. In short, the king of Persia was recognized to have ‘power’ over his subjects, but he did not ‘rule’ them. He was a ‘potentate’, not a ‘ruler’. And it may, perhaps, be said that, in denying ‘rulership’, in the proper sense, to a ‘despot,’ the Greeks were beginning to make the supremely important distinction between ‘power’ and ‘authority’. ‘Ruling’ in the proper sense is not merely exercising ‘power’, it is
exercising ‘authority’; but being ‘despotic’ was a matter of ‘power’ alone. Or, to put it another way, the subjects over whom a ‘despot’ exercises ‘power’ are not free men, they are not even ‘men’ in the strict sense at all, they are pieces of ‘property’. The second word we have to exclude is the word hegemon, and its companion hegemonia. Properly translated, this means ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’. It was used by the Greeks to describe a relation of one polis to others in a league or confederation of cities, or to describe a relation of one tribe to others in an alliance of tribes. But the ruler or rulers of a polis were never said to exercise ‘hegemony’ over those they ruled. In a democratic constitution there was often a man who was recognized as a ‘leader’—like Pericles in Athens. But he was never hegemon. And, here again, hegemonia was rejected as a word for ‘ruling’ a polis because it was understood to mean control by superior power. ‘Hegemony’ was ‘supremacy’ based upon superior power, and was therefore distinguished from ‘government’. A hegemon was ‘mighty’; and to be ‘mighty’ was not characteristic of the ‘ruler’ of a polis.
3 Now, these exclusions begin to tell us something about what the Greeks believed the ‘government’ of a polis to be, and about the office of ‘ruler’ of a polis. And we may learn more by considering the words they did use for this activity and office. The words arche and archon. Like most of the other words whose meanings we are considering, the word arche did not begin as a political word. It emerges as a verb, and it means ‘to make a beginning’, or ‘to take the initiative’. To be the first to speak, for example; or to do something which sets in motion a course of events. The carrying off of Helen to Troy by Paris was said to be the arche of the Trojan war. Indeed, perhaps the nearest equivalent in English to this word arche, which is often translated ‘government’, is the word ‘cause’ in a non-technical sense. Now, it is at once obvious how appropriate this word arche, with all these colloquial connections, must have seemed to the Greeks as a description of the activities of the basileus, the ‘king’ of the primitive polis. This man, distinguished by royal blood and the almost magical scepter of office, called together his noble councillors, discussed matters of policy with them, reached decisions, summoned the demos, and made the necessary public pronouncements. He was the mediator between gods and men in the discovery and interpretation of law; he was a judge, a leader in war, and a priest. He was the man to make the first sacrifice in public religious ceremonies. The most notable thing about him was not his powers as an executive, but that he spoke first. He took the initiative and made the beginning. It was he who drew attention to situations which needed a public response. He set things in motion.
‘Ruling’, then, was understood to be an activity of this sort; this is the significance of arche. But the Greeks had another word for a man who ‘set things going’; the word orchamos. But there was a world of difference between an orchamos and archon. An orchamos set things going by an act of violence, by giving thema push. An archon, a ruler, on the other hand, did it in speech; not the speech of command but of deliberation. This, then, is arche—‘ruling’ in a polis. The basileus was the first kind of archon known to the polis. But he was something more than merely the first; he was the model for the Greek notion of ‘ruling.’ The later rulers—the aristocrats, the oligarchs, the democratic assemblies, the councils and the committees, the holders of specialized archonships, and the tyrants—all, in their various degrees and manners, exemplified this notion of ‘government’. It was a peculiar notion of ‘government’, in which ‘ruling’ was only marginally distinguished from politike, ‘doing politics’. Both politike and arche were activities which belonged to the agora; both were a matter of speech, of words: both were distinguished from violence, the mere exertion of force. That ‘governing’ itself, and not merely ‘politics’, should have been understood as a matter of persuasion, is both odd and characteristic of the Greeks. We often think of ‘government’ as mainly concerned with laying down the law and enforcing the law. And we are apt to think of the authority of the law as in some way deriving from the authority of the government. But the ‘government’ of a Greek polis had very little to do with the making of law. There was always an aura of sacredness about the laws of a polis, which were rarely changed and then only with great reluctance. And even the enforcement of law was apt to be thought of in terms of ‘persuasion’. The obedience of the citizen (as distinct from that of the slave) was thought of as peitharaxia, based upon
persuasion. He obeyed, not because he was commanded to do so, but because he had been talked to, and because he had perhaps himself contributed to the talk. Arche was an activity predominantly not concerned with making law, but with the conduct of the affairs of a polis; and this often concerned the relations of one polis with its neighbours. Arche was deliberating and deciding upon policy. There is one other word connected with ‘government’ to be noticed, which seems to introduce a note of command rather than deliberation: the word kurios. Much later, in the New Testament, this is the word used in addressing Jesus which we commonly translate ‘lord’. And in the Athenian political vocabulary it was used in a manner which has suggested to some translators the word ‘sovereign’. Aristotle says that in a democracy the assembly of the demos is ‘kurios even over the laws’. But I think it is a mistake to use the modern word ‘sovereign’ here. Kurios means something more like having ‘supreme and indisputable custody of the laws’. Now, there is something very individual in this conception of government. It clearly reflects the belief that the exercise of arche, ‘ruling’, is the exercise of authority. But if you were to ask: who did the Greeks think had authority to ‘rule’, and where did he get this authority from? you would be asking a very difficult question. We know that they did not think the authority to rule in a polis was analogous to authority in a family or a household. It was not, like a father’s authority, natural. We know that they did not regard their gods as in any proper sense ‘rulers’, or that the source of an archon’s authority was in any sense ‘divine’. We know that they distinguished between the authority of a ruler and the authority of the law; and that something like a sacred authority attached to the law itself. We know that, like many other peoples, they were sometimes inclined to think that men of notable wisdom should be regarded
as having some authority in a polis. And this wasa notion greatly elaborated by Plato. But I think it is very difficult to find in their notion of a ‘democracy’, for example, any clear idea that the whole citizenbody had any natural or inherent right to arche. If they had a theory of ‘democracy’ it was much more the belief that every citizen should be allowed to talk and that every citizen should be eligible to hold office. In short, the Greeks (unlike many other peoples) were hazy about where the authority to rule came from and about how it could be properly acquired. And they could, perhaps, afford to be hazy about these matters because they had so firm a belief in the inherent authority of a relatively unchanging law of the polis. As we shall see later, European thought applied itself to the question of the authority of rulers, and this question often became the centre of their thought, only when ruling became associated with making ‘law’.
4 I want now to say something about the beliefs which centred round another very important word in the Greek political vocabulary: the word eleutheria, which we translate, ‘freedom’. What specifically did eleutheros, a ‘free man’, and eleutheria, ‘freedom’, mean for the Greeks? In the Greek mythological manner of thinking, in which notable human activities and attributes were personified in the character of a god, Dionysus was given the title of eleutheros, ‘free’. He was the god of wine; and no doubt ‘free’ here signified ‘uninhibited’. This primitive notion of ‘freedom’ may not be terribly important when considering ‘freedom’ as a political idea; but it does give us a significant hint. It suggests that the condition of being free is achieved in a process of ‘liberation’ of some sort. To be free is not a ‘natural’ condition; it is an achieved condition. Wine is a notable ‘liberator’; but is there not a more significant ‘liberation’ than this? This question takes us straight back to the Greek’s view of the world and his place in the world. It is a twofold world composed of the necessary processes of nature and the emancipating processes of human artifice—men making something out of the things of the world. The emblem of human freedom is, then, this power of artifice in which men are emancipated from natural necessity. In designing and making things, and in deliberation, choice and action, men are ‘free’. This is the freedom which distinguishes men from beasts and which makes them akin to gods. But if all men are, in this sense, potentially ‘free’, able to impress themselves upon the world, are there not some men who enjoy this freedom more fully than others? And are there not some circumstances which offer it in greater measure than others? Who is the ‘free man’? And what are the specific circumstances of ‘freedom’?
First, it was clear to the Greek that a slave was not free, and for two reasons. First, he has a ‘master’ who rules him ‘despotically’ and secondly, a slave is wholly engaged, within the ‘household’, in producing the necessities of life; that is, in serving the necessary ‘life-process’. He is too close to the earth to be ‘free’. Secondly, the only ‘freedom’ which can be enjoyed within the family—‘household’—life is the limited freedom of fabrication. And this is true also of the peasant, and the artisan. They enjoy the very limited freedom of being able to make things. It follows, then, that the genuinely ‘free man’ is he who by circumstances or education is able to live at least a part of his life outside the ‘household’, and actually does so. In short, the ‘free man’ is the man of the agora; for it is only there, in political activity, that the kind of deliberation and action which constitutes being free from natural necessity is possible. Polis-life is ‘free’ life. A man is free in virtue, not of being a ‘worker’, but in view of being a citizen. Every man, says Aristotle, belongs to two worlds. He belongs to the world of ‘nature’, the private world of the oikia where relationships are biological, and activity is governed by natural necessity. And he belongs to the public world of the agora. And it is this second life, the bios politikos, which offers him the opportunity of being ‘free’. Moreover, this ‘freedom’ is the product of a ‘liberation’. You become a man of the agora when you reach the age when you take the oath of citizenship, when you are grown up. Then, and not until then, is a boy liberated from the tutelage of his father and his exclusive engagement in the private affairs of his ‘household’. Then, and not until then, can he (while remaining a member of his family) step out into the public world of the agora and have his name registered on the roll of citizens. And there may be further heights of freedom to reach. For example, at the age of thirty, in Athens, he is eligible to become a member of the Heliaea. But ‘coming of age,’ becoming a citizen, is
the moment of emancipation and consequently becoming a ‘free man’. On this reading of things, it would appear that the Greek would connect ‘freedom’, not exclusively, but unmistakably, with a democratic polis. And this I think was so. In a ‘democracy’ every citizen has the opportunity of engaging in the ‘free’ activity of deliberation and choice in respect of the public affairs of his polis. But, whatever its constitution, a polis was recognized to provide a condition of ‘freedom’ which could never be enjoyed by those who, like Persians and Egyptians, were ignorant of polis-life. There was, then, in the Greek view of things, no opposition between being ‘governed’ and being ‘free’. Arche and eleutheria were counterparts of one another. The opposition, as they understood it, was between being ‘free’ and being under the command of a ‘despot’, or being in the position of a slave in a household. In short, whereas we are apt to regard the ‘private’ life of a man as the realm in which he is ‘free’, the Greeks regarded the private life of the oikia as a realm of ‘necessity’, and the ‘public’ life of the agora as the realm of ‘freedom’.
5 Now, among the many other beliefs in terms of which the Greeks gave an intellectual organization to polis-life, there is one which deserves special consideration. As we have seen, it was commonly recognized that a new sort of human being had emerged with the polis, the human being denoted by the word ‘citizen’. And the relation of citizen to citizen was identified as almost unique among human relationships because it was a relationship of ‘equals’. The only proper counterpart to this relationship was that which exists between ‘friends’. This, it was believed, was one of the chief differences between the oikia or the tribe, and the polis. In agora-life the ‘natural’ unequals of the ‘household’—women, children, and slaves—never appeared. The idea of isotes, ‘equality’, then, as it appeared in the Greek political vocabulary, was understood as the counterpart of polislife. Equality, in some sense, and a polis, go together; just as ‘freedom’ and a polis go together. Now, this notion of ‘equality’ had nothing directly to do with a ‘democratic’ constitution. It was not applied to human beings as such. It did not refer to the ‘natural’ qualities of men, or to their property. Men were not thought of as having been in any sense ‘created equal’. It was ‘citizens’ who by legal definition were equal, and who, by circumstance, in the agora, were equal. Moreover, there was much in the Greek notion of politike, and in their notion of arche, which recognized and had a place for this notion of ‘equality’. For example, where political activity is understood to be an activity of ‘persuasion’, it assumes or entails a certain sort of egalitarianism. It is only ‘equals’ whom you try to ‘persuade’. Command implies ‘unequals’, subordinates.
And where the ‘ruler,’ the archon, is not thought of on the analogy of the father of a family or of the owner of an estate and slaves, where he is not thought of as a ‘god’, but is thought of as a man who initiates a debate, gathers the consensus of opinion, and sets things going in a certain direction—where this is the notion of ‘ruling’, the main ‘inegalitarian’ analogies have disappeared. But besides appearing in this general way in the Greek political vocabulary, the word isotes appeared in two specific connections. (1) In the word isonomia (equal laws). This word started life as indicating the quality of ‘balance’ which belongs to a healthy organism in which each part properly performs its functions in relation to the other parts. But it entered the Greek political vocabulary to express the condition of things in a polis where rule was ‘by law’ and where every citizen was equal before the law. Isonomia (literally, ‘the same laws administered in the same way for all conditions of citizens’) was said by Herodotus (III. 80) to be the ‘most beautiful word’ in the Greek political vocabulary. It had, however, nothing expressly to do with a democratic constitution. Thucydides, for example, speaks of an ‘isonomic oligarchy’. It was something which could subsist wherever there was arche in the proper sense. Indeed, it was often observed that isonomia and democracy were apt not to go together. The partiality and the prejudice of an assembly of the demos was notorious; it was apt to rule, not according to the law, but according to the whims of the moment. And what was characteristic of a ‘democracy’ was, not isonomia, but something quite different—an equalizing of property or wealth. (2) The second word in the Greek political vocabulary which took up this notion of ‘equality’ was the word isogoria, which meant the equal right of speech.
This was more genuinely connected with demokratia than isonomia; but it did not originate with a democratic constitution. Isogoria was the practice which prevailed in the council of ‘notables’ which was the partner of the ‘king’ in the monarchical polis. What a ‘democratic’ constitution did was to extend isogoria to the assembly of the demos. But it belonged to the Greek notion of politike. Politics, that is, citizens speaking and listening to the utterances of other citizens, was impossible without isogoria.
6 Now, these beliefs about law, justice, government, freedom, equality, and so on, are not, I think, to be regarded as abstract ideas upon which the Greeks modelled, or tried to model, their conduct of affairs and their institutions. They are, rather, the reflections of the feelings, emotions, and events which composed their political experience and which they used to give an intellectual organization to that experience. The experience which overshadowed all others in generating these beliefs was the emergence of polis-life—a life that was neither tribal, nor home life, and which it was recognized that human beings (with the help of the gods, perhaps) had created for themselves and which reflected the unique qualities of human beings. The polis emerged as the product of contingent circumstances. And a certain ancient, tribal way of thinking about ‘law’ (themis) was superseded by other and more appropriate ways of thinking— thesmos and nomos. With the polis appeared the ‘citizen’. And reflection disclosed that the distinguishing feature of the citizen-to-citizen relationship was properly to be described as isotes,a relationship of ‘equality’. The idea of ‘equality’ emerged from the event of citizenship. The agora and agora-life appeared. And the word eleutheria (‘freedom’) was available and seemed appropriate to describe that sort of life and activity—a life of speech, choice, decision, and action, ‘free’ from the natural necessity characteristic of the oikia. The most unmistakable feature of polis-life was the singleness which it imposed upon tribal diversity. And the word ‘justice’ was available to describe the quality of this unity and to describe the process in which it had been achieved—a deliberative process. And so on. Each of these words, as it was incorporated into the Greek political vocabulary, took on a new ‘political’ meaning.
But there is something to add to all this, and something very important. A polis emerged out of a union of tribes. And in these circumstances it might be expected that the Greeks should think of political activity as the art of reconciling diverse interests, and of a polis as a limited liability company for the peaceful exchange of goods and services. But, in fact, a polis became something very much more than this. Each of these cities gathered to itself the exclusive loyalty of its citizens. Each had a fanatical feeling for its own independence; a passion for autonomy and self-sufficiency. Each was a religious community, with gods exclusively its own. And in these circumstances, it became impossible for the Greeks to think of the law of a polis as merely the rules which arbitrated between diverse interests. A polis was something more than a convenience. And the Greeks gave a great deal of thought to formulating the difference between a mere alliance of tribes for the peaceful exchange of goods and services, and a polis. This difference was often appealed to in political speech. Pericles often referred to the unity and harmony which distinguished Athens; and Sparta had an even stricter sense of itself as something very much more than a mere association. But all this remained on the edge of things. It needed a philosopher to formulate this feature of polis-life. Aristotle had a characteristic way of tackling this problem. A polis, he said, is certainly an association of families, living on a common site, designed and organized in such a way as to guard against being unjust to one another, and so live in peace. But, he goes on, if it were merely this, there would be nothing to distinguish it from an alliance of families, or to distinguish its law from the agreed rules of an alliance, and very little to distinguish it from a well-organized market.
The difference, as Aristotle understood it, lay in the fact that a polis was not merely an association for the sake of protection and a more prosperous and more peaceable life. It was an association for the sake of a ‘good’ human life. What distinguished polis-life from all other forms of human life was that it supplied the conditions for the exercise of the uniquely human qualities of human beings. Animals are capable of co-operation; tribal societies seek the most prosperous life which their circumstances allow. But a polis is to be understood as an association of human beings, brought together and held together, not by ‘nature’ or ‘natural ties’, but by choice; and an association of human beings devoted to living a life which fully engaged their unique powers of rational deliberation, choice, and action. In short, what distinguished a polis was politike and arche: it was a society in which human beings could enjoy their unique capacity for freeing themselves from the bonds of natural necessity, and a society whose unity was sustained not by ‘nature’ but by arche, ‘government’.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 2, fos. 63–74. Photocopy of a typescript with autograph corrections.
Aristotle (1) 1 I do not think there is anything to be gained by denying the name ‘political thought’ to any of the mental activities which are apt to go on in politics and government. A speech in the House of Commons, the advice given by a civil servant to a minister, a pamphlet advocating the reform of the betting laws, are no less examples of ‘political thought’ than the constitution of the United States, Hooker’s defence of the Elizabethan church settlement, or Plato’s Republic. Nevertheless, I think we shall go seriously wrong unless we recognize that there are different levels of political thinking, and that we shall not expect quite the same thing from a speech of Pericles as we shall expect from Plato’s Republic: nor should we judge them in the same manner. So far, we have been concerned with a fairly well-defined level of Greek thinking about politics: the sentiments, beliefs, and ideas which composed what may be called the practical political vocabulary of the ancient Greeks. These beliefs gave an intellectual organization to their politics, and made them more fully aware of what they were doing. But, like most beliefs of this sort, they were imperfectly thought out, they were ragged at the edges, and they often suggested questions for which they had no answer. The most notorious example of this was the confused popular belief about the connection between ‘laws’ and ‘nature’. I want now to go on to consider some of the other levels of political thought among the ancient Greeks: the levels where thought acquired a ‘scientific’ or a ‘philosophical’ refinement appropriate for answering some of the questions suggested but left unanswered in their practical political beliefs.
Some peoples seem to have got on well enough without anything very much in the way of political philosophy; but it is only to be expected that so curious and so enquiring a people as the Greeks should have been intrepid explorers of their political experience at these ‘scientific’ and philosophical levels—although it has to be admitted that what may be called ‘scientific’ and ‘philosophical’ thinking about politics was, for the most part, confined to Athens, although others besides Athenians took part. Of the many writers who pursued this enterprise, Plato and Aristotle are incomparably the most famous. And although Plato was born some eighty years before Aristotle, it is with Aristotle I propose to begin.
2 Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. in northern Greece, where his father was court physician to the king of Macedonia. He was destined for a medical career, but instead of starting on his medical education he went, at the age of eighteen, to Athens to study in the Academy of Plato. This Academy was in the nature of a university designed to give a general education in what may be called the explanatory sciences rather than the practical arts: the curriculum centred round mathematical and philosophical studies. After studying and teaching there for twenty years, and on the death of Plato, Aristotle migrated to a city named Assos, on the coast of Asia Minor, where a branch of the Platonic Academy had been established; and later he went to the island of Lesbos. When he was forty years old he was invited by King Philip of Macedonia to be tutor to his son Alexander. After a period of about five years in his native Macedonia he returned to Athens, founded a school of philosophy of his own, called the Lyceum, and remained there for the rest of his life. The works of Aristotle as they have come down to us, some of them after a long period during which they were lost and forgotten, are mostly in the nature of textbooks or treatises. They cover almost every aspect of Greek thought: physics, biology, astronomy, logic, metaphysics, ethics, art, economics, rhetoric, and politics. Many of them have reached us in an incomplete form, not because a few pages are missing, but because they were left in the form of lecture notes; and some of them have been reconstructed from notes taken by his pupils. This is the character of the Politics. It is disjointed and disordered; in it arguments are begun which are never finished; casual, disconnected observations abound; it is divided into eight books, but the divisions are often arbitrary. Nevertheless,
it remains incomparably the most read and the most influential work on politics ever written. What holds it together and gives it a unity is: (1) its exclusive concern with the Greek polis, and (2) the organization which these reflections on polis-life derive from having been connected with Aristotle’s more general understanding of the cosmos and the place of human beings and political activity within this cosmos. This, indeed, is what gives the book its philosophical character. A large part of this book is concerned with establishing the place of politics on a kind of intellectual map of the cosmos. Consequently, I propose to begin by saying something about Aristotle’s map of the universe, which constitutes both the context into which Aristotle is putting ‘politics’ and the apparatus of inquiry he is using to answer the question: What is politics?
3 As a Greek, Aristotle recognized the cosmos, or universe, as a totality of connected, living things, each of which has a ‘nature’ of its own which it exhibits in the way in which it moves, or behaves. The ‘nature’ of a thing is not to be discovered by asking: What is it made of? but by asking, What is the ‘principle’, or cause, of its behaving in the way in which it did behave? To understand the cosmos, then, is to have reliable knowledge about the processes of movement, of change, or behaviour which are characteristic of the components of this cosmos. To understand politics is to understand it in its place in this cosmos. The first principle of Aristotle’s understanding of this cosmos is that it is made up of a number of different things each of which has a characteristic way of moving, behaving, or ‘living’. And its characteristic way of moving is what the thing is; its ‘nature’. Thus, to be a stone is to behave in a manner which exhibits the ‘nature’ of a stone. And to be a man is to behave in a human manner—that is, to exhibit ‘human nature’. But, as Aristotle understood it, to behave as a stone, or as a human being, is not merely to exhibit the ‘nature’ of a stone, or a human being; it is a constant striving to become more and more completely stone-like, or ‘human’ (as the case may be). Thus, all the movement that goes on in the universe, all the change that takes place is: • Things exhibiting their ‘natures’; stones falling, water running downhill, dogs yapping, clowns making jokes etc. Each thing acting according to its nature, or being ‘just’ to itself. • Things exploring their ‘natures’ in an attempt to achieve a more and more exact and unqualified exhibition of their ‘natures’.
Or, as one might say, all movement (and there is nothing but movement in the universe) is, at the same time: • Diurnal movement: a thing responding to its contingent environment in its characteristic way. • Secular movement: a thing endeavouring over time to do this ever more perfectly. Or it might be said that a thing not only is identified in terms of the way in which it behaves, but also every item of its behaviour is both exhibiting its nature and learning more about its nature. Now, in the language of the philosophers, this idea of movement is called teleological movement or change. This means: • Movement which is directed towards a telos, or an end or a fulfillment, as distinct from fortuitous or purposeless change. • Movement directed towards an end or a fulfillment which is potential within the thing that moves, as distinct from an end or a fulfillment imposed on it from outside. Or as it might be said, all movement is growth, but growth in which the being concerned is becoming what it is in its ‘nature’ to be. Perhaps, the simplest way of understanding what Aristotle thought about the world is to say that he thought of all the movement or behaviour of things on the analogy of biological growth: that is, movement directed towards a condition of ‘maturity’ or of being ‘full-grown’. And this condition of being ‘full-grown’ is a condition in which the ‘nature’ of a thing is fully realized. For example: • An acorn grows up into a sapling, the sapling into a fullgrown oak tree, and the process goes on until the tree reaches its ‘natural’ size. It is the ‘nature’ of an acorn to become an oak tree.
• A boy grows up into a man, and reaches the condition of being an adult man. And everything he does is not only an exhibition of ‘human nature’ but a striving to realize adult ‘human nature’. Boys don’t become ‘gods’ or ‘elephants’ because their only potentiality is to become men. But, in all cases, this process of ‘becoming’ is followed by what Aristotle calls a process of ‘passing away’, which is equally characteristic of the thing concerned. It belongs to a man, for example, to have a certain span of life. The movements, changes, manners of behaviour, then, of the things that compose the universe are continuous processes of coming into being and passing away, governed by the different natures of the different things concerned. The cosmos, then, for Aristotle, was a continuous process of teleological change. Now, this conception of the natural processes which go on in the universe—at any rate the sublunary part of the universe— needs to be qualified. It is not impossible for a natural process to be obstructed. A tree, because its seed has fallen upon poor soil, or from some other cause, may never in fact reach maturity. It may be pushed off the line of its ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ development. A boy, because he has not received the appropriate nourishment or education, may pass away without ever having realized ‘human nature’ to the full. And this may happen to anything in the sublunary world. These obstructions of normal processes Aristotle calls ‘accidents’, divergences from the normal. But what is an ‘accident’? If the growth of a tree is obstructed by the seed falling upon stony ground, that growth is being obstructed by the ‘natural’ behaviour of the stone: it is the ‘nature’ of a stone to be hard, resistant, not to provide nourishment. The tree never becomes a full-grown tree because the stone insists on being and behaving like a stone.
Thus, ‘accident’ is not really a break in the teleological processes of the world; it is the product of a fortuitous clash between two different ‘natures’, each seeking its own end or fulfillment, and one succeeding and the other failing. Nothing that is, nothing that happens in the world, can be regarded as ‘unnatural’, but the sublunary world holds examples of ‘normal’ and of ‘abnormal’ behaviour in particular things. Now, there is a particular and very important example of this clash of ‘natures’. Aristotle calls it ‘artifice’. Artifice is the designed clash of two natures; and human beings alone are capable of injecting it into the world. When a man fells and cuts up a tree and makes it into a table he is doing violence to the ‘nature’ of the tree: it is not potential in a tree to become a table. Nevertheless, in making the table out of the tree, the man is exercising one of his ‘natural’ powers: it is ‘natural’ to men, it is a potentiality in human ‘nature’, to be a maker of artefacts. To make an artifact is, then, to impose the teleology of ‘human nature’ upon the teleology of the ‘nature’ of something else. Human beings, then, are recognized to have this unique power of imposing their own ‘natures’ upon the rest of the world by design; the power of choosing to make the other things of the natural world serve human purposes. Other things impose their ‘natures’ upon one another ‘by accident’. Man alone does this by design. And it is in virtue of his power, the power of acting in pursuit of a conscious purpose, that Aristotle calls men ‘rational’ beings. And, as we shall see, this involves attributing to human beings a ‘nature’ quite unlike the ‘natures’ of the other things which compose the cosmos. It is the ‘nature’ of a man, it is potential within human nature, to choose for himself what he shall aim at; or to arrive at his own perfection in a series of choices, and not merely in a series of determined events. ‘Rationality’, in Aristotle’s vocabulary, means the power of realizing one’s ‘nature’, fulfilling one’s potentiality, in conduct
which springs not from natural necessity but from conscious choice or design. There are, then, three permanent characteristics of the world in which we live: • Natural necessity—movements which go on according to the law of the ‘natures’ of the things which compose the world. • Accident or chance happenings. • Artefacts—things made by men by their imposing their own purposes on natural processes. Now, of all the entailments of this view of things two are specially important for us. • Understanding or explaining anything in the world is discovering its ‘nature’, discovering what ‘causes’ it to behave as it does and be what it is. • The only way to make this discovery is by observing how a thing moves or behaves when it is not being obstructed by the behaviour or movement of some other thing. ‘Science’, systematic inquiry, then, the attempt to acquire reliable knowledge about the world, is an inquiry which concerns itself with the two major aspects of this world. • It is inquiry into what ‘causes’ a thing to behave as it does and be what it is; an inquiry into the ‘natures’ of things. • It is an inquiry into what may cause a thing to behave in a manner eccentric to its own ‘nature’—that is, an inquiry into the circumstantial or contingent relations between different things; the accidents which happen to them, or (in the case of men) the designs they may have and carry out. The first is a ‘philosophical’ inquiry; the second is an ‘historical’ inquiry. This, then, is the understanding of the cosmos, and of the place of human beings within it, which supplies the organizing ideas of all Aristotle’s reflections on the polis and political activity.
And, before we go any further, we may notice at once how this set of ideas about the world enables Aristotle to recognize a polis both as an artificial creation of human beings, a human invention, and as something that is ‘natural’ to human beings. It is ‘artificial’ because it is chosen, and is not (like the family) a product of natural necessity. It is ‘natural’ because it belongs to the nature of human beings to determine their conduct ‘rationally’—by making conscious choices. And this is precisely what Aristotle understands polis-life to be. And in order to understand and explain polis-life, what has to be shown is that it is a way of living which belongs to the ‘nature’ of human beings and necessary to the fulfillment or achievement of that ‘nature’.
4 The Politics of Aristotle is concerned with seven main themes or inquiries. Each of them is suggested by the political experience of the Greeks and each of them is formulated in terms of this understanding of the cosmos and of human ‘nature’. • The ‘nature’ of the polis and of the citizen to citizen relationship as it may be gathered from a study of the polis coming into being or emerging, from a study of its unobstructed growth. • The ‘nature’ of the polis as it may be gathered from a study of some imaginary cities constructed by theorists and held to be well-constructed, and from the study of some actual cities held to be well-governed, i.e., those which exhibit, or purport to exhibit, the end potential in a polis. • The ‘nature’ of citizenship and of a constitution determined by considering in abstract terms the end or purpose of a polis. • An inquiry into the ‘nature’ of the polis pursued by a method of ideal types. • An inquiry into cities whose ‘natural’ or normal development has been obstructed. That is, a study of political ‘monstrosities’, stunted growths, the results of political ‘accidents’. This may be understood as a study of the pathology of the polis. • An inquiry into the causes of political ‘accidents’ (here called ‘revolutions’), and into the means of preventing them. • Reflections on the sort of constitution which most nearly represents the ‘nature’ of a polis. What Aristotle has to say on some of these themes is collected together in one place in the Politics; what he has to say on others is scattered throughout the work.
5 I propose now to say a little about how Aristotle pursues some of these themes. (1) Nobody can get far into Book I of the Politics without perceiving that Aristotle is telling us something about the history, and particularly about the early history and emergence, of the Greek polis. Here, indeed, is a masterly account of what I have called the legend of Greek politics, and Aristotle himself was one of the great constructors of this legend. Nevertheless, the ‘history’ of the polis as it appears in Book I of the Politics is a strange sort of history. No particular polis is mentioned; the events recorded are all of a very general character. It is, in fact, what the eighteenth century called ‘philosophical history’ or ‘conjectural’ history. The polis, here, is not so much a historical phenomenon as a ‘natural’ phenomenon. Aristotle is treating it as if it were a species of animal or tree, and he is asking himself the question: What is the characteristic process in which a polis emerges and develops? And he is asking this question because he believes that the best way of getting to know the ‘nature’ of anything is by studying it ‘coming into being’, as he says. The ‘nature’ of a thing is to be discerned in its behaviour. Its behaviour is its ‘growth’. This, then, is the ‘natural history’ of the polis, as Aristotle understands it. The ‘seed’, so to speak, from which the polis grows is a potentiality in human beings: the power of rational deliberation and of speech. Human beings are, thus, ‘by nature’ political creatures, and polis-life is the ‘natural’ life of a man because it has its roots in human nature itself. Certainly the polis is the product of human choices, it is an invention of human beings; but it is a condition of life in which alone the peculiar ‘excellence’ or ‘nature’ which belongs to human
beings can be achieved; their peculiar ‘excellence’ being the ability to deliberate and to speak and to choose. Polis-life is a highly specific sort of life—it is not merely a ‘social’ life (sociability is not peculiar to human beings)—it is a life in which human beings are engaged in political activity; that is, the activity of deciding things by deliberating and talking about them. But, if this is the ‘seed’ in human ‘nature’ from which the polis springs, the polis itself emerges (often provoked by a contingent need for defence) as a union of families and tribes. And it is set on its course of development by an activity called ‘justice’—a human, deliberative activity of giving their due to the laws and religious beliefs of each of the tribes which compose it: Dike belongs to the ‘nature’ of the polis. But this is only the beginning of a long process of development in which this ‘nature’ is gradually explored and realized: the process in which a polis, like a man or a tree, grows up and becomes adult. When it first emerges the polis has a king; but kingship gives place to aristocracy, aristocracy to oligarchy, oligarchy to tyranny, and tyranny to democracy. And here, or hereabouts, the process stops. Why? Not because Aristotle regards a democratic constitution, like that of Athens in his own time, for example, as a perfect constitution, but because he believes that the adult or grown-up polis will have a constitution which has ‘democratic’ elements; and until a ‘democratic’ constitution has emerged these essential elements of the ‘nature’ of a polis will remain merely ‘potential’. When Aristotle says that the adult polis is a ‘democracy of some sort’, we know that he means that some kind of democratic structure is potential in the polis from the moment of its emergence—as a full-grown oak tree is potential in the acorn. And we know, further, that he believes that this entire process of change is the polis striving to attain its adult form.
The polis, then, emerges in an activity of doing ‘justice’, and the whole process of its growth is a striving after a more complete and a more exact ‘justice’. Now, I have spoken as if Aristotle thought of a polis as if it were, itself, a tree or a plant. And this is how Aristotle speaks of it. But he can only do so because, all the time, he is understanding a polis as human beings behaving in a certain manner. A polis is an artifact; but all artefacts are to be recognized as forms of human conduct. And the peculiarity of a polis is that it is an artifact entirely made out of human conduct. It is not like a vase made out of clay; both it and its materials are human conduct. (2) But, besides this study of the polis coming into being, Aristotle has another inquiry to make. He is interested in the different constitutional forms, not only as stages in a normal development in which ‘justice’ is generated, but also in themselves. And he now turns to consider them as structures which can be classified. Now, classification is an ambiguous and somewhat arbitrary activity. It entails the choice of a principle. Some principles of classification reveal more than others and therefore are more useful. But before classification can begin a principle of classification must be chosen. For example, there have been various principles used in biology for classifying animals: • number of legs—bipeds, quadrupeds, etc. ‘insect’—six legs; • habitat—land, air, water—amphibious; • mode of generation—mammals, oviparous, etc. • presence or absence of backbone—vertebrate or invertebrate. • the sort of food they eat—herbivores. And each of these principles, in operation, reveals a different classification of animals; and each may be enlightening. Aristotle’s classification of constitutions is based upon two principles:
In every polis the activity of governing, arche, is in the hands of one man, a few men, or many men. And, as an empirical corollary to this: the few are always wealthy and the many are always poor. In every polis governing is carried on either solely for the benefit of the rulers themselves, or solely for the benefit of the ruled. And as a corollary to this: the first is always unjust, the second always has some semblance of justice. When these principles are applied the following classification of constitutions emerges. Number of Rulers
Just Constitutions
Unjust Constitutions
One Man
Kingship or monarchy
Tyranny
A few men (wealthy)
Aristocracy
Oligarchy
Many men (poor)
Polity (politeia)
Democracy
In the Politics Aristotle elaborates these broad classifications. There are at least two different kinds of ‘democracy’ and there are several different kinds of both monarchy and oligarchy—but we need not concern ourselves with these refinements. Now, there are some important things to notice about these principles of classification and the scheme of constitutions which emerges from them; they are not always properly understood. Aristotle is reputed to be very much an empiricist, concerning himself with observations and with conclusions which may legitimately be drawn from putting observations together. And he often deserves this reputation. He was a tireless observer, both of the natural and of the political world, and he had an immense appetite for information. But neither these principles of classification, nor this scheme of constitutions, are based upon observations in this sense.
To say, for example, that every polis is ruled by one, or by a few rich, or by many poor, and to represent these as not only exclusive categories (which they are) but also as categories into which all the cities of the Greek world could be put without remainder, is certainly not true. Or, to say that all cities are ruled either for the benefit of the rulers, or the benefit of the ruled, is to propose a dichotomy which does not correspond to any facts in Greek history. Of course, there were some notorious examples of cities ruled in a violently oppressive manner, and most of them were ‘democracies’ in the accepted Greek sense of the word; but most cities were, in fact, governed partly in the interests of the rulers and partly in the interests of the ruled. The scheme of constitutions which springs from these principles of classification has no direct connection with any particular cities of the world of the Greek polis. It is, in fact, not a classification of known cities in terms of their constitutions, but a scheme of ideal types, none of which is exactly to be found anywhere. This becomes clearer when we observe that Aristotle in using these common words of the Greek political vocabulary— ‘kingship’, ‘aristocracy’, ‘oligarchy’, ‘tyranny’, ‘democracy’, etc., has given each of them a new meaning. Monarchy in Aristotle’s scheme means ‘just government by one man’. But government by one man was never characteristic of any Greek polis—it was characteristic only of the oriental despotisms or, for example, of the hereditary kingdom of Macedon. The Homeric basileus ruled always in consultation with his council of ‘notables’. And there was nothing in ‘kingly’ government, as the expression was normally used, to signify that it was inherently ‘just’. Aristocracy and oligarchy are distinguished by Aristotle as ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ forms of minority government. But, before Aristotle, they had no such meanings. ‘Aristocracy’ normally stood for the exercise of archê by some fraction of the whole number of citizens distinguished on
account of noble blood; and ‘oligarchy’ meant rule by a minority distinguished by anything except noble blood. Both could be, and were in Greece, either ‘good’ government in Aristotle’s sense, or ‘bad’ government. Tyranny, in Aristotle’s use, is the rule of one man for his own sole benefit; but what distinguished ‘tyranny’ in Greece was that the ruler was a usurper: he might rule well or ill. Democracy for Aristotle means ‘government by the many poor in the sole interests of the many poor’, whereas its normal meaning was government by an assembly of all citizens (in which it is true the poor were usually the majority); all citizens above a certain age being eligible to hold office as archons and the archonships were usually filled by lot. And polity: this word was not invented by Aristotle, but again he uses it in a restricted sense. Its normal meaning was a constitution in which there was a mixture of oligarchic and democratic institutions and in which the office holders were men of some substance. But with Aristotle it means a constitution in which ‘free birth’ and ‘wealth’ are the qualifications for office. Now, it cannot be supposed that Aristotle intended us to understand that he believed that, for example, all the ‘democratic’ constitutions of Greek cities conformed to his definition of demokratia and that all oligarchies were ruled solely in the interests of the oligarchs: this is a gross and unmistakable error. What, I think, we have to suppose is that in his scheme of constitutions the names do not stand for boxes into which actual constitutions could be distributed without remainder; they stand for ideal types. His procedure is not that of an observer, but that of a logician. And this is a procedure to be met elsewhere in Aristotle’s works. For example, in his Metaphysics he distinguishes seven meanings for the word phusis, but at least three of them are not actual meanings at all (nobody ever used the word in these
manners), but ‘possible’ meanings, put in by Aristotle to make his review logically complete. These ‘constitutions’ of Aristotle are not ‘actual’ but ‘possible’ or ‘ideal’ constitutions defined so that each has a simple and exclusive character. And this, indeed, is the character of all classifications. What, then, is the point of this Aristotelian scheme of ideal types? What use does he make of it? And before trying to answer these questions it is worthwhile to remember that other political thinkers, often under the influence of Aristotle’s Politics, have considered the structures and operation of different sorts of government in relation to ideal types or models—Montesquieu, for example, and Max Weber. So far as Aristotle is concerned, this procedure enabled him to do two things. First, to discern the constituents of the constitutions of actual cities, and to determine the tendency a constitution has towards ‘justice’ or ‘injustice’ and (a very important consideration for Aristotle) its tendency towards stability or instability. Most cities were, in fact, mixtures of varying proportions of the characteristics represented by these ideal types. Secondly, it enabled him to construct what he describes as the most viable constitution for ‘most’ cities by combining in different proportions the ideal elements which his scheme of types gave him. And he does this in much the same manner as a metallurgist, wanting a product with certain qualities of hardness, for example, tensile strength and malleability, makes an alloy out of a number of different metals combined in different proportions. And it is characteristic of Aristotle to want to make a construction of this sort and to do it in this way instead of doing it in the very different manner that Plato, as we shall see, employed. We will have to consider later what Aristotle believed to be the mixture of these ideal characteristics which would constitute the best sort of constitution for a polis. But we may expect it to be
a mixture, in certain proportions, of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. (3) From Aristotle’s inquiries in the Politics there emerges a vision of three possible political sciences or bodies of knowledge relevant to the understanding of polis-life and the practice of politike, the art of politics. There is, first, the study of what Aristotle thinks of as the normal development of a polis, a development in the strict sense in which the potentialities present in the emergent polis are realized and in which the polis grows up to be an adult polis. This might be called the ‘biology’ of the polis; and it begins with the identification of the polis as belonging to ‘the class of things that exist by nature’. This raises some important questions. What is the difference between a ‘household’ and a polis, and how out of a union of ‘households’ can something that is not itself a ‘household’ emerge? What is the difference between an alliance of ‘households’ and a union of ‘households’? What is the difference between a member of a ‘household’, and even the head of a ‘household’, and a ‘citizen’? How are we to account for the different species of polis? For, Aristotle does not take the simple view that variety here is simply divergence from a norm. There may be good and bad dogs, but different species of dog are not to be understood as simply better and worse dogs. And, the most important question: By what analogy, Aristotle asks, are we to understand governing in a polis? Not the analogy of a master’s rule over his slaves; that is a relationship of owner and owned. Not the analogy of a father’s rule over his children, that is, an educational relationship. But, Aristotle thinks, the relation of husband and wife is, perhaps, not so remote from that of ruler and ruled in a polis—although it is nothing like an exact parallel. This sets Aristotle on to thinking that there may be persons who are to be recognized as ‘naturally’ rulers and others who are
‘naturally’ subjects. Male, he thinks, has a ‘natural’ authority over female, the elder over the younger, the wiser or more intelligent over the less wise or less intelligent. And if there are ‘natural’ rulers, what effects will this have on our beliefs about the government of a polis? There is, then, a science of politics which may be called the ‘biology’ of the polis: it is concerned with the ‘normal’ and with the operation of normal processes. There is, secondly, the possibility of a science of political abnormalities, the results of political error or ‘accident’. This may be described as the ‘pathology’ of the polis. It is a study of political disease and the causes of political disease; and it springs easily from Aristotle’s belief that every natural thing has a normal mode of behaviour in which it is striving to realize its own specific ‘nature’, but that this normal mode of behaviour may be interrupted or obstructed. For Aristotle the major form of diseased polis is one in which government is carried on solely for the benefit of the rulers and not the ruled, for this is ‘injustice’ and it is a political disease because ‘justice’ belongs to the ‘nature’ of the polis. The symptoms of this disease are discontent, disunity, the absence of eunomia, and often revolution. But each species of polis is prone to diseases peculiar to itself, and some are more liable to disease than others. A polis which has a constitution naturally resistant to disease must be considered superior to those which are liable to catch anything that is going. And thirdly, there is the possibility of a ‘remedial’ science of politics, the aim of which, like that of the science of medicine, is to devise cures for political disease. But to cure is not to transform, it is not to turn the patient into a different sort of being: it is to restore to him such health as he is naturally capable of enjoying. Therefore, in this remedial science of politics, Aristotle’s attention is directed, not towards the imaginative construction
of a perfect polis, but towards the discovery of the conditions in which each species of polis may be as healthy as its constitution allows it to be—that is, to restore its own constitution to working order. Now, when I say that from the Politics of Aristotle there emerges a vision of these three political sciences I mean that this is the way in which Aristotle thought, and that the Politics makes a contribution to these three ways of considering the political experience of the ancient Greeks.
6 I have left until next week a consideration of Aristotle’s beliefs about the relation of polis-life to human ‘nature’—what may be called his philosophical exploration of polis-life. But, so far as we have got, you will recognize this book, the Politics, as a mixture of several different modes of thinking about political matters. There is something like ‘history’ in it; there is something like ‘science’; there is philosophical explanation; and there is practical advice and recommendation. We must get used to this sort of mixture, because it is common enough in the literature of European political reflection. But getting used to it does not mean failing to recognize the important differences between these modes of thought.
Editorial Note LSE 19/1. The first two sheets are photocopies of autograph sheets numbered ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘3a’ in Oakeshott’s hand, and replace the first two sheets of the sixteen-page lecture, a photocopy of a typescript with autograph corrections. This version is more legible than the copy at LSE 1/1/21, file 2, of which fos. 76–9 are photocopies of autograph sheets replacing fos. 80–2, and fos. 83–9 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections.
Aristotle (2) 1 The book called the Politics is a work in which Aristotle is reflecting upon the experience of the ancient Greeks, and particularly upon what they regarded as their greatest achievement, namely, polislife. The context of this examination of polis-life is an elaborate view of what goes on in the world in general. It is a world in which everything has its own distinctive ‘nature’; and this ‘nature’ is, at once, (1) the principle of its normal behaviour, and (2) the ‘end’, or ‘excellence’, which this normal behaviour is striving to achieve. The normal behaviour of anything is sometimes frustrated by accidents; and an accident is a conflict between two or more normalities. Understanding anything in the world is a matter of discussing its ‘nature’—its normal behaviour—and knowing something about the accidents which may befall it. From this there emerges, for Aristotle, a vision of four possible political ‘sciences’, or bodies of knowledge relevant to the understanding of polis-life. • A science of the normal development of polis-life; a development in which the potentialities of the emergent forms are realized. • A science of political abnormalities, the outcomes of political error or accident: polis-life thrown of its normal course: political pathology. • A remedial science of politics, in which cures for these ‘diseases’ abnormalities, ‘accidents’ etc. are devised. • A science in which a ‘constitution’ for polis-life might be designed which is most resistant to the sort of ‘diseases’ which
it is most liable to. This is the science of the most generally reliable kind of polis-life: the best all-round constitution. And you will find in the Politics passages, moments, and sometimes whole chapters, in which one or other of these themes are being pursued. Instead of saying anything more about these, I want this evening to follow Aristotle in another direction of his thought; what may be called his political philosophy. And in looking at this we will get our first glimpse of what it is to reflect philosophically about politics.
2 Throughout the Politics Aristotle is always returning to a brief characterisation of polis-life. It is a manner of living in which human beings deliberate together about their common affairs and choose the courses of action to be followed. And what Aristotle, as a philosopher, wants to show us is that this manner of living is an exhibition of the ‘nature’ of human beings; and that, therefore, living this sort of life may be understood as human beings striving to achieve the ‘end’ or ‘excellence’ potential in a human being. At the outset there is an apparent difficulty to be overcome. As a union of families or tribes, polis-life is not a primordial condition of human life, nor is it a universal condition. It appeared first at a certain point in the history of Greek peoples; and there are large parts of the world where it has never emerged. Can it be true that a large part of the human race does not live in the manner which displays human nature? How Aristotle overcomes this difficulty will appear as we go along. Now, there are three questions which may be asked about polislife, each of them (as Aristotle understands it) carrying his inquiry a step further; and only when he has found the answer to the third of them does Aristotle think he has shown us polis-life as human beings exhibiting their ‘nature’ and pursuing ‘human’ excellence. (1) Polis-life is an emergence in human history, and we may inquire, first: How did it emerge? We may seek, that is, in the contingencies of human circumstances, for some ‘historical’ reasons for its emergence. Aristotle’s answer to this question is easy, but it does not carry us very far. He believes that polis-life emerged among sets of neighboring families or tribes because they needed some defence
against common enemies which a more temporary alliance of tribes would not provide. This, in Aristotle’s view, accounts circumstantially for the emergence of polis-life. And all that we may note is: (a) That it is a very generalized account which attributes the emergence of polis-life to a single, universal, cause, and is therefore not very satisfactory history. (b) That it is a very incomplete account; what needs to be added to it is some recognition of city-states which were founded (as many of the city-states of Hellas were founded) by emigrants from already existing city-states. In short, all we have is a suggestion about the conditions in which some of the city-states of Greece actually emerged. (2) The second question is: How could polis-life emerge? In other words, polis-life (which is admitted not to be primordial in human life) still remains only partially intelligible unless we can recognize it, not only as a brute fact with some contingent ‘historical’ reason for it having appeared, but also recognize it as something that is possible. If it, in fact, exists, it must be possible; but the grounds of its possibility have to be understood. Now, this is a very important question. It is a question which we shall observe people asking again and again in the history of European reflection about political society, and which has received many different answers. It is a question which must be answered if we are to have an adequate explanation of political life. What, then, makes possible this association of families in which common affairs are arranged by deliberating about them? In considering this question Aristotle rejects one answer which, if it pointed to something relevant might be considered to be a convincing answer. He says, the possibility of polis-life is not to be found in the natural sociability of human beings. Why is this answer insufficient? Aristotle thinks there are two very good reasons for its insufficiency.
Polis-life is something peculiar to human beings, and while it is true that human beings are sociable, gregarious creatures, they are not the only sociable creatures in the world. In other words, what has to be accounted for, polis-life, is something exclusively human, and it cannot be accounted for by pointing to a characteristic which is not exclusively human. If ‘sociability’ made the polis possible, why do not other notoriously sociable creatures, like bees and ants and wolves, live a polis-life? And, secondly, polis-life is something very much more than a merely ‘sociable’ life; it is a life of ‘political’ activity. And, even if human beings were the only ‘sociable’ creatures in the world, their sociability would not account for something different from a merely sociable life; namely, a polis-life. Having disposed of this insufficient answer Aristotle is left with the question: What power, capability, or aptitude is common to all human beings, exclusive to human beings, and contains within it the possibility of polis-life?—that is, a life in which human beings deliberate with one another about what shall be done. The answer he gives is: the capability which makes polis-life possible is that of speech, of communicating with one another in words. ‘Man alone of the animals is furnished with the faculty of language,’ he says; and we need to look no further than this in order to see the possibility for human beings of a life in which common affairs are decided by deliberating and talking about them—the possibility, namely, of polis-life. What Aristotle has done here is to seek and find universal in human nature something which makes polis-life possible. And polis-life, on account of this discovery, is no longer a brute fact to be observed in the world, but has become an intelligible fact. Here is an explanation, which is fuller and deeper than the explanation which pointed to the merely contingent circumstances of the need for defence against enemies. It shows how, from this need for defence, polis-life, and something else, could emerge. (3) But it is still an incomplete explanation.
For something to be wholly intelligible we need to be able not only to know that it exists, and to understand that it is possible, but also to understand that it is necessary and to discern the ground of that necessity. The third question is, then: Why, given human beings, must there be polis-life? This is a genuinely philosophical question; answering it is an attempt to explain what is by showing its necessity. Now, as it stands, it is an ambiguous question; and Aristotle himself removes the ambiguity by telling us what he means and what he does not mean by it. ‘Necessity’ might mean natural necessity. And if this is what it were to mean here, a demonstration that polis-life was a necessary condition of the survival of the human species might be taken as a proof of its necessity. But Aristotle tells us that he is not undertaking to show us that polis-life is necessary to the survival of the human race. Indeed, he does not believe this to be the case. Polis-life may help to preserve the human species; but, so far as Aristotle is concerned, the only manner of living which is necessary for the survival of the species is ‘household’ or ‘family’ life—a life, namely, in which men get their living and procreate. And ‘family’ life, we know, is possible in the absence of polis-life. Moreover, the human race does not show any signs of coming to an end in such places as Persia or Egypt where the experience of polis-life is unknown. With this put out of the way, Aristotle makes clear that what he is undertaking to show is that polis-life is necessary to human ‘nature’, to the achievement of human beings of the potentialities of their ‘nature’. To show, in short, that men who have no experience of polis-life lack something that is necessary to the achievement of that particular excellence which is characteristic of human beings, and do not merely lack something necessary to survival. And Aristotle announces this undertaking by saying that he is concerned to show polis-life as the necessary condition of the good
human life. For the ‘good’ of anything is the complete realization of its ‘nature’. The question: Why must there be a polis? may, then, for Aristotle, be reformulated in the following alternative ways: • What do we know about human ‘nature’ which will reveal to us, not only that human beings are capable of polis-life, but that in the absence of polis-life that ‘nature’ must remain imperfectly realized? • How can it be shown that human beings in inventing polislife are acting teleologically—that is, acting in such a way as to achieve what is potential in human ‘nature’? How can it be shown that this particular piece of human conduct (the invention of polis-life) is ‘natural’ to human beings? In short, in order to understand polis-life fully—that is, to exhibit its necessity—we must get to know something more about human ‘nature’ and the human ‘good’ in which that ‘nature’ is realized and fulfilled. What is the ‘human good’? What is the ‘end’ which all ‘human’ conduct is designed to achieve?
3 Now, Aristotle’s answer to this question is to be found in the work of his called the Ethics, and all that he says on the matter in the Politics assumes the conclusions of the Ethics. The last page of the Ethics leads on to the Politics. I propose, therefore, in order to help you to understand the Politics, to put before you the main line of the argument of the Ethics, and to do so in the form of five questions and the answers Aristotle gives to them. (1) The first question is: What specific ‘end’ is the activity we call ‘human conduct’ in process of realizing? What does human activity naturally aim at? To this question Aristotle first gives an answer which is not in fact an answer at all, buta restatement of the question. The answer, he says, is eudaimonia. Now this word eudaimonia is usually translated ‘happiness’; and when it is translated in this way, the answer to Aristotle’s question is: Human activity is a process in which human beings strive to achieve happiness; the happy man is the man in whom human ‘nature’ is fully realized. But eudaimonia really means something much less specific than ‘happiness’: it means something much more like ‘satisfaction’ or ‘fulfilment’. But to strive after the ‘satisfaction’ of their own natures is not peculiar to human beings; it is the common characteristic of the behavior of all natural things. A horse, an elm tree, and a sunflower are each behaving in such as way as to ‘realize’ or to ‘satisfy’ their ‘natures’: each of them aims at its own specific eudaimonia. All that Aristotle has done by answering this question in this way is to impress upon us the initial fact that he understands the behavior of human beings, like that of every other species of natural thing, to be teleological: to be aimed at the achievement of a specific end potential in human nature. So we must start again.
(2) The question we want to find an answer to is: What specific ‘satisfaction’ or fulfilment does human conduct aim at? What is the peculiar human eudaimonia? And Aristotle answers this question by saying that human activity has two special characteristics which between them determine the eudaimonia of human beings and distinguish it from that of all other things. First, human activity is motivated by ‘desire’. And by ‘desire’ Aristotle means ‘conscious attachment to purposes pursued’. Stones, trees, animals move and change, grow and behave in response to their ‘natures’, and in pursuit of the realization of their ‘natures.’ But they follow and seek their ‘natures’ ignorantly and blindly. An acorn does not ‘desire’ to become an oak tree; it blindly fulfills its destiny, unless it is frustrated by ‘accident’, for example, action by a pig. Human beings, on the other hand, move on their way towards the realization of their particular inherent excellence ‘selfconsciously’, in response to specific ‘desires’. Desires are not merely ‘wants’, ‘urges’, ‘impulses’, or ‘inclinations’; they are ‘urges’, ‘impulses’, or ‘inclinations’ which have been selected, or singled out to be pursued in preference to other ‘urges’ and ‘impulses’. Secondly, human conduct is capable of being governed and directed by ‘reason’. Aristotle uses the word ‘reason’ in several different senses, but in this connection it is the counterpart of ‘desire’ and it means the power of deliberating and making certain choices about what to do. To be rational means to be able to choose between the many impulses, the many courses of conduct, which may present themselves to a man on any occasion; and it means choosing that course of conduct which will lead to the realization of the particular ‘excellence’ which is inherent in human ‘nature’. In other words: desire is the power of choosing between different impulses; and reason is the power to choose to pursue those impulses the satisfaction of which will contribute to the
human eudaimonia. And desire and reason are exclusively human powers. Now from these two observations about human conduct Aristotle formulates his answer to the question: What is the specifically human eudaimonia? He says: The eudaimonia of a man is to follow his ‘nature’ and to achieve the excellence that belongs to that ‘nature’ by the exercise of rational choice. This is what distinguishes human beings from all other creatures. This may be restated in another way. What Aristotle has said is that the particular virtue of excellence of being a man is to regulate ‘desire’ by ‘reason’; to act in such a way that ‘desire’ impels us towards what ‘reason’ has chosen. ‘Reason’ being the faculty by which a man knows what his ‘nature’ needs, knows where human excellence lies. (3) But, Aristotle continues, how is this adjustment in the components of human soul (desire and reason) to be brought about? How do desires come to be controlled by rational choices? He answers: by practice and by acquiring a habit of living according to a rule. Human excellence is to be achieved, and rational choices followed, only when choice is governed by a rule or principle. (4) This gives Aristotle his fourth question, the most important of all: namely, What is the rule which ‘reason’ gives as a guide to conduct? What is rational choice? It is, answers Aristotle, choosing, in conduct, a mean, or middle way, and of avoiding extremes. The rule of ‘reason’ is to avoid excess. The human eudaimonia is achieved when human conduct exemplifies the principle of the mean. Or, since the achievement of the human eudaimonia is the same thing as realizing the peculiar excellence which belongs to human ‘nature’, aiming at the mean may be described as ‘good’ human conduct, the ‘good’ life for man.
Aristotle’s doctrine, then, is that human conduct is distinguished from animal conduct by the conscious pursuit of chosen purposes; and that good human conduct is distinguished from bad human conduct by choosing a mean between extremes and rejecting excess. Here, as you will at once perceive, Aristotle is catching up into his moral philosophy the moral sentiments we have already seen belonged to the Greek people. It was the message of the Delphic oracle that human beings were neither gods nor beasts and that the appropriate conduct for human beings was meden agan: ‘nothing in excess.’ But we must be clear about what Aristotle is doing. He is not telling human beings what virtuous human conduct is; he assumes that they know this already. He is saying: You and I agree that certain forms of conduct are virtuous and others are vicious, and by virtuous conduct we understand conduct which is conducive to the achievement of the excellence inherent in human ‘nature’. But you are accustomed to thinking of virtuous conduct in terms ofa list of virtuous acts, you don’t see what is the common principle which runs through all these virtuous acts. I, however, am a philosopher, and my business is to explain the variety of virtuous acts by discerning their common principle. That common principle is the principle of the mean. Hence, it may be said that a virtuous disposition in a man will be a disposition to aim at a mean and to avoid extremes. In short, he is not telling his audience how they ought to behave; he is merely explaining to them the general character of all good behavior. ‘Moderation’ is not one virtue among others, it is the ‘nature’ of all virtue; it is what makes good behavior good. (5) But there remains a last question to be answered; namely, by what test shall a man know that he has a virtuous disposition? How shall we know when we have properly acquired the habit of behavior signified in the expression ‘desire governed by reason’?
And to this Aristotle answers: You may be sure that you have properly acquired this habit when aiming at the mean is easy for you, when it is a pleasure and not a pain, when you feel it as a release and not a frustration. The human eudaimonia is to choose always a mean in conduct and to take pleasure in making this choice.
4 Now, you will recollect that we embarked upon this exploration of Aristotle’s ideas about good human conduct because it is by means of these ideas that he proposes to explain: (1) the necessity to human beings of polis-life; and (2) the appropriateness to human beings of a polis with a certain sort of constitution. Let us return to this theme. (1) Now, it is not Aristotle’s view that polis-life, as such, supplies all that is needed by human beings in order for them to be what their ‘nature’ requires them to be. He believes that ‘household’ and family life are essential to human ‘nature’, and he is critical of Plato for not seeming to recognize this. But he believes, also, that polis-life supplies something that ‘household’-life does not supply and something equally necessary to human ‘nature’. And, briefly, what Aristotle understands the polis to supply is a life in which conduct is determined by choice, a life in which ‘desire’ may be controlled by ‘reason’—in short, a life which we have seen is preeminently necessary to what is characteristically human in human ‘nature’. Without it a humanly ‘good’ life is impossible. Now, what is Aristotle thinking of when he tells us that polislife, unlike ‘household’ life, is conduct determined by choice? He is, I think, pointing to the fact that family life is not something that you make for yourself. You are born into a family, and the relationships of a family—brother and sister, father and mother, and even owner and slave—are not ‘chosen’ relationships; they are the sort of relationships which men share with animals. A polis, on the other hand, is something entered into by an act of choice; those who join to make a polis have made a decision to do what they are doing. The relationship between citizens is described by Aristotle as a relationship of ‘equals’ and of
‘friends’—a relationship of choice, not blood or birth. Moreover, the common activity of men in polis-life is one making free choices about what to do. It is public affairs made human. In short, polis-life is artifice and therefore it reflects this uniquely human aptitude for artifice, in a way in which family life does not. Thus, Aristotle can say: ‘there is an immanent impulse in all men towards polis-life, but the man who first constructed a polis is the greatest of benefactors.’ These, then, are the arguments by which Aristotle designs to show that polis-life is necessary to human beings. And to show the necessity of something is to have explained it fully. In this explanation polis-life appears no longer as a merely contingent happening in human history, nor as a merely possible emergence, but as a necessary feature of a human life which can be a ‘good’ life. Of course all of this leaves much that is unexplained; Aristotle cannot ‘explain’ why human beings are what they are. The ‘rationality’ of man remains a brute fact, the unexplained principle by means of which polis-life is accounted for. But this is the common feature of all explanations of this sort—they all go back to something unexplained and perhaps inexplicable. (2) But the argument does not stop there. Aristotle not only thinks polis-life, this ‘second’ life which men make for themselves in order to satisfy an immanent impulse in their ‘nature’, is necessary; he thinks also that only a polis with a certain sort of constitution will satisfy this immanent impulse. What sort? Or, to put the question in another way, politike, the activity which creates and sustains polis-life, is characteristically and exclusively human activity. Consequently, ‘good’ political activity (and its product, a ‘good’ polis) will display the characteristics of ‘good’ human conduct in general. What are those characteristics? Having read Aristotle’s Ethics we know the answer to this question already: the principle of all ‘good’ human conduct is aiming at a mean and avoiding excess. And this will also be
the principle of ‘good’ political conduct, and its product a good constitution for a polis. Or, to look at the matter from the other side, the product of ‘good’ political activity (namely, the structure and constitution of a polis) will be good (that is, appropriate to human ‘nature’) if it reflects the principle of moderation and the avoidance of excess. This is the principle; but what of the detail? (a) First, this constitution will be a ‘mixed’ constitution—a constitution from which the propensity to run to extremes has been excluded. The rulers will be neither exclusively the rich, nor exclusively the poor; neither exclusively the noble, nor exclusively the ignoble; they will be drawn from a ‘middle’ class, neither rich enough to be indifferent to the claims of the poor, nor poor enough to be indifferent to the claims of property. This constitution will be a mixture of a sort of aristocracy and a sort of democracy. And this moderate ‘constitution’ will have also the virtue which goes with moderation, namely, stability; of all constitutions it will be the one least liable to sudden disintegration or revolutionary upheaval. It is called by Aristotle polity. (b) Secondly, the principle of the mean will determine the citizen population of this polis and the extent of its territory: both will be ‘middle-sized’. In population, it will be large enough to provide the variety of skills necessary to meet its own needs and the diversity of activities necessary to provide a stimulating life, but not so large as to prejudice its unity or to make it impossible for it to be addressed by a single speaker: politics is talk. In territory it will be large enough to be self-sufficient, but not so large as to be indefensible against external enemies. Like a ship—if it is too small it will be easily swamped, if it is too large it will be unmanageable. (c) The ‘good’ human life, we have seen, is a life lived according to a rule—the rule of aiming at a mean in human conduct.
The polis appropriate to such a ‘good’ human life will, therefore, be one ruled by a law and not by the arbitrary command of a despot—whether that despot be a single tyrant or a tyrannous assembly. The rule of law, indeed, is itself the rule of moderation and ‘reason’; the law demands from its subjects neither the excess of heroic behavior nor the defect of ‘beatnik’ indifference and inconsequence, but a steady, moderate, undramatic consideration for others. (d) The ‘good’ human life is a life in which ‘reason’ directs ‘desire’ to choose the avoidance of excess. In the polis this is recognized as ‘justice’. ‘Justice’ is a mean between extremes; it is giving each man neither more nor less than his due. (e) And further, the ‘equality’ characteristic of this polis will be neither an absolute equality which recognizes no differences, nor the minimum equality of equality before the law, but an equality of breeding, education, and judgment in which citizens recognize their affiliation with one another and share a common political education which teaches them those habits of moderation which are appropriate to human conduct. Aristotle, then, has shown us (1) that polis-life is not only a fact and a possibility but a necessity for human beings; and in doing so he has given us this ‘philosophical’ explanation of politike. Politike, he tells us, is the preeminently human activity; it employs precisely those powers and aptitudes which are exclusively and characteristically human, and without a polis these powers and aptitudes would be unemployed and human ‘nature’ would be frustrated in its striving after the excellence that belongs to it. In short, polis-life is the necessary condition for the attainment of human ‘nature’. And (2) he has shown us what sort of constitution provides most appropriately for human excellence; namely, a constitution which exhibits, at large and in every detail, the characteristic of ‘moderation’.
5 But before we leave Aristotle, there is something else important to notice. If we understand him to have succeeded, within his own world of ideas, in showing the necessity of polis-life to human ‘nature’, and thus to have found a place for politike on the map of human activity, we are not to understand that Aristotle believed political activity to supply all that human beings need to realize their ‘natures’. Simply to bring the common affairs of a polis under the control of reasoned choice is not itself the sum of human excellence. Below, and inferior to, political activity, is family life, the life of the ‘household’, which supplies human beings with something (not supplied by the polis) which they also need: the conditions of racial survival. But, also, there is another mode of activity in which human beings employ an aptitude which Aristotle understands to be the supreme aptitude of their ‘nature’, an aptitude even more fundamental than that of a life governed by rational choice of what to do and what not to do. In polis-life human beings are making rational choices about how they shall behave towards one another; they are doing what only human beings can do and they are doing what human beings must do if they are to fulfill their human ‘natures’. And in doing this they are employing what Aristotle calls their ‘practical reason’, the ‘reason’ which may control desire and action and direct it to the achievement of human excellence. But human beings have another aptitude which he calls ‘theoretical reason’—the ability not merely to choose the courses of action in which their human ‘nature’ is realized, but the ability to understand and to explain what they are doing. And it is in this ‘theoretical’ or ‘contemplative’ activity that human beings are distinguished from animals even more securely and more
completely than in political activity. Human beings are not only praktikos, but also theoretikos. In this sort of activity human beings are employing the aptitude of human nature which not only puts them far above animals but which affiliates them to the gods. Here, then, is Aristotle’s final word on the place of political activity on the map of human activity. Politike, because it is an activity of rational choice, is a more characteristically ‘human’ activity than the activities men share with animals—the activities of getting a living, procreation, and carrying on the human race. Nevertheless it is not the highest activity of which human beings are capable. This highest activity—in which men reveal their godlike capacity—is an activity of contemplative understanding. Thus, in Aristotle’s map of human activity there is a place for getting a living and carrying on the human species; there is a place for politike (the activity of making and sustaining a polis), and there is a place for the activity of understanding and explaining. On this map these activities are arranged in a hierarchical order: all are necessary to the fulfillment of human ‘nature’, but the last is more exclusively and characteristically human than the other two. This Aristotelian map, with a few amendments scribbled on it by later thinkers, was the context of all European political thought for 2,000 years.
Editorial Note LSE 19/1. The first sheet is a photocopy of autograph sheets numbered ‘1’, ‘1a’ in Oakeshott’s hand, and replaces the first one-and-a-half sheets of the fourteen-page lecture, a photocopy of a typescript with autograph corrections. This version is more legible than the copy at LSE 1/1/21, file 21/1/21, file 2, of which fos. 90–1 are photocopies of autograph sheets and fos. 92–110 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections.
Plato (1) 1 Aristotle’s attempts to understand polis-life led him in a variety of directions. The Politics is a supremely miscellaneous work. Sometimes he takes the path of history, and illuminates polislife by explaining the circumstances in which it emerged. On other occasions he is more like a scientist, concerned to understand the features of polis-life as examples of the operation of general laws. And beyond this, he is a philosopher, seeking to identify the place of polis-life in his map of human activity, and considering the polis in relation to ‘human nature’. And each of these explanatory enterprises is apt to flow over into some practical reflections about the best sort of constitution for a polis, or about the best way to avoid, or to repair, political disasters, like revolution or the dissolution of a polis. Aristotle’s Politics is one of the masterpieces of political reflection that has come to us from the ancient Greeks. And this morning I want to begin to consider another of these masterpieces, namely the work we know as Plato’s Republic. Plato wrote other works on political themes, but I shall confine what I have to say to the Republic. It is a book which you should all read, and what I have to say is designed to make it more intelligible to you when you do read it. But, first, I must say something about Plato himself, and how he came to write the Republic. Plato was born towards the end of the fifth century B.C., roughly two generations before Aristotle; and unlike Aristotle he was a native-born Athenian and a member of one of the leading families of the city. During his early years, Athens suffered disastrous defeats in the war with Sparta and was the scene of several violent revolutions.
It was, moreover, a time of intellectual ferment when ancient beliefs were being questioned by some and scorned and ridiculed by many; it was the golden age of the ‘Sophists’. The ‘Sophists’ were not a school of thinkers; they had no common doctrine. They were independent public lecturers who entertained the always curious and intellectually excitable Athenians with their often disruptive and critical discussions. Among these public talkers was one, named Socrates, who became more famous than all the rest, partly on account of what distinguished him from the others. The difference between him and the other public disputers of his day was, first, that he did not talk for pay, listening to him was a free entertainment; and secondly, he always asserted that he didn’t know anything but was trying to find out, whereas the typical ‘sophist’ posed as a know-all who could tell his listeners what the truth was. Notable among the admirers of Socrates was Plato. But in 399 B.C. Socrates was accused of not believing in the gods and of demoralizing the young by his teaching; after a trial he was condemned to death and executed by being given a cup of poison to drink. In his early days, Plato may have had political ambitions, but in disgust at the execution of Socrates, whom he regarded as the one intellectually honest man in Athens, his thoughts turned in other directions. For Plato, the condemnation of Socrates was the condemnation of Athens. He withdrew to Megara and later to Sicily, and during an absence of nearly twenty years from Athens he composed a number of philosophical conversation-pieces in which Socrates is the central character and speaker. When he was about forty years old he returned to Athens and opened a school, called the Academy, which offered an education in the explanatory sciences rather than the political arts.
The book we know as the Republic was written in the early years after his return to Athens. And like other of Plato’s works it is a conversation in which Socrates is made the chief speaker. It is a work quite unlike Aristotle’s Politics. It is a sustained philosophical argument devoted to a single theme, namely, justice. Indeed its original title was, simply, Concerning Justice. The question being asked throughout is, What is justice? And, at one point in the argument Plato has a good deal to say about the structure and the organization of a polis. It is no puzzle why Plato should have thought that the questions What is justice? and What is a polis? overlap one another: justice and the polis, as we have seen, had always gone together in Athenian thought. But, in order to understand Plato’s answer to this question, What is justice? one must first understand what sort of a question Plato thought this question to be, and how he thought it must be answered. This, no doubt, is annoying. But it is one of the things we have to tolerate from philosophers, who will never allow any question to be a straight question with a straight answer. And I want this morning to say something about Plato’s method of inquiry; and in my next lecture to say something about the conclusions about the nature of justice it led him to.
2 And the reason why we must consider Plato’s method of inquiry first is because we shall be discovering what Plato thinks we must attend to if we are to understand or explain anything whatever that falls within our experience, or, indeed, if we wish to engage in any sort of practical activity. The first thing we have to consider is, then, what the books call ‘Plato’s doctrine of ideas’.
3 We are accustomed to use this word ‘idea’ in a loose and general sense. We say, ‘What’s the idea?’ or ‘What’s the big idea?’ Or we say, ‘the idea of the play is …’; and, ‘the idea of democratic government is …’; and, ‘this is Darwin’s idea of evolution’; or, ‘this is Karl Marx’s idea of social change’. And at least we know roughly what we mean. For us, the word ‘idea’ stands for ‘something’ in somebody’s head; and it stands for a general ‘something’, which is often obscured by a lot of irrelevant detail. Now, when Plato uses this word ‘idea’ his meaning is not entirely remote from ours, but it is much more precise and it has entailments which our use of the word usually does not have. And the best way of getting at what he means by the word is, I think, by considering, not how we use it, but some other ways of speaking we have, and some other words we use, which correspond more closely to Plato’s way of thinking when he uses the word ‘idea’. In our attempts to make the world intelligible to ourselves we are accustomed to make various distinctions, and one of the commonest and most important of these distinctions is that between the essence of a thing and its accidental, circumstantial, contingent details or accompaniments. By the ‘essence’ of a thing we mean that without which the thing would not be what it is. We say: ‘this is essential’, meaning that it can’t be dispensed with, and that, normally, there is something else in the situation, called ‘inessential’, which can be dispensed with without loss. The circumstantial characteristics of something are characteristics which may or may not be present and which, if they are present, are nevertheless recognized as having no inherent or necessary connection with it.
Let us, like Plato himself, take an example from geometry. If we were to use the expression, ‘the essence of a triangle’, our train of thought runs something like this. We are aware that there are many different sorts and sizes of triangle, but we think we can detect something which is common to all triangles, which belongs to nothing but triangles and in virtue of which a figure is properly called a triangle. And we have an abstract word for this: we call it ‘triangularity’. The essence of a triangle is ‘a three sided plane figure’. We know that the lengths of its sides do not matter; we know that some triangles have sides of equal length but that this does not belong to the essence of a triangle; we know that some triangles are drawn in pencil, others in ink, others in yellow chalk; we know that they may be drawn on paper or in sand—but none of this has anything whatever to do with triangularity. Now, the Greeks were pioneers in making distinctions of this sort; they invented many of the logical tools we use in making the world intelligible to ourselves. And you will see at once, from what we have already observed about their ways of thinking, that their word phusis—‘nature’—had a meaning which corresponds pretty closely to our meaning when we use the word ‘essence’. The ‘nature’ of a thing was that in virtue of which the thing is what it is and not another thing: the ‘principle’ of its character. When Aristotle said that a polis is a self-sufficient association of ‘households’ for the purpose of a good human life he imagined himself to be telling us what the ‘nature’, or as we might say, the ‘essence’ of a polis is. He is saying something which he believes to be true of all ‘cities’ and of nothing but ‘cities’. Or again, it is by means of observing a distinction of this sort—a distinction between what is ‘essential’ and what is ‘inessential’— that we come upon the conception we denote by the word ‘change’. The things we observe in the world often alter—they alter their place, their shape, their chemical composition, their appearance; they grow, they decay.
But when we use the word ‘change’ we are referring to a process in which there is, at once, an alteration and a remaining the same. If there were no alteration there would be no change; if there were no remaining the same there would be no ‘change’, but the replacement of one thing by another quite different thing. And this process is intelligible to us when we understand that what is altered is the ‘inessential’ and what remains the same is the ‘essential’. When one asks for ‘change’ for half-a-crown and is given a shilling, a sixpence, two threepenny bits and six pennies, it is a genuine ‘change’ because although there are now ten coins instead of one, the ‘value’ is unchanged: the ‘essence’ of a half-crown is not its weight, color, size, etc., but, from this point of view, its ‘value’. And here again, what the Greek would say is that the ‘nature’ of a half-crown is to be ‘worth’ so much. The ‘nature’ of a thing is its permanent and unchanging character, that which if it were different it would be another thing, that which ‘causes’ the thing to be what it is. Now, what Greek thinkers (in a general way) were accustomed to regard as the ‘nature’ of a thing, and what we often call the ‘essence’ of a thing, Plato spoke of as the ‘idea’ of a thing. Triangularity—the essential character of all triangles—is the ‘idea’ triangle. Thus, for Plato, every actual thing in the world has an ‘idea’ or an unchanging and essential character, and has also accidental, contingent, inessential, and changing characteristics. There is an ‘idea’ man, table, polis, justice, courage; and there are men, tables, cities, just judgments, courageous actions, each of which is composed of an ‘idea’ or essence and some accidental, changeable characteristics. Now, if we understand Plato to be using the word ‘idea’ in very much the same way as we are accustomed to use the word ‘essence’ (only perhaps a little more precisely), we can see at once that it entails a distinction between ‘ideas’ and the actual, particular, things which fall within our experience.
The characteristics of these actual ‘things’ (particular men, actions, cities, triangles, chairs, and tables) is (1) that we are able to see, touch, hear, and otherwise observe them. They belong to the world of space and time; (2) that each of them is liable to change; they begin and cohere, they grow and decay, they are here and not there, they are now and not then. On the other hand the characteristic of ‘ideas’ (like humanity, courage, justice, triangularity) are: (1) that we cannot see, touch or hear them. They do not belong to the world of space and time; (2) that they are not liable to change. You could listen to a just judgment being delivered; but you could not hear ‘justice’ itself. You might do a courageous action, but you could not do ‘courage’ ; you could have a generous feeling, but you could not feel generosity. You might draw a triangle, but you could not draw ‘triangularity’. Triangularity is not a perfect example of a triangle, because it is not an example of a triangle at all. In short, ‘ideas’ or ‘essences’ are not ‘other things’, like but in some respects different from the things we can see and touch; they are nothing like these ‘things’ at all. They are timeless, changeless, and are devoid of accidental characteristics. Now, it is specially important to recognize this difference between ‘ideas’ or ‘essences’ and particular things when the adjective ‘ideal’ is used in place of the noun ‘idea’. We are accustomed to use this word ‘ideal’ to stand for a particular example of a thing which we think especially desirable or, as we say, a ‘perfect’ example. We might think that it would be difficult to establish an ‘ideal state’ in the world, but we would not think it inherently impossible because we use ‘ideal’ as an adjective to qualify a particular thing. But in Plato’s usage the adjective ‘ideal’ cannot be attached to a particular thing because ‘ideal’ means ‘essential’, and an ‘essence’ can never be a particular thing.
Thus, if you think of Plato’s enterprise in the Republic as telling us something about the ‘idea’ polis and at the same time understand what he is doing as giving us a sketch of a particular, very desirable, and in that sense ‘ideal’ polis, you are misunderstanding him altogether. For him, the ‘ideal’ polis could not exist in the world, could not possibly be established in Attica or anywhere else, not because it would be too difficult, but because it would involve a logical contradiction. The ‘ideal’ polis for him is simply the ‘idea’ polis, or the ‘essential’ character of all cities and therefore not itself the concrete character of any particular city.
4 So much, then, for the words ‘idea’ and ‘ideal’ in Plato’s vocabulary, and for the distinction between ‘ideas’ and particular things. But what is the relation between ‘ideas’ and particular things? There must be a relation of some sort between a particular triangle and triangularity, between a particular man and the ‘idea’ humanity, between a particular courageous action and the ‘idea’ courage. What is it? Now, as Plato understood it, the particular things of the world, the things we can touch and see and hear and taste, are, each of them, copies of their ‘ideas’. That is to say ‘ideas’ are models or archetypes, and particular things are copies of these models. The relationship, then, between actual triangles and ‘triangularity’, or between courageous actions and ‘courage’, is that of copy to model. And following out this analogy of model and copy, Plato believed that the models come first and the particular things of the world, the copies made from these models, come after. It is difficult to find an exact analogy to illustrate this view of things, but what Plato is thinking of is a relationship something like that of the full orchestral score of a piece of music and a particular performance of that piece of music: the performance might be said to be one particular copy of the score. Or, it is something like the relationship between an engineer’s drawing and a particular motor-car. The drawing comes first; the drawing (that is, the ‘idea’) is not itself a car, you couldn’t drive it on the road; and a particular car is a copy of this drawing, made in different materials—steel instead of paper and ink. This parallel of course is not exact; it breaks down because the drawing (although it is not itself a motor-car) is itself a particular thing, and the score (although it is not a performance) is itself a particular thing, but an ‘idea’ is not a particular thing; it is the ‘essence’ of a particular thing. And the relation between a just
action and the ‘idea’ justice is the relation between a copy and a model copied. As Plato understood it there were three sorts of things in the world, and all of them are to be recognized as copies or models or archetypes. There are (1) natural things; (2) things made by men which are copies of natural things; (3) things made by men which are not copies of natural things. (1) Natural things: horses, trees, men, mountains, etc. These Plato imagined to have been made by a craftsman god. And the manner in which they had been made was by this divine craftsman making copies of ideal models. Ben Nevis and Mount Kenya are both copies of the ‘idea’ mountain. You and Napoleon are both copies of the ‘idea’ man. The divine craftsman lives in ‘heaven’, and he is supplied with models or archetypes for each kind of thing he is going to make, and a mass of formless material out of which he makes his copies from these models. (2) Things made by men as copies of natural things: pictures of horses in paint, drawings of mountains, statues in stone of human beings. Like a tailor who has a roll of cloth out of which he makes a pair of trousers; and the ideal model which he copies, since it is not itself a pair of trousers, must be supposed to be something in his head: the idea ‘trousers’. Here the process is similar, but the craftsman is human instead of being divine and what is copied are not ‘ideas’ but particular things. These things, pictures, statues, etc., made by men as copies of particular things in the natural world are, you will see at once, two removes from the original ‘idea’ or model. A sculptured man is a copy of a copy of the ‘idea’ man. And on this account Plato had a low opinion of human works of art, which he regarded as mere copies of copies.
(3) Things made by men which are not copies of things in the natural world: tables, chairs, houses, cities, courageous actions, etc. How do these come to be made or done? They must be copies of models because that is the only activity Plato will recognize; and since there are no models of them in the natural world, they must be copies of original models. This sort of human activity is, then, like the divine activity in which the things of the natural world were made. A table is a copy made by a carpenter of the ‘idea’ table; a courageous action is a copy made by a man who performs it of the ‘idea’ courage. Everything in the world, natural or artificial, is a copy, direct or indirect, of its ‘idea’ or ideal model. But what about this activity of copying? It is an activity in which imperfection or misrepresentation is unavoidable. Copies may be more or less exact. And it is very difficult to make an exact copy. Even the craftsman god does not always succeed and the result is a three-legged chicken or an idiot boy: idiocy is eccentric to the idea ‘boy’. The copy must always misrepresent the model because it is made in different material from that of the model. The copy is made in impermanent, changing, and unstable material; the ‘idea’ or model is permanent and unchanging. Every performance, in some degree, misrepresents the full orchestral score, simply because it is a performance and not itself the score. A copy made in this unstable, changeable material is itself unstable, and in the course of time it must become a less exact copy.A man gets senile, the stone ofa statue decays,a pair of shoes wears out. The conclusion of all this is that the world of things we live in, this world of copies of ideal models, is pretty remote from the ideal models themselves. The copies, many of them, were never very exact; they are inevitable misrepresentations; and time can only make them less exact.
5 Now, this vision of the world as composed of changing, insubstantial, accidental things, each of which is to be understood as a copy, direct or remote, of an eternal unchanging essence or ‘idea,’ leads Plato to two different and important conclusions. (1) The first conclusion is about the nature of genuine knowledge. These impermanent, unstable things of the world which appears before us when we open our eyes, these particular things, in which essence and accident are mixed, accident obscuring essence, are incapable of being ‘known’ in any important sense of the word ‘know’. The most we can have about them is ‘opinions’ (doxa). They are mere descriptive ‘images’ (eidolon), insubstantial shadows (skia); and the connection we make with them through our senses is a connection which must fall far short of ‘knowing’ or ‘understanding’. If, then, we want to understand the world in which we live we must recognize that the things which compose it are ‘copies’. And we can only recognize this by knowing the ‘ideas’ or archetypes of which they are copies. Genuine knowledge is knowledge of the permanent ‘ideas’ of things. To know anything is to know its essential character. This is Plato’s first conclusion. To understand and to explain are intellectual activities in which the permanent essences or ‘ideas’ of things are separated from the accidental and temporary characteristics of things. Those who aspire to understand and to explain the world must ‘turn away’ (periagoge) from the particularity of things and attend only to permanent essences or ‘ideas’. And this, as Plato understands it, is precisely the philosophic enterprise. Where true knowledge is sought, the question to be asked is: ‘What is the “idea” or essence?’ Consequently, if you want
to understand ‘just conduct’, or polis-life, what you must enquire is, What is the idea justice? What is the idea polis? (2) But, from his vision of the world as composed of unstable things in which essence and accident are mixed, accident obscuring essence, Plato draws a second conclusion. This time it is not a doctrine about human understanding and explanation, but a doctrine about human fabrication and action. When Plato said that the particular things of the world are related to their ‘ideas’ or ‘essences’ as copies are related to ‘ideal’ models he understood this to indicate: (1) that particular things could be understood and explained only in terms of their ‘essences’ or ‘ideas’: you cannot understand a copy unless you know its archetype; (2) but also, that particular things can appear, or come into being, only in an activity of copying their ‘ideas’ or ‘essences’: you cannot make anything unless you know the model you are copying. The craftsman god makes the things of the natural world by copying models which he has before him. And human beings make things they are capable of making by copying models. We may recognize in this the preeminent place which the activity of fabrication occupied in Plato’s thought. The natural and the human world is the product of fabrication, making by copying. Now, the entailment of this is that whether you are a god or a man, in order to make anything you must know the ‘idea’ you are to copy. A god could not make a man unless he had the ‘idea’ man before him from which to copy; and a man could not build a ship, or make a table, or write a play or a poem, unless he knew the ‘idea’ ship, table, play, poem. There is, then, no place in Plato’s world for an activity of ‘free creation’: all is copying, and you cannot copy without a known model. Moreover, as Plato understood it, this applied not only to ‘fabrication’ in the strict sense, to making things, particularly
things, like cities or constitutions, which have no model in the natural world; it applied, also, to the performance of actions. Thus, as he understood it, a ‘just’ or a ‘courageous’ action was a copy of the ‘idea’ justice and the ‘idea’ courage. And no man could make a just judgment or perform a just action or do a courageous deed unless he knew the ‘idea’ justice and the ‘idea’ courage. But we have seen that Plato identified a concern to understand things, a concern with the ‘ideas’ of things, with philosophy. If, however, it is true that a philosopher is a man who, because he is concerned to understand and explain things, must know the ‘ideas’ of things, it must now be equally true that one requires to be a philosopher in order to make anything or to perform any action. In short, a knowledge of the ‘ideas’ of things is the necessary qualification for both understanding and doing. One must be a ‘philosopher’, both if one wants to understand the world, and if one wants to make or do anything in the world—other, of course, than merely enjoying something that exists in the natural world. Thus, in Plato’s view of things, knowing and explaining are joined with making and doing. And in his philosophy a theory of knowing and explaining is joined with a theory of making and doing. What joins them is this belief that both knowing and doing are impossible without reference to the ‘idea’ of what is to be known and the ‘idea’ of what is to be done. Here, then, is the heart of the doctrine which Plato is to apply to the politics and government of a polis. Polis-life is the pursuit of human excellence or ‘justice’. It is impossible to understand what this really means unless we acquire a knowledge of the ‘idea’ justice; and it is equally impossible to participate in this pursuit of justice, to engage in political activity, unless we know the ‘idea’ justice. The Republic is designed to reveal this to us. There is, perhaps, something puzzling about this assimilation of action to understanding and explaining; something a little odd
and unfamiliar about this notion that action is making a copy of the ‘idea’ of the action; something a little strange about the notion that a man who cannot answer the question: What is courage? is incapable of doing a courageous action, because he doesn’t know the model he is to copy. These are notions which Aristotle, in a large measure, rejected. Nevertheless, they are at the heart of Platonism, and they have never been far below the surface of Western European thought.
6 We shall have to consider later in detail the conclusions Plato drew from this view of the world and of human activity, but I would like now to draw together all I have been saying by introducing you to Plato’s own account of it in what is, perhaps, the most famous passage in the Republic: what is known as the parable of the cave. The argument of the Republic is graced, at frequent intervals, by brilliant poetic allegories. At the beginning of Book VII Plato introduces one of these allegories. You should read it with care: every word counts. In it he likens the common world in which we live to an underground cavern, like a long passage with one end open to the light. The inhabitants of this cave (that is, human beings) have lived there all their lives, at the far end, remote from the entrance. Moreover, their legs and necks are shackled in such a way that their backs are turned to the distant entrance of the cave and they are forced, as if in blinkers, to gaze steadily at the end wall. They can talk to one another but they cannot see each other; they can see only what may appear on the end wall of the cave. Some way down this passage-like cavern, towards the entrance, there is a parapet, or half-wall, and behind the parapet is a fire. From time to time, people crouching behind the parapet hold up artificial objects, made of wood, etc., which include figures of men and animals. These objects, on account of the fire behind them, cast flickering shadows on the end wall of the cave at which the prisoners are forced to look. They are like an audience in a cinema. And because the flickering shadows of these artificial objects are all that the prisoners in the cave can see, or have ever seen, they are taken for real things. The prisoners talk to one another about these shadows and even run a sweepstake on which shadow will appear next, because in the course of years they have become
familiar with the pantomime, and have names for the different shadowy appearances. But, says Plato, suppose one of these prisoners were, somehow, to release himself from his shackles and were to stand up and to turn towards the distant entrance of the cave. And suppose, further, that he were to walk towards the entrance, passing the pantomime at the parapet and seeing the artificial objects which had cast the shadows, and so, out into the sunlight world outside—what would he feel and think? At first he would be dazzled and bewildered. But he would gradually become accustomed to the new world of light and in the end would come to contemplate the sun, recognizing it as the cause of all light and therefore as the final cause of the shadows in the cave. In short, he would become himself enlightened; he would understand the shadows in the cave and would be able to explain them to himself as various images emanating from a single source. Now, says Plato, imagine, further, that this man returned to his former seat in the cave. It would take him some time to get used to the darkness. But, in talking with his fellows, he would be able to enlighten them and to explain their world of shadows to them, telling them what these shadows really were—that they were only copies, and that they were living in a world of illusion. At first, says Plato, the prisoners in the cave would not believe what they were told. Then, they would be angry at being told that they lived in a world of mere shadows, and, says Plato, if they could lay hands on him they would want to kill him. A reminiscence, no doubt, of what had happened to Socrates. That is the story, or the main part of it. Plato wishes us to understand that, in so far as we live in the world of particular things we are prisoners of the illusion that they are real things. We live in a world of unstable, flickering, experiences which we mistake for the real world.
The escaped prisoner, on the other hand, is a man who has acquired a knowledge of the ‘ideal’ cause of these images, and this enables him to understand them: they are mere copies of ideal models. And it enables him to enlighten the prisoners in the cave, thought they can’t be expected to welcome this enlightenment. He is the philosopher. In virtue of his inquiry into the ideas of things he can understand and explain. But Plato goes further. Of course, among these particulars there will be, not only the things we can touch and see, there will be also the particular actions performed by shadowy human beings and denoted by adjectives such as just, courageous, good, etc. And these, of course, can only be understood if we know the ‘ideas’ or models of which they are copies. But these actions not only cannot be understood unless we have a knowledge of the ideas of which they are copies, they cannot be performed unless we have this knowledge. A courageous action is a copy of the idea courage, and we must know the model we are copying in order to make this copy. Thus, among the prisoners in the cave, the returned ‘philosopher’ is, not only the only man who can understand, for example, what a just action really is, he is the only man who can do a just action. He alone can be ‘just’, because he alone knows what ‘justice’ itself is. And if, as Plato supposes, the ability to act justly is the chief quality we require in a ruler, the philosopher alone will have the ability which gives him the authority to rule. We will consider next week where this remarkable doctrine led him.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 2, fos. 113–30. Fos. 114–15, 127–8 are photocopies of autograph sheets; fos. 113, 116–26, 129–30 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections. Fo. 129 has been placed out of sequence in the MS but should follow fo. 113.
Plato (2) 1 Plato’s Republic is a long and elaborate conversation designed to answer the question: What is justice? Last week we were concerned with what may be called the intellectual apparatus which Plato uses in trying to answer this question: what is called in the books ‘Plato’s doctrine of ideas’. From this point of view, the four main principles of Platonism are: 1. That the world to which we open our eyes contains natural things (made by God), and things made or done by human beings—artefacts and actions. And each of these things and actions is an imperfect copy or representation of an ‘idea’ or ‘ideal model’. 2. Understanding any of these things made or actions performed is a matter of knowing the ‘idea’ or ‘ideal model’ of which it is a copy. 3. Further, for a human being to make an artifact, or to perform an action, is for him to make a copy of the ‘ideal model’ to which it corresponds, and therefore making and doing entails a knowledge of the ‘ideal model’. 4. Since to know the ‘ideas’ of things and of actions is the peculiar enterprise of ‘philosophy’, all understanding, making or doing are, in this respect, ‘philosophic’ activities. You cannot understand or make a ship without knowing the ‘ideal model’ of which the ship is a copy—that is, without being a philosopher. You cannot understand or do a just action without knowing the ‘idea’ justice of which all just actions are copies—that is, without being a philosopher.
The only man who need not be a philosopher is a sculptor or a painter, because his models are not ‘ideal’ but merely things in the natural world. This doctrine is composed of beliefs about the appearances and the realities of the world in which we live, and about the logic of any inquiry designed to reveal the true nature of experiences like just conduct. And I spent some time on it because I think the significance of the Republic will escape us unless we understand these beliefs which underlie its argument. This morning I want to say something about the course and substance of the argument in the Republic, and the conclusions Plato reaches in this inquiry into the idea of justice: the ‘idea’ of justice being the ‘ideal model’ of which anything which is properly qualified by the adjective ‘just’ is a copy.
2 Now, for Plato, this is preeminently an intellectual inquiry. We may observe just actions, we may hear a man deliver a just judgment, but we cannot either see or hear ‘justice’ itself. It is true that Plato has an exceedingly graphic way of writing, and he often represents this intellectual comprehension of an ‘idea’ as a ‘vision’; but we should not be misled into thinking that the ‘idea’ of anything can be ‘seen’. The ‘idea’ justice is the unseen principle in virtue of which an action or disposition may properly be called ‘just’. And it can be understood and used to explain human actions and dispositions precisely because it is not a particular example of justice. It is the unchanging ‘law’ the operation of which ‘just’ actions are examples or copies. Now, this inquiry into the ‘idea’ justice, like all other intellectual inquiries, must be taken in two stages. (1) We must, first, make up our minds where to look for what we want to discover: the analogy of a ‘hunt’ or the game of ‘hide and seek’ is a favourite of Plato’s when describing an intellectual inquiry. We live, like the prisoners in the cavern, in a world of shadowy images; hidden in each of these images is an ‘idea’; consequently, we have first to identify the ‘images’ which, however inaccurately, are copies of the particular ‘idea’ we are seeking to understand. (2) Secondly, having made up our minds about the direction in which it is most profitable to look, we must bring to bear our reflective intelligence in order to elicit in these particular shadowy images the ‘idea’ of which they are copies. Book I of the Republic is mostly taken up with the first stage of this inquiry. ‘Images’ of justice are being looked for and identified.
Different participants in the conversation make different suggestions about the sort of things or the sort of conduct which it is proper to qualify by the adjectives ‘just’ or ‘unjust’. The preliminary question Plato wants to answer is: If we are looking for an ‘image’ of justice, where shall we look? What sort of ‘images’ or things in the world does the ‘idea’ justice inhabit? The unmistakable answer to this question seems to be: ‘Justice inhabits human conduct: we must look for it in human conduct’. It is true, of course, that in its earlier use in Greek writing the word ‘just’ stood for something much less specific than this. It stood for the reciprocal relationships between the parts of any complex whole in virtue of which it ‘worked’ as a whole. But by Plato’s time this was a remote metaphor: the words ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ had come to specify a quality in human conduct and not, for example, in the behavior of elephants or electrons. This preliminary conclusion, then, is stated by Plato in the proposition: ‘Justice is a quality of the human soul’. And what he means is that the only place to look for ‘images’ or copies of the idea ‘justice’ is in human dispositions, human conduct, and the products of human activity. But, besides reaching the conclusion that only human conduct and the products of human activity can properly be called either ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, Socrates, in this conversation, insists that justice and injustice are qualities, not of some kinds of human activity, but of all kinds. A man, he says, may properly be called ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ in everything that he does. By the end of Book I of the Republic, then, one important point has been settled; namely, how the words ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ are going to be used in the rest of the conversation. And we may notice that a much more comprehensive meaning is given to these words than we usually give. The conversationists agree that to say that a man is ‘acting justly’ is to say that he is doing what is right and is behaving as he ought to behave. Justice and virtue or goodness are identified with one another. The ‘just’
man is a man as he ought to be; or to be ‘just’ belongs to the ‘idea’ man. Now, our normal use of the word ‘just’ is different from this use in two respects. (1) We think, perhaps, that to be ‘just’ is to exhibit a virtue; but we sometimes think that what the situation calls for is not this virtue but some other. We may say, for example: ‘The “right” thing here is not justice but mercy’. But Socrates and his companions are agreed that in their debate ‘justice’ is to stand for what is right in human conduct on all occasions. Thus, in their way of talking, if ‘mercy’ is the right thing, then it would be ‘unjust’ not to be merciful. In short, what is being discussed is ‘right’ human conduct. (2) We ordinarily think of ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ as words which apply to the relationship of one man to another. We think of being ‘just’ as a ‘social’ virtue; and it is only metaphorically that we speak of a man being ‘unjust’ to himself. But in the Republic justice is not preeminently a ‘social’ virtue; indeed, it is a ‘social’ virtue only derivatively. Justice and injustice are qualities of a human personality which do not need a relationship with others in order to bring them into play. In the Republic the conduct of a man alone on an island could be ‘just’ or ‘unjust’; and a man is ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ to other people only by virtue of being himself a ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ man. The words ‘just’ and ‘unjust,’ then, are to stand for qualities to be found in human conduct or the products of human activity. A man may be ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ in everything that he does, when he is alone or when he is with others; and to speak of an action as ‘just’ is to say that it is right. But the conversation cannot proceed until this view of things is refined and made a little more exact.
‘Even if it is true,’ says Socrates in his plausible way, ‘may we not suppose that justice and injustice will be exhibited more obviously in some kinds of activity and in some situations than in others?’ And so the question is: Shall we not be wise to look for ‘images’ of justice and injustice in some human activities rather than others, and if so in what activities? Is there an ‘image’ of justice to be found, for example, in a carpenter making a chair? or, in a farmer harvesting a field of wheat? or, in a general planning a battle? Certainly; but is there not some better or more obvious place to look for it? Now, if we were considering this question, it would not be surprising if somebody were to say that the best place to look for ‘images’ of justice and injustice was round the corner, in the Royal Courts of Justice. After all, ‘justice’ is the business of the place. At least, to our way of thinking, this would be a more sensible suggestion than, for example, the suggestion that we would do specially well to look for these qualities in the stock exchange or in Covent Garden market. We might look there if we were discussing ‘honesty’ and ‘dishonesty’, but not ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’. But in the Republic the conversationists are Greeks, they are Athenians, and consequently it does not surprise us that, before long (in the middle of Book II), somebody says: ‘Why, the supremely obvious place to look for an “image” of justice is in the activity of a statesman and in the structure and constitution of a polis’. And we are not surprised by this because we know that according to popular belief it was ‘justice’—dike—which made the polis. The polis was constituted in a judicial activity of dealing out ‘justice’ to the various tribes and families which came together to compose it. ‘Justice’, according to the legend of Greek politics, was the midwife of the polis. It was dike which transformed the themis of the tribe into the thesmos of the polis.
‘Justice’ and ‘injustice’ were recognized to be uniquely characteristic of a polis: the ‘household’ and the tribe are not the scene of just and unjust actions. No Greek, then, could fail to think first that the ‘image’ of ‘justice’ or ‘injustice’ was most profitably to be looked for in the structure of a polis. But the suggestion that the image of justice shall be looked for there gives a momentous change of direction to the whole argument of the Republic. A very large part of the rest of the work is concerned with the question: What is the polis? What is the ‘idea’ polis? because this seems to be an appropriate way of answering the question: What is justice? To be ‘just’ belongs to the ‘idea’ polis no less than it belongs to the idea ‘man’.
3 This change of direction in the inquiry is, at the time, defended dialectically by Socrates. He says: What we are looking for, this ‘idea’ justice, is a quality which can be reflected both in the conduct of an individual man and in the structure of a polis. We are interested in it wherever it appears, though we are chiefly interested in it as a quality of the human soul because it belongs to a polis only because a polis is the work of human beings. But, since a polis is larger than an individual man, we may expect the ‘image’ of justice (and of course injustice) to appear on a larger scale in the structure of a city, and consequently to be more easily discernible there than in the conduct of individual men. Let us, then, look first for the reflection of justice in the structure of a polis. But whatever conclusions we may reach about the ‘idea’ justice from seeing it reflected in the polis will hold good for justice in the individual soul, because ‘justice’ is one and the same quality wherever it is reflected.2 In short, the structure of a polis may be expected to provide a clearer, because a larger, ‘image’ of the ‘idea’ justice that is to be found in the conduct of individual men. Now, this is something very much more important than a way of pushing the conversation in the direction Socrates wants it to take. It indicates Plato’s conception of the relationship between the individual man, the citizen, and the polis—and it is both a remarkable and a highly characteristic conception. According to our commonplace way of thinking, a society is composed of individual men and women. But here Plato is not [2] A note in Oakeshott’s hand suggests he included a quotation from the Republic 368d-369a at this point.
thinking in those commonplace terms at all. For him, the polis is not composed of individual human beings; its structure represents the structure of an individual human soul. A polis and an individual soul are organizations of exactly the same character but of different dimensions; the one is merely larger than the other. And the government of a polis is an exact counterpart of the mastery a man may be said to have over himself. A man ‘governs’ himself, well or ill, or fails to govern himself, in exactly the same sense as a king governs, well or ill, or fails to govern, a kingdom. Consequently, for Plato, a ‘just’ polis will structurally represent or reproduce a ‘just’ man. Indeed, Plato takes the view that there is a correspondence between citizen and polis, so that the adjectives we apply to constitutions are applicable also to types of human character: thus there is a kingly, an aristocratic, an oligarchic, a tyrannous, and a democratic polis, and a kingly, aristocratic, oligarchic, democratic type of man. In short the polis and the individual man are replicas of one another; to understand the one is to understand the other. To understand what it is to be a just man is to understand what it is to be a just polis. Now, it is worthwhile dwelling for a moment on this rather strange notion, because it is the spring of Plato’s whole political philosophy. It has to be distinguished from two other beliefs, which do not go anything like so far. (1) Plato might have said that the constitution of a city is something which is made by men, and that it takes ‘just’ men to make a ‘just’ constitution. But he says more than this: he says that the ‘idea’ of a ‘just’ man is identical with the idea of a ‘just’ city. There is only one idea ‘justice’, and every possible example of ‘justice’ is an example of this one idea.
(2) Secondly, Plato is sometimes said to have believed that a society is, in some mystical way, more than the people who comprise it: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But, in fact, he is saying something quite different from this. He is saying that the relationship between a man and a city is that of microcosm to macrocosm. Now, the macrocosm is larger than the microcosm, and is therefore easier to perceive. But the qualities of the macrocosm are derived from the qualities of the microcosm: a ‘just’ constitution of a polis is a reflection of a ‘just’ constitution of a human soul. And, it may be noticed, Plato here is harking back to the original meaning of the Greek word ‘justice’: long before it became a ‘moral’ or a ‘political’ or a ‘legal’ word, it meant simply the condition of any complex whole when its parts all fulfil their own particular function. The question is, then,what do we know about the structure and components of the complex whole we call a human personality which will help us to identify a ‘just’ condition of it, and distinguish it from an ‘unjust’ condition of it?
4 Plato’s answer to this question runs something like this: (1) A human personality or soul is composed of three faculties or ‘powers’; namely, reason, courage (or spirit), and ‘want’: a deliberative faculty, an executive faculty, and an appetitive faculty. Every man in the world has these three powers or manners of being active. They are the universal components of human personality. But different men enjoy these three powers in different proportions. Consequently, different souls may be said to be composed of different mixtures of these three powers. Indeed, what distinguishes one man from another is, precisely, the proportions in which these three powers are mixed in his soul. Each of these powers is an ability to behave in a certain manner and an ability to perform certain sorts of actions. Reason is the ability to behave reasonably and with judgment. Courage is the ability to behave courageously. ‘Want’ is the ability to seek and to acquire. Therefore, none of these three powers can take the place of (or, as Plato says, ‘do the work of ’) either of the others. A man cannot in virtue of reason act courageously; and exhibiting courage or want in our conduct is different from exhibiting reason. But, although none of these powers can do the work of either of the others, although each is in this sense autonomous, they are not all of equal significance. Indeed, there is a hierarchy of importance among them. Reason, although it cannot take the place of either courage or ‘want’, is, nevertheless, superior to both courage and ‘want’. Courage comes second in this hierarchy of importance, and ‘want’ last. The main thing which determines this hierarchy is the relative self-sufficiently (or ability to exist on its own) of the three powers:
reason is absolutely self-sufficient; courage has some degree of self-sufficiency; ‘want’ has none at all—it is absolutely dependent. Thus, the ground for saying that one of these powers is superior to another is not its ability to do better (or even to do at all) the work of the other, but its ‘natural’ authority over that other. For example, an ability to have wants is, by itself, unusable. Before ‘want’ can operate there must be added to it, as a guide and director, the ability to choose between wants. And this ability to choose is one of the characteristics of the faculty called reason. Choosing is not the same thing as wanting and cannot take its place; but wanting without the ability to choose is sterile. (2) Now, to this analysis of the parts of the human soul and their relations with one another, Plato adds two other principles. (a) That these different faculties or powers exist in different mixtures or proportions in different men by nature. In respect of the compositions of their souls men are born different from one another. Some men are born with more reason than courage and want, others with more want, others again with a preponderance of courage. These differences are ‘natural’ in the sense that they are differences in the accuracy of the copy of the ‘idea’ man which each man represents. And, as we shall see, since, in Plato’s view, reason is preeminent in the ‘idea’ man, those who have a preponderance of courage or want in their souls are less accurate, or more degenerate, copies of the ideal model ‘man’. (b) Nevertheless, by a process called ‘education’ it is possible to modify the structure of a man’s soul. A soul born with a preponderance of courage or of want may become a soul in which reason predominates. There are, of course, limits to what can be expected from ‘education’; but no man is necessarily fixed forever in the character with which he was born. Thus Plato reaches two important conclusions:
• that ‘no two persons are born exactly alike’. But there are three general types of human being, each distinguished by a predominant faculty—reason, courage, or want. • that since to have a predominant power means to have a special aptitude for behaving in a particular way—reasonably, courageously, or desirously—each man may be said to be specially fitted to do one thing rather than another: ‘there is no twofold or manifold in man; everyone has a predominant aptitude’.
5 Now, it is these observations about the human soul which suggest to Plato his doctrine about the conduct proper to a human being— that is to say, his doctrine about ‘justice’ in the human soul. Every human soul is a complicated structure, displaying three dispositions in differing strengths, one of which will naturally be predominant. And since to say that a man is ‘just’ is to say something about the condition of his soul, ‘justice’ may be thought of as a particular relationship between the component dispositions of the soul. Plato’s doctrine may, perhaps, be summed up by saying that there is, so to speak, a beginning, a middle, and an end in human justice: an intimation of justice, a substantial justice, and a condition of absolute justice. (1) It is the beginning of justice for each human being to exercise his predominant faculty (whatever it is) and behave in the manner it demands. ‘Every man ought, in accordance with his particular nature, to do the one work for which he has a particular aptitude’. We are not, at the moment, considering a ‘just’ order of society; we are considering only the just condition of a human soul. And Plato holds that a man is ‘unjust’ in the simplest and most elementary way, if he refuses or is denied his own particular opportunity of excellence. And excellence is simply what one can do best. He may, by ‘education,’ try to change his predominant aptitude; but whatever that aptitude is, he should submit to it and exercise it. Not to do this is being unjust to himself. The first precept of ‘justice’, then, is ‘Be true to yourself, whatever that self may be’. This is minimum justice; the least intimation of a condition of ‘justice’ in a human soul. And this minimum condition of ‘justice’ is within the reach of every man if he is not denied it.
(2) But justice depends not only on being true to whatever your particular aptitude is, but also on the recognition that some aptitudes are superior to others. The ‘just’ man will be the man in whom each of these powers— and he has all of them in some degree—performs its own particular function properly. In other words, the ‘just’ soul is that which reflects the hierarchy of the faculties. It is the function of reason to rule over courage and want; therefore, in the ‘just’ soul reason (however little of it there may be) rules. A soul in which want is not only the strongest faculty but is also the ruling faculty and reason is subordinate to it, is a disordered soul and ‘unjust’. ‘Want’, in fact, is incapable of ruling even itself. To be a well-ordered soul is, then, what may be called substantial ‘justice’. Of course, you will have a better opportunity to be a well-ordered soul if reason is the predominant faculty; but even if reason is the smallest of one’s gifts it may still be the ruling power and in the just soul it must be. (3) But what is the summit of justice? What ‘image’ or condition of justice in a human soul is closest to the ‘idea’ or ‘ideal model’ justice? In answering this question Plato propounds a difficult, but I think intelligible doctrine. He tells us that the entirely just soul is one in which reason is, not merely the predominant and the ruling aptitude, but is the only aptitude. It is the soul which is, so to speak, filled with reason so that there is no room for any other faculty. Of course, in such a soul, reason could never take the place of courage or want, doing their work for them. The characteristic of this soul is that the necessity, as well as the opportunity, of behaving in either a courageous or a desirous manner has been entirely removed. Now this seems, at first sight, an odd doctrine. What has become of Plato’s insistence that every soul has, in some degree
or another, all three of these powers, and that men differ from one another, and are superior to one another, only in respect of the faculty which is predominant? I think there are two considerations which make sense of this Platonic conception of the wholly rational man. (a) We must remember that Plato is concerned with the ‘idea’ justice, the ‘ideal model’ of which no actual man could be anything more than an imperfect copy. And, although a wholly rational man is an impossibility, it is an impossibility only in the same sense as it is impossible for the ‘idea’ to be itself an actual copy or example. It is impossible that any actual man should be wholly rational; but the ‘idea’ man is that of a wholly rational being. (b) The conception of a wholly rational man is reached by removing from the human soul its two other aptitudes—courage and want. And the suggestion is that this is a valid procedure. Why? Because both courage and want are aptitudes which are, so to speak, accidental to the ‘idea’ man. They belong to the copy and have no counterpart in the ideal model. Courage and want are aptitudes which, unlike reason, require for their exercise the world of time and space. Both involve doing something. But in respect of its rationality, the soul is timeless; it exhibits the ‘idea’ man without the alloy of the material which belongs to the copy. Here, then, is Plato’s conclusion. Justice is a condition of the human soul. The ‘idea’ justice is that of a wholly rational soul: this is the definition of justice. But the most perfect ‘image’ or ‘copy’ of the ‘idea’ which can actually appear in the world is that of the soul in which reason is predominant and rules courage and want.
6 Now, let us remind ourselves of Plato’s design when he is engaged in this elucidation of the ‘idea’ justice in the human soul. He embarked upon it as a consequence of reaching the conclusion that the proper place to look for an image of justice was in human dispositions and human conduct. But he also believed that an image of justice could properly be looked for in the products of human activity, and among such products the polis is supreme—the greatest work of human beings and the work most completely expressive of human ‘nature’. Moreover, he believed that a polis was a replica of a human soul. Consequently, his conclusions about justice in the human soul carry with them some very important conclusions about the character of a polis as an image of justice. What of the just polis? It is a polis which is the counterpart of a just human soul; it is a polis which, in its structure and organization, reproduces the structure and organization of a just human soul. Let us consider this in a little more detail. Every polis, so the argument will run, is a replica of the human soul. As the human soul is composed of aptitudes for rational, for courageous, and for desirous conduct, a polis will be found to be composed of three kinds of men—men in whom each of these aptitudes is predominant: that rational kind of man, the courageous kind of man, and the kind of man whose special aptitude is to want. Let us apply to this polis the principles of justice we have already learned from studying the individual soul. A polis will be ‘just’ if each of its citizens is permitted to exercise the special aptitude which belongs to him. A polis will be ‘just’ if those whose predominant aptitude is for courageous behavior fight for and defend it; and if those whose predominant aptitude
is for desiring produce the necessities of life in it; and if those whose predominant aptitude is for rational conduct, rule it. This is the ‘well-ordered’ polis, the polis in which not only is each man doing what his special aptitude fits him to do, but in which, also, the proper hierarchy of the faculties of the soul is preserved. Or, we may put the situation the other way round, by asking the question: What are the marks of an ‘unjust’ polis? (1) A polis will be unjust which demands from each citizen ‘manifold’ activity, which requires or allows each of its citizens not to do that ‘one work’ for which his predominant aptitude fits him, but to do other work as well. This is an ‘unjust’ polis because it is a polis which requires or allows its citizens to have ‘unjust’ souls, in the simplest and most elementary sense. It does not allow its citizens to be ‘true to themselves’. If the man of courage or of want is made to rule (which is properly the unique function of reason), then the man of courage and of want is being denied the justice which belongs to him, and the polis has had imposed upon it an ‘unjust’ constitution. And with this Plato sweeps away not everything, but a very great deal of what the Athenian understood by ‘democracy’. ‘Democracy’ requires all citizens, regardless of the special aptitudes which belong to their different characters, to take their turn at ruling and being ruled. The ‘happy versatility,’ as Thucydides called it, of the Athenian character, in which every citizen was considered to be qualified to hold any office and which exhibited itself in the rule of the popular assembly, is recognized by Plato to be the exact opposite of a ‘just’ condition of a polis. (2) A polis governed by those of its citizens whose predominant aptitude is either courage or want will be an ‘unjust’ polis; and
it will be unjust because it makes a ruler out of aptitudes which (because they require to be ruled) cannot themselves rule. A polis governed by those whose aptitude is to fight, one which is ruled by its army, is a merely warlike polis, beckoned by every call to fight and incapable of discrimination. It is a disordered or ‘unjust’ polis. Perhaps it might be called a merely expansionist polis. A polis governed by those whose aptitude is to ‘want’ and to acquire is a merely ‘productivist’ polis in which every plausible opportunity of betterment is grasped at. In such a polis there is no deliberation or choice, no rejection of one want in favour of another, because want itself is incapable of deliberation or choice. It is a disordered or ‘unjust’ polis. Plato’s understanding of the ‘idea’ justice leads him, then, to the doctrine of the authority of reason to rule; or, as he puts it, the authority of those who by nature or by education have souls whose predominant aptitude is for rational conduct. And who are these men? Are they not those who, dissatisfied with the shadowy world of the cave, turned their backs upon the meaningless pantomime of changing images and sought to understand it by inquiring into the ‘ideas’ of which these images were mere copies? Those who, having attained to a knowledge of the ‘idea’ justice are able to act justly? Are they not, in short, those whom Plato calls ‘philosophers’? In this long and elaborate argument (which I have only scratched the surface of) Plato has moved from a doctrine about knowledge and about human activity, to this doctrine that a polis is properly constituted and ruled only when it is constituted and ruled by men whose special aptitude and engagement is knowledge of the ‘idea’ justice. For it is this aptitude, and this engagement, which enables them to act justly.
7 Now, Plato recognized that this rule of reason, or the rule of a polis by those whose predominant aptitude is for rational activity—rule by ‘philosophers’—brought with it some difficult problems. How, for example, can citizens, whose predominant faculty is not reason, be persuaded to submit themselves to the rule of those whose predominant faculty is reason? How to establish and make acceptable the rule of ‘philosophers’ to those who are not philosophers? What course of education can be devised to reinforce the faculty of reason in those who have it naturally predominant in their souls? What manner of life must be imposed upon these rational rulers to make certain that their lesser aptitudes for want and courage shall not usurp the authority to govern and turn their rule into misrule? How can philosophers, whose essential attribute is an aptitude for the contemplative life passed in the inquiry into the ‘ideas’ of things, be persuaded to leave this for the distracting life of ruling a polis? What sort of deliberation is required to decide about responses to political situations? Much of the Republic is concerned with questions of this sort, and Plato has some remarkable answers for them. But they are questions which follow from and depend upon this central doctrine: that the image of a just man is a man in whom reason rules his other faculties; and that the image of a just polis is a polis whose constitution provides that every man shall do that one work for which he has a special aptitude, and that those whose special aptitude is reason shall rule.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 2, fos. 131–9, 141, 143–51. Fos. 132, 139 are photocopies of autograph sheets; fos. 131–8, 141, 143–51 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections. Fo. 140 is a photocopy of an autograph sheet that has been crossed through; fo. 142 is an alternative draft of fo. 141.
Stoics and Epicureans 1 Our study of political thought, so far, has been a study of the intellectual responses evoked by the political experience of the ancient Greek polis. We have been concerned with thinking about political activity at two levels: The practical level, in which the ancient Greeks gave a rough and ready intellectual organization to their political habits and customs. The philosophical level, at which writers like Plato and Aristotle took up and sorted out the popular political beliefs and attempted to remove some of the ambiguities and incoherence of those beliefs. This political experience of the polis, fascinating in itself, lively, various, and changeful, is made doubly fascinating by the reflections it provoked among those who lived through it during the seven hundred years of its history. But this experience came to an end, and in a manner which is almost unique among political experiences. On the face of it, it was a dramatic end at the close of the year 338 B.C. This is the date of the battle of Chaeronea in which Philip of Macedon subjugated the free and independent cities of the Greek mainland, turning them into dependencies of an imperial power. But we must not exaggerate either the drama and the unexpectedness of this end, nor its suddenness. In many of these cities politics had taken a turn which allied itself to what entered from the outside to overwhelm them. If you read the speeches of Demosthenes, you will get some idea of what was happening in Athens.
The old pride of citizenship had declined: there were beginning to be men (mostly engaged in trade) who were citizens of more than one polis and had no single allegiance; the feeling for autonomy and self-sufficiency were disappearing in a mixture of races. Indifference and the pursuit of private fortune took the place of the old passionate interest in public affairs. Democratic constitutions of one sort or another gave way to oligarchies, and the oligarchs were superseded by a new sort of tyrant—one who modeled himself upon an oriental despot. Revolution and violence bred dictators who sought, not to ‘govern’ as the Greeks had understood it, but to exercise dominion. And where these tyrannies emerged, the hopes of citizens centred no longer upon a recovery of their political initiative, but merely upon a tyrant who would be benevolent rather than rapacious. What supervened upon the Greek world of independent citystates was, then, the product of changes which were taking place within the cities, combined with the conquest of the armies of Philip and Alexander of Macedon. And what supervened was a vast military empire, the language of which was Greek, and which carried the arts and the technology (but not the politics) of the Greeks to Africa and to Asia, but which was oriental rather than Greek in character. Kingship took the place of constitutional rule. The laws of a Greek polis became subject to the decrees of a conqueror made known by a local governor. The centre of government moved outside the city to some distant court or camp. Politics which had been the activity of friends and acquaintances became world-wide and evaporated. What took its place was military rule. Some small attempt was made by political thinkers to embrace this new experience. No proper theory of the Hellenistic empire ever appeared. But it was made more intelligible, and perhaps for some more tolerable, by finding an analogy between the new kings and the old ‘heroes’ and ‘demigods’ of Greece—Alexander was likened
to Heracles. The kings were credited with divine powers and a divine mission; divine honours were accorded to them. It was all dreadfully unsophisticated. But, if the Hellenistic empire itself found only a sketchy intellectual recognition, the situation which it imposed upon the Greek world of hitherto independent and self-governing cities was deeply reflected upon. And even in this disintegrated world (or, perhaps because of it) Greek thinkers found the energy to compose some kind of coherent intellectual response. Indeed, the situation called forth many such responses; but two of them proved more effective and more enduring than the others, namely, Stoicism and Epicureanism. The teachings of Zeno, the Stoic, and of Epicurus were concerned with much that has nothing to do with politics, but they each contained something that may be called a political doctrine or message. One hesitates to call them political philosophies. It is true that the urge to explain is present in both, and neither merely scratched the surface of things. But whatever explanatory enterprise they may contain was deeply overlaid by the much more immediately appropriate enterprise of reassurance and consolation. In fact what both Stoicism and Epicureanism offered was what may be described as a profoundly thought out (and in that sense philosophical) reassurance to those who had lost their status as free citizens of a free polis that they had not lost everything. The good human life had for so long been identified with polis-life that when the polis disintegrated the one thing people wanted to be told was that the good human life was still possible. And this was the message, differently worded, of both Zeno and Epicurus.
2 The doctrines of Stoicism and Epicureanism were first propagated in Athens during the fourth century B.C. But, by way of introduction, let us jump the centuries to the year 155 B.C., an interval during which most of the Greek-speaking world had been conquered by the armies of Rome. In that year, Carneades, a citizen of Athens, came to Rome as the leader of a diplomatic mission. In the intervals of business he was asked to address the intelligentsia of Rome, and for their entertainment he delivered two lectures on the principles of political order. (1) The first was a discourse designed to show that there was an ‘order’ in the cosmos and that the order of a civil society could be understood as a copy or replica of this ‘natural order’. He propounded the doctrine that the cosmos was governed by a ‘natural law’, and that human beings, in virtue of a faculty of reason, which they alone enjoy, can perceive this ‘natural’ law and are, consequently, able to construct human societies whose law and organization are a reflection of this ‘natural’ law—though, of course, they do not always succeed in doing so. ‘Justice’ in human conduct and in human societies is conformity to the ‘just’ and rational order of the cosmos. In short, the polis had gone, but a model upon which a good human life could be constructed still remained: an ideal model. (2) On the next day, however, Carneades delivered a second lecture in which he propounded a very different doctrine. The cosmos, he said, has no law and no order, and therefore exhibits nothing recognizable as ‘justice’. It contains no authority which gives each thing its ‘due’. Indeed, the cosmos is nothing but a fortuitous concourse of ‘atoms’, and provides no model whatever for an ordered human
society, nor any analogy by which an ordered human society may be understood. Nevertheless, civil order does exist in the world, and since the cosmos provides neither a model nor an analogy for it, it must be understood as a purely human creation, a work of human artifice. And to understand a civil order all we need is to recognize that it has utility to human beings, that it is within the known powers of human beings to fabricate it, and that it need not be a polis of the old kind. The human aptitude which makes it possible is the ability of making agreements with one another, which, in turn, springs from the power of communicating with one another by speech. The ‘reason’ that enters into the situation is not the power of perceiving the order of the cosmos, because there is no such order; it is only the power of detecting what is useful. Justice among human beings is what they agree to regard as just; and this agreement is both possible and useful. Carneades was a retired professional boxer, a man of cynical disposition and a loud voice. No doubt he intended to confuse, and had a certain Athenian contempt for these unlettered Romans. It is reported that he succeeded in annoying Cato (the most famous Roman senator of his day) and in this year a decree was issued banishing Greek philosophers from Rome. Now, I have jumped the centuries to Carneades, because his two lectures were expositions (rough and ready it must be admitted) of the two doctrines about civil order which Greek thinkers had propounded in the fourth century B.C. These doctrines were designed to commend civil society to men who had been deprived (or were being deprived) of the traditions of the Greek polis, and to reassure them that having lost all, or nearly all, that they understood by politics they had, nevertheless, not lost everything. The first lecture was on Stoicism, the second on Epicureanism. And I want now to say something about each of these doctrines.
3 The founder of the Stoic teaching was a man named Zeno (c. 300 B.C.). He was not an Athenian, but a Cypriot. But he came to Athens and, after studying in the Platonic Academy (Plato himself was, of course, long since dead), set up a school of his own in a place called the Porch (stoa)—hence, Stoicism. (1) There are, of course, many reminiscences of Platonism and of Aristotelianism in this teaching. Its foundation was the belief that there are two permanent and indestructible features of the cosmos: • Instability, change, movement, the coming into being and the disintegration of all the individual things which compose it. • A universal law or order which governs and determines this change and movement. Change, happening, movement are not fortuitous; they are to be understood as the operation of an unchanging law. This law of the cosmos was thought of by Zeno in various ways. From the religious point of view, it was a providential order; an order imposed upon the cosmos by divine wisdom. From the scientific point of view, it was a ‘natural’ order, according to which each component of the cosmos obeys the ‘law’ of its own nature. From a philosophical point of view, it was a ‘rational’ order—an order not imposed upon the cosmos by the caprice of a creating god (and therefore inscrutable), but a self-explanatory order. The prime observation of the Stoic teaching is, then, that of a cosmos ruled by a permanent, inflexible law, divine, natural and rational—a cosmos, therefore, which afforded a model or an analogy for an ordered human society.
(2) Within this cosmos human beings are distinguished as ‘rational beings’. This means that they are capable of apprehending its law and capable of obeying it, not blindly, like animals and vegetables, but consciously, and by choosing to do so. Here you will observe a strong reminiscence of the teaching of Aristotle. The characteristic virtue of human beings, then, is this voluntary conformity to the law of nature. All evil, misery, and injustice springs from the violation of this law—that is, from ‘irrational’ conduct. Human beings, however, have a propensity for going their own capricious ways regardless of the law of nature, and this propensity is called ‘passion’. It signifies thinking and behaving, not in accordance with their own ‘rational’ natures, but at the dictation of external, contingent circumstances. The thoughts and actions which human beings think and perform in this manner are ‘passions’ because they are ‘suffered’ rather than ‘done’, and they signify the absence of self-command. Men are said to be ‘slaves’ to their ‘passions’. Human beings, with both ‘passionate’ and rational dispositions, find their eudaimonia in subjecting their passions to their reason and voluntarily obeying the law of the cosmos. In short, men deprived of the law ofa polis directing them to the good human life, still have a law to direct them, and are still capable of a good human life. From this image of human ‘nature’, Zeno derived the precept, injunction or law of human virtue: ‘Follow nature.’ It is a precept already familiar to us from our study of Plato and Aristotle, but in Zeno’s teaching it is given a fresh turn appropriate to the circumstances of his time. Plato had said that good conduct for human beings was conduct modelled upon the ‘idea’ good. Aristotle had said that human eudaimonia was the realization of what was potential in a human ‘nature’ characterized by ‘rationality’.
But for Zeno, what in Plato and Aristotle were, fundamentally, elucidations of human virtue, ‘Follow nature’ becomes unmistakably a precept for human conduct; and moreover, it is a simple and dogmatic precept, appropriate for men who were lost and were seeking a guide to the good life. For Zeno, ‘Follow nature’ meant, ‘Obey the law of nature’—‘Let your passions be governed by your reason’. You may think this is a commonplace way of understanding the human condition. So it is; we have it at the back of our minds all the time. But it was the Stoics who formulated it. (3) But Zeno’s teaching contained something else supremely appropriate for the circumstances of his time: in this pursuit of a good human life, each man is not a solitary traveler. Zeno held that, in virtue of their common character as ‘rational’ beings, all men may be considered to be citizens of a single, ideal community, called the cosmopolis—this polis of the cosmos—whose law is the rational law of ‘nature’. The audiences of Plato and Aristotle had been men who were conscious of belonging to a particular polis which gave them a place and a home in the world; a polis which, in principle, was a morally self-sufficient as well as an independent community. Zeno was talking to men who had been deprived of this consciousness, men whose ostensible allegiance was to the distant ruler of a vast, formless, irrational empire which had an empirical quality but no moral quality. For these men to be told that they were citizens of a universal polis whose law was the law of reason and nature, came as an immense reassurance and consolation. It was from their citizenship in this cosmopolis, and from their common subjection to the law of reason, that men derived their moral rights and duties—moral rights and duties which seemed to have disappeared from the world with the destruction of the polis as a moral community. ‘It is true’, says Zeno, ‘you have lost your polis; but the cosmos is, as it were, a polis’.
(4) But further: Zeno did not deny the obvious fact that, in addition to being a citizen of the cosmopolis—a citizen of the world—every man was also a citizen of some narrower, particular, civil society. Nor did he deny that, in addition to having a duty to obey the law of the cosmopolis—the law of nature—every man found himself the subject of rights and duties under the local, manmade, laws of his particular state. But what the doctrine of the cosmopolis and the law of nature provided was a criterion by which to determine the ‘justice’ or ‘injustice’ of human arrangements. In short, the cosmopolis and its law provided an ideal model for all lesser, man-made cities, kingdoms, and empires, which were to be considered ‘just’ in virtue of their being true copies of the cosmopolis. Together with this doctrine about the character of civil societies went, of course, an interpretation of political activity, of the activity of governing, and of the qualities required in rulers. Properly speaking, political activity was understood to be an activity in which the laws and arrangements of local societies were made and kept in conformity with the ideal laws and arrangements of the cosmopolis. And the qualities to be desired in government were perceived to be qualities of ‘reason’ and ‘wisdom’, which would enable a ruler to rule in accordance with the law of the cosmos. In short, the good man, the good citizen, and the good ruler were men all of the same kind—men whose passions were in control of their reason and who ‘followed nature’. Stoicism did not place a high value upon political activity. To his audience Zeno suggested that politike was not an activity necessary for the achievement of the human eudaimonia, as Aristotle had thought it to be. But where, in other circumstances, political activity was not so peripheral and unpromising an activity as it was in fourthcentury Athens—in republican and imperial Rome, for example,
which was deeply influenced by the Stoic teaching—the doctrine of Zeno was readily modified in this respect, and the good man was thought to have a duty to be an active citizen. (5) In the political doctrines of Stoicism, then, there are many reminiscences of earlier Greek thoughts about politics, law, government, and justice. But these thoughts have become formalized, perhaps vulgarized. The cosmopolis was a kind of poor man’s version of the Platonic ideal model of which every polis was an imperfect copy. Aristotle’s idea of the human eudaimonia as the realization of the potentialities of a specifically human ‘nature’ is turned into obedience to an ideal law of nature. And even ‘reason’ itself becomes a law to be obeyed rather than an aptitude to be used and enjoyed. But this vulgarization gave Stoicism a simplicity, a strength required by the current circumstances. It was a doctrine appropriate to men who could no longer live in the confidence of being citizens of a polis capable of providing them (in the activity of the agora) with an opportunity of exercising the human aptitudes of decision and action, and (in its laws) a focus for loyalty. Stoicism is a severe and unsmiling doctrine for severe and unsmiling times; a consolation prize rather than a prize to match the confidence and the elation of a victor ludorum. And this is what it has always remained. In the subsequent history of Europe there have been not a few occasions when the circumstances of third-century Greece have been reproduced— circumstances when a traditional morality and a traditional politics have disappeared. When this has happened, there has often been a recourse to the teachings of Zeno, in which an ideal citizenship replaced a lost actual citizenship, and an ideal law of lature replaced a lost actual legal system.
4 Now, at the end of the fourth century B.C., perhaps a generation after Zeno had stood in his porch instructing his pupils, another man in Athens was teaching a doctrine which composed the other main response of Greek thought to the circumstances of the time. It is a less severe, more light-hearted response; and like Stoicism it has become one of the great traditions of European thought about the human condition. This man was Epicurus. He was an Athenian by birth, and he gathered round him a community of pupils who met in his garden. Like Zeno, he was a philosopher who had an explanation for what went on in the cosmos, and it was an explanation which owed much to earlier Greek thought, but to Democritus rather than to Plato or Aristotle. And like Zeno, Epicurus had a practical message of consolation and reassurance for his generation. Embedded in his teaching is a doctrine about the utility of a civil order. He wrote little that has survived—a hundred pages of fragments and a few letters to his friends. But nearly two hundred years after his death the Epicurean philosophy was expounded in Latin by a Roman poet named Lucretius in a long didactic poem called De rerum natura—‘Concerning the Nature of Things.’ (1) The principles with which Epicurus began were almost the direct opposite of those of Zeno. The world in which we live, the world before us when we open our eyes, he recognized to be composed of unstable, moving, changing things, things coming into being and disintegrating. But, while Zeno perceived in this change and movement the operation of a universal law, Epicurus perceived simple chaos. The constituents of the cosmos, he said, are ‘atoms and the void’—an infinite number of invisible particles, moving
perpetually and fortuitously in infinite space, bumping into one another occasionally, and sometimes clustering together for short periods of time to compose the visible things of the world. From this somewhat unpromising beginning, Epicurus deduced and made intelligible the main components of the cosmos as the Greeks understood it, namely, gods, things, and human beings. The gods, he said, are creatures who live blessed and untroubled lives and are the amused and disinterested spectators of what goes on in the world. They are totally indifferent to how human beings behave, and have no feelings or ideas about how men ought to behave. They are, therefore, neither to be loved nor feared by men, but only to be envied for their untroubled existence. There is no ‘providence’ to help men in difficulties and to reward those who behave well; and there is no ‘nemesis’, or divine punishment, for ill-doing. There is no ‘fate’. This doctrine about the gods was, itself, intended as a reassurance to men who, in this evening of Greek religious belief, had been overtaken by a great fear of their gods. Epicurus believed that this ‘theology’ would release men from their fear of divine anger and divine punishment. The natural world of things is a world of change and movement which has no order in it and obeys no law. Things are temporary clusters of atoms which come into being and pass out of existence fortuitously—both necessity and purpose are absent from the cosmos; there is nothing but chance. Similarly, human beings are composed of temporary conglomerations of atoms. But they are creatures of a peculiar sort. During their temporary existence, they have an ability to choose and originate their own movements, they have some power of perceiving what is friendly and what is hostile to their happiness and self-preservation; and they have the power of communicating with one another in speech.
They are at liberty to please themselves; they have no obligation to one another, and no obligation to please the gods, they belong to no divine, rational, or natural order. (2) There is, however one fundamental natural impulse common to all human beings: all men desire pleasure and have an aversion to pain. Consequently, all human activity is to be understood to be directed towards the enjoyment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. But since, as Epicurus understands it, to seek pleasure and to avoid pain belongs to the ‘nature’ of human beings, he is able to formulate his precept for human conduct in the well-known expression: ‘Follow nature.’ For the Stoic this expression meant: ‘Obey the law of nature; let reason rule passion’. For Epicurus it meant: ‘Have confidence in your natural impulses; pursue pleasure’. ‘Divine pleasure is the guide to life’. An agreeable and reassuring doctrine. (3) The good life, then, for human beings, their eudaimonia, is for each man to pursue his own pleasure—but with judgment. The Epicurean life was nothing like what the vulgar imagination made of it; it was nothing like an orgy. Epicurus believed that, after the few essential desires had been satisfied, pleasure was a kind of equilibrium to be maintained chiefly by the avoidance of desires and so of the pain of unsatisfied desires. In short, the greatest pain is frustration and, the world being what it is, this is most surely avoided by not having desires. It is, fundamentally, an ascetic doctrine. But, whatever element of judgment there must be in the pursuit of pleasure, the good human life was not at all concerned with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, or with doing your ‘duty’, or with observing obligations to other people. Indeed, it was not lived in relation to other people; it not only could be lived alone, but it was ‘naturally’ lived alone. Each man is alone in an indifferent cosmos.
It could be achieved without a polis, by an independent individual man pursuing his own pleasure with judgment, and preferably unencumbered by relationships with other people. And to a man who had lost his polis, which had formerly given him his standards of good conduct, to a man who had found himself deprived of any significant agora-life, it was a consolation and a reassurance to be told that these things were not necessary, and that he still had within himself all that was needed for a good human life. If the Stoic founda place to be at home in the cosmopolis, the Epicurean found it in himself. Both, it would seem, were well equipped to live in the empire which had taken the place of the polis. (4) Now, it would appear from all this that the Epicurean doctrine would have no place for a theory of civil order. It is made to look as if civil society, its laws and obligations, was something a man could very well do without. If any explanation of civil society were in place in the Epicurean doctrine it would seem to be a slightly more detailed demonstration of its superfluousness. But Epicurus recognized that civil societies existed, and he found a place for them and an explanation of their existence in this scheme of things. His questions were: What must be the nature of civil order if human beings are what I have said they are? And, What is the utility of a civil order to human beings of this sort? How can it contribute to pleasure? A civil order entails laws and public arrangements; it entails the observance of rights and duties; it entails notions of what is just and unjust; and it entails government. But none of these things are inherent in human ‘nature’; human beings are neither naturally ‘social’ nor naturally ‘political’ creatures. And, moreover, there is no suggestion of an order in any corner of the cosmos which might be used as a model for a
civil order. How then can we conceive of a civil order emerging among human beings? And what is its use? And to this difficult question Epicurus answers that we can only suppose that civil orders (which certainly exist) are the voluntary creation of human beings and that the manner in which they are created is by human beings agreeing among themselves. At least, they are equipped to come to such an agreement in virtue of their natural ability to communicate with one another in words. Indeed, speech is the sole social quality of human beings. The agreement itself will be an agreement to regard some sorts of conduct as ‘just’ and other sorts as ‘unjust’, to make laws for themselves and to set up a common authority to punish offenders against these laws. In short, a civil order must be the result of an agreement, a treaty, or a contract between human beings who find themselves living next to one another; and it must be this because, men being what they are, no other generation for a civil order is imaginable. But for what purpose should human beings enter into such agreements? What is the utility of all this paraphernalia of laws and obligations, of rights and duties, of justice and injustice, of government and the enforcement of law? And when Epicurus asks the question, What is the utility of it all? it must be interpreted to mean: What useful contribution does it make to the human eudaimonia—that is, to the well-judged pursuit of pleasure? The answer Epicurus gives is that, of course, human beings would never have been so foolish to enter into such agreements and to set up civil orders—all of which must constitute a prima facie hindrance to the pursuit of pleasure—unless they feared that in their absence the pursuit of pleasure would be even more greatly hindered. The sad fact about human life, as Epicurus observed it, is that every man has a next-door neighbor who is capable of frustrating his pursuit of pleasure.
Men fear one another because they are apt to hinder one another’s pursuit of pleasure. The utility of a civil order lies in its propensity to reduce this fear by limiting the occasions of it. But how does the creation of a civil order mitigate this fear and reduce this liability to mutual frustration? It does so, says Epicurus, by narrowing the field of human conflict. In constituting a civil order we, admittedly, limit our individual freedom to do what we judge to be most likely to bring us pleasure, but we get out of this civil order a security from the petty and continuous frustrations we are otherwise apt to suffer from our neighbors. We are protected against one another. To agree upon what shall be regarded ‘just’ conduct and to make people behave justly towards one another establishes no more than a common minimum of non-frustration, but that minimum is better than being continuously at the mercy of other men, depending for our unhindered pursuit of pleasure upon a good will in others which we have no reason to believe exists. There is, however, one serious gap in this theory of a civil order, which Epicurus proceeded to fill. It will be seen at once that for each man it will be an advantage to be ‘unjust’—that is, to go his own way in the pursuit of pleasure regardless of the rules of noninterference which belong to a civil order—so long as everybody else behaves ‘justly’. The best situation for a man is not to keep the rules in a civil society in which everyone else is very punctilious in keeping the rules. The best situation will be that of an anarchist protected by a policeman, or of the queue-jumper among people all of whom are punctilious about keeping their proper places. What is there to prevent or to discourage any man from trying to get into this position? The answer Epicurus gives to this question is: what discourages this sort of behavior in a civil society is fear of the pain of punishment. If one could behave ‘unjustly’ and be certain of never being found out, or, if found out, be certain of avoiding punishment, then the lawbreaker among those who keep the law would clearly
be in a superior position for the pursuit of pleasure than anyone else. But in any well-established civil order (and a sketchy or uncertain civil order would have no utility to anyone) we can never be certain of getting away with it, and not to be certain of escaping punishment is to suffer the fear of punishment even if, by chance, one manages on any occasion to avoid punishment— and the fear of punishment is pain. Consequently, for a man who is, as Epicurus assumes all men to be, ‘concerned for himself alone’, it is better to accept the common advantage of a civil order and to observe its rules than to suffer either the continuous and unlimited interference of other people or the pain that goes with the fear of punishment. Q.E.D. An elegant if a not entirely convincing proof. And a line of thought which later political philosophers were to pursue, notably Hobbes.
5 The explanations of civil order, of law, and of government which are contained in the Stoic and the Epicurean doctrines, and the practical precepts which each of these doctrines suggests, were offered, in the first place, to the Athenians of the fourth and third centuries B.C. who, like the rest of the Greeks, had lost the polislife which earlier generations had created and had enjoyed. The question which these doctrines answer was evidently the question which had emerged with this new circumstance, the question, namely: What is there to replace what I have lost? I live subject to a civil order, imposed by a remote, foreign ruler, a civil order which commands my conduct but which has no moral authority such as the polis had: What am I to think? (1) To those who asked this question, Zeno announced that they should think of themselves as belonging to a moral order more magnificent than that of the ancient polis—as citizens of the cosmopolis. This universal city (of which all men are citizens in virtue of their common rational character) had a law—the universal law of nature. It was a law not made by men, but it proclaimed the moral rights and duties of all men. The moral allegiance which the current civil order could not claim, or could claim only in so far as it reflected the order of nature, was owed to the cosmopolis itself. (2) The teaching of Epicurus, though different from that of Zeno, was a not less appropriate answer to the question. Epicurus announced that there is no moral order and that human beings need no moral order: the good life is something each man may achieve for himself—the life of the prudent pursuit of pleasure.
What men need is a civil order; and a civil order may perform its function in human life without its being at the same time a moral order. The fact that there is no ‘justice’ in the universe does not prevent human beings from making a ‘justice’ for themselves— that is, making a purely conventional civil order. Perhaps it is imposed by some remote, foreign ruler; but even if this be so, its utility is not destroyed. And nothing is of any consequence in the civil order but its utility.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 2, fos. 152–66. Photocopy of a typescript with autograph corrections.
The Political Experience of the Ancient Romans (1) 1 Political thought, as I am trying to put it before you, is a reflective activity in which a political experience acquires an organization of sentiments, beliefs, and general ideas. In its most practical aspect, it is commonly concerned with deliberation about policy and about the institutions and instruments of government. But it may branch out into an imaginative construction of a legend of political life which endows the aspirations and fortunes of a political society with a heightened self-consciousness; or into a philosophical examination of the conditions of political life. We have seen something of what this amounted to among the ancient Greeks. I want now to turn to the second of the great political experiences we have to consider—that of the Romans. I hope I shall be able to interest you in the Romans. They were a remarkable people, and their political experience is one of the most memorable of all the political experiences of European peoples. I think it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Romans are the only European people to show a genuine genius for government and politics. This may appear to be a second-rate kind of genius, but when it acquired the dimensions it did among the Romans it is pretty impressive. In most respects the political experience of the Romans is utterly unlike that of ancient Greece. The expression ‘the ancient world’, which puts Greeks and Romans together, is one of the most misleading generalizations ever made.
Greek politics was the politics of a world of independent citystates, each with a character and history of its own. In Athens, it was the politics of perpetual revolution, the product of an all too lively political imagination; illuminated, in the end, by astonishing achievements in philosophic reflection and understanding. Roman politics was the politics of a single city-state which, in the course of a thousand years, grew to embrace in a single empire the greater part of the known world. It was the politics of a people whose inventive powers were devoted, not to risky political experiments or to dazzling speculative adventures, but to interpreting and responding to the situations into which their impulses or their fortunes led them. The ‘rationalistic’ disposition of the Greeks (or, at least, of the Athenians) was almost wholly absent from Roman politics. I propose to begin by saying something about the events which compose this political experience—the events and the immediate interpretations which the Romans put upon them. It is a story in which fact and legend are mixed, and in which legend is more important than fact. The books on your list which you should be reading in this connection are: • R.H. Barlow, The Romans • L. Homo, Roman Political Institutions • F.E. Adcock, Roman Political Ideas and Practice • F.R. Cowell, Cicero and the Roman Republic • H.J. Rose, Ancient Roman Religion • D. Earl, The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome And if any of you care to venture further into the histories of Livy and Tacitus, so much the better.
2 In considering this political experience, we are met, at the outset, by a legend: the legend of Roman politics as it appears in the writings of Livy, Tacitus, Polybius, Cicero, and Virgil—not philosophers (like Plato and Aristotle), but historians and lawyers and poets. This legend is composed of the beliefs the Romans had about their beginnings, and the interpretations they imposed upon their fortunes. It constitutes the political self-consciousness of the Romans. This legend is the story of a hero and the vicissitudes of his life in the world. The hero of this legend is the Roman people, the populus Romanus. No people of modern times has exceeded the Romans in their self-consciousness. They ‘saw’ themselves, as an actor might ‘see’ himself, playing a part on the stage; and they were fascinated in the part they understood themselves to be playing. Sometimes it seems as if this severe and practical people lived in a dream world, so great is their self-absorption. In modern times, the only thing comparable to this is, perhaps, the self-absorption of the French in their period of revolution, or that of the British people in their imperial dream. Both dreams were short-lived. The Athenians had moments of thinking they had a mission to be the ‘teachers’ of Hellas, as Thucydides says; but the Romans believed they had a mission to rule and civilize the world. Moreover, the self-absorption of the Romans was that of a profoundly religious people. You may think it odd to speak of the Romans as ‘religious’, but they were; and if they had not been, Christianity would have had a very different history. In the nineteenth century—in the era of the emergent so-called democracies—the politics of ancient Greece was a fashionable
subject of reflection; but at all other times ancient Rome has supplied the models and the vocabulary of European politics. This legend, however, was an imaginative interpretation of events and circumstances; and it is about this other formulation of the political experience of the ancient Romans—namely, what actually happened, so far as a modern historian of ancient Rome can discern—that I must say something first. There was a time when Roman political history was familiar to any student of history, but since this is no longer the case, you must forgive me for spending some time on it.
3 The Italian peninsula, the scene of this experience, is a land of mountains and hills, valleys and plains. But, unlike Greece, its mountains form no impassable, or even difficult, barriers; and at least two of its plains are extensive. It has a long coastline; but natural harbors are few and there are no significant coastal islands: there is nothing to provoke its inhabitants to a notably seafaring life. Unlike that of Greece, the soil is fertile; its rivers are many, and only in the south is the countryside significantly arid. In short, it is a land fit for the farmers who were to inhabit it—farmers whose relationship to their land was a mixture of love and submission. The Romans began by being a people of farmers and soldiers, and this is what they remained to the end of their history. (1) In very early times this peninsula was invaded from the north by a variety of peoples whose names are known to us. They spoke different languages, they were at times friendly and at times hostile to one another, but in many respects were not dissimilar. Each of these peoples was composed of tribes or clans, kinship groups of one dimension or another. They were pastoral peoples, who brought their cattle with them; but they were not mere nomads and were already learned in the arts of agriculture. The most important of these peoples, from the point of view of later history, were those who were called, respectively, the Latins and the Sabines. These settled in and about the Alban hills which lie immediately to the southeast of the river Tiber, and now look down upon the airport of Rome. If you have ever been there you will not wonder why a wandering people should have come to settle there: it is irresistible. The fertile land, the wooded slopes, the lakes (like Lake Nemi), and the rivers. They settled, they cultivated the land, and they built
towns which were at once strongholds, granaries, and places to live in. The religion of these people was a family religion, the worship of ancestor-gods, the head of each family being a priest in his own household, celebrating the rites in which the gods of the hearth and the home were worshiped; and the law was a tribal law. But, in each of these independent fortress towns, social ties were added to the ties of blood. The family gods and the tribal laws gave place to gods, religious ceremonies, and laws of territorial communities. So these people lived, governed by their chiefs, often at war with one another—lives, centred upon urban strongholds, which, if they were not yet properly political, were not merely tribal. The most famous of these fortress towns was a Latin settlement called Alba Longa. There was a legend (of much later construction) about its foundation. It was reputed to be composed of a union of Latins and Trojans, the Trojans having arrived in that part of the world under the leadership of Aeneas after he escaped from the burning city of Troy. And according to the legend Aeneas was the first ‘king’ of the settlement known as Alba Longa. (2) Following these peoples, coming we do not know from where, there appeared in the Italian peninsula another people of a different sort from the Latins, the Sabines, and their companions. This people we know as Etruscans. They settled the whole of west-central Italy north of the Tiber, in what is now Tuscany, pushing earlier immigrants south and occupying an area which reached down to the Latin and Sabine settlements in the Alban hills. The Etruscans were a severe, masterful, and warlike people, more advanced in military skill, in artistic achievement, and in manner of life than their neighbors. Their arrival and hostility did something to unite the settlers in the Alban hills.
At a point where a stream, called the Anio, which descends from these hills, joins the river Tiber, about fifteen miles from the sea, and where there is an island in the Tiber making the crossing less difficult, there lie seven small hills. Here the territory of the Etruscans and that of the Latins met. And about the year 750 B.C. (traditionally, 753 B.C.) this area began to be occupied, as a frontier post, by a community of Latin people from Alba Longa.
4 The first of the seven hills to be settled was the Palatine; and the Latins who settled it were, according to the legend, led by a man named Romulus, the reputed son of Mars (then the god of agriculture) and a niece of a ‘king’ of Alba Longa. Later legend equipped Romulus with a romantic and extraordinary upbringing appropriate for one who was to be recognized as the progenitor of the Roman people and the father of the Roman state. Not long after this first settlement, other of these hills were similarly occupied by Latin and Sabine communities; and in the course of time each of the seven hills was settled—one of them, reputedly, by an Etruscan community. Walls were built, treaties were entered into; alliances were made. One hundred and fifty years later there was a wall which enclosed a large part of the area of the seven hills; and the communities of these hills had somehow come to recognize themselves as a single civitas—that is, a political community, a polis. Thus was the city of Rome made, the civitas Romana founded, and thus the populus Romanus emerged. In the legend of Roman politics this was, and remained, the most momentous event. The Romans might, at some periods in their history, look forward, but they never failed to look back with wonder and pride to the foundation of their civitas, and every event of their subsequent history was dated from the year of its foundation. What we call 753 B.C. the Romans called anno urbis constitutio—the year of the foundation of the civitas, year 1. The only comparable event in modern times which has generated similar emotion has been the founding of the United States of America.
5 The civitas Romana was, then, composed of a number of hitherto independent, territorial communities of settlers. These communities spoke the same language; but they were not the same ‘people’—at least two peoples (Latins and Sabines) were represented—and to unite them into a single community was not easy. Traditionally, the means by which this unity was achieved was, in the first place, by a treaty. And this word ‘treaty’ (foedus) became the characteristic Roman idea in connection with the formation of a ‘state’ or with any great constitutional settlement. In Livy this idea of a community emerging from a treaty is even pushed back into the legendary past when he writes of Alba Longa as having emerged from a ‘treaty’ between the Trojans led by Aeneas and the ‘Latin’ people of the locality which created a single ‘polity’. There is a characteristic formality about the founding of Rome, which contrasts with the informality of strangers meeting, getting to know one another, and settling down together which Aristotle imagined to be the origin of a polis. No Greek city ever looked back to the moment of its foundation as the Romans did. Somehow or other, then, in a manner that remains obscure, these original communities of the seven hills became a single civitas. And this unity was based upon a reorganization (attributed to Romulus but which must have taken several generations to achieve) in which the old components were superseded by social and territorial units which had nothing to do with the seven hills themselves. The materials, so to speak, available for organization into a community of a new style consisted of the traditions of government which the settlers brought with them, and the Latin and Sabine families who had composed the original settlements. There are two things to note about these families.
(1) They were ‘households’ consisting of a man, his wife, children, the freemen attached to the household (clientes), and slaves; and over all these the head of the household had absolute authority. In his household, the head was both king and priest. The Roman family in its earliest appearance is in the hands of a ‘despot’, in whom is vested not only the property but also the lives of this family and dependents. This despotic family rule, though in later centuries it was greatly modified by Roman law, remained always a kind of emblem of government for the Romans, who recognized a kind of parallel between household rule and the rule of a king or an emperor. But it was by no means the only source of Roman traditions of government. (2) Long before the settlement of the seven hills was achieved, a distinction between families had established itself. This was not, fundamentally, a distinction of wealth, but of social prestige derived from ancient lineage and also the long enjoyment of wealth. There were, in this sense, noble families (later called ‘patrician’ families), and what were later called ‘plebeian’ families. These two kinds of families were long kept distinct from one another, not only by the different parts they were to play in the political life of the Roman civitas, but also by the prohibition of intermarriage between them. But it is a mistake to suppose that either in these early years, or later, that the ‘plebeian’ families were necessarily poor: they were simply the families which could not claim ‘nobility’ and which were excluded from the precise privileges and the duties of the nobility. This distinction is of the first importance because from it sprang the characteristic Roman political notions of dignitas (which went with auctoritas) and libertas. Dignitas belonged to the ‘noble’, libertas to the plebeian. The reorganization which constituted the civitas Romana consisted of the replacement of the sub-communities of the seven
hills by a new set of sub-communities called curiae. Each family found itself joined to neighboring families in a curia. Now a curia was a territorial unit, and at the same time it contained relics of older ‘tribal’ divisions. It became an association of families, living in a defined area, who participated in common religious festivals, who had a meeting place and a place of worship of its own, and a public life of its own. In this early stage it is important to us because the ‘Roman people’—the populus Romanus—was held to consist of those who were members of a curia. And it is also important to notice that each of these curiae included both noble and plebeian families; it was an organization which cut across the social classes, just as an English parish does.3
[3] Oakeshott’s marginal note: ‘Athenian citizen = one who belonged to one of the original tribes.’
6 This, then, was the Roman people from its first appearance: a people who, by devious ways, had graduated from a tribal to a political character, and from being a collection of settlements to being a single civitas. How were these people governed? (1) Rome, in these early days, was ruled by kings, the first of whom was Romulus. The office of rex was to exercise on behalf of the community the comprehensive authority which the Roman understood by the word imperium—government. This is a word the meaning of which we shall have to consider later in detail: but it may be taken now as it is the Latin word for ‘government’. For the moment we will concern ourselves with its meaning in connection with the early kings of Rome. Kingship was not a hereditary office, nor did a rex hold his position either by popular or by divine appointment. The noble families had something to do with his appointment and so also did the plebeian, but when once he was installed he was an autocrat and held his office for life. His office had three main duties. • He possessed the auspicium, the ability and the sole authority to ascertain the will of the gods; and he had the duty to secure the pax deorum, the peace between the community and its gods, without which, it was believed, no community could prosper or even survive. • He was the commander in battle. • He was the custodian of the law and the administrator of justice between his subjects. The three normal functions in primitive government: the gods; war; and peace. (2) Beneath the rex, the heads of the noble families (the ‘fathers’, patres, who were the heads of the aristocratic families) had an
important part to play. They could be summoned by the king to give him counsel. Later these ‘patricians’ came to compose a more exactly official body called the senate (the council of elders); but, in the early years of Rome, they were simply the ‘magnates’ of the kingdom whom the king might consult if he chose: their business was to discuss and to advise when called upon to do so. They had, however, a position of great importance on the death of a king. It was into their keeping, on such occasions, that the auspicium and the whole imperium reverted, to be held and exercised until the appointment of a new king. On these occasions the patres were the custodians of the arcana, the secrets and the mysteries, of government. In this manner it was believed, so Livy tells us, that the authority of the semi-divine Romulus, the first king, was handed on in an uninterrupted transmission. The notion of an authority, legitimate because of its uninterrupted transmission from an original authority, is a very important and characteristically Roman idea. It was, much later, reflected in the notion of papal authority. (3) The third feature of this manner of government was an assembly of the curiae: the comitia curiata. This assembly could be called together by the king, and was called mainly for the purposes of proclamation and for witnessing certain important religious ceremonies. It was in no sense an assembly for debate, but on rare occasions it was asked to signify assent, and when it did so its members voted by curiae and not as individuals. This was, and was recognized to be, the assembly of the whole populus Romanus: and, as such, it of course included both noble and plebeian persons. That is to say, while plebeian persons were excluded from the senate, patrician persons were members of the comitia curiata.
Thus, in this system of government, there was room for deliberation and advice (the senate), for public proclamation and approval (the assembly of the curiae), and for executive decision (a king). And the autocratic position of the rex was not only made intelligible by the parallel autocratic position of the head of a Roman family, but was maintained by the fact that these were years of constant emergency and filled with warlike operations.
7 The Roman people were ruled in this manner, by kings, for a period of about 250 years. The most famous of these early kings was Numa; to us a misty, priest-like figure, but one who during his long and relatively peaceful reign was reputed to have been deeply learned in the laws of gods and men and to have given a religious formality to the public life of his people. At some point during this period, it would appear that Rome came under the rule of alien kings of Etruscan origin. And whatever other mark these Etruscan lords may have left upon Roman life, their rule was the occasion of two important happenings: • A reorganization of the Roman people, originally for the purpose of conducting military operations, but later having a very great political significance. • And a revolution which, after the foundation of the civitas Romana itself, was to be regarded as the most momentous event in the Roman political experience. (1) The first of the Etruscan kings, Tarquinius Priscus, for the purpose of increasing the military force at his disposal, set on foot a change in the manner of raising levies which was completed by his successor Servius Tullius. The old military organization corresponded to the ‘curial’ structure of the population, each curia being responsible for its quota of soldiers. But under these so-called Servian reforms the military organization was divorced from the curia and based upon an arbitrary division of the free landholders of Rome into companies of a hundred (‘centuries’). These companies were of different ‘classes’, each with its military function to perform: the ‘centuries’
of horsemen, for example, being composed of the wealthier landholders who could afford the necessary equipment. Military enterprise being so important a part of Roman life, these ‘centuries’ came to supersede the curiae as the political constituents of the Roman state. In the course of time they came to meet in an assembly, called the comitia centuriata, which, for many important purposes, took the place of the assembly of the curiae and was recognized as the assembly of the Roman people. Thus the Roman state, from being composed, politically, of curiae, half-religious and half-political, socially mixed, communities of neighbors which met and voted in the comitia curiata, was transformed into a collection of socially homogeneous sets of a hundred landowners, under military discipline, from which all relic of ancient tribal allegiances had been excluded, and which met in a new assembly of their own. (2) The third Etruscan king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, was not only the last of his line but also the last of the kings of Rome. In a revolution, in the year 509 B.C., he was deposed and exiled. The revolution was inspired by the aristocracy, and was led by a patrician, Lucius Junius Brutus. But it was hailed by the Roman people as an emancipation from tyranny. In the legend of Roman politics it was celebrated as the ‘beginning of liberty’. It was the foundation of the Roman republic. But this is legend; for, as in many other revolutions, the regime which succeeded to that of the early kings of Rome, namely, the Roman republic, inherited relatively unchanged all the political institutions (except kingship) of those early centuries, and all the important beliefs and ideas which went with them. The rex did not disappear altogether. He became a rex sacrorum, a person who performed some, but not all, of the religious duties of the defunct kings. Having got rid of a king whose authority had become tyrannous, the imperium (the authority to rule) reverted to the assembly of
patricians, the senate, as it would have done if the last king had died and not been expelled. It would seem that the senate were determined upon two things—first, that this imperium should never again be normally exercised in its entirety by one man; and secondly, that whoever exercised it should not do so for more than a limited period of time. Thus, there was set up, as the successor to the rex,a magistracy of two independent persons, neither having authority to prevail over the other, the duration of their office being a single year. These magistrates were called praetores or praetores consules (joint rulers): consuls. These consuls were appointed in a manner that conformed to all the old traditions and current arrangements. They came from the patrician nobility; the participation of the senate in their election preserved the constitutional fiction that their authority to ‘take the auspices’ and preserve the pax deorum descended to them in an unbroken transmission from Romulus himself. The participation of the new assembly of curiae recognized and confirmed a recent change in the distribution of power. And the participation of the assembly of curiae was a bow to ancient tradition. (3) But if this device solved, at least temporarily, the problem of tyranny, it left a situation common enough in Roman history unprovided for. A dyarchy of two consular magistrates may be supremely appropriate in circumstances of peace and quiet when the chief concern of the subjects of a government is to be allowed to enjoy their rights and to be assured of impartial justice; but is it appropriate in an emergency, when an enemy is at the gates and rapid decision and unified command are what the situation calls for? So, having provided for ‘liberty’, the Romans proceeded to provide constitutionally for ‘security’. In an emergency it was
within the authority of the consuls to appoint, for a period of not more than six months, a ‘dictator’, a magister populi (master of the people) who would himself exercise the imperium entire. (4) The Roman republic, then, was the Roman civitas in which the executive officers of government were two equal magistrates appointed for a year a time. No new notion of ‘government’ was entailed in this arrangement. Together these magistrates performed the duties which kings had hitherto performed. They were endowed with the imperium; they had the duty of preserving the pax deorum (perhaps the most important duty of a Roman ruler); they commanded the Roman army in war; as judges they administered the customary, unwritten law. In the early years of the republic these magistrates, although their election was a matter in which both the senate and the comitia centuriata participated, were always drawn from the patrician families, and were the nominees of those families.
8: The Rule of the Patrician Consuls But these early republican arrangements, if they closed one chapter in the political experience of the Roman people, also opened another. The distinction between the ‘noble’ or patrician families and the plebeian families was very ancient. It was an historic distinction, and while it may have reflected a difference of wealth, it did not in the early years of the republic reflect the current distribution of wealth. It was a social distinction, and one which was maintained chiefly by marriage laws. According to the legend, Romulus had originally ‘created’ the senatorial class by designating a hundred of the heads of noble families to be ‘senators’, and these had handed on their social position and political rights to their descendants. Whatever historic truth this may reflect, the fact was that by the beginning of the fifth century B.C., the patricians had closed their ranks against new entrants, and had protected themselves by a law which prevented a plebeian from marrying into a patrician family. Nevertheless, plebeians are not to be thought of as a poor or a propertyless class. They consisted of wealthy families and poor families, of landowners and craftsmen, of men who had commended themselves as ‘clients’ to noble families and formed part of a noble household, and men who were independent. They were all ‘free’ men and were, alike with patricians, cives, citizens of the Roman civitas. Now, this distinction between patres and plebei had, in the early monarchy, had no very great political significance. Together both classes were represented in the curiae and (less completely) in the comitia curiata. In the organization of ‘centuries’ they had become separated from one another, but they were both represented in the comitia centuriata, the assembly of the populus Romanus.
Under the kings, if the patricians had a special position denied to the plebeians, they were both subordinate to the rex. With the republic this situation was inevitably modified. If the rule of patrician consuls gave the patrician class a ‘freedom’ it had not enjoyed under the monarchy, it did not do exactly the same for the plebeians. If the populus Romanus (patricians and plebs alike) might complain of the tyranny of an autocratic king, and might be discontented with the ‘justice’ he imposed, under the republic the rule of the patrician consuls was the subject of similar complaint and discontent among the plebeians. In short, the republican constitution could be suspected of government not only by the patricians, but in the interests of the patricians at the expense of those of the plebeians. This suspicion came to the surface in relation to the administration of the law with regard to debtors. The consequence of indebtedness has always been a fertile source of political change: in Greece, Solon’s main problem was to reform the law about debtors, and the same situation has appeared in many more modern contexts. The law of Rome, as it stood, prescribed the loss of liberty— enslavement—as the penalty for a debtor who could not pay his debts. It was a very ancient law, and its administration had often been lenient; few plebeian debtors relapsed into slavery. But under the patrician consuls, in circumstances of peace, when the military support of the plebeian ‘centuries’ was not so essential, this law was more rigorously administered. And this rigour closed the ranks of the plebeians, and rich and poor alike united in discontent and complaint. It was a revolt, it should be noticed, against the administration of justice. But it went so far that the plebeians refused to perform their military duties and the plebeian city dwellers removed themselves to the Mons Sacer, three miles outside Rome, and set up (or threatened to set up) what was, in effect, a civitas of their
own. From this position they negotiated with the senate and the patrician consuls. The agreement reached was characteristically thought of as a ‘treaty’ between plebs and patricians (afterwards known as the lex sacrata). It provided for the following arrangements, which came into operation gradually in the course of years, and which came to be recognized as constitutionally valid: (1) First, the plebeians acquired the right to appoint ‘magistrates’ or ‘leaders’ of their own, who came to be called tribuni. These tribunes were recognized to have no share in the consular imperium, but to have ‘powers’ of a different sort of their own. To begin with, the chief of these ‘powers’ was to give ‘help’ or ‘protection’ (auxilium) to any plebeian arraigned before a consular judge. There were, in the first place, two tribunes, but the number was later increased. They were appointed for one year at a time; and the persons of the tribunes were sacrosanct. (2) Secondly, the plebs acquired the right to meet in an assembly of their own, which came to be called the concilium plebis. This assembly was convened and presided over by the tribunes in the same manner as the consuls convened and presided over the comitia centuriata. The tribunes had the right to put resolutions before the concilium; and when such resolutions were voted upon, the manner of voting was neither by ‘centuries’, nor by curiae, but by ‘tribes’. These resolutions, when agreed, were known as plebiscita— ‘decisions of the plebs’. They were binding only on the plebs and not the whole populus Romanus. In short, the plebs were recognized to have the right to make law for themselves. This was a very remarkable arrangement, for it went a long way towards creating a state within a state.
The only superiorities which the senate and the consular government could claim over the plebeian assembly and the tribunes were: • that the tribunical ‘power’ was not recognized as a share in the imperium; • it still required the consuls, the senate and the comitia centuriata to make law for the populus Romanus as a whole; • the consuls retained the exclusive authority of military command. It was not, then, a situation which could endure for long unchanged without the Roman state falling apart. And that this did not happen was due to a series of modifications, taking place over more than a century, which generated a sort of equilibrium between the patricians and the plebeians, the two ‘orders’ of the populus Romanus. The patrician class became less exclusive by the abrogation of laws which prohibited the intermarriage of patrician and plebeian families. A new ‘nobility’, not of blood but of office, emerged in which both patricians and plebeians were sharers. After a long period of confusion, during which it seems that on occasion a tribune exercised the military imperium, it became the custom for one of the two consular magistracies to be reserved for a plebeian holder. The resolutions of the concilium plebis acquired a binding force on the whole populus Romanus without requiring the assent of either the senate, the consuls or the comitia centuriata. And the comitia centuriata was soon left with the single duty of participating in the appointment of the consular magistrates. Each of these changes was not so much the result of abstract reflection as of accommodation forced upon the patrician senate by contingent circumstances, such as the emergency of war. By early in the third century B.C., then, in a struggle spread over 200 years, it seemed as if the concilium plebis had acquired the dominant place in the government of the Roman civitas.
9 But long before this another profoundly important change had taken place. One of the earliest demands of the tribunes on behalf of the plebeians had been for the ancient unwritten law of the Romans to be written down and published. This law was in the custody of the patrician consuls, the senate, and a patrician college of pontiffs, priestly lawyers; and the reason for the demand of the tribunes is clear. The Romans were governed by a law, the provisions of which were obscure to the plebeians and therefore the administration of which was suspect. The demand appeared, first, as a demand for the codification and publication of the law relating to the authority of the consuls; but over a period of about ten years it was extended until it became a demand that the whole of the ancient law of the Romans should be revealed. To satisfy this demand, the senate and the concilium agreed to appoint ten patricians for a period of one year to rule the state, to put the law in order and to publish it. (You will remember that a similar demand in ancient Greece was met by the appointment of dictator nomothetes, the most famous of which was Solon in Athens.) The co-called decemviri did their work not very expeditiously; its result was the twelve tables of the Roman law, published in 451 B.C. Henceforth the populus Romanus was ruled by a law knowable to all, the keepers of the law (the college of pontiffs) was thrown open to plebeians, and the Roman political experience began to include, with more and more assurance, and activity until then very sparingly engaged in—the activity of ‘lawmaking’. The early centuries of the Roman political experience, then, provided some important topics for reflection:
• How does a collection of tribes become a political society, a civitas, and what is involved in this change? • What is citizenship; and what are its rights and duties? • What sort of a political community did the populus Romanus constitute? • How may a political community combine executive authority and freedom? • What is law, and how may it be made?
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 3, fos. 168–84. Photocopy of a typescript with autograph corrections.
The Political Experience of the Ancient Romans (2) 1 The political experience of the Romans began as the experience of creating a political community, a civitas,a state, out of tribal societies; and of creating the Roman people, the populus Romanus, out of a miscellany of different peoples. With the expulsion of the ‘kings’ under whom this had been achieved, it became an experience in which the political ascendancy of an hereditary nobility was invaded and gradually modified by the claims of a non-noble class of free landowners, called plebeians. The result of this struggle for power, which went on for about three and a half centuries, was that, by the beginning of the third century B.C., the city-state of Rome was governed in a very complicated manner. There were four partners in this republican constitution: 1. Two ancient assemblies of the populus Romanus which had the right to approve or disapprove all legislative proposals, and took part in the election of the executive government. 2. The ancient patrician senate, which was a deliberative assembly of the heads of noble families. 3. A new assembly of the plebeian class, the concilium plebis, controlled by tribunes, which had the right to propose and approve laws—called plebiscita—which applied not only to themselves, but to the whole populus Romanus. 4. Two consular magistrates, elected for one year. These held the imperium, the right to rule; and they constituted the executive government. They were elected by the popular
assemblies and by the senate. And they usually belonged to the patrician class. It was a situation of immense tension, but a temporary modus vivendi had been achieved. The ancient prerogatives of an hereditary aristocracy were being invaded by the claim to exercise power of a numerous, wealthy, non-noble class of small landowners and traders. And the plebeian claims were winning. A great victory had been won in 451 B.C. when the plebs successfully demanded the codification and publication of the ancient Roman law, which had hitherto existed as an oral tradition in the care of the senate and in the custody of priestly authorities. Now, at the beginning of the third century B.C., it looked as if the concilium plebis would outshine all other assemblies as an authority for making law, and as if its leaders, the tribunes, would invade the consular magistracies and might capture the executive offices of the Roman state; and thus, give Rome an oligarchical government from which the nobility were excluded. Nevertheless, this did not happen; and our first question is: why did it not happen? (1) The short answer to this question is that, just as the concilium plebis was in a position to exploit its constitutional victory over the senate, Rome became involved in a war with the other great Mediterranean power, Carthage. In its first phase, this war lasted sixteen years; but it was nearly eighty years before the destruction of Carthaginian power was achieved. And in the later part of this period of nearly a century, Roman armies, in a major military effort, invaded and conquered Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, and Spain. War, in any case, is apt to postpone domestic disputes and ambitions. And a long period of military engagements, in which there were some crippling defeats as well as final victories, is not the most favourable circumstance for an assembly which had
hitherto spent its energies on winning new rights for itself to take over the direction of policy and the government of a state. Indeed, these wars, in which there were not one, but many, Roman armies in the field, in which there were several theaters of war, were beyond the capacity of even the annually appointed consular magistrates to conduct and control. What was required, in order to provide a continuous policy and an over-all strategy, was a body of persons who could reach decisions after debate and discussion, and which could transmit these decisions, if only in the form of advice, to those charged with executive power. The concilium plebis was completely unequipped to play this part. But this had long been the part played by the senate in Roman politics. In respect of procedure alone, the concilium plebis was at a hopeless disadvantage. It was not an assembly for debate; it could meet only when called together by its tribunes. From being an assembly of protest it had become a legislative assembly; but legislation is one thing and the conduct of policy is another. The senate, on the other hand, met without having to be called together; it was never a legislative assembly, but an assembly of debate, and its debates terminated in the expression of an ‘opinion’ or ‘advice’ to those who held the executive imperium: the consuls. In these circumstances the government of Rome and the conduct of policy fell into the hands of the only constitutional body able to carry it out, namely, the senate. And the emergent power of the plebs remained only emergent. (2) But there is something more significant to be said about the situation than this. What we want to know is: (a) How, apart from convenience, could the senate acquire this dominating position so soon after it had suffered a considerable constitutional defeat at the hands of the plebs? And (b) what, in fact, was the composition of the senate in this century of war?
(a) To answer the first of these questions I shall have to open a subject about which there will be a lot more to say later on. In the Roman way of thinking about politics a firm distinction was made between those who wielded legally authorized ‘power’ (potestas), and those who had ‘authority’ (auctoritas). Potestas was understood to be specific and definable; it was to hold a particular office and to have the right and the duty to exercise the ‘powers’ which belonged by law to that office. Thus, the tribunes had the potestas to do what belonged to the office of tribune; and the censor was endowed with the particular potestas which belonged to his office. The consular magistrates were in a slightly freer position; as holders of the imperium they exercised a larger and more compelling potestas which might on occasion be the imperium militae of an army commander in the field; but, even so, it was potestas and consequently, in principle, definable. There was, in fact, a law which defined their powers. On the other hand, auctoritas (authority), where it was recognized to be enjoyed, was not limited to any particular sphere of action. Nobody by virtue of having auctoritas could command, or make a law; what he could do was to think for himself, to give an opinion or an advice which must be listened to. Auctoritas meant, not having a narrow sphere of action in which your word was law, but having initiative to think and to deliberate and speak about policy. To have auctoritas was precisely not to have potestas; and to have potestas carried with it no auctoritas. Now, what the patrician senate was recognized to have was, precisely, auctoritas. Thus the senate, not only by its procedure, but also by its constitutional character, was less encumbered and less limited than any holder of a potestas, even the potestas which belonged to the consular imperium. In other words, potestas is specific, auctoritas is extendable and can grow. And in the circumstances of the time of which I am speaking the auctoritas senatus grew tremendously. Before the end of this period of war what had been senatorial ‘opinion’ and
‘advice’, given only when asked for by a consul, became senatorial ‘decree’. This is an almost supreme example of duties falling to those who are there and can perform them without any overt or revolutionary change in their character or status. The declaration of war and peace and the ratification of treaties were matters in which the populus Romanus never lost their rights. But it was the senate which settled the terms of peace, which gave audience to foreign ambassadors, which regulated the yearly levies of soldiers, which decreed the annexation of provinces, which controlled supplies, which considered strategy, which (when a new and more aggressive policy seemed to be called for) dismissed Fabius from his command and appointed Scipio in his place. Much of this was done in the form of advice to the consular magistrates, but it was the senate and not the magistrates who supplied the initiative. (b) But what was the composition of a senate which could wield such ‘authority’? Even before the time of which I am speaking, the senate had ceased to be a merely hereditary body of patricians. Not only has a ‘nobility’ of office appeared beside the old nobility of blood, but the nobility of blood had become less exclusive by intermarriage with plebeian families. In short, the senate had become a body determined to a significant extent by appointment; the change was not altogether unlike that which has taken place in the House of Lords during the last fifty years. And a magistrate (called the censor) had the duty of making appointments to vacancies in it. Nor were these vacancies rare; in 216 B.C. in the disaster at Cannae, more than half the senate was killed on the field of battle. Moreover, there was by then a well understood order of preference which the censor was expected to follow in appointing to the senate.
Thus, the senate, in whose hands was the conduct of policy at this time, had become more and more a body of ex-magistrates— not merely ex-consuls, but ex-tribunes and ex-holders of the numerous other magistracies. So, if it is said that during this period the senate staged a great ‘comeback’ from its defeat by the plebs, it must be recognized that it was, in many respects, a new sort of senate which acquired this dominating position.
2 But wars come to an end; and it is almost a maxim of Roman political experience that peace and the cessation of danger is the signal for a renewal of the internal tensions of Roman politics. There was even a proposal not to destroy Carthage because war abroad meant the greater chance of peace at home. (1) This meant, first, the attempt of the concilium plebis to regain the power it had lost during the long supremacy of the senatorial auctoritas. But this, second, great bid for supreme power was also frustrated by circumstances. The Rome which had come out of this century of war was very different from the Rome which had first defended itself against Carthage. It was the centre and ruler of an immense Mediterranean empire of subject peoples, variously governed. Outside Italy, this empire was divided into provinces, each with a governor, and each governor was in command of considerable military forces. How were these inevitably powerful governors, the provincial proconsuls, to be controlled? It was a new problem in Roman government. The concilium plebis could hamper and frustrate senatorial control and often did so. But it was utterly incompetent to exercise adequate control itself—and for the same reasons as had made it incompetent to conduct a major war. The result of this situation was that control over the provincial empire disintegrated; and the disintegration spread to the whole of Roman government. For half a century Roman politics collapsed into a contest for power, and among these contestants were often successful military commanders from the provinces who returned to Rome with their armies, intent on asserting themselves. It was civil war, not politics.
For a brief period there was some semblance of order under an appointed dictator, named Sulla; but that also collapsed. (2) Nevertheless, before the Roman republic gave place to a manner of government which, because it was so different, in the end required that a new name should be found for it, there was a final oscillation from one extreme to another. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar, the commander of the armies which had just completed the conquest of Gaul, learned that his hopes of appointment to a second period of consulship, and a new command, were likely to be thwarted by his enemies at home. He returned at the head of his veterans and made himself master of Rome by force. To him the senate was nothing, the concilium plebis merely an exasperating survival, and the magistrates fit only to be his agents. He turned what the Romans had always understood as a temporary expedient—namely, a dictatorship—into a system of government. He was masterful, and gave Rome its first taste of genuine autocracy, which lasted five years. On the Ides of March 44 B.C. he was assassinated in the senatehouse by patricians who had in their hearts the shadowy ideals of the republic and who hated him as a despot. Junius Brutus had been the agent by which the Romans rid themselves centuries earlier of a despotic king, Tarquinius Superbus; this time it was the hand of Marcus Brutus which struck for ‘liberty’: ‘liberty’ and the restoration of the republic. But, whatever may have been designed by his assassins, the death of Caesar did not restore the republic. It was the signal for renewed civil war, in which revenge for Caesar’s death was added to all the other current political causes. In this civil war two great figures gradually emerged, commanders of armies: Mark Antony, who made himself master of the East and took on the habits of a Hellenistic despot; and Octavian, the great nephew, adoptive son, and designated heir of Julius Caesar, who held the West as consul and military dictator.
The Roman world was not large enough for these two. Their armies finally met at Actium, in Greece, in the year 31 B.C. Octavian triumphed, and proceeded at once to reconquer the East. Two years later he entered Rome, greeted as the man who had restored the sovereignty of Rome over the civilized world and as the saviour of the republic. The doors of the temple of Janus were closed for the first time in two hundred years, signifying that the Roman world was at peace.
3 The authority of Octavian was the prestige of a successful military commander, and he returned to Rome with the treasures of Egypt, which were lavished upon the populus. His legal position was that of consul—this was the sixth successive year that he had held the consular imperium. The senate, the concilium plebis and the popular assemblies had survived, though severely battered and demoralized. All the institutions of the republic were still there. There were two obvious lessons to be learned from the recent political experience of the Romans. The first: that merely to ‘restore’ the republican constitution would be to restore anarchy both in Rome and in the provinces. The second: that a military dictatorship, like that of Julius Caesar, was intolerable. Something that was neither the one nor the other had to be generated. And it is a tribute to the political genius of the Romans and to the astuteness of Octavian that in the course of the next forty-four years it was generated. Moreover, it was generated with remarkable political economy, out of materials which lay ready to hand. The Romans never indulged in political invention, if they could find among their institutions something suitable to meet the situation. The new order of government (as it came to be called) which gradually emerged was an immensely subtle rearrangement in which sheer invention played a negligible part. Each phase of the change was unobtrusive because it differed minimally from what had gone before, and nobody could say for certain where the old ended or the new began. It began, under the renewed consulship of Octavian and Agrippa, with an act of conciliation and oblivion.
Old proscriptions were expunged from the record, ancient enmities were forgotten, arrears of taxation were cancelled, the senate was restored to its ancient dignity, the plebs and the legionaries were rewarded with remarkable indifference to past loyalties, the shrines and temples of the gods were repaired, the irregular enactments of past times were annulled, confidence was restored, and the rate of interest fell from twelve to four percent. On the first of January 27 B.C., Octavian ceremonially announced his resignation of the extraordinary potestas with which he had been endowed less than two years before and (as he said) he ‘transferred the res publica into the keeping of the senate and the populus Romanus.’ It was a dramatic move, and the response was equally dramatic. The senate, with the approval of the popular assembly, forthwith invested Octavian himself, without a partner, for a period of ten years, with the consular imperium. He was given the sole command of all the Roman provinces where there was need of an army (the others remaining within the jurisdiction of the senate); he had sole responsibility for levying troops within the empire, for the declaration of war and peace and for making treaties. He was to take precedence over all other magistrates, whose nomination was put in his hands. Thus, firm control was arranged for where it was needed; and the danger of civil war was averted by putting all the legions under the command of one man. No longer could a proconsul from the provinces appear with his army to subjugate Rome. This was a bold step which might be thought to be in the direction of autocratic government; but it was well within the conventions of Roman republican government. At the time there were divergent interpretations of what had been done. To some, it appeared as a definitive restoration of republican government; Octavian’s position was supreme, but he owed it to the senate and the populus; and he held office as
a consul. He was, indeed, declared to be the ‘champion of the freedom of the populus Romanus’. To others, to the Italian and provincial municipalities, he appeared as ‘Caesar’, the ‘guardian of the Roman imperium and the ruler of the world’. And it was in virtue of this ambiguity that what was to become the new order of government could be launched without opposition or serious misgiving. The Romans had, in fact, settled for peace and security, and the appearance of republican ‘liberty’ was saved in the technicality of the manner of Octavian’s appointment. Further, on this same occasion, the name Augustus was conferred upon Octavian, and he was thenceforth known by this title. The name carried with it a vague religious dignity, but what was in men’s minds at the time is indicated by the fact that some thought the name Romulus more appropriate than Augustus: he was being connected with a notional refoundation of the Roman state.
4 This, however, was only the beginning of the process in which the new order of government emerged out of the old republic. Less than four years later, in 23 B.C., Augustus resigned his consular imperium and retained only the proconsular in virtue of which he governed those provinces of the empire which were under his military command. The renunciation of the consulship meant the renunciation of authority within the city of Rome itself, of his precedence over other magistrates, his right to convene the popular assembly and to demand advice from the senate. It seemed, in short, to restore a manner of government in which authority at home was separated from authority abroad, which had in the past proved so disastrous. In their anxiety, the senate and the populus pressed upon Augustus various extraordinary powers, including that of dictator for life. All these he refused as unconstitutional. But by a device, which was not here used for the first time in Roman politics, he was offered and accepted ‘powers’ which, in fact, restored to him everything he had resigned. The device was that a man might exercise the ‘powers’ of an office without holding the office itself. And on this occasion Augustus was invested with the imperium of a consul without holding the office of consul (which he had resigned). And when this imperium was added to his imperium as a proconsul (which he had not resigned) he had powers which no Roman had ever before enjoyed. He had the imperium militae of a proconsul, and he was authorized to exercise it domi, ‘at home’, in Rome itself. To these ‘powers’ others were added. Without being appointed censor, he was given the ‘powers’ of a censor; without being appointed pontifex maximus, he was given the ‘powers’ of this office; and without being a tribune, he was given the tribunical potestas: and all for life.
Now, all this was constitutionally possible precisely because he did not hold these offices, any one of which would have disqualified him from holding any of the others: a man could not, for example, be a tribune and a consul at the same time. No office had been terminated, there still remained consuls, tribunes, a censor, and a pontifex maximus, but Augustus alone could exercise the potestas which belonged to each and all of these offices. No new powers had been invented, the appearance of ‘dictatorship’ had been avoided; but an all-powerful ruler had been created by endowing Augustus with all the constitutional ‘powers’ known to the Roman state. Without being a ‘dictator’, in the technical constitutional sense, he was the supreme guardian of the res publica Romanorum. And, as if this were not enough for one man, he was declared princeps senatus: ‘first senator’. Now, this might seem an insignificant addition to his position, but in fact it was the most important item of all. He was not the first man in Roman history to be declared princeps senatus; but in the case of Augustus what it meant was that besides enjoying the potestas which belonged to each of a number of important magistracies, he had also the auctoritas senatus. In short, he had everything. For the first time in Roman history, potestas and auctoritas were joined in one person. However, as we have seen, although the potestas of a magistrate could not increase (it was exactly defined, a matter of law), the auctoritas of the senate was something without any exact limits. In being declared princeps senatus, then, Augustus joined auctoritas to potestas and imperium and had acquired absolute supremacy. And from being princeps senatus he came to be recognized as princeps of the Roman state; and the new order of government acquired the name by which it has ever since been known: the principate.
These, then, were the honours, powers, authority and dignity conferred upon Augustus round about the year 23 B.C. And these were what he enjoyed and exercised for the remaining thirty-six years of his life. The only significant addition to them came in the year 2 A.D. when he was declared pater patriae, ‘father of his people’. It was an honorific title (as much religious as political) which, among much else, connected the Roman state with a Roman household and the princeps with the paterfamilias, and it glanced back to Romulus, the original, founding father of the Roman state. In virtue of his enjoyment of these powers and authorities, Augustus is commonly thought of as the first Roman emperor, the period of his rule is spoken of as his ‘reign’, and the principate as the beginning of the imperial government of Rome. Certainly Augustus was supreme, and his power and authority might properly be thought of as those of an emperor. But he owed every item of his supremacy to the senate and populus Romanus; his powers were given him for his sole use and had been expressly renewed and confirmed at intervals during his reign. There was nothing in them which he could bequeath in his will to a successor, as a Hellenistic king could bequeath his kingdom. Now, the powers and the authority of Augustus must die with him; but, such was the confidence which the new order of government had won, that it seemed clear that there should be somebody able and ready to succeed him. Nobody doubted, least of all Augustus, that it was the exclusive right of the senate and populus to confer such powers; but it was the part of Augustus himself to see thata suitable candidate, versed in the business of government, was available. Whom should he choose? How should he indicate his choice? What steps should be taken to avoid an interregnum and civil war? In finding a successor, Augustus had bad luck: his first two choices died before they could succeed. In the end Augustus settled for his stepson Tiberius, who had for many years been
one of Augustus’s colleagues in government and held many of the offices of state. Tiberius, then, succeeded; and he was invested by the senate and the popular assembly with all the powers and authority they had given to Augustus. Who could not assert that some new system of government had emerged, something comparable to a fresh foundation of the state? And yet who could with confidence assert that the old republican constitution was a thing of the past? A change had certainly been made; and it was acceptable because nobody new exactly when it had come about, or what had been changed.
5 On the death of Augustus, the political experience of the Roman people had already extended over a period of nearly eight centuries. The major problem that had emerged was that of transforming the government of a city-state into a government appropriate for a vast empire. A solution to this problem had emerged with Augustus. The Romans had got themselves an emperor—and a characteristically ‘Roman’ emperor. He was, in character and authority, quite unlike other rulers of empires—oriental despots or Hellenistic kings. He was not a dynast, the Roman empire was far from being his property, his authority was derived neither from conquest nor was he surrounded with the myth of divinity. For some time, indeed for nearly two centuries, the authority of the Roman republican constitution over men’s minds was never completely lost. Sometimes it was strong, at others weak; but it can be seen to be gradually dwindling away. Although the immediate successors of Augustus were a remarkable collection of eccentrics (Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero)—some of whom were pushed into preeminence by military force and many of whom died by assassination—the path marked out by Augustus was never completely deserted. And it was trodden more exactly by others—like Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius. Even if no regular and satisfactory method of selecting an emperor was ever devised, the powers he enjoyed were always recognized to be conferred by the senate and populus. The imperial office had, then, been designed to rule an empire and to control the politically dangerous military forces of the empire. The princeps was the protector of the Roman state against civil war. This was the principate. At what point this design began to be seriously modified is difficult to say exactly. In origin it was the firm footprint of
Augustus upon circumstance; and each of his successors added their own footprints, not always exactly in the steps of the founder. But it is commonly understood that the seizure of the imperial power in 192 A.D., 150 years after the death of Augustus, by Septimus Severus, an African general, marks the end of the principate and the beginning of that undisguised autocracy which composes the last three centuries of the political experience of the populus Romanus—an experience, not of governing but of being governed. The rule of these Roman emperors was autocratic, sometimes wise or competent, often negligent and incompetent. They were successful, or not so successful, dynasts. They became surrounded with an aura of divinity, and their power rested upon their command of their armies and upon the faithfulness of their body-guards. The magnificent was mixed with the sordid in their conduct; their word was law. The last realities of the Roman republican government had long ago disappeared, although the somewhat theatrical relics of patrician dignity remained in Rome. But it should not be thought that this Roman world was grossly misgoverned under these great autocrats. It enjoyed peace, the pax Romana, and (more intermittently) prosperity. The law of Rome gave an orderliness to this world, and Roman citizenship was extended to all who came under their rule. There was more freedom of movement in this empire than there had ever been before in the Roman world. It was far from being an empire designed by Augustus, but it was far, also, from being a ramshackle empire. It fell a victim not to the vices and injustices of autocracy but to external forces—a vast and gradually accumulated movement of barbarian peoples over its frontiers, themselves pushed on by others in more distant regions. It is difficult to imagine any empire with resources adequate to meet and to master this invasion which had been probing the frontiers of the empire from the time of Marcus Aurelius, but the
empire of Rome certainly had not got them at its disposal. It was a running engagement which went on, now here and now there, for three centuries. Peoples known as the Goths and the Vandals, pushed on by the Mongolian Huns, swept over Gaul, into Spain and Africa. And the end, or a sort of end, came in the year 476 A.D. when the city of Rome was captured by the Ostrogoths who established a Gothic kingdom in Italy under Theodoric. The civitas Romana, like the city states of ancient Greece, was, in the end, destroyed by an invasion of foreigners. There is no way of summing up this political experience of a thousand years. Later peoples have been fascinated by it because it seemed to contain everything that could possibly happen to a people. No circumstance was absent, and every circumstance met with some kind of response. It is an endless political improvisation, by a conservative people supremely capable of learning from experience. It left many relics behind. To a significant extent it may be said that the political dwellings European peoples have since lived in have been built out of materials which were left lying about when the political experience of the Romans disintegrated. But what is more important to us is that this political experience generated a legend of itself in which actions and events acquired poetically universal significance—a legend, unmatched until quite modern times, in which the Romans expressed their beliefs about themselves as a community and about what they were doing in the world. It generated also some notable political sentiments, beliefs, and ideas which gave it a remarkably comprehensive intellectual organization. The philosophical talents of the Romans may have been small; but they certainly did not lack the power to understand their political experience in the idiom of general ideas. And this is what we must concern ourselves with next.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 3, fos. 185–202. Fos. 185–6 are photocopies of autograph sheets; fos. 187–202 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections.
Roman Political Thought (1) 1 The Romans are always thought of a people memorable for what they did in the world—a race of soldiers, organizers, engineers, colonizers, and rulers. And unquestionably they earned their reputation. And at the same time they have appeared to be a remarkably ‘unintellectual’ people, whose thoughts never reached the level of their deeds. It is conceded that there were Roman poets; there were historians and lawyers; but we look in vain for a philosopher—let alone one in the class of the philosophers of Greece. But, if it is true that they were not much given to intellectual speculative adventures, we should beware of underestimating their powers of thought—especially when it comes to politics. For, in fact, this empirical-seeming politics of theirs had a remarkably firm and profound intellectual organization. Any such organization, however deeply it seems embedded in popular sentiment and belief is, of course, the work of writers. But in the case of the Romans, the writers who endowed them with this political self-consciousness were historians, poets, and lawyers, not philosophers. The manner in which the Romans governed and were governed during the thousand years of their political experience was never turned into a coherent system of abstract ideas. Instead, its intellectual organization was that of a legend in which the events and the fortunes of this remarkable people was endowed with a universal significance by being made to compose a work of art—a drama, or a story, whose moral was always being made explicit in events.
2 I propose to begin with what must be regarded as the central core of this organization of political ideas, namely, the beliefs the Romans had about the sort of community they believed themselves to constitute. Every people has some beliefs about the kind of community they compose, and usually they are among its more important beliefs. The Genevan Calvinists of the sixteenth century believed themselves to compose a community engaged in the worship of God; others have used the word ‘nation’ to denote the sort of community they constitute. Such beliefs are apt to change over the years: recently we seem to have sunk so low as to believe that the community we compose is an ‘economy’. And, of course, one’s beliefs about the sort of community one belongs to involve beliefs about the kind of person one is. In the case of the Romans, it may be said, that over a period of about a thousand years their beliefs about the sort of community they composed did not change very much. They clustered round the notion of the populus Romanus, ‘the Roman people’, or (as they sometimes said) ‘the Roman race’. We are not, now, concerned with the actual components of this ‘people’, with where they came from, or with how they emerged upon the scene and what they did. We are concerned with what they came to think about themselves. The populus Romanus was, in fact, the chief, the comprehensive dramatis persona of this legend of Roman politics. Everything that happened, happened to the Roman people. Every actor who appeared upon the stage was recognized as a representative of the Roman people. How did they think of themselves?
(1) In this much used expression—populus Romanus—there appears, in the first place, the notion of the Romans as composing a single family—both literally and metaphorically. To think of the Roman people as, literally, a single family entailed some idea of an original progenitor. And the Romans thought of Romulus, not merely as the leader of the mixed collection of Sabines and Latins who settled the seven hills of Rome, and as the founder of a city (urbs), and as the creator of the Roman civitas, but as the original parent, the ‘father’, of the Roman people. Nor was this merely a primitive way of thinking which they grew out of. They took these expressions literally. Romulus parens, the Romulus who was the first pater patriae, was a figure looked back upon even after centuries of Roman history. In this they are not unique: recall ‘father’ Abraham. And later, the supreme figures of Roman politics were thought of, not merely as honorary ‘founders’ or ‘refounders’ of the Roman civitas, but as honorary progenitors of the populus Romanus. Julius Caesar, for example, was recognized, by those who recognized him to have authority, as parens of his people. He was given the title pater patriae; his assassins were denoted by the word parricidia (murderers of their father); and the Ides of March was ‘the day of the parricides’. And when we consider how deeply Caesar was hated, this was going pretty far. Indeed, the Latin expression for a traitor was parricidium patriae. When Octavian was to be honoured with a special praenomen, the name Romulus was canvassed, although the name Augustus was chosen. In short, the Roman manner of expressing profound respect for a man was to attribute to him the character of the progenitor of the Roman race; and the major political crime was identified with the murder of a parent. But even more significant was the belief that ‘the family’ was a compelling analogy by which to understand the communitas composed by the Roman people. And it is the character of the Roman familia which gives point to this analogy.
According to ancient custom, the aristocratic Roman family, which was a household (domus) consisting of wife, children, slaves and ‘clients’—clientes were ‘free’ dependents, who took the family name and were in the position of ‘retainers’ who received protection from the family they were associated with and in return gave it their support—was a world ruled by the absolute authority of the paterfamilias. Ata later stage in Roman history, this absolute authority was limited here and there by law; but, in principle, the ‘right’ (jus) of the paterfamilias was absolute except where it was expressly restricted. He determined the lives and activities of his entire household; the whole family property was in his ownership; he chose husbands for his daughters and wives for his sons; and in early times he enjoyed the jus vitae necisque, the right of life and death over his children and slaves. Now, it is easy to understand what entailments for political thought would follow from taking this ‘family’ as the model or analogy of the Roman civitas. It suggested the notion of governing as an activity which sprang from a ‘natural’ authority of a ‘natural’ head: patriarchalism. It suggested a certain sort of relationship between ruler and ruled. And the relationship between the paterfamilias and his clientes was available to be applied to the relationship between the Roman state and the ‘kings’ of the Italian tribes which were its first conquests or allies. Indeed, it may be said that Roman politics was, fundamentally, family politics. Roman political history has often been written in terms of what is called the struggle of the patrician and the plebeian orders, but the real parties in Roman politics were ‘family connections’, as in eighteenth-century England. A family’s ‘clients’ were its retainers, its political supporters. It is not the socalled politics of family interests; the great Roman families were organizations of opinion about policy, not mere organizations of interests. In short, to think of the populus Romanus as a sort of perpetual family, the patrician elders as its perpetual patres gave a specific
direction to Roman ideas about government which it never quite lost.4 ‘Government’ as a sort of counterpart to the domestic disciplina of the Roman family was an idea never far out of sight, though it was also never without qualification. And this marks the distinction between the Roman and the Greek way of thinking of a political community. All that is most representative of Greek thought expressly rejected the understanding of the polis on the analogy of a family or a household. (2) But besides thinking of themselves as a single family, the populus Romanus thought of themselves as a historic communitas or ‘partnership’ which had been composed by a treaty (foedus) between tribes and which was held together by a ‘treaty’ or ‘agreement’ in which their mutual dependency was recognized. If the word familia represented the, so to say, poetic unity of the Roman people, the word foedus represented the practical operation of this unity. It is almost the notion of a ‘contract’. This notion of their political community being based upon agreement was very ancient: it appeared, for example, in the legend which attributed the foundation of Alba Longa to a treaty between the Latin inhabitants of the Alban hills and the immigrant ‘Trojans’ led by Aeneas. And it might be taken to represent the facts of the case about the founding of the city of Rome. On the two notable occasions in Roman history (one perhaps legendary, but the other certainly historic), when the communitas Romanorum was disrupted by the secession of an important part of it, unity was restored by the renewal of the ‘treaty’ which was believed to be its foundation. And, as we shall see, this idea of foedus is fundamentally involved in both the Roman religion and the Roman idea of law. [4] In Oakeshott’s hand at this point: ‘SPQR’, i.e. ‘Senatus populusque Romanorum’, the senate and the people of Rome.
This notion had one supremely important entailment: since the populus Romanus was a community founded upon and held together by a ‘treaty’, therefore the notion of fides, of ‘keeping faith,’ of bona fides in the observance of the terms of the treaty, was of unmistakable importance. And so it was: fides, ‘keeping faith’ between partners was a constantly operative idea in the conduct of Roman politics. And here again there is a divergence from the Greek way of thinking. Aristotle, at least, rejected the idea of a ‘treaty’ or an ‘alliance’ as representing the character of the unity of a polis. But for many centuries the Roman state revealed itself, and was understood, as an alliance which was not incapable of being disrupted. The Romans had, what the Athenians never had, namely the notion that they composed a civil association. What united them was not engagement in a common enterprise, but respect for the mos majorem, ancient customs, and respect for the law. And this law was not thought of as the organization of an enterprise, but as the terms in which they kept faith with one another. And this is what I mean by a civil association. So far, then, we may suppose the Romans to think of one another as ‘brothers’ and as ‘partners’, rather than (as Aristotle said the members of a polis should think of themselves) as ‘friends’. (3) The populus Romanus was, then, both a ‘family’ and a ‘partnership’. But further, it was essentially a sacred partnership—a communio sacrorum, a partnership in the performance of sacred rites. And this takes the relationship of Roman to Roman to a deeper level. Soon I shall have something more to say about the Roman religion, but for the moment we may observe (a) that the Roman family was itself understood to be a religious community; it had gods of its own and the head of the family, the paterfamilias, was the ‘priest’. And (b) that the original legal qualification for belonging to the populus Romanus was membership in one of
the curiae or ‘parishes’ into which Romulus is reputed to have organized his followers. And a curia was a local community which had a place of worship and religious rites and festivals of its own. In an important sense the populus Romanus was a curia (a religious society) composed of curiae (religious guilds). Politics never ceased to have an element of religious ritual. (4) Further, and perhaps not without some contradiction of what I have already said, the populus Romanus was a people with a ‘purpose’ in the world, a ‘destiny’, a fortuna; and it was held together and united in the pursuit of this ‘purpose’. In this respect they were ‘comrades’. How early this notion imposed itself upon the Romans is difficult to say, but it was already strong in early republican times. Nor is it easy to say exactly what they thought this destiny to be. Early, it was, no doubt, a reflection of their success in remaining whole and in having overcome the forces which made for disintegration—a reflection of the feeling of being blessed by the gods. Later it certainly became a much more precise idea—the idea of their destiny to rule the world and impose a civilization and an orderliness upon its barbarisms. But the important thing was that it was thought of as the destiny of the Roman people. It carried them through every defeat and they found it confirmed in every victory. And it was from this belief in the destiny of the Roman people that the much later idea of the ‘eternal’ and indestructible city of Rome emerged. The politics of Rome is the politics of a ‘chosen people’ who, more fortunate than the ancient Hebrews, were never brought so low as to doubt their ‘destiny’. What broke the force of this idea was not defeat, but the extension of Roman citizenship by Caracalla to all the subjects of the Roman government. The belief that they were a ‘chosen people’ was destroyed by dissipating their sense of family solidarity.
(5) Lastly, the fortunes of Roman arms, the extension of Roman power, the achievements of Roman civilization over this period of a thousand years, were always thought of as the fortunes and the achievements of the populus Romanus. It was the history, not of Rome, but of the Roman people. Roman rulers, magistrates, consuls, proconsuls, military commanders, emperors—these were the agents of the destiny of the populus Romanus. Roman rule in the world was the imperium populi Romani, and the emperor was custos imperi Romani. This, then, was the cluster of related ideas which gathered round the expression populus Romanus, and together constituted the terms of Roman political self-consciousness.
3 I want, now, to take up the theme of the populus Romanus as a ‘religious’ community, and say something about the religious beliefs of the Roman people as they enter into their political beliefs. With the early Romans, as with most emergent political societies, religion and politics, although they may be distinguished, were inseparable activities. Moreover, this was not a feature of Roman history which gradually receded. In the course of centuries, the relationship between these two activities changed, but they never sprang apart. And yet Roman government was never at any time properly to be described as ‘theocratic’; and both Roman religion itself and its relationship to politics were significantly different from anything that appeared in a Greek polis. (1) The Latin word religio was understood, by Cicero and others, to be connected with the verb ligare, which means to ‘tie’ or to ‘bind’. Thus, it signified the condition of being ‘bound’ or ‘obliged’, and the activities which belong to this condition. Hence, religious observances were thought of as the recognition and celebration of a sacred ‘bond’. In earliest times, this ‘bond’ was the obligation which tied a present generation to its forebears. Religion centred in the family; it celebrated the sanctities of hearth and home. It was a worship and consultation of ancestors in which the current paterfamilias was the officiating priest. The human disposition it generated and expressed was pietas— the veneration, the love and the loyalty of children to parents, alive or long dead. But when the religious feelings and beliefs of the Romans came to be centred in the larger ‘family’ of the populus Romanus itself, the emotion of pietas was directed towards the gods of the new
domus, the civitas, and towards the progenitors and founders of this ‘family’. The custodians of the sacra, the priests, of this communitas Romanorum were the counterparts of the paterfamilias—namely, kings and their partners in ruling. And in the early history of Rome, King Numa (as his name indicates) was recognized as a preeminent holder of this office of priest-king. After Romulus had founded the city, it is Numa who was reputed to have impressed upon its inhabitants their sense of being a religious community. Now, the gods of the Romans were local inhabitants, and every human activity had its own providential god. Unlike the gods of Greece (who were limited in number, who had a home of their own on Mount Olympus and who made only occasional excursions into the human world), the gods of the Romans actually inhabited the temples in which they were worshipped, and perpetually watched over, not only the fortunes of the Roman people, but every activity of every Roman. It was, then, the preeminent office of the ruler to preserve what the Romans called the pax deorum—the ‘peace of the gods’— which was the good relations between the populus Romanus and its gods. And these good relations were thought of as a ‘treaty’ (foedus) between gods and men, in which men were bound to reverence, and the gods (in return) to promote good fortune. Thus, religio (being bound, by a treaty), pietas (reverence), and fides (keeping faith) were ideas which belonged together. (2) Politics, then, the pursuit of policy, was, in the first place, a religious activity. It entailed always, as a preliminary to action, a process of ascertaining whether what was proposed was in accordance with the will of the gods. This process was called auspicium, divination of the will of the gods by the observation of the flight of birds.
Rex and augur, the ruler and the man who had the prerogative of auspicium, were joined in a single person, because the chief office of rex, one that no other man could perform, was to preserve the pax deorum upon which the success of human enterprise depended. The first rex of the Romans was the founder of the Roman civitas, Romulus. And all the ceremonies of ‘augury’ in the subsequent long history of the Roman people were traced back to that neverforgotten legendary occasion when Romulus sought the blessing and approval of the gods for the enterprise of founding the city of Rome, and received it when twelve vultures appeared. Moreover, this right of auspicium was believed to be so overwhelmingly important that there had to be some understood manner in which it was handed on from one rex to another in an unbrokered transmission. Thus it was believed that, between the death of one rex and the succession of the next, the custodian of this right was the senate— that body of ‘patricians’ whom Romulus was reputed to have appointed to be his partners in government, and which (while of course mortal in its members) as a body never died. And the religious character which was attached to the pursuit of policy was attached also to legislation. The legal arrangements of the Roman state were in the care and custody of the gods. (3) This identity of religion and politics was never seriously modified during the course of Roman history. But in republican times certain distinctions emerged. When there was no longer a ‘king’, the priest-like functions of the former kings were performed by a rex sacrorum,a ‘king’ of the sacred things. And the rights and duties of men in respect of the gods were distinguished from the rights and duties of men in respect of one another: the jus divinum was distinguished from the jus humanum.5 [5] In Oakeshott’s hand at this point: ‘cp. The distinction between “god palaver” & “man palaver”’.
Nevertheless, some of the earliest politico-religious beliefs of the Romans survived to the time of the emperors. What is called ‘caesar worship,’ the worship of the emperor as a god (which alone of their civil duties Christians refused to perform), is to be understood as a survival of this sort, and not as a degenerate bowing and scraping to an autocrat. The ordinary paterfamilias, as we have seen, could at death be said to become divine (divus) and even a god (deus); and the part of him which was believed to survive death (namely, his genius or ‘spirit’) was an object of family worship as deus parens. And the difference between a caesar, an emperor, and an ordinary man was not that a caesar was reputed to be divine and a god and the ordinary man not, but that the genius of the ordinary man became a private and family god and the genius of a caesar became a public god, a god of the ‘family’ of the populus Romanus and publicly worshipped. The divinity of a caesar was, therefore, a counterpart of an emperor being recognized as parens of his people, pater patriae corresponding to the paterfamilias. And when Vespasian said on his deathbed, ‘Dear me, I must be turning into a god’, he said no more than any dying paterfamilias might have said without any tinge of blasphemy. Nevertheless, there was something a little novel when (as happened in the second century A.D.) emperors were worshipped during their lifetime. It was a novelty learned from the near theocracies of the Hellenistic kings and was more prevalent in the Greek provinces of the empire than in Rome itself. But it can be recognized as a corruption of something that had belonged to Roman religion from earliest times. (4) Religio, then, for the Roman stood for the obligations which ‘bound’ him to his gods and to his ancestors. But politically the most significant feature of religio was that it stood for a profound, pious, and ‘binding’ attachment to the great
event in which the populus Romanus itself emerged, namely the foundation of the city of Rome and the Roman state by Romulus. All the sanctity which gathered round the hearth and home of the familia was transferred to this new ‘public’ home of the Romans, the city of Rome. And their overwhelmingly religious duty was to preserve what Romulus had founded. In the Greek world there were innumerable cities and each was a new and independent foundation; in the Roman world there were no new independent foundations, there was only one Rome and the dependent municipalities of the empire. Indeed, the ‘destiny’, the ‘mission’ of the populus Romanus was, precisely, to make Rome immortal; and they sought the authority for every enterprise in this original sacred foundation. They dated every event in their history from the year of foundation, anno urbis conditur. Some peoples have looked back to an ‘original constitution’ and believed it to be their destiny to remain faithful to it. There is something of this feeling in modern America. But the Romans had no such ‘constitution’. What they looked back to, and were ‘bound’ to, in pietas and fides, was the event of ‘foundation’ and the ‘founding father’, Romulus. And this, perhaps, is only another facet of the fundamental ancestor worship of Roman religion; turning it, in this case, from an ordinary ‘natural’ religion, common to many peoples, into an ‘historic’ religion unique to themselves—a religion which had a specific historical beginning, a sacred moment in time, and was not merely a reflection of the mysteriousness of natural processes. The Romans, then, may be recognized as a profoundly religious people. Their religion was never elaborated into a theology worth the name. It was a religion of feeling and conduct, a practical faith which kept pace with great social and political changes, and always remained the centre of their self-identity as a people and as a state. The Roman religion was the energy of Roman politics; and Roman politics was the reflection of Roman religion.
Thus, as might be expected, when, under the rule of autocratic emperors, the vigour ebbed from Roman politics, the religion also lost its vitality. From the first century B.C., the old Roman religion was on its way out. It was undermined by skepticism; and from this time the Roman empire was invaded by the popular religious cults of the East, the most powerful of which was the religion of Mithras. Nevertheless, this ancient Roman religion reasserted itself in a remarkable manner in the adoption of Christianity by the rulers of Rome. And, on any reading of it, this was a tremendous achievement. For Christianity began by being, in Rome, a religion of the lower classes, even the slaves—all those whose share in the religious rites of the Romans was peripheral because a worship of ancestors can make only an indirect appeal to those who have no ancestors and no ancestral homes. (5) Round about the year 30 A.D., the rulers of Rome began to observe closely the appearance of a new religious sect in the empire, which they had earlier discounted and tolerated, having mistaken it for a Judaic sect. This sect, whose members called themselves ‘Christians’, was suspected of treasonable activities and was identified as being politically dangerous. From the time of the emperor Nero (64 A.D.) there begana long period during which Christians were alternately persecuted and neglected; and during this period the sect grew in numbers and spread itself throughout the empire. Then, at the end of the second century, Diocletian made a determined attempt to eradicate it. This attempt failed; and it was followed by a policy of toleration, first announced by Constantine (himself a convert) in the so-called edict of Milan in 313 A.D. In the course of the next fifty years, toleration turned into favour; and then, in 378 A.D. under Theodosius, Christianity was adopted as the official religion of the empire.
The old Roman religion was proscribed, its priests dispossessed, its temples turned into museums, and even the Roman calendar, in which dates had always been calculated from the year of the foundation of Rome and which recorded the festivals of the old Roman religion, was abolished. In its place appeared a calendar based upon Christian festivals, and beginning from anno domini—‘the year of the Lord’. The Roman state, by an imperial edict, had placed itself under the aegis of the god of the Christians. Of course, relics of the old Roman religion remained for centuries to come; and, indeed, embedded themselves in Christian belief and practice. To this day, in the remotest parts of Calabria, the distinction between Diana and the Virgin Mary is far from certain. But, on any estimate of its effect, this edict constituted a remarkable revolution. Perhaps it may be regarded as the decisive event which marked the end of the Roman political experience; this, and not the fall of Rome to the Ostrogoths a century later. Of course, it was not intended to be the end. It was an attempt to give a renewed sanctity to the Roman state in what appeared at the time to be the current idiom of sanctity. It was an alliance with the ‘god’ who had proved himself to be ‘the most powerful god’. Nor would it have been possible if Christianity had not already acquired features of a profoundly ‘Roman’ character. Christians by that time were no longer a sect of believers notable for their indifference to what went on in the world, and above all to politics and public affairs. They constituted a church, organized on a Roman pattern and endowed by law with special ‘immunities’. It was a church with a hierarchy of officers, elders, and priests, and a diocesan organization geared into the Roman civil administration. Moreover, many of the current beliefs about the church reflected Roman ideas. It was a church believed to have been ‘founded’ in a manner not remotely different from the legendary foundation of Rome itself. And there was an attachment to this ‘foundation’ at
least as strong as the attachment to this ‘foundation’ of Rome. The authority of its current leaders was based upon the authority of its founder. There was, further, a profound belief in the authority of the foundation, an authority handed on, from generation to generation, in an unbroken transmission—not at all unlike the handing on of the right of auspicium by the undying senate. But in order to make the Christian church of the third century an adequate religious foundation for the Roman state, one thing remained to be done. This church was rent by divergent doctrines and practices, and it was necessary to impose upon it an orthodoxy of belief and practice. This was achieved in the great church councils of the period, and it was achieved under pressure from the Roman imperial government. The unity of the Christian church was a Roman and a political achievement. Indeed, it was the emperors themselves who summoned the councils of the church. And when they had shed the divine attributes which the old Roman religion had given them, they acquired priestly attributes in the Christian church. If the Christian church could be said to have a ‘head’ in the fourth century A.D., it was the emperor. The design of Theodosius was, then, to reunite the empire by allying it with the strongest current idiom of religious belief. But the effect of this policy was something different from the design. For the Christian church already had an independent organization of its own, and it was impossible at the stroke of a pen to turn its priests into the servants of the state which the priests of the old Roman indigenous religion had been. In short, the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the empire introduced a tension between religion and politics which had never before existed. Religion and politics were no longer a single activity. If they did not automatically pull in different directions, at least the possibility that they might do so had appeared.
Bishops were appointed by emperors, and were often the civil governors of Roman municipalities; and the ecclesiastical and municipal organizations were often difficult to distinguish. But the great bishops, like Ambrose of Milan, regarded themselves as the critics, not the servants, of emperors. If, then, one understands the political experience of the Roman people as the fortunes and achievements of a people who conceived themselves as guided by a religious destiny to rule and civilize the world, then, I think there are two important points at which a discordant note is struck. 1. The extension of Roman citizenship to all subjects of the Roman government. This, so to speak, dissipated, or began to dissipate, the notion of a ‘chosen people’. 2. The adoption of Christianity and the termination of the absolute unity of religion and politics, the last emblem of which had been the worship of the emperors themselves, although the discord struck by this note was profoundly qualified by the Roman character which Christian belief and the organization of the Christian church had acquired. The important change here was not the spread of Christian moral sentiments, somewhat different from those characteristic of Roman civilization, but the appearance of a religion which had an organization at least potentially independent of the civil organization of the state.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 3, fos. 203–17. Fos. 203–12, 214–17 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections; fo. 213 is a photocopy of an autograph sheet.
Roman Political Thought (2) 1 Last week we considered two features of the organizing sentiments, beliefs, and ideas of the Roman political experience: • What the Romans thought about themselves as a people, and the analogies they used when thinking about the community they believed themselves to compose; • The religious beliefs which informed and shaped this political experience. This morning I want to consider the family of related beliefs which, for the Romans, represented their understanding of government, the activity of governing, and the experience of being governed.
2 In this connection the first expression we have to consider is res publica. This is not an easy expression to translate. It is of, course, singular, not plural. Literally it means ‘the public thing’, or ‘the public concern’. It is sometimes translated ‘the state’. But this is a little off-centre. The Romans had a word for ‘state’—the word civitas—which stood for the political community, founded by Romulus, to which all Romans belonged. Res publica, on the other hand, stood for the ‘concern’ or the ‘affair’ in which all Romans believed themselves to be united: the public activity of the populus Romanus. Now, the Romans recognized (as most settled communities recognize) a distinction between things which, in some sense or
other, may be said to be ‘publicly owned’ and those which were privately owned. There were the res publicae (like roads and harbors), the owner of which was recognized to be the populus Romanus (or, as modern Americans would say, ‘the people’); it is not a matter of chance that American politics is shot through with expressions that come from Roman politics; the founding fathers had clearly before them the republican constitution of Rome. And there were the res privatae, things which were in private ownership. And further, there were res communes, which were things (such as the air, the sea and running water) of which nobody was the owner. But what distinguishes the expression res publica is that it denotes a political distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’. It indicates a notion, not of ‘public ownership’ contrasted with ‘private ownership’, but ‘public concern’ contrasted with ‘private concern’. Res publica was the common, or public, activity or concern of the populus Romanus. It was sometimes called, simply, res Romana: the Roman concern. We have noticed, among the Greeks, a distinction between public and private—particularly a distinction between a public place (the agora) and a private place (the household). But it was nowhere near as clear and precise as the Roman distinction. ‘Public’ meant for the Roman very much what it means for us— namely, that which is the concern of, and that which affects all members of, a community indifferently and none in particular. Now, government was understood, precisely, as the care and custody of res publica, the public concern in terms of which all Romans were united. And the ‘ruler’, whoever he might be, or whatever the name given to his office, was the custodian of the res publica Romana. In these circumstances, it is not difficult to understand how, on different occasions and by different people, this res publica Romana might be recognised narrowly as ‘the immediate concern’
of the Roman people, or widely and more profoundly as the destiny or fortuna of the Roman people. ‘Public policy’ might appear narrowly, in fighting off an enemy or in making a treaty or in a piece of legislation (such as the law which permitted marriage between plebeian and patrician), or in a wider interpretation as pursuing the fortuna of the Roman people. Thus, the Romans recognized a distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’, between ‘public law’ and ‘private law’, which the Athenians never quite managed to make. In virtue of this distinction the Roman communitas may be said to have been not only a political community (which Athens certainly was) but also a civil community: that is a community which recognized itself as private individuals or families joined together in the enjoyment of rights and duties in respect of one another. Private persons having not merely ‘private’, contractual relations with one another, but also ‘public’ relations with one another. This is the sort of community we should be at home in; we also live in a civil as well as a political society. We recognise private as well as public law. But Athens was a community of a different sort; one which is much more difficult for us to understand. Now, we have seen that governing, the care and custody of the res publica, for the Romans was understood to be, in the first place, a religious activity: winning and maintaining the favour of the gods for the public enterprise, endeavours, and activities of the populus Romanus. But under this aura of religion and dependence upon the gods, the Romans understood the activity of governing to be a mixture of what may be called ‘the exercise of initiative’ and the exercise of often great but always exactly and legally defined ‘powers’. A mixture of what they called ‘authority’, auctoritas, and ‘legal power’, potestas, a mixture between ‘leading’ and ‘administration’. And we must understand what they meant by these two words, auctoritas and potestas.
3: Auctoritas (1) As an abstract noun, the word auctoritas stood for the qualities which belonged to an auctor. And an auctor was a man who originated something—an author, a creator, a founder, or a progenitor. Consequently, auctoritas meant having the quality or characteristic of ‘inventiveness’ or ‘initiative’, or of being the source, or cause, or origin of something. Thus, auctor and auctoritas were words which could be used in connection with a number of different activities, such as writing a book, designing a building, inventing a machine, or even setting going a course of events. We are interested in it when it was used in connection with human activities which entail a relationship between a man (said to be an auctor) and other men. (2) The simplest, and probably the most primitive, appearance of this idea of being an auctor and having auctoritas was in connection with a family. The ‘founder’ of a family, its original progenitor (so far as recorded history is concerned), was its auctor. (Thus, in one image of the human race, not of course a Roman image, Adam would be recognized as its auctor; indeed, Adam is thought of, by Augustine for example, as ‘the author of all our misery’. And the Israelites looked back to ‘father’ Abraham as their preeminent auctor or progenitor.) But, if auctoritas is, supremely, the quality of the reputed progenitor of a family, every paterfamilias in his own generation must be understood to have a share of this quality of being an auctor. He displays his auctoritas in ‘carrying on’, ‘increasing’, ‘augmenting’ what the original progenitor, or auctor-in-chief,
began or ‘founded’. And he derives his auctoritas from being the current and temporary successor of the founder. Both auctor and auctoritas derive from the verb augere, which meant to ‘increase’, to ‘enlarge’, to ‘augment’, or ‘to add luster to’. Thus, in a family, auctoritas is handed on in an unbroken, legitimate transmission, there being no doubt who is, in any generation, its current holder, namely, the paterfamilias. He has a ‘natural’ authority over his family. (3) Now, we have seen the powerful pull of the analogy of the family upon Roman political thought; and it is a short step from auctoritas in the familia to auctoritas in connection with the populus Romanus and res publica. The founding father of Rome was Romulus.6 In the legend his ancestry was not neglected—the son of a vestal virgin (herself the niece of a chieftain) and Mars. But so far as Rome and the populus Romanus were concerned he was the auctor, the historic progenitor, and therefore the possessor of a natural auctoritas. Whoever, in the later political history of Rome, was understood to have auctoritas was believed to derive it from Romulus and his ‘foundation’. And the activity of every subsequent auctor was to ‘increase’, to ‘enlarge’, to ‘add luster to’, to ‘augment’ this original ‘foundation’. ‘Authority’ in the living always derived from the original auctor, the founder of Rome. Thus, anyone recognized to have auctoritas bore a special relationship to the populus Romanus, and had a special activity to perform in relation to res publica. For there to be no contemporary representative of auctoritas in the Roman state would have been recognized as a break with the original foundation which would be the equivalent of the destruction of everything that belonged to res Romana.
[6]
Oakeshott’s marginal note: ‘Founder of the “family fortunes”’.
(4) Our questions, then, are: (a) What was understood to be the exact relationship of auctoritas to res publica and the populus Romanus? ( b) Who w as understood to have auctoritas? and, How was it acquired? (c) What was believed to be the proper attitude of the populus Romanus towards auctoritas and its possessors? (a) The relationship between an auctor and the populus Romanus was, fundamentally, a tutorial relationship: to exercise auctoritas was to advise, to give guidance, and to educate. And in relation to res publica, what was to be expected from those who were recognized to have auctoritas was, not command and executive direction, but reflective advice and the sort of initiative in policy-making which could be supplied by men steeped in the traditio which joined the present generation to its roots in the original foundation. Thus auctoritas was an activity at once limited in its inspiration and totally unlimited in its range; and, as the Romans thought of it, it supplied something indispensable for the care and custody of res publica. It was a spring of political initiative, not a reservoir of political power; for, to have auctoritas was, precisely, not to have power (potestas); it was to be a teacher, not a commander. No state could be ruled by auctoritas, but a state without auctoritas (although it might be orderly and well-arranged) would be only devoid of any sense of direction on account of being cut off from the ‘tradition’ which flowed from its ‘foundation’. (b) Now, the Roman had no doubt that whoever had auctoritas acquired it from some connection, direct or indirect, he had with the original auctor of the Roman civitas. This connection must be historical, but the evidence of auctoritas might appear in certain observable personal characteristics. Among these characteristics, some giving more convincing proof than others, were age, birth, force of character, actual achievement, and a recognizable but indefinable ‘wisdom’ in counsel.
Of these characteristics, ‘age’ was the simplest and the most significant. But the elderly were considered to have auctoritas, not because their opinions might be supposed to be ‘mature’, but because to be old was to be nearing the time when one becomes an ‘ancestor’ and might be supposed (having, so to speak, one foot in the grave) to be in direct communication with the founding fathers. But, however surely a Roman might believe himself able to detect auctoritas in the face and bearing of a man, the main evidence that he possessed auctoritas was his historical or notional-historical connection with the foundation of Rome. Now, Romulus had, reputedly, chosen a hundred of the heads of the most distinguished families of early Rome to be his counselors, and this was the reputed origin of the senate. And the senate, being composed of patres, the ‘fathers’ of the populus Romanus, was recognized as the preeminent possessor of auctoritas. This historical connection with the original auctor was, of course, weakened by the passage of time and by the changes which took place in the composition of the senate; although a senate composed chiefly of ex-magistrates could still appear as a repository of political wisdom, and thus of initiative. But the attribution of auctoritas to the senate was unmistakably confirmed by its behavior over the centuries of Roman history. Even at those times, usually times of war, when the senate came near to governing Rome, it never pretended to executive power (except, perhaps, in the appointment of army commanders), and it worked always through giving advice and guidance to the consular magistrates. The right of the senate was the right to be heard and not interrupted when it gave advice; but its advice could be ignored. And, further, by attributing auctoritas to the senate, the Romans acquired the confidence that it was perpetually available to them: the senate never dies, and it is perpetually in session.
During the republic, then, the answer to the question, Who has auctoritas? was, unquestionably, the senate. But, as the republican constitution was gradually modified by Augustus, auctoritas was acquired by the princeps himself, although it was not lost by the senate. And the notable characteristic of the princeps was that, for the first time in Roman history, senatorial auctoritas was joined by magisterial potestas in a single office. But, at least so far as Augustus was concerned, auctoritas and potestas were never confused. He had auctoritas in virtue of being recognised as ‘Augustus’, as pater patriae and as princeps senatus, but his potestas, his executive power, came from a quite different endowment, which we will consider in a moment. There was one other set of people in the Roman state who, in later times, were also recognized to have auctoritas; namely, the jurisconsults. These were the learned writers on the law, who had no magisterial office but who (after the desuetude of the office of pontifex maximus) were recognized as both custodians and interpreters of the law. At first they were scholars who were consulted on account of their learning; but later, under Augustus, they were formed into a ‘college’ of jurisconsults and given official status. And, appropriately, since what a jurisconsult did was to give an ‘opinion’ about the law, or an ‘interpretation’ of it, he was said to have auctoritas. He was not a judge, deciding a case, but a man ‘learned’ in the law. (c) Lastly, the appropriate attitude towards auctoritas was the attitude appropriate towards an auctor; namely, reverentia, ‘respect’ and ‘deference’. He was not a ruler who commanded obedience, or a legislator who laid down a rule; he was a guide to be consulted and whose opinion should be listened to in all that pertained to res publica. (5) In auctoritas, then, the Romans translated what they believed to be an indispensable feature of political activity into the idiom
of a general idea: namely, the necessity for reflection about the conduct of public affairs. But what we have to try to understand is that Roman politics was not, what it often is for us, and what it was for the Athenians, an open-ended activity governed by imagined and sought-for desirabilities still to be enjoyed; it was the exploration of the intimations of an original foundation. Roman politics, understood to be the exploration of the intimations of an original foundation, required an understood and an unbroken connection with that foundation and its auctor; and this was supplied, first in the auctoritas senatus, and later in the auctoritas attributed to the princeps. What, in politics, the Roman asked himself was not will this policy or this change in the law have a desirable outcome, but is it congruent with the mos maiores, the ancient customs of the original foundation to which the populus Romanus belongs. And the bearer of auctoritas, the man whose words should be listened to, was recognized to be the custodian of the mos maiores of the Roman people and therefore as the guardian of the unchanging standards of conduct which should guide political activity. Auctoritas was the word the Romans used to denote what they believed to be one of the essential ingredients of government. What it supplied was, not merely counsel in connection with res publica, but insight into the fortuna, the destiny and the traditions of the Roman people, without which no policy could be formulated or successfully pursued. And, when it is properly understood, auctoritas may be recognized as a uniquely Roman idea. It had no proper counterpart in the political ideas of the ancient Greeks. Authority is defined, not in terms of the quality of its acts, but in terms of a procedure of authorization.
4: Potestas Now, to guide, to advise, to admonish, to teach, to provide that connection with the past which endows a people with a sense of their own identity—to do all or any of this, is not to ‘rule’. And as the Romans understood it, government, strictly speaking, was not the exercise of auctoritas, but the exercise of potestas. Potestas we translate as ‘power’; but it must be understood that what it stands for is legal or rightful power. It is not ‘physical power’—the Latin language has another word for that: potentia— it is the exercise of legally acquired potentia: the right to rule. (1) More exactly, the word potestas (in connection with government) stood for the rights and duties which belonged to each of the specified offices of state. Each office was, in fact, the right and the duty to do certain things; and these rights and duties were legally defined. On taking up an office the holder would swear an oath to perform the duties of his office exactly and according to law and precedent; and if he were to go beyond this he would be guilty of an illegality for which he might be brought to book at the end of his term. For no office (at least under the republic) was held for more than a specified period of time. There were many different offices; and during the republic they were greatly multiplied. A position such as that of tribune, which began by being informal, when it was turned into an ‘office’ was understood as the exercise of a definable potestas. For example, the tribunical potestas was, at first, the right to intercede on behalf of a member of the plebeian class if it seemed that he had been unjustly treated by magistrate or senate; and later, it became the right to summon the concilium plebis, to put propositions before it, to take a vote and to pass this plebiscitum on to the consular magistrate.
Government, then, when it was thought of as the exercise of potestas, was an activity distributed between a great number of different offices each with exactly defined ‘powers’. But all the rights and duties which pertained to all the different current officers of state could be thought of as composing a finite total, and this sum represented the total potestas available to be used in government—the total amount of legally authorized power available to the community. The potestas belonging to one office would, of course, be different from that belonging to another: a censor, a consul, and a tribune each had different rights and duties. But, besides being different, the potestas of one office might be recognizably greater or less than that of another: ‘dictatorship’, for example, was an emergency office to which extraordinary powers belonged; but these extraordinary powers were ‘powers’ which already belonged to different offices—‘dictatorship’ was a composite office; it did not add to the sum total of potestas. And further, the potestas of a particular office might vary with different circumstances. For example, the Romans made a very important distinction between the potestas to be exercised by an office holder within the city of Rome itself and the potestas he could exercise abroad. The military commander of a Roman garrison had far less power over his soldiers than he had over the same soldiers in the field. This way of thinking enabled the Romans to make an important distinction, which we have already noticed: a distinction between the office itself and the potestas which defined it. In virtue of this distinction they were able to think of a man exercising the potestas which belonged to two or more offices while not holding the offices themselves—which in most cases it would be illegal to hold concurrently. Thus, Augustus was successively endowed with the potestas of a consul, of a proconsul, of a tribune, and of a censor, and, in consequence, wielded an amount of potestas hitherto unknown for a single man, who had not been appointed a ‘dictator’, to wield.
Indeed, in theory, the princeps was simply a man who not only had the auctoritas senatus (though without depriving the senate itself), but also the potestas which belonged to all the important offices of state, and to hold it for life. He appeared as supreme guide and ruler of the populus Romanus. Thus, the Romans could recognize the imperial office as constituting no increase in the total potestas in the state, but merely as gathering together in one office all the hitherto dispersed potestas. (2) Now, there was one kind of potestas distinguished from all others by reason of its magnitude and importance: it was called imperium. This word had a long history, and in the end was used to signify something which simply did not exist when it first joined the political vocabulary of the Romans. Under the republic, imperium normally stood for the potestas of a military commander; that is, his power over his army. But, since in republican days, one or both of the consular magistrates might (on the outbreak of war) be given command of an army, imperium was not infrequently added to the consular potestas for the period of a campaign or of a war. And when he marched out of Rome at the head of his army, and when the pomerium (the boundary of the city) was passed, he put on a red toga signifying that from that moment he exercised the imperium militae, which, needless to say, was far greater than any consul possessed within the city. But, at a later stage in Roman history, there were other circumstances, besides those of actual warfare, when potestas equal to that of the imperium militae was believed to be necessary or appropriate. The governor of a province, called a proconsul, was endowed the proconsular imperium—a potestas far greater and more embracing than that which belonged to any consular magistrate in Rome itself.
And it was an extreme step to endow a man with ‘dictatorial’ imperium at home; this was never done except in great emergency and then only for a very limited period of time. Nevertheless, war, emergency, and the government of conquered peoples made the Romans acquainted with offices to which belonged extraordinary powers. And, I suppose, in a speculative sort of way, the potestas which was called imperium was thought of as simply a very large proportion of (perhaps, in some cases, the total) potestas available to be used in government. But the most important practical consequence was that there were offices which carried with them so much power (designed to be used only in particular circumstances) that it was more difficult for a man who used them out of place to appear as a monster of oppression. He was, indeed, only using recognizably legal powers—but not quite in the right place. Julius Caesar returning from Gaul, and setting up a dictatorship in Rome by military force, could be identified as a man, no doubt behaving unconstitutionally, but not unrecognisably: he was exercising the proconsular imperium (with which he had been endowed) but exercising it in Rome instead of in Gaul. And when it was thought necessary to endow a man with very great power in Rome itself, the model was there to be followed: he could be given the proconsular imperium. Thus, a proconsul was a man who, as governor of a province of Rome, normally had far greater potestas than a consul at home. It was when this proconsular imperium was added to all the other bits of potestas given to Augustus that he became a genuinely supreme ruler, and for life. Imperium, then, began by signifying that great exercise of extraordinary potestas which was entailed in pursuing the destiny of Rome in a military campaign. (3) But with Augustus the word imperium began to be used in a different manner. It no longer meant merely ‘rule’ or ‘government’; it stood for empire: the imperium Romanum was the Roman
empire as a territorial and administrative whole. It was a ‘thing’, not an activity. And its counterpart was imperator: emperor—who was custos imperi Romani: custodian of the empire of the Romans. And when this change took place, all the sanctity which had before attached itself in the Roman mind to the providential destiny of the Roman people to rule and bring order and civilization to the world, attached itself to the empire itself. The blessing of the gods was invoked, not upon the enterprise and the activity of the Roman people in pursuing their destiny, but upon the empire itself and upon its imperator who had rolled up in his single office all the potestas available, and held it for life. (4) But the question we must ask ourselves is: If the Romans thought that the potestas (in virtue of which a man might exercise ‘rule’ at one level or another) was leased out and distributed between the various known offices of the Roman state, where did they think it came from? And, oddly enough for an unspeculative people, the Romans were in no doubt about the proper answer to this question. The source and donor of all potestas was the populus Romanus itself. Potestas belonged to the ‘Roman people’, just as auctoritas belonged to the Roman senate. Thus, the Roman people understood themselves to be governed by the potestas with which they themselves endowed their rulers. And the bestowal of imperium upon a man was the greatest thing the populus Romanus could do. Until Augustus, they never did it save for a stated period of time. Now, this giving of potestas always took the form of appointment to an office (or to the prerogatives of an office), the potestas of which was already settled by law and custom. And, usually (although not always) the manner of the appointment showed where the potestas had come from. During the republic, for example, consular magistrates were elected by the comitia centuriata; tribunes were elected by the
concilium plebis; and either comitia or concilium had a hand in the appointment of all inferior magistrates. It is true that the part played in these elections by the popular assemblies was restricted: no name could be proposed from the floor of the house; voting was acceptance or rejection of a name presented to the assembly. And for long periods there were conventions which restricted candidates for certain offices to certain classes in Roman society. Nor, since potestas belonged to the whole populus Romanus and not merely to the plebs, was the senate left out of this process of appointment of magisterial offices. The formal approval of the senate was necessary for any appointment. Moreover, the imperial office itself, as it emerged, was not excluded from this procedure in respect of its potestas. Augustus and his immediate successors were properly appointed consuls before they were princeps, and they were separately endowed with the potestas of various offices in the usual manner. The only things peculiar about their position were that they often had the potestas without the office to which it belonged, and that they were endowed with it for life and not for the usual term of years. It later became the custom to pass a lex de imperio on the succession of an emperor which endowed him with comprehensive rights and powers. In later times there were often irregularities, but they were irregularities which often obliquely demonstrated that imperium belonged to the populus Romanus—such, for example, as the election of an imperator by the acclamation of his army. (5) Imperium populi Romani, ‘the rule of the Roman people’, then, was not an empty expression. It was the Roman people who ruled themselves and who ruled the Roman world through the agents which it endowed with power. And when imperium came to mean, not the activity of
ruling, but the empire itself, it was still the empire of the Roman people. There was, of course, nothing ‘democratic’ (in either an ancient or a modern sense) in this belief that potestas belonged to the people; for the Roman people never imagined that they could rule except through their appointed agents. But, vaguely perhaps, it was felt that while auctoritas belonged to the senate, potestas and the extreme of potestas, imperium, belonged to the people. And even some of the most autocratic emperors acquired their power from the lex regia passed at the beginning of their reigns.
5 Roman government, then, was understood as a subtle mixture of the exercise of auctoritas and the exercise of potestas. Under the republic these were never confused; and even during the period of the Punic wars when the senate took charge of res publica Romana and its advice became decision and direction, it never itself assumed executive office; it always worked through the consular magistrates. Indeed it might be said that if there was any theory of the republican constitution it was the separation of auctoritas from potestas.7 But with the rule of emperors, a certain confusion made its appearance. An imperator was recognized to have both potestas and auctoritas; and, having both, they tended not to be so clearly distinguished from one another. And the later jurists tended to ignore the distinction, regarding the will of the imperator as supreme, and not worrying to consider very much how he became endowed with this supremacy.
[7] Oakeshott’s mariginal note: ‘Potestas = election to office. Auctoritas = never election.’
6 Now, there is one other word which is important precisely because the Romans did not normally use it for ‘government’: the word dominium. Dominium belonged to the vocabulary of the Roman family or household. It referred to a specific potestas of the head of a household, namely, his potestas as the owner of property and slaves. In respect of his property and slaves, but not in respect of his wife, children or clientes, the paterfamilias was dominus (‘lord’) and exercised dominium (‘lordship’). But in spite of the fact that Romans found in the government of a family so appropriate an analogy by which to understand the government of the civitas, they fought shy of transferring the words dominus and dominium to their political vocabulary. Imperium was not thought of as dominium: the potestas of the rulers of the populus Romanus was not thought of as springing from ownership: ‘subjects’ were not ‘slaves’. Indeed it was from the populus Romanus that the rulers derived their potestas. The Romans, however, were familiar with other societies whose rulers were the owners of their territory, whose subjects (with little exaggeration) might be spoken of as their ‘slaves’, and whose potestas did derive from ownership. And it was in describing the government of these societies, and not that of their own, that the Romans used the word dominium. In short, the words dominus and dominium correspond to the Greek words despotes and despoteia, which, meaning the owner and master of slaves, were rejected by the Greeks in describing even the most autocratic ruler of a polis, and were used only to describe the rulers of Persia and Egypt. Nevertheless, when the Roman emperors acquired autocratic powers, this word dominus began to creep into the Roman political vocabulary; but rather as a general indication of the
absoluteness of their potestas than as a technical word meaning that their subjects were understood to be no better than slaves. The title dominus was offered to Augustus and to Tiberius, but it was refused, by the one out of policy and by the other out of contempt. But it was accepted by Caligula. Suetonius tells us that Caligula ‘did away with any pretense of being merely the chief executive of the populus Romanus’. ‘Bear in mind,’ Caligula is reputed to have said, ‘that I can treat anyone exactly as I like’. This, however, is to be recognized as the boast of a lunatic; at all events it was a desperate departure from the traditions of Roman government. Except that dominium might perhaps be recognized as the activity of one who, like an emperor, exercised both auctoritas and potestas. The words auctoritas, potestas, and imperium were the words the Romans used to signify the different activities in which the res publica Romana was cared for; the different activities which composed the activity of ‘governing’. Dominium, ‘rulership’ based upon ‘ownership’, ‘lordship’, was not, strictly speaking a political word at all; but, although it did come to stand on the edge of the Roman political vocabulary, the distinction between autocracy and despotism was not obscured.
Editorial Note LSE 1/19. Photocopy of a fifteen-page typescript with autograph corrections, except for the photocopy of the autograph page numbered ‘7a’ in Oakeshott’s hand. Another copy is at LSE 1/1/21, file 3, of which fos. 221–7, 229–36 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections; fo. 228 is a photocopy of an autograph sheet.
Roman Political Thought (3) 1 The thoughts of most communities which achieve any high degree of political self-consciousness are usually concerned with such matters as: • What sort of a political community do we compose? • What is ruling and being ruled? • What is the authority of rulers, and how do they acquire it? What are the rights of subjects, and how are they acquired? • What is law? And I want to say something this morning about the idea of law among the ancient Romans. Two things stand out very clearly. (1) A political experience, or a political culture, is composed of the pro-feelings current in the society, its valuations. And the Romans set a very high value upon something which the Athenians valued very little and scarcely understood, namely, legality. Legality can never be more than one of a number of values; but the Roman political culture is distinguished in recognizing it to be very valuable. They were most unwilling to sacrifice legality in favour of other values. (2) The law of the Romans is by far the most comprehensive and elaborate system of law that any people, save in modern times, ever generated for themselves. And among their contemporaries, the Romans were notable as intrepid lawmakers. They not only valued their law very highly, but they had some very clear ideas about the authority of law and the process of legislation.
Nevertheless, this Roman law, like any other, sprang from very primitive beginnings. But its emergence was, in many ways, very different from that of the law (such as it was) of the cities of ancient Greece.
2 The words we are concerned with are fas, nefas, jus, lex, edictum. Law is concerned with what is right and wrong in human conduct. (1) The most elementary and primitive conception of right and wrong in human conduct appears in the words fas and nefas. Fas stood for what is permitted and nefas for what is forbidden. Now, what was this idea of right and wrong? In the first place it was a ‘tribal’ idea. That is, fas and nefas stood for what is permitted and what is forbidden to the populus Romanus. No doubt it was a redaction from earlier tribal laws; but from the time when the populus Romanus emerged, they recognized themselves to be different from other peoples and were proud of that difference. And when they came into contact with other peoples, the Romans never even expected them to have the same rules of right and wrong conduct as themselves. And so long as they thought in terms of fas and nefas, they had no law which they could or wished to impose upon anyone else. Fas and nefas stood for what was permitted and what was forbidden to a Roman. Secondly, nas and nefas were religious ideas. The founders of the civitas were believed to have made a treaty with the gods in which the protection and favour of the gods was secured in return for certain duties performed; and it was these duties which comprised fas. It was a divine law, representing the will and pleasure of the gods, and it was the product of a covenant between the Roman people and its gods. A large part of it was a ceremonial law which determined the procedure to be followed on important occasions; and beyond this it was composed of some simple rules of ordinary conduct.
The custodians of fas were priests. But what distinguished fas was its origin in a covenant or a treaty with the gods; and these ideas of covenant and treaty ran through the whole of Roman legal thought; it is this which, more than anything else, distinguished fas from the Greek themis. The Greeks had next to no contractual relationship with their Gods. But, in other respects, it was like most other primitive law in that it identified sin and crime. Nefas is socially undesirable conduct because it is displeasing to the gods who, on account of it, might withdraw their blessing. (2) Jus. But, more rapidly than many other peoples, the Romans came to distinguish between religious duties, moral rules, and law strictly speaking. And the word jus represents a stage in the emergence of these distinctions. Jus, in its earliest meaning, meant that which is ‘right’ and ‘fitting’, not because it was the will and pleasure of the gods but because it was the custom of the society. As a late Roman lawyer put it, perhaps a little too definitely: ‘fas is divine law; jus is human law’. At all events, when jus came to be the word ordinarily used for conduct proper to a Roman, two kinds of jus were recognized: jus divinum, obligations to the gods, and jus humanum, obligations to one’s fellows. And this distinction set the jus humanum free to develop, not, of course, as a purely secular system of rights and duties, but as a system of rights and duties of which it was thought men and not gods were the responsible authors. Like fas, jus humanum was thought of as springing from a covenant; but a treaty, not between gods and men, but between families and tribal groups. It was not unlike thesmos; except that, whereas thesmos was thought of as the product of ‘doing’ justice to a variety of tribal customs, jus was the product of more specific covenants of mutual trust.
The custodians of fas were priests, and the jus divinum still remained in their care. But the custodians of jus, the jus humanum, were magistrates. Later, the word jus acquired other meanings. The activity of law-courts was described as jus reddere—which may be translated ‘to dispense justice’. It was the word used to indicate a whole section of the Roman law: jus civile meant the whole body of law which applied to the relations between Roman cives (citizens) and jus gentium (the ‘law of nations’) meant the whole body of law which governed the relations between cives and those who were not cives, that is, foreigners or what in Rome itself were called peregrini (temporarily resident foreigners). As a law governing gentes (nations), the jus gentium was the inspiration of the later European ‘international law’. (3) Fas and jus were, then, the words in which the Romans expressed the legal order of the communio Romanorum; they were the customary, unwritten law of the Roman people, relating to gods and men. But at some stage, difficult to determine (because Roman writers were apt to project into the distant past ideas and even words which did not become current until later times), the Romans acquired a third word for law. It represents an idea of law much more positive and historical than the ideas represented in fas and jus: the word lex. Various derivations of this word have been suggested, the most likely being that it represented the ideas of something binding and something read out, or spoken, or declared. But, whatever the truth about that, when lex came to be used as the ordinary word for a law, it stood for a law known to have been made at a certain time and a written-down law; in short, what we should call a statute. But, like the earlier Roman words for law, lex contained also the idea of an agreement or a covenant. And this idea was kept alive and reinforced by the methods by which lex was made.
Law as lex, then, distinguished itself from law as fas or jus because it reflected a process of lawmaking, legislation. And what lex was believed to be is revealed in the process in which it was made. Reputedly from its first emergence, and certainly from very early times, there was an assembly of the Roman people. The earliest assembly was the comitia curiata, but it was the somewhat later comitia centuriata which became what may be called the first ‘legislative’ assembly of the Roman people. It represented all classes in the Roman community, patricians as well as plebeians. In republican times it was called together by the consular magistrate. The making of lex was a process in which the presiding magistrate made a proposal, followed by the formula: ‘Is it your pleasure, and do you hold it to be the divine will that…?’ The proposal was a question, rogatio; and if, when the assembly had voted, the proposal was found to be accepted, it became lex, requiring only in addition the imprimatur of the senate. There was no debate; no proposal could be made from the floor of the house; and technically the legislator was the magistrate (legis-lator, meaning ‘the proposer of law’). All lex was recorded under the name of the consular magistrate who proposed it. Thus, it was (for example) by the lex Publilia (471 B.C.) that the lawfulness of an assembly of the plebs was established; by the lex Hortensia (467 B.C.) that the concilium plebis was recognised as a lawmaking body whose plebiscite had the force of lex; and by the lex Canuleia (445 B.C.) that mixed marriages between patricians and plebeian families became legal. Each of these were the names of the consuls concerned. Throughout the republic there were in fact two ‘legislative’ bodies, the comitia centuriata controlled by the consuls, and the concilium plebis controlled by the tribunes. Both operated with the same procedure of rogatio (question) and answer given by a silent vote. But whereas the resolutions of the comitia were called
lex, those of the concilium were called plebiscite—resolutions of the plebs. Later, after the plebeians had gained entry into the senate itself, lex could be made by consular magistrates senatus consultum, that is, ‘in consultation with the senate’. The fundamental change in lawmaking came gradually with the imperial constitution. The popular assemblies ceased to be the source of law, and lex was made, first, by imperial direction to the senate, and later by imperial proclamation (edictum or decretum). In the end the famous principle (which appears in Justinian’s Institutes) established itself: quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorum: ‘what pleases the princeps has the force of law’.8 Lex was the will of the imperator: the emperor was solus conditor legis, ‘the sole source of law.’ He had acquired (theoretically by the lex regia) the powers and prerogatives not only of magistrates and tribunes, but also of assemblies. Now, lex, made in these manners, entailed an idea of law which had two fundamental features. (a) Lex is a statement that, whatever may have been the approved practice in the past, henceforward this shall be the established rule. Every lex has a date from which it becomes current; and in this it differs from customary law, which has no date. Consequently, lex is a law which should have no retrospective application—it operates only from the date of enactment. And further, since it has been made, it is capable of amendment or even repeal. The important point about lex is that its authority derives, not from its reasonableness or convenience, but from the fact that it has been made by the recognized and legitimate lawmaking process. Lex is an artifact, and its counterpart is this specific and narrow idea of ‘law’. [8] Oakeshott’s marginal note: ‘Even when the emperor pronounced an edict, he did so as representative of the Roman people, who were the sole source of law.’
You may argue that it is inconvenient, even that it is unjust, but until it has been repealed it requires obedience. This is an idea of law that had very little counterpart among the Greeks. (b) Lex is, in form, a bargain, a covenant or a treaty; and the parties in this covenant are (on the one side) the magistrates, the administrators of law, and (on the other side) the populus Romanus. It has the arbitrariness of a covenant; and its operation depends upon fides, the magistrate and the administrator ‘keeping faith’ with the populus Romanus. This notion of a covenant was reinforced by the fact that, in republican times, lex was often a bargain between the patrician order (in whose hands most of the magistracies were) and the plebeian order (whose will was embodied in lex). The famous secession of the plebs from Rome and their settlement on the mons sacer was brought to an end by a solemn agreement or covenant in which the patricians promised the reforms demanded by the plebs, and this covenant was called the lex sacrata. And this notion of covenant survived into imperial times, growing more and more a fiction, when the law was thought of as a covenant between imperator and populus. (4) In the history of Roman law there was one great event which overshadowed all others. In early days, the law of the Romans was a customary, unwritten law, the sanctity of which was emphasised by its custodians being priests. Now, one of the earliest demands of the concilium plebis, when it had achieved the status of being a legal assembly, was that this unwritten law should (in the words of Livy) ‘cease to be kept secret among the mysteries and sacraments of the immortal gods.’ The demand was that the law should be written down and published.
The immediate occasion of this demand was the suspicion that the law of debt was being harshly administered by patrician magistrates. But the result of the demand was the setting up of a commission of ten patricians, the decemviri, whose task was to reduce the law to writing and to publish it. They took more than a year over the job (and were more than suspected of spinning it out in order to remain in power); but in the end what they produced was laid before the popular assembly by the magistrates (in the usual way) and was made lex. Ancient custom was converted into law. This was the famous twelve tables of the Roman law (lex XII tabularum). It was engraved on panels of metal and set up in the forum. And it was for ever cherished as the fundamental, original, sacred law of the Romans.9 All leges subsequently made were thought of as additions to or amplifications of this fundamental law. This, also, was thought of as a covenant—a covenant between patricians and plebs, in which it was agreed that law henceforth should be, not secret, but known to all. (5) The character of Roman law, and the methods of making law recognized by the Romans, then, reveal two beliefs of almost equal strength. (a) The conviction that the populus Romanus itself is the source of all law. This belief is the counterpart of the belief that the populus Romanus is the source of all potestas—executive power in government. And, together, these beliefs about law and government survived all the vicissitudes of constitutional change. Even the later emperors, whose word was law, and whose power was used autocratically, were thought of as having acquired their right to make law and their right to rule from the populus Romanus itself. [9]
Oakeshott’s marginal note: ‘Cp. Magna Carta.’
But, it should be recognized, that even under the republican constitution, the function of the popular assembly in lawmaking was never more than the right, without debate, to give or refuse their consent to what was proposed to them. (b) The belief that, by means of this process of making lex, the Roman people were emancipated from the rule of ancient custom. There are very few societies which have not had some difficulty in divesting themselves of the notion that ancient custom has a prescriptive authority from which there is no escape. There is the feeling that you cannot abolish custom, you can only try to forget it if it becomes too inconvenient. The Romans, however, did manage to emancipate themselves from the rule of ancient custom. In lex, a statute, they discovered a means of modifying, and even abolishing, ancient custom. And they helped themselves to this conclusion, in later days, by coming to think of ancient custom as itself lex and therefore capable of being emended in a lawmaking process. This belief that, by means of a known process of making law, they had command over their own rules of order was an elementary belief in what later came to be called sovereignty. A ‘sovereign’ authority is not merely one that has no contemporary superior, but one which is emancipated from the past.
3 Roman reflection about law was, then, clearly confined to reflection about the processes in which it could be properly made, and to the actual elaboration of a system of laws which embraced all the relationships that made themselves known in the course of their history. But there was one speculative idea, characteristically acquired from the Greeks, which the Romans resorted to in trying to understand the relationship between ‘law’ and ‘justice’. This was the idea of a law of nature, lex naturalis. An idea which had a long subsequent history in European thought. The experience of injustice is an experience common to all peoples. One form of injustice is easy to understand—namely, the injustice which springs from a corrupt administration of the law: the injustice which is identified as a denial of what are known to be your legal rights. For here the law itself provides the standard and criterion of justice. But there is another form of injustice which is less easy to give an intelligent account of—namely, when injustice is attributed to the law itself, to what the law itself commands or allows. How can the law itself be said to be ‘unjust’? What do we mean when we assert the ‘injustice’ of the law? This is an important question because assertions of this sort are often made. There is one simple way out of this puzzle. It is to recognize that an ‘unjust’ law is simply a law which has not been made in the manner in which it is recognized that all law should be made. In other words, if you cannot fault the way in which the law has been made, it must be recognized to be a ‘just’ law. And any people which has settled upon a procedure for making law is likely to look first at the way in which a law has been made when considering its ‘justice’ or ‘injustice’.
But this really answers a different question. You may agree that if a law has been made in the proper process, it ought to be obeyed. But to say that a law ought to be obeyed is not necessarily the same thing as to say that it is ‘just’. Thus, a law may be recognized to be legitimate, because it has been made in the proper way, and it may in consequence command my obedience; but it still may be thought to be ‘unjust’. How can this be? This is both a practical and a speculative question with which thoughtful people have always been faced. The Romans recognized it as a sensible question, and they answered it with the aid of an idea which Roman lawyers appropriated from the Stoic philosophy: the idea of a law of nature. Briefly, it was thought that ‘justice’ must be the correspondence of a demand or a duty or an act with a law of some sort. And in order to determine the ‘justice’ or ‘injustice’ of lex, the man-made law, an appeal must be made to another law, not made by men, and therefore not to be suspected of being ‘unjust’ itself. This other, or higher, law was the lex naturalis. And if this were thought to be a law embedded in the operation of the universe, or as having been made by a providential god, it could be considered to be itself absolutely and unquestionably ‘just’, and to afford a criterion by which to judge the ‘justice’ or ‘injustice’ of lex. This entailed the belief that some forms of human conduct were ‘naturally just’ and other forms ‘naturally unjust’; and lex which conflicted with ‘natural justice’ was, on that account, convicted of being ‘unjust’. This is the nearest the Romans got to a philosophical understanding of law and justice; and they put the idea to a variety of uses. (1) The law of nature was appealed to in the Roman courts when it appeared that the operation of the law would leave behind it the feeling that, somehow, less than justice had been done. Where lex
seemed unreasonable in its operation, an appeal could be made to reason itself, embodied in a law of nature. Or, the law of nature was sometimes appealed to when it seemed to a defending lawyer that the case against his client left nothing else to appeal to. (2) The law of nature was, rather vaguely, thought of as a source from which just lex might be generated. This was so particularly in those realms of human relationships where the law as it stood seemed unsatisfactory or inadequate or where there was no ancient custom to recognize as its source. It was under the aegis of the law of nature that the Romans constructed all that part of their law which was concerned with the relations between Roman citizens and foreigners, and was called the jus gentium, the ‘law of nations’, natio being the word they used to signify communities—such as the Jews—within the Roman Empire. In short, even in their most speculative and philosophical moods, the Romans clung to the idea of legality. They could think of no other way of criticizing the justice of current legal rules than by measuring them against other and higher legal rules, the rules of the law of nature. In other words, they recognized no fundamental distinction between the activity of the judge, the activity of the critic of current law, and the activity of a legislator. The judge decided cases according to the law. The critic of current law judged its justice by measuring it against a higher law. The legislator made law which could survive the ordeal of being judged according to this higher law. It was in virtue of the high value the Romans placed upon legality, and their understanding of what this meant, that the Roman civitas became and was what may be called a civil association. That is, a set of private persons joined in the recognition of a law to which they, all alike, owed obedience.
They could at times think of themselves as a people with a destiny to fulfill, and it was only in later times that they began to lose the sense of belonging to a family whose founder was Romulus. But behind all this was the idea that what held them together as a community was their ancient customs and the law which they had made for themselves. And, just as they shared with the peoples they conquered their technological achievements, so also they shared their law. They were, besides, a remarkably law-abiding people—at least in the centuries of the republic. For nearly seven centuries, the city of Rome had no police force, and capital punishment was unknown. (3) More speculatively, the idea of the law of nature was used simply to give a precise meaning to the belief that lex, even if legitimate and properly made, could not be considered to be automatically just.
4 I want to end by considering briefly another important word in the Roman political vocabulary: the word libertas—‘freedom’. Libertas was essentially a practical idea. It was not connected with anything so speculative as liberation from natural necessity. What was recognized as a bar to being ‘free’ were certain restrictions (mostly man-made) which were easily observable in the world. (1) Liber, was, of course, originally a deity—the Roman god of the vine, Bacchus, the counterpart of the Greek Dionysus; and libertas was, so to speak, being ‘uninhibited’. But for the early Romans ‘freedom’ was understood as the characteristic of a man’s genius, which was identified as his immortal part and was also regarded as his procreative spirit. In the widest possible sense, libertas was a condition in which a man’s genius could fulfil itself and demonstrate its immortality by founding a family or by ‘augmenting’ a family already founded. Freedom was the characteristic of an auctor, of an ‘originator’. This most general sense of libertas was exemplified: (a) in the belief that a condition of servitium (i.e., being a ‘slave’) was not ‘free’, because a slave’s genius could never demonstrate its immortality in this manner. He could get children, but never found a family, and he had no ancestors. And (b) in the belief that to become ‘adult’ and to put on the toga virilis, which was a recognition of procreative power, was to attain a certain sort of libertas. Further, freedom was generally connected with the human ability to act, which was also recognised as the work of the human genius. History was res gestae, ‘things done’ by human beings which demonstrated their freedom to act, their capacity to be an auctor.
(2) But, within this very general context, we are concerned with the political idea of libertas, the recognition that Rome began in a ‘free act’. And here the fundamental belief of the Romans, the belief to which all other beliefs about freedom were connected, was that the foundation of the city of Rome represented the most momentous ‘free act’ in their history, the founding of the family of the Romans. ‘Freedom’ was something that a Roman felt himself to have inherited from the way in which the Roman state came into existence—something, perhaps, a little like the feeling that modern Americans have that freedom is something they have inherited from the way in which the United States came into being. From almost every point of view, Roman political thought began ab urbe condita, from the foundation of the city. And this act of foundation was, for them, the original act of ‘freedom’. To be rooted in this foundation was the first and supreme ‘freedom’ for the Romans, because (as they understood it) their ‘mission’ was to explore and elaborate it and spread it through the world. In short, auctoritas indicated the path you must, as a Roman, tread; and libertas was to walk in that path. Thus, while auctoritas belonged to the senatus, the elders, the patres, libertas belonged to the populus Romanus: auctoritas senatus; libertas populi. To be free was not to be unguided; it was to follow a fortuna which you recognised to be your own. There was, then, an important sense of libertas, in which it was identified with being a citizen of Rome. Roman citizenship was the enjoyment of the Roman inheritance, and that inheritance was the outcome of an act of freedom, an act of the free, ‘generative’ spirit, the genius of Romulus. Thus, libertas was something Roman, and it was something that Romans could, to a limited extent, give to others by drawing them into the world governed by the imperium populi Romani.
This is why, when the Romans conquered the cities of Greece, they thought and spoke of that conquest as a ‘liberation’. What Rome gave to Athens was libertas. (3) But beyond this, the history of Rome (not unlike our own history) was recognized as the story of a people whose liberty was always being compromised and as often as it was lost it was regained again, usually dramatically. Junius Brutus, when he organized the expulsion of the last ‘king’, Tarquinius Superbus, was thought and spoken of as the ‘liberator’ of Rome; and ‘kings’ were ever after identified with servitude. The republic was an era of ‘liberty’, freedom being identified with the establishment of the consulship. Julius Caesar, when he entered Rome as a self-appointed dictator in 50 B.C., represented himself as the ‘liberator’ of the Roman people. Marcus Brutus, when he assassinated Caesar, was hailed, by many, as a ‘liberator’. Octavian, when, in 43 B.C., he defeated Mark Antony, was a ‘liberator’, and his rule as Augustus was represented as the restoration of ‘freedom’. On the death of Nero, Suetonius tells us, ‘citizens ran through the streets wearing caps of liberty, as though they were freed slaves’; because Nero had come to be recognized as more like a slave-master than a ‘ruler’. Later more than one emperor was assassinated to the cry of ‘liberty’. All this is, perhaps, a little confusing; not unlike the confusion which has overtaken the word ‘liberation’ in our own time. But there is some logic in it. Behind it was the distinction between dominium (‘lordship’) and imperium (‘rule’). Dominium was what an owner had over his slaves, and what the Roman was accustomed to think an oriental despot or a Hellenistic king had over his subjects—a despotic ‘lordship’.
Imperium, on the other hand, was ‘rule’ of a different kind. And it was believed that so long as you were subject to imperium (even if it was the imperium of a temporarily appointed dictator) you were ‘free’, or at least this was no bar to your being free. It was because Tarquinius had become a ‘despot’ that his expulsion established ‘freedom’. Lucretia was his property. It was because the republic was ruled by magistrates who were endowed with their potestas by the populus Romanus that it was though of as an era of freedom. It was because Caesar had become a ‘despot’ that his assassination by Brutus restored ‘freedom’. And it was because the Romans rescued the Greek cities from the ‘despotic’ rule of the Macedonian kings that they could represent themselves as bringers of ‘freedom’ to Greece. And within the Roman empire there were municipalities which were recognised as civitates liberae, free municipalities. These lived under their own law, and had financial independence, and their differences with the Roman government were settled by negotiations. The ‘unfree’ communities were ruled by a Roman ‘governor’. (4) Slaves, then, were ‘unfree,’ because they lived under the dominium of their masters. Minors were ‘unfree’ because they lived under the autocratic rule (potestas dominica) of their fathers. To live under a despot or a usurper was to be ‘unfree’. But citizens were ‘free Romans’, not because they enjoyed ‘self-government’ in any significant sense, nor because they ever themselves exercised imperium, but because those who did exercise it were known to have been endowed with it by the populus Romanus, and because they knew themselves to be joined in the common recognition of the authority of a law. The great moments in the history of Roman freedom were recognized to be: the foundation of the city of Rome; the expulsion of the last king; the recognition of the tribunes and the concilium
plebis; the publication of the twelve tables of the Roman law; the winning of the right of appeal from magistrates to populus on certain occasions; and the destruction of usurpers and rulers who had broken ‘faith’ with their subjects and become ‘despots’.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 3, fos. 237–55. Fos. 239–48, 251–4 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections; fos. 237–8, 249–50 are photocopies of autograph sheets.
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 peoples, their acquired past-relationship with Rome became far more important than their relationship with their own past. (2) Besides this Roman inheritance—or as an indistinguishable part of it—these peoples, coming with religions of their own, were converted to the Christianity which they found in the territories they occupied.
What they encountered, in the first place, was three different sorts of Christianity; each with some kind of organization: • Latin Christianity: the beliefs of an organized church which from about 300 A.D. recognized the bishop of Rome as its head, and called him pope. • Arian Christianity, which was a version of Christian belief which had been propagated by a man named Arius. It had been condemned by the council of Nicea in 325 A.D., but it continued to flourish in parts of Eastern Europe. • Celtic Christianity, a version of Christian belief current in the more northern parts of Europe and deeply entangled with other native religions. But incomparably the strongest of these organizations was that of Latin Christianity (Roman Christianity). Indeed, the pope had come to fill the place occupied by the later Roman emperors as head of the Roman Christian church, and by about 700 A.D. a uniformity of Latin Christianity had been established in medieval Europe. But not before 1200 can it be said that Christianity embraced the whole of the medieval world we are dealing with. Thus, the political cultures of medieval peoples may be said to be the institutions of government, and the thoughts about them, which emerged gradually from what these immigrant peoples brought with them, mixed with what they found—a Christian church, the relics of a Roman civilization, and peoples with laws and customs of their own who had known the Roman only as an overlord.
2 Our first business is to understand how this world of medieval political thought and activity emerged, who were the peoples concerned and what they brought with them, and their fortunes. The Roman world (orbis terrarum Romanorum), at its greatest, stretched from the Cheviot Hills to Egypt, from the Rhine to the Atlantic, and from Asia Minor to Spain. From the second century A.D. barbarian peoples were beginning to seep over its frontiers, particularly from the east and north-east. And, during the course of two centuries, this trickle of invaders became an irresistible flood of migrant peoples. Where the movement of peoples began, nobody knows; but it is known that the territory left by those who came over the borders of the empire was rapidly filled by others moving in from further east. The migrants were displaced peoples. During the fourth and fifth centuries these peoples spread themselves over the greater part of the continental Roman Empire: Britain, Gaul, Italy, Spain. In 476 A.D. the city of Rome itself was captured. This movement of peoples was slow enough for the Romans themselves to distinguish between the various peoples, and to give them names: Saxons, Goths, Franks, Burgundians, Alans, Vandals, Avars. Each of these peoples was a conglomeration of tribes—tribes with their tribal chiefs, their tribal laws, customs, religions, and manners of dealing with their common affairs. None of them had ever lived under Roman rule; all were alien to Europe. The circumstances of migration, however, broke up the tribal organization of these peoples. They moved into the Roman empire as ‘hordes’ composed of non-tribal groups, of various dimensions, which the Romans called comitatus.
This is a matter of some importance. Medieval politics, no doubt, began with many reminiscences of tribal organization; but unlike both ancient Greece and Rome, the political communities which in the end emerged in medieval Europe were not unions of tribes. And part of the reason why anything like a recognizable political community was so long in appearing in the post-Roman world was that this world was an immense and almost unqualified chaos of small, local communities. Indeed, apart from what was inherited from Rome, the political experience of medieval Europe was more nearly built up out of nothing than any other political experience we know of. A comitatus was a group or detachment constituted by a ‘leader’ (dux) and his ‘followers’ (comites). It was a small military formation held together, not by a tribal tie of common blood, but by a tie of fidelity, displayed in an oath of allegiance to the ‘leader’. The process was one of infiltration; or it became so after the peoples who had for long lived on the frontiers of the empire and who had learned some military skill and organization from the R omans, had a ctually defeated the R oman defenders.
3 This period of movement and migration was gradually succeeded by settlement. The piece of territory upon which any of these peoples organized in these detachments settled seems to have been determined largely by pressure or absence of pressure from behind. They cast about for a home where they might come to rest. It was a slow process. The Iberian peninsula, for example, was invaded by the Suevi, the Vandals, the Alans, and the Visigoths, who had crossed Gaul. But the Vandals moved on to north Africa, and the Visigoths first came back over the Pyrenees to settle in southern Gaul and later returned to conquer the whole of Iberia. Some of the Saxons settled just east of the Rhine, others invaded Britain. The Salian Franks settled in northern Gaul; the Austrasian Franks in southern Gaul and the Rhineland; the Ostrogoths in Italy. This activity of settlement generated the first, primitive territorial communities of medieval Europe. Now, wherever these peoples settled there was already an indigenous population, not tribal in character, sometimes living in towns of Roman foundation, and often larger in numbers than the immigrants and having laws, customs, and a religion of their own. The immigrants mixed with these natives, and the communities which emerged came to be distinguished by the territory they occupied, and neither by a tribal belief in common blood, nor even by a common law. And it was in these circumstances of settlement and mixture that the first so-called ‘kings’ of medieval Europe emerged: men of authority who were neither tribal chieftains nor merely leaders of military formations, but rulers who had managed to impose themselves upon bits of territory. The dux (leader of a comitatus) became rex (king), and a ‘king’ was a ‘lord’—a ‘land lord’.
4 In many cases it is, of course, an exaggeration to call these early settlements of European peoples ‘communities’; or to attribute to these ‘kings’ anything so specific as ‘government.’ Each settlement was a chaos of multiple peoples, laws, customs, and religions. In any village (to say nothing of larger settlements) there were wandering men who, having been used to carrying their own law with them wherever they went, claimed to be under a different law from their neighbors, and particularly from that of the native who remained. In short, the situation called for ‘politics’—a reconciliation of differences. But there was next to no political experience to draw upon. These ‘kings’ were men of violence, who ruled for the most part by force and in virtue of military superiority, possibly with some relics of the authority of tribal chiefs, and always in virtue of the possession of land. Some of them, in the course of time, carved out considerable ‘kingdoms’. Clovis, who styled himself as ‘king’ of the Salian Franks and took the Roman title of consul, was particularly successful, and managed even to found a short-lived dynasty. And Theodoric in Italy, of course, had the advantage of succeeding to the prestige of a ruler in Rome. The problem of government was how to impose and maintain the rudiments of law and order in a world in which the pax Romana had been destroyed, in which a single, recognized ‘law of a territory’ had not yet emerged (but in which many different laws were current), and in communities in which there were recognized to be ‘noble’ families, families of free men, and serfs and slaves. ‘Noble’ often signifying merely ‘conqueror’; ‘serf ’ often signifying ‘the conquered’. Settlement was, in fact, the acquisition of land; the ownership and cultivation of land was the main feature of these communities;
government, such as there was, was the exercise of ‘lordship’: rule in virtue of ownership. All authority was connected with landed property. The ambition of every ambitious man was for the power that came from the ownership of land. But he could buy power only by giving away part of his land in return for military support. And this is what he did: paid for support by alienating land to men who became his tenants and his subjects. On the other hand, the need of every man was for a protector more powerful than himself. And to meet this need a practice emerged which perhaps owed something to the old comitatus. Free men who were relatively powerless ‘commended’ themselves to those who were more powerful. They pledged their loyalty to one more powerful than themselves, thus turning his potentia into potestas. In this practice a ‘lord’—one who owned more land and disposed of more resources—would acquire a retainer, and the retainer would acquire a powerful protector. A ‘king’ was often a ‘lord’, perhaps recognized to have royal blood, but chosen by his fellow ‘lords’ to organize the defence of a territory or a people, and given the necessary support to perform this service. He was a man to whom others ‘commended’ themselves for particular purposes; usually war. In short, something like political societies were constructed out of the most elementary materials—the materials of a simple social structure, of authority deriving from ‘lordship’ and from ‘commendation’, and a notion of law which went back to primitive tribal times. Of these communities the smaller were the more durable; ‘kingdoms’ emerged only to dissolve again. For, where the possession of land is the only source of power, and where the only way a landowner could acquire ‘subjects’ was by alienating part of his land to others in return for their support, the process was inherently self-defeating. These ‘kings’, for example, created counts and dukes, and the counts and dukes destroyed the power of kings.
Moreover, according to custom, on the death of one of these ‘kings’ his ‘kingdom’ would be dispersed among his heirs, and the process of collecting together and consolidating a ‘kingdom’ would have to begin all over again.
5 Now, these people, the invaders and settlers of this once Roman world, brought with them their religions: religions which, no doubt, had begun in tribal ancestor-worship but which had, in some cases, acquired gods and elaborate theological beliefs. Coming with these religions, they entered a world in which, for a century or more, the Christian religion had been spreading itself. And they became converts to Christianity. The conversion was, in most cases, the work of missionaries sent out for the purpose from what had already become the centre of the Christian church in the West, namely Rome. Thus, for a people to be converted to Christianity meant not only throwing out old religious beliefs and acquiring new (which we may suppose was often a very slow process), but also being brought within the orbit of an organized church and of the authority of its head. Indeed, the only authority in early medieval Europe which did not derive from the ownership of land was that of the church and the pope. And since the normal method of ‘conversion’ was first to convert the ‘ruler’, the ‘king’ (who then imposed the new religion upon his people, often by force—in the same manner as the converted Roman emperors had imposed it upon their subjects), these ‘kings’ acquired an added prestige and the office of king acquired a reflected sanctity. Christian kings were crowned in an ecclesiastical ceremony; and among their duties was the duty of defending the Christian church within their realms and, often, of defending Christendom against the attacks of pagan invaders. Christian beliefs about the duties of kings, in the course of time, penetrated deeply into the political beliefs of medieval peoples; but the immediate political impact of Christianity upon these converted peoples was to add a sanctity to the office of kingship
and thus to enhance the authority of rulers whose authority was otherwise often not very great or very durable. A notable example of this was that of Clovis, who, being elected king of the Salian Franks, established himself in northern Gaul, with his capital in Paris at the end of the fifth century. He was converted to Christianity, he imposed Christianity upon his subjects, and his alliance with the Christian church gave a religious sanction to his authority—not unlike the religious sanction which the emperor Theodosius had sought from Christianity—which made him the most powerful ruler of his time.
6 Thus, even in these early times, when force was so much more in evidence than recognized and legitimate authority, there emerged an institution and an idea of ‘kingship’, closely connected with the church of Latin Christianity. It was compounded of outstanding personality, the resources which came from the ownership of land, the belief in royal blood, the constant need for an organizer of defence, and the sanctity provided by coronation in a Christian ecclesiastical ceremony. Kingly rule was not very far removed from the analogy of family rule; it retained a fundamental element of ‘lordship’; but it was on the way to being ‘political’ rule, and the impact of Christianity pressed it in this direction by adding a new source of authority to it.
7 In this early medieval Europe, incomparably the most successful ruler was Charles, known as Charlemagne, king of the Austrasian Franks. At the end of the eighth century, he had gathered together by conquest, and held together by a rudimentary system of administration, an empire which stretched from the Ebro (in Spain) to the Elb, and from the North Sea to the Tiber. It was an empire composed of great counties and duchies, in which counts and dukes ruled as ‘lords’ in virtue of their ownership of land. But it was a ‘political’ empire because the authority of Charles himself was not based upon ‘lordship’ but upon the authority accorded to him by dukes over whom he ruled, and upon an administrative and judicial organization which he superimposed upon the rule of the counts and dukes. And in the year 800, in recognition of the position in Christendom which he had carved out for himself, he was crowned imperator by Pope Leo III in Rome: the first of the medieval ‘emperors’, who came to represent in their office some shadowy ideal of the political unity of Christendom. Nevertheless, even with this prestige to support it and the not insignificant administrative system he had built up, Charlemagne’s empire did not survive him. According to Frankish custom, it was divided between his sons, and subsequently suffered further division. Moreover, even in the ninth century, Europe had not passed out of the era of movement, invasion, settlement and resettlement. Peoples were still on the move, entering, harassing or pressing upon this old Roman world, all of them non-Christian. A great movement of Muslim peoples from Arabia began in the sixth century. In the course of a hundred years they occupied the whole of north Africa and Spain, and in 722 reached Tours in
France. Here they were defeated but they remained in occupation of a large part of Spain until the end of the middle ages. In the eighth century Europe was invaded by the Norsemen, who first ravaged the northern shores of Europe and later established settlements in England, Ireland, Normandy, Sicily, and the eastern Mediterranean. In the ninth century the Magyars invaded Europe from the east. They occupied parts of northern Italy and Provence, and withdrew only after their defeat by Otto I of Germany at Lechfeld in 955. In short, for the better part of eight centuries the territory which had been that of the Roman empire had no rest: nine hundred years of violence and invasions. And not until these had been repelled or accommodated could Europe begin to acquire a durable political shape.
8 From about the ninth century, however, more durable political shapes began to emerge. The political experience of medieval Europe became: First, an experience in which, over a large part of Europe, local rulers of various magnitudes, dukes, counts, margraves, bishops (who ruled their tenants and retainers by virtue of their ownership of land) not only became subject to the rule of kings, whom they elected, but themselves gave shape to the laws, institutions, and beliefs characteristic of a medieval monarchy. Secondly, an experience in which some of the old Roman municipalities of the empire which had retained their independence generated republican governments of their own. Thirdly, an experience in which, largely under the inspiration of the Christian church, Christendom acquired a semblance of political unity—an experience of empire.
9 There are similarities and differences in the processes in which— to call them by their modern names—France, Germany, England, and Spain, the four great realms of medieval Europe, emerged. (1) In 987 Hugh Capet, Count of Paris, was elected king of the West Franks by his fellow lords—the dukes of Aquitaine, Burgundy, Normandy, and Brittany, and the counts of Flanders, Vermandois, Champagne, and Toulouse. He regarded himself as the successor of Clovis and Charlemagne, and his descendants ruled France as kings until the end of the eighteenth century. But it was nearly four hundred years before the king of the West Franks could speak of himself properly as king of France, and before France emerged as a political community. (2) In 918 Henry, Duke of Saxony, was elected king of the East Franks by his fellow lords—the Dukes of Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia, and Lorraine. Their immediate need of a king was the need of an organizer to defend their lands from the invading Slavs, Magyars, and Norsemen. But the office of king was established, and Henry was succeeded over a period of nearly five hundred years by kings holding this office. But Germany, neither in the middle ages nor at any subsequent time, became a ‘kingdom’: partly because the wealth and power of the great dukes and margraves enabled them to retain a large measure of independence, and partly because the office of emperor, with all its distracting obligations and engagements, became annexed to the office of king of the East Franks. Germany remained an agglomeration of semi-independent principalities—duchies, margravates, ecclesiastical states, and free cities—held together in late medieval times under an inconsequent imperial constitution.
(3) Britain, first conquered by the Romans, then by the Saxons, a prey to the invasion of Danes and Norsemen, a land of seven kingdoms, achieved some sort of unity in the tenth century under Saxon kings—a unity which was tremendously enhanced when the island was finally conquered by the Normans. Earlier than any other of the medieval realms, England became a kingdom whose unity was uncompromised by the independence of great lords and ‘lordships’, and over a period of four and a half centuries it explored a political experience in which the nobility, the free men, and the king each participated. (4) The Iberian peninsula, after the collapse of the Visigothic kingdom, was overrun by Arab invaders who, early in the eighth century, penetrated as far as southern France. When the tide of this invasion receded, the peninsula became a land, like France, ruled by lords whose authority derived from the ownership of land. By the thirteenth century it had been composed into four kingdoms—Navarre, Castile, Aragon, and Portugal—and the remaining Arab province of Granada in the south. By the end of the middle ages it had become a single kingdom in which, nevertheless, the pull of provincial independence was strong and has remained so to this day. (5) Italy, after the collapse of the Ostrogothic kingdom, became and remained a divided territory of small civil and ecclesiastical principalities and free cities. It suffered perpetual invasion: by the armies of Byzantium, by the Normans who established a short-lived kingdom in the south, by the armies of the king-emperors of Germany, and by the armies of Aragon and France. The Italy of which Machiavelli wrote in the early sixteenth century was, politically, not very different from the Italy of the ninth century: a battlefield of contending ‘lords’, mostly foreign invaders.
10 Now this, often confused and always changeful, political experience gave medieval people a number of political themes to reflect upon, the most important of which were: (1) The rights and duties of civil rulers. This theme was reflected upon mostly in connection with monarchy, but it was a theme of considerable complication. There were monarchies of different sorts; and in each an intelligible relation had to be determined between kings and dukes; and between civil and ecclesiastical authorities; and between the various kingdoms which composed what by the ninth century came to be called Christendom and the church, which in a large manner constituted Christendom. In general this reflection upon kingship was a prolonged endeavor to understand a ruler who was not a ‘lord’, a ruler whose authority did not spring from ownership: a political head and not the owner of an estate with tenants. How could legitimate authority emerge from the rule of force? (2) The duties and liberties of subjects. This theme is the obverse of the theme of kingship and was a prolonged endeavour to understand a ‘subject’ who was not a ‘tenant’, somewhat similar to the endeavour in ancient Greece to understand a citizen who was not a tribesman. And it generated the second great political invention of medieval times. If the first invention was kings who were not mere ‘lords’, the second was parliaments: meetings of men who were ‘subjects’ and not mere ‘tenants’. (3) The nature and authority of the church. In medieval Europe, religion and politics were related to one another in a manner somewhat different from their relation in ancient Greece and
ancient Rome; and this difference conditioned the whole of medieval politics and political reflection. (4) The nature of law. Here again there was vast complexity. The middle ages inherited a multiplicity of laws and a multiplicity of notions about the authority of law; and it was their fortune to add greatly to that multiplicity. It was a theme of perpetual interest and importance. (5) The nature of property and ‘lordship’. It was in reflecting upon this theme that medieval thinkers may be said to have discovered ‘politics’. (6) The idea of empire. This theme gathered into itself reminiscences of the never-forgotten Roman empire, and was the nucleus round which was grouped the never-neglected ideal of Christian unity in its political aspect. ‘Lordship’, property, kingship, parliaments, the liberties of subjects, the church, medieval laws, empire: from one point of view these are all recognizable as what are called ‘institutions’— that is, patterns of conduct, manners of behaving, improvised in response to situations or in answer to requirements. And the political experience of medieval Europe is an experience of continuous inventiveness and improvisation; the view that this was a period of European history of even comparative stagnation has nothing whatever to be said in its favour. These ‘institutions’ were the product of human choices; and some of them may even be recognized as first designed to serve a particular purpose—although, where this is so, they rapidly outgrew their original design. A king might be designed to organize the defence of five dukedoms against a common enemy, but he became a unique and durable political character.
The church, which was first the organization of the life and worship of the converts to a new religion, became the mightiest political power Europe has ever known. A parliament, first devised to provide support for royal authority, might become an indispensable partner in government. All these, then, from one point of view, are institutions. But from another point of view, they are thoughts and families of thoughts. They are the understanding people had of conduct, the expectations people entertained about behavior, the interpretation they imposed upon events and happenings. Kingship is what came to be believed about the authority and office of men called ‘kings’. Property is what was believed about the legitimate relations between men and things. ‘The church’ is what was thought about the relation between the spiritual and the temporal life of human beings. And it is from this point of view, as thoughts and organizations of thoughts, that I propose to consider them.
11 Lastly, medieval political reflection did not neglect the more general and philosophical themes, themes which had been explored by the ancient Greeks—the nature and necessity of government, the source of authority, the division between the public and the private realm. And on these matters the reasoning of medieval thinkers was utterly unlike anything we have met in the ancient world. As political philosophers they had a style of their own, of which I shall try to give you some impression.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 4, fos. 257–70. Photocopy of a typescript with autograph corrections.
Medieval Government 1 There are four words commonly used in the middle ages in connection with the authority and the office of a ruler. They are Latin words; they carried with them meanings for the ancient Roman state, but they had new meanings imposed upon them in medieval political thought. (1) Potestas. This was the most general word for the authority of a medieval ruler; it stood for his right to rule. (2) Dominium. This word stood for a special sort of relationship, namely, ‘lordship’. ‘Lordship’ was a relationship which derived from the ownership of land. A ‘lord’, strictly speaking, had tenants or serfs or even slaves, but not ‘subjects’. A lord was not, as such, a ruler; but as rulers were also, all of them ‘lords’—‘lordship’ and ‘rulership’ were connected. A ruler was ‘lord’ of his own land; for example, John was king of England and lord of Ireland. (3) Jurisdictio. This meant ‘to have jurisdiction over’. And it might refer to a territory or to a particular set of people. Jurisdictio was the right to do certain things—e.g., to hold a court of law, or to levy a tax. ‘Jurisdiction’ was always defined and always limited. It was a relationship between a ruler and his ‘subjects’, not between a lord and his tenants. (4) Gubernaculum. This was originally a maritime word, meaning the activity of a helmsman or a pilot. It was used by the Romans in a colloquial to stand for ‘government’. The ruler is being thought of as the pilot of the ship of state. In the middle ages it acquired a technical meaning.
It meant all those powers or authorities to decide or to act which belonged to a ruler, but were not comprised in his ‘jurisdiction’. A ruler as a judge in a court of law was exercising his jurisdictio; a ruler as the initiator of policy, declarer of war and peace, a ruler as a leader, was exercising his gubernaculum. Thus gubernaculum was an open-ended activity; jurisdictio was precise and limited. And the two words corresponded to, and distinguished between the two different kinds of activity which it falls to any ruler to exercise.
2 Now medieval peoples may be said to have had two deeply rooted prejudices, or beliefs, about ruling. They began, no doubt, as feelings, but they came to be written up into principles. (1) First, they believed that for a man to have authority over others, for him to have a right to rule, was something he must have acquired. No man could be thought of as having a natural right to rule over other men; or, to put it another way, a right to rule could not derive from any natural quality that the ruler, as a man, might have—his superior strength; his superior intelligence or virtue. Now, you will see that this belief excludes any close analogy between the authority of a ruler and the ‘natural’ authority of a father over his family. And further, it made it very difficult for medieval peoples to believe in an hereditary right to rule—to believe, that is, that the right to rule could be acquired by inheritance. Indeed, for medieval peoples, inheritance had to do with the ownership of land and not with the right to rule. And the notion of an hereditary right to rule was not really medieval at all; it appeared first in Europe in the sixteenth century when ‘kingship’ began to be regarded as itself a piece of property. In medieval times, such things as ‘royal families’ were certainly recognized, and a man might succeed to the office of ruler by inheriting it from his father. But it was not this that endowed him with his right to rule. Or to put it another way, a right to rule belonged to the office of ruler, and although there might be proper and improper ways of coming to occupy this office, it was not these which constituted the right to rule. Where, then, could he get his right to rule from?
As medieval people understood it, he could acquire a right to rule, authority, only be being given it by somebody who had a right to give it. And the conclusion they reached was that only God could give a man the right to rule over other men. They argued that the only self-evidently legitimate ruler in the universe was God, and that, consequently, all human rule must be understood to derive from God. Omne potestas est a Deo. Now, as we shall see, they thought that there might be a variety of procedures through which a man may acquire from God the right to rule, but all of them were recognized as bestowing the right to rule only because they were recognized to be channels through which God had given authority. So, in an important sense, all human rulers are deputies of God. They are occupants of offices which have got their authority from God. (2) The second deeply-rooted belief of medieval peoples was that ruling was the activity of a monarch. Asa broad generalization it would be true to say that nothing which fell outside monarchy seriously entered into the thoughts about government of medieval peoples. Monarchy was, in fact, the political inheritance of the middle ages, both from its Roman imperial pedigree and from its Teutonic pedigree. But, although this was the accepted view, medieval ways of thinking required it to be justified and made intelligible. Various general ideas were adduced to support this monarchical experience. For example, in the monotheism of Christian orthodoxy, God himself was recognized to be a monarch; and all earthly rule (understood to be a ‘representation’ of this divine rule) must therefore be monarchical also. The sublunary world was the counterpart of the world above the moon; and a human ruler who was not a king would be unintelligible.
But to be a monarch, to ‘rule’, was always to hold a more or less specified office. And what we are concerned with is the office of kingship, because it was to this office that potestas—jurisdictio and gubernaculum—belonged. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that the office of ‘king’ was ever, in the middle ages, a uniform office. There were recognized to be various sorts of king and various modes of kingship. To speak of medieval kingship as if it were a single, settled, and unequivocal institution would be a great mistake.
3 Kingship in the middle ages may be said to have been a complex and manifold institution composed of two diverse dispositions and pointing towards two simple and ideal types of monarchy, which rarely, if ever, corresponded exactly to any of the actual monarchies. These two ideal types of monarchy may be called ‘absolute’ and ‘conditional’ monarchical rule. Neither of these words is medieval, and I use them merely to describe the two ideal directions in which medieval belief about monarchy found itself pulled. (1) ‘Absolute’ monarchy. Here the ruler was believed to derive his potestas directly from God. The authority to rule is a direct gift of God. For example, Coke in Cowdrey’s case defines an absolute monarch as one independent of the pope. The ruler may be elected (indeed, he usually was), but election was understood to be appointment to an office; and the potestas belonged to the office. It is ‘absolute’ if the responsibility it entailed was owed directly to God and to nobody else. This, in medieval parlance, is monarchy Dei gratia, by the grace of God. This does not mean that in monarchies which approximated to the ‘absolute’ type, there were no recognized standards in the conduct of the holder of the kingly office, that there was nothing that he ought not to do. Such standards certainly existed; but in a monarchy of this sort the king is responsible only to God for their observance. He is, and he remains, king Dei gratia, by the ‘grace of God’. And grace is neither an indication nor a warrant of good character or good behavior. Grace, in Christian theology, is an unmerited gift of God. Many kings and popes were known to have disreputable characters, but their authority to rule was not derived from their ‘natural’ characters.
(2) ‘Conditional’ monarchy. Here the kingly potestas was, also, believed to derive from God, but not directly. The intermediary between the king and God was the king’s subjects, those over whom he ruled—or some of those over whom he ruled. A king in this position was, of course, recognized to be responsible to God for the performance of his duties, but this was an ultimate responsibility. His immediate responsibility was to his subjects. And in these circumstances his subjects (or some of them) were recognized to have a right to exercise some control over him, and to recall him to his duties if he neglected them, and perhaps even to depose him. Here, again, the middle ages does not provide us with an exact and unmodified example of this type of monarchy; but this was one of the directions of all medieval thought about kingly rule. These, then, are the two directions in which medieval thought about kingly rule tended to run; and I want to illustrate them by saying something about three different examples of monarchy: the government of the church, the government of France, and the government of England.
4 The medieval Christian church was incomparably the most authoritative and the most sophisticated of all the political institutions of medieval Europe. Nearly all medieval ideas about government were first generated in the church; and the medieval church was the political educator of Christendom. It is from this point of view I want to talk about it. The word ‘church’ (ecclesia) in the middle ages did not stand for the whole body of baptized Christians. The church was not, in this sense, a community or society of all those who had common Christian religious beliefs. It was understood to be a set of men, who, in respect of occupying certain offices, were recognized to have authority to rule over the inhabitants of Christendom in respect of certain, not very exactly defined, activities. Generally speaking, they were activities which were said to concern the soul and salvation as distinct from the body and its earthly welfare. These men were the holders of a variety of ecclesiastical offices in many different organizations—parochial, diocesan, monastic, and organizations (often under archbishops) annexed to the particular realms of Christendom and composing rudimentary ‘national’ churches. But it is possible to speak of the church in medieval western Europe because the bishop of Rome very early established his supremacy over the whole of this organization. In 343 A.D. the Council of Sardica authorized appeals to Rome. This supremacy was unmistakably acknowledged in the title of papa (pope) which from the fifth to the eleventh century was gradually appropriated uniquely to this bishop. And by about 700 A.D., the papal or Latin church had destroyed the early Celtic church and had suppressed the Arian heresy. The pope, then, was a ‘ruler’; he was the occupant of a recognized office to which was annexed a potestas, a right to rule.
The subjects over whom he had this right to rule were of various sorts: 1. The holders of ecclesiastical offices—bishops, abbots, priests, etc. 2. In the later middle ages anyone who belonged to the class of persons known as ‘clerks’ (that is, at its widest, literate persons) was claimed by popes as falling within their rule. 3. The claim of some of the later popes to exercise their potestas over kings and emperors was based upon the view that they, also, were holders of ecclesiastical offices—coronation being an ecclesiastical ceremony. Uncrowned rulers—dukes, counts, margraves etc.—were, as such, outside the papal potestas. 4. All persons in respect of some of their activities, for example marriage, family relations, making wills etc. It was, for example, by church law that usury was forbidden in the middle ages. During the middle ages the person appointed to the office of pope was always an already consecrated bishop. In early centuries, popes were elected by the clergy, the senate and the populus of the city of Rome; they were sometimes nominated by kings (Theodoric nominated Felix in 526), and by emperors; but the accepted method of appointment became election by a body of ecclesiastical magnates known as the college of cardinals. By reason of the rule of sacerdotal celibacy in the Western church, hereditary succession to the office of pope was legally impossible. But the manner of election had nothing whatever to do with the potestas of a pope. That belonged to the office itself; and the papal ‘office’ appeared long before that of any of the other kingly offices of Christendom.
A pope, on election, made no promises to his electors or to anyone else. He did not, like other kings, await sanctification in a coronation ceremony. He immediately succeeded to the potestas of the office. This potestas was believed to derive directly, without contemporary intermediary, from God himself. The pope was ruler of his subjects Dei gratia; and he was responsible only to God. By what process was it understood that the papal office had acquired this potestas? The potestas of the papal office was recognized to be of two sorts: potestas ordinis and potestas jurisdictionis. The potestas ordinis belonged to a consecrated bishop, and thus the pope enjoyed it already, before his election. To it belonged the sacramental powers of a priest which he acquired at his ordination or consecration and which were believed to have been handed down in an unbroken succession from bishop to bishop, not unlike the auctoritas of the Roman senate. The potestas jurisdictionis, on the other hand, was peculiar to the office of pope. It was the ‘right’ in virtue of which all ecclesiastics were subject to his rule. This was understood to derive directly from the commission of Christ to St. Peter to found and govern the church, as recorded in the New Testament. In short, to be elected pope was to succeed to the potestas with which it was believed St. Peter had been directly endowed by God. It was the potestas of an absolute ruler, responsible to God alone. As successor to St. Peter, and ‘head’ of the Christian church in Western Europe, the pope was, then, a ruler exercising an imperium over all his subordinates. In the course of time, a great deal of landed property came to be annexed to the office of pope, but his rule was never dominium, rule in virtue of the ownership of property. It was potestas, political rule, not ‘lordship’. This rule was exercised with the assistance of a curia of cardinals; and it made itself felt throughout Christendom by means of papal
emissaries, known as legates, direct representatives of the pope himself. The potestas jurisdictionis of the pope was the unshared and absolute right: (1) to make decisions about the conduct of ecclesiastical affairs, and (2) to make law for the church, and to judge all ecclesiastical causes according to the canon law, which was, so to speak, the domestic law of the church. It was a potestas which went back to that of the Roman emperors, who had been the recognized heads of the Christian church, and who had often been depicted in ecclesiastical robes. In every realm of Christendom there were ecclesiastical courts, conducted usually by bishops, which had jurisdiction not only over the conduct of ecclesiastics, but over all men in respect of certain matters. In virtue of this ecclesiastic jurisdiction of the pope throughout Christendom, it was recognized that in every realm of Christendom there were at least two ruling authorities—an ecclesiastical or papal authority, and a civil or kingly authority. And these two jurisdictions were known as the sacerdotium and the regnum. But the papal court in Rome was the head of a hierarchy of courts, itself hearing all important cases and settling appeals from lower courts. Moreover, it was the pope as a judge in his own court who assumed jurisdiction over the disputes of medieval rulers and who sanctioned treaties between kings. It was a papal bull which in 1493 divided the newly discovered but unexplored lands of South America between the kings of Spain and Portugal. In short, the papal potestas jurisdictionis was the rule of a ruler, a legislator, and a judge. Now, as may be expected, this understanding of the potestas of the papal office did not appear suddenly. It emerged gradually and was not fully established until the twelfth century. But it had already been formulated in the eleventh century by one of
the most remarkable of medieval popes—Gregory VII, known as Hildebrand. The so-called Dictatus Papae Gregorii VII (1075) set out the principles of the papal imperium with absolute clarity. The pope is declared to be head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Christendom; and all potestas exercised by any ecclesiastic derives from the potestas of the pope. All are agents of the pope; and his direct agents, papal legates, are declared to take precedence over all others. The pope has the sole right to appoint, transfer, or depose all holders of ecclesiastical offices. Every ecclesiastical court in Christendom operates under his authority; the pope himself is the final dispenser of all justice. He has the sole right to promulgate laws for the church, to create new bishoprics, to ordain clerics. He alone may summon a general council of the church. Thus, there emerged in the twelfth century the understanding of the papal potestas as a plentitudo ecclesiasticae potestas; an absolute imperium, derived from God alone, responsible only to God; boundless, exceptionless, complete, and imprescriptible—a potestas perfecta. In addition to this ‘absolute’ potestas, or right to rule, the pope claimed (and it was recognized to belong to his office) an auctoritas, ‘authority’. Now, we have seen that auctoritas for the Roman signified an activity of guardianship rather than ‘rule’, a right to advise, and to teach, and to admonish. And this is what it also meant in the political vocabulary of the medieval church. It corresponded to the notion of gubernaculum—the right to decide policy; to be a helmsman. The papal auctoritas was exercised in respect of two different, but related, matters. (1) In virtue of his auctoritas the pope was recognized to be the guardian, the custodian of Christian doctrine, and its sole
authoritative interpreter. This ‘authority’ he was held to have derived from St. Peter. It might be used to settle, judicially, actual disputes about Christian belief; but it was something much larger and less defined than merely this. Like the auctoritas of the Roman senate, which was the guardianship of the tradition and the fortuna of the populus Romanus, the papal auctoritas was the authority to guard and to ‘augment’ and to interpret Christian belief according to the tradition founded by St. Peter in response to the commission of Christ and carried on in the great doctrinal general councils of the church in the second and third centuries. Here, as in so many other respects, the Christian church in the West reflected the beliefs of the ancient Romans: the pope in respect of doctrine was like an emperor who had succeeded to the auctoritas of the senate; a general council of the church itself corresponding to the senate. (2) But the pope was not only recognized to have auctoritas over Christian doctrine; he claimed, and he often successfully exercised, auctoritas over the kings and emperors of Christendom. Here, also, auctoritas was the right to advise, to teach, to warn, and to admonish rulers. This auctoritas went back in an unbroken succession to the auctoritas exercised by the great bishops over emperors in Roman days: an ecclesiastic like Ambrose of Milan admonishing an emperor like Theodosius. The ground of this auctoritas was the pope’s position as guardian of the Christian church; and it was often used to instruct kings and emperors in their duties as Christian rulers and as protectors of the church. But in the course of time it went far beyond this, and became the right to instruct and to admonish rulers in all their conduct as rulers. This is what pope Galasius I in the fifth century believed himself to be establishing when he claimed that, while the kingly and the ecclesiastical potestas were separated and were
exercised in Christendom by two different sorts of rulers, popes and kings; nevertheless, the ecclesiastical auctoritas extended to the supervision of the conduct of kings and emperors. Innocent III instructed John to come to an understanding with and make peace with the magnates of England in 1215. Now, at least from the time of Gregory VII, this papal auctoritas over kings began to be interpreted and used as if it were potestas— that is to say, a right to rule, to command, and to punish. For the most part it was used when a monarch ruled in such a way as to neglect or to prejudice the interests of the church in his realm; but in fact the claim went far beyond this. And at least part of the ground of the conversion of this auctoritas into potestas was the belief that kings, in virtue of being anointed persons, were in some sense ecclesiastics and therefore came under the potestas jurisdictionis of the pope. Nor were the punishments at the disposal of the pope with which to execute the judgments of this potestas ineffective. He claimed the right to depose kings and emperors, and to excommunicate them thereby to absolve their subjects of their allegiance. Gregory VII deposed the Emperor Henry IV; Innocent IV deposed Sancho II of Portugal and appointed a regent in his place; and King John of England was excommunicated and his subjects absolved from their allegiance. The papal monarchy in the middle ages was, then, a very close approximation to one of the ideal types of medieval monarchy, namely, an ‘absolute’ monarchy. And, in respect of the pope’s potestas and auctoritas being universal throughout Christendom, he was universally recognized as one of the ‘rulers’ in every medieval realm. And he was a ruler whose jurisdiction went far beyond narrowly ecclesiastical matters. He was the ruler of all that jurisdiction known as sacerdotium. But, although the papal monarchy is a close approximation to this ideal type of medieval monarchy—‘absolute’ monarchy—it did not quite coincide with the type, which remained a merely ideal type.
For the history of the later middle ages is, among other things, the history of the incursion of the beliefs and ideas connected with ‘conditional’ monarchy even into the papal monarchy itself. The whole of what is called the conciliar movement in the fifteenth century, all the claims then made on behalf of general councils of the church to share the authority of the pope, and all the ideas you will find, for example, in the writings of Marsilius of Padua about the government of the church—all these are to be understood as the ideas connected with that other ideal type of medieval monarchy (‘conditional’ monarchy) being applied to the papal monarchy itself. Nevertheless, medieval Europe never came nearer to a conception of absolute monarchy than it did in the papacy; and when the notion of ‘absolute’ civil monarchy was later explored, the model in the minds of the explorers was that of the papacy. When some kings in the sixteenth century claimed a plentitudo potestas they were aping a claim made centuries before on behalf of popes. The church of Latin Christianity was, then, a political institution; and the manner in which it was governed, and the manner in which its rulers exerted their right to rule, represents one of the most important directions of medieval thought about the office of ruler. And, as a political education and example, the church may be said to have made medieval Europe familiar with two very important ideas. As we shall see, the authority of the office of a king only very gradually emerged out of the authority of ‘lordship’. ‘Kingship’ only gradually became distinguished from ‘lordship’—regale (kingly rule) from dominium (rule in virtue of ownership). But the potestas of the pope was never dominium; it never had anything to do with ‘ownership’ of land. It derived from Christ’s commission to St. Peter. Papal authority began by being ‘regal’ authority. And thus, the church supplied medieval Europe with an idea of ‘rulership’ already completely detached from ownership.
Secondly, the papacy supplied medieval Europe with an idea of absolute regal authority. And the so-called ‘absolute’ rulers of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were applying the model of papal rule to a civil state, having themselves in fact acquired some, if not all, the potestas of a pope.
5 The second example of monarchical government I want to consider is that of the kings of France. France, after the collapse of the Carolingian empire, was a land in which the great dukes and counts ruled in their dukedoms and counties. Their rule was ‘lordship’—that is, the right to rule based upon the ownership of land. They were grands seigneurs. Each was the immediate owner of an estate, a demesne. And beyond this they administered a customary law among their ‘vassals,’ as these did among those under them. They were jealous of their independence; their titles were hereditary because they were connected with land; and they had a monopoly of military force within their counties or dukedoms, which were often very large. Among these, in the tenth century, was the count of Paris, whose lands in the Ile de France were, in fact, less extensive than any of the other grands seigneurs; he was by no means the greatest ‘lord’ in France. There had been kings in France in earlier days, the most notable of whom was Clovis, king of the Salian Franks in the fifth century. A convert to Christianity, Clovis had been crowned in an ecclesiastical ceremony in Paris, and had exercised some vague authority beyond his own lands. In 987 Hugh Capet, Count of Paris, was elected ‘king’ of the West Franks by his fellow lords—the dukes of Aquitaine, Burgundy, Normandy, and Brittany, and the counts of Flanders, Vermandois, Champagne, and Toulouse. And a ‘king’ (though nothing more than a count in his own demesne) is something more than a seigneur. What more is he? Where does his authority as king come from? His authority in no sense extended into the lands of his fellow lords and electors. It was solely an authority over them,a recognition by them of his value mainly as an organizer of defence
against common enemies. He was a ‘king’ of ‘lords’, not of France. Hence, whatever the source of his authority, it was certainly not seigneurial. Although, of course, his actual power (potentia) was derived from the resources which came from being seigneur in his own land. But, he was a ruler, crowned in an ecclesiastical ceremony at least four centuries old even in France; he was the holder of a sanctified office and therefore something very much more than a count of Paris, and his authority was significantly more than merely a ‘lord’ elected by his fellow ‘lords’. He had been elected to an office. Indeed, tracing his office back to Clovis and to Charlemagne, it was understood that his royal potestas had not been given him by his electors, nor did it derive from his royal blood; it was something he had acquired in the anointing ceremony of his coronation. The oil of anointment had, according to repute, been brought by a dove from heaven for Clovis’s coronation, and it was preserved from generation to generation, over centuries. He was king Dei gratia. This was the peculiarity of kingship in France. The king in France made no promises at his coronation, he acknowledged no duties to his people—he could scarcely be said to have subjects— but only to God. He was rex sacerdos; the bishop’s words at the coronation were: ‘through this crown you become a sharer in our ministry’. If his electors, his ‘vassals’, the great dukes and counts, had given him more authority, there might have emerged a notion of kingship in which the kingly potestas was understood to derive from the gift of his ‘vassals’, the notion of a king accountable to his subjects. But they gave him little and that grudgingly. What power he acquired he took for himself; his authority came from God at his coronation. Kingship in France, then, began as an approximation to what I have called one of the two ideal extremes of medieval monarchy— ‘absolute’ monarchy.
This did not mean that French kings had extraordinarily great power; quite the reverse, they had very little. It signified only that their potestas was derived, not from their subjects, but directly from God, and was bestowed on them in an ecclesiastical ceremony. But, having become kings, the counts of Paris began to rule in their own ‘country’, not only as seigneurs, but also as kings. They ruled as imperatores, exercising an imperium, not derived form ‘lordship’ but from God. The law of the city of Paris became the king’s law, promulgated de plenitudo potestatis regiae (out of his absolute kingly right). And the emergence of the French monarchy was a process in which a king, powerful only in his own ‘lordship’, and coming to rule his own country as a king, and not merely as a ‘count’, gradually extended his authority from this base. At first, the most he could exact from the great dukes and counts was what they exacted from their ‘vassals’—namely, ‘fealty’; the obligation not to make war on him and to support him in his military enterprises. And the French monarchy emerged not from a king enlisting the cooperation of his mighty ‘vassals’ and acquiring extended authority from them, but from a king, believed to rule Dei gratia, gradually destroying his ‘vassals’ and extending his demesne to take in their land, by conquest, sequestration, marriage, and all the other means by which a medieval monarchy could emerge. It took many centuries. But this was not a process in which he extended his ‘lordship’, but his ‘kingship’. The result of this was that, in the French monarchy, ‘lordship’ and kingly potestas were joined in a way which they were not joined elsewhere. And if this had not been so, the history of French politics would have been very different from what it has been. Now, there was one important consequence of these beliefs about the authority of the French king. Since the king ruled Dei gratia, his competitor in authority was not his subjects, but the church. A king ruling Dei gratia was a
king whose source of authority made him susceptible to papal pressure. And throughout the middle ages the kingly government of France suffered more than that of any other medieval realm from papal supervision and papal interference. It was, indeed, in an attempt to frustrate the claims of the pope in France that the French monarchy acquired some of the characteristics of that other ideal type of medieval monarchy— ‘conditional’ monarchy. We shall see later what these were and how deep they went.
6 The third example of kingship I want to notice may be called ‘feudal’ kingship. It may be thought of as an approximation to that ideal type of kingship I have called ‘conditional’ kingship. The word ‘feudal’ may be taken to stand for an ‘order’ of an elementary kind which emerged first in northern France and Burgundy and later spread, in various forms, nearly all over Europe, and became a recognized political order. From one point of view it may be seen to be the sort of ‘order’ which sprang from an extension of the early practice of ‘commendation’. The weak, but free, man ‘commends’ himself to a stranger and thus becomes the ‘vassal’ of a ‘lord’. The ‘vassal’ owes services to his ‘lord’; the ‘lord’ protects his ‘vassal’, for example, he holds a court in which disputes between vassals may be settled. From another point of view, it can be seen to spring from the practice of a large owner of land giving tenancies of parts of his estate to others in return for services. The tenancies may be of various sorts, and the services of various kinds. Either way, the result is a legal relationship of mutual benefit, based upon the ownership of land, between a ‘lord’ (dominus, seigneur) and his ‘vassals’. Both are ‘free’ men; and there is a compact between them made under oath. Now, this arrangement may take place at any level of society. But when several great ‘lords’ ‘commend’ themselves to one of their number, electing him to perform some office on behalf of all (such as that of an organizer of defence against a common enemy) a ‘feudal’ king may emerge. Or, when the ‘lord’ of a very extensive estate parcels out large parts of this estate (in this case called ‘fiefs’) to lesser ‘lords’ in return for services, and undertakes to protect his ‘vassal’ lords, again a ‘feudal’ king may emerge.
In both cases, the ‘lord’ who enjoys ‘kingship’ is legally related to his ‘lordly’ vassals; they have entered into a mutual compact with him in which each owes to the other a service or services. The normal services owed by a ‘vassal’ to his king were auxilium (military aid) and concilium (advice or counsel), and the duty of not taking up arms against him. The normal protection was a court for settling disputes. But where a ‘feudal’ king does emerge, he is something different from merely one ‘lord’ among others. His authority over his ‘vassals’ derives from the compact he has with them, and is not itself the authority of ‘lordship’. And further, when this king is crowned in an ecclesiastical ceremony he acquires an added authority, quite different from that of either ‘lordship’ or of compact. The ‘feudal’ king’s superiority is signified in his duty to protect not merely the ‘lordships’ of his fiefholders, but the kingdom. And a kingdom is something different from a ‘lordship’. And it lies also in his coronation. The conditional character of feudal kingship is signified in the king’s duty to keep the compact he has entered into with his fiefholders to perform the services expected of him, and in their right to hold him to that duty. A ‘feudal’ monarchy, then, was an elaborate network of personal legal relationships based upon the holding of land. The king is recognized to be the head of a hierarchy, owing duties to those under him, and being recognized to have the rights necessary for the performance of those duties. These are the rights of kingship. Now, there was an element of ‘feudalism’ in most medieval monarchies. Sometimes it was qualified (as in France) by a strong belief in the Dei gratia title of a king; sometimes it was strong enough to assert itself as the dominant belief in respect of the king’s authority. This was so in England, in spite of some features in the AngloNorman monarchy which gave the king a stronger position and a more independent authority that a simply ‘feudal’ monarch.
But in England, also, kingship had peculiar difficulty in emerging from ‘lordship’. At the Norman conquest it was established that, notionally, the whole territory of England belonged to William the Conquerer by right of conquest. At the conquest all the ancient seats of ‘lordship’ were abolished, and William asserted his ‘lordship’ over the whole land. This territory was then parceled out as ‘fiefs’ to ‘lords’ who thereby became the tenants-in-chief of the king, owing him services. Each tenant-in-chief had sub-tenants of parts of his ‘fief ’; and the king himself had the rights of ‘lordship’ over his own demesne, upon the resources of which he lived and governed. But the ‘fiefs’ of the tenants-in-chief were scattered; there were no enormous estates such as existed on the continent. And the royal demesne, also, was not concentrated in one place, but consisted of scattered ‘royal’ manors. No tenant-in-chief enjoyed the right of justicia (the right to hold an independent court) in his ‘fief ’. Justice was the concern of the king throughout his realm. And by the Oath of Salisbury a direct relationship was established between the king and, not only his tenants-in-chief, but all his subjects. The Norman kings of England were among the first to have ‘subjects’ who were not themselves ‘lords’. They are kings of ‘England’. Now, all this was something like a carefully planned ‘feudal’ monarchy. It gave the king the strongest possible hold over his tenants-in-chief, but it admitted that the king owed duties to his subjects to the performance of which they had the right to hold him. And this was recognized in the coronation oath of medieval English kings. The king in England, then, like the king in France, was certainly believed to be responsible to God for the care of his subjects, and he was certainly believed to rule Dei gratia. But there was something else in the situation which qualified the absoluteness of his authority.
He owed duties to his subjects; he recognized these duties in his coronation oath; and his tenants-in-chief were recognized to have the legal right to hold the king to the performance of these duties—a right which they exercised on several occasions, the most notable of which being the presentation of Magna Charta to King John in 1215. The authority of the king of England was the authority of the head of a ‘feudal’ hierarchy of ‘lords’. But, if his authority was, thus, ‘conditional’ or ‘constitutional’ (in the way in which the authority of the king of France was not, and the authority of the pope certainly was not) it was, nevertheless, very great. In so far, then, as a ‘feudal’ element entered into the authority of a medieval king, his ‘kingship’ approximated to what I have called the ideal type of ‘conditional’ or ‘constitutional’ monarchy. And it was an acute observation of political writers in Russia in the nineteenth century that what stood in the way of converting the ‘absolute’ rule of the tsars into a ‘constitutional’ rule was the fact that Russia had never been feudal.
7 These, then, were the main directions of medieval thought about the authority of rulers. (1) The kingly office (except in the case of the pope) was a notion of ruling which gradually emerged out of ‘lordship’. (2) Since the actual resources of a king were, largely, the resources of his own demesne, ‘lordship’ (the right to rule derived from ownership of land) remained a component of the notion of kingship. The dual personality, or ‘two bodies’, of a king. (3) But the potestas of a king, his right to rule as a king, was gradually detached from his ‘lordship’. And the beliefs which clustered round it pulled in two different directions. • Those beliefs which tended to recognize his authority as Dei gratia, and therefore, in respect of his subjects, absolute. • Those beliefs which tended to recognize his authority as that of the head of a feudal hierarchy responsible to his subjects for his rule, and to recognize his subjects as having a legal right to recall him to his duties, and perhaps even (if necessary) to depose him.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 4, fos. 271–94. Fos. 271–5 are photocopies of autograph sheets; fos. 276–94 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections.
The Medieval Theory of Empire 1 The history of medieval political thought is littered with the words imperium and imperator—‘empire’ and ‘emperor’. But it is not always clear what these words stand for; and, in different contexts, they have so many different meanings that, at first sight, they seem to stand for nothing specific at all. Nevertheless, they were connected with a direction of medieval political thinking (half practical and half visionary) which is both interesting and very important for understanding medieval politics. The words themselves were, of course, inherited from ancient Rome; and, although they were often detached from any reminiscence of ancient Rome, there was one connection in which they were used which contained a very clear reminiscence of ancient Rome. How were they used and what did they stand for in the middle ages? First, we must understand that there were many realms within the political experience of the middle ages which, at one time or another, were called and recognized as ‘empires’, and were ruled over by ‘emperors’. There was, in the first place, the ‘Roman empire’ of the East, with its capital in Byzantium. This lasted until 1453 when it fell before the onslaught of the Turks. Throughout the middle ages, after the fall of Rome in 410 A.D. to the Goths, this Byzantine empire was recognized to be the one genuine relic of ancient Rome, dating from Diocletian’s division of the empire in the third century. Then there was a Bulgarian empire, a Serbian empire, a German empire, from the thirteenth century a Russian empire, and the Castilian kings of Spain were rulers over what was known as a Spanish empire. In all of these cases the ‘emperor’ was a sort of ‘king of kings’ who exercised a hegemony over various realms and
princes and this hegemony was thought of as an ‘empire’. They might perhaps be called ‘feudal’ empires; at any rate they were empires on the ground. Secondly, the words ‘emperor’ and ‘empire’ were used simply to indicate political independence, to indicate that the ruler and the realm were subject to no higher or external authority. This is the meaning of the words in the well-known medieval political maxim: rex est imperator in regno suo—‘the king is emperor in his own realm’. And it was reflected also in Henry VIII’s claim that ‘This realm of England is an empire’. It stood for an assertion of political independence made against the claim of any other ruler to have superior jurisdiction, and (in the case of Henry VIII) made against a claim of the papacy. Moreover, various kings of medieval Europe took imperial titles (like the title Augustus)—Philip II of France was known as ‘Philip Augustus’—intending only to assert their importance in a general way. But, thirdly, there was a quite different use of these words ‘empire’ and ‘emperor’—a use in which they were neither mere assertions of independence, nor indicating a particular piece of the territory of Europe and the supremacy of the ruler of that territory. And it is this use which we have to consider.
2 After the death of the emperor Honorius in 423 A.D. there ceased to be a ‘Roman empire’ in strict descent from Augustus in the West. From this date the only Roman emperor, in this strict descent, was the emperor in Byzantium. Nevertheless, from the year 800, for a short period, Charlemagne, the king of the Franks and Lombards, held the title of ‘Roman emperor’, a title which one of his sons, Louis, also held. Then, from the eleventh century, the expression ‘Roman empire’ (imperium Romanum) came back into currency: from the twelfth century there was something which was called ‘the holy empire’ (sacrum imperium); and from the thirteenth century there was something called ‘the holy Roman empire’ (sacrum imperium Romanum) which was supposed to have lasted until it was destroyed by Napoleon in 1808. Our questions are: What were medieval people thinking of when they used these expressions: ‘Roman empire’, ‘holy empire’, and ‘holy Roman empire’? And, what were they thinking of when they used the word imperator (emperor), and did not mean by it (for example) the ruler of the Bulgars, or a mere assertion of independence on the part of a feudal king? Perhaps we should be clear, first, that they were not thinking about either of two things which we might suppose them to be thinking about. They were not thinking of a so-called ‘revived’ ancient Roman empire in the West. They called it (often, but not always) a Roman empire; and I don’t believe that they could easily have thought what they did think without having some reminiscence of the empire of ancient Rome in their minds. But they were not thinking of a ‘restored’ or ‘re-established’, or a ‘renewed’ Roman empire. They were, in short, thinking of something new, something that made sense only in medieval circumstances.
They were not thinking of a piece of the territory of Western Europe ruled over by somebody called an ‘emperor’. There were such territorial empires, but the medieval ‘Roman’ or ‘holy Roman’ empire was not a piece of territory. Consequently, when they spoke of a ‘Roman’ or a ‘holy Roman’ emperor, they meant a man who occupied an ‘imperial’ office, who had duties, functions, and an ‘imperial’ authority, but whose imperium was not a piece of territory; because there was no piece of territory in medieval Europe which could be called the ‘Roman’ or the ‘Holy Roman’ empire.
3 Now, to our way of thinking, this appears an odd situation: an emperor without an empire; a ‘Roman’ emperor, yet not believed to be a successor to Augustus. And we may resolve the puzzle by asking: Who were the people who thought and talked in this manner? When did they begin to think and talk in this way? Who were these emperors? How did they acquire their title? What were their duties if they were not, as emperors, the rulers of a piece of territory? (1) The medieval Roman ‘empire’, or the holy Roman empire, was, fundamentally, an invention of ecclesiastics; first of popes and later of ecclesiastical lawyers. And it was a remarkable case of the invention in practice of something that was required by theory but which did not exist until it had been invented. Expedit esse imperatorem: ‘it is necessary that there should be an emperor’. What is the necessity? Why must there be an emperor in the sense that if he did not exist he had to be invented? The short answer to this question is that an ‘emperor’ was required by ecclesiastical theory, and by ecclesiastical circumstances. The situation was as follows: In the time when the ancient Roman empire in the West was still a reality, and after the adoption of Christianity as its official religion, the emperors were, in a special sense, the secular protectors of the church. Some, like Theodosius in the fourth century, were recognized as performing this function with special zeal. Julian the Apostate, it is true, was notably hostile to the church and its interests, but he was recognized as having failed in one of the duties of a Christian emperor. On the death of Honorius, however, there were no more Roman emperors in the West, and the leaders of the church (and later the popes) had to seek protectors where they could among the secular rulers of Christendom. In the early centuries they looked to the
emperor in Byzantium—and in the fifth century we have seen that pope Galasius I could write to the emperor in Byzantium setting out the ecclesiastical theory (which was merely an abridgment of earlier practice) that pope and emperor were, under God, the joint rulers of Christendom, the pope exercising an ecclesiastical auctoritas and the emperor exercising an imperial potestas in the interests of the Christian faith—but the emperor was powerless to do what was wanted. After his failure to establish his authority in the West in the sixth century, he was no longer a possible protector. (2) This is the context of the event which may be taken as the enterprise of the church to make for itself an ‘emperor’ in the West who should be its sword and its shield, and also its agent in the protection of the Christian faith against its enemies. This event was the coronation of Charles, King of the Franks and Lombards, as ‘Emperor of the Romans’ by Pope Leo III on Christmas day in the year 800; Charles having been ‘elected’ (according to the ancient forms) by the people of the city of Rome. Charles was the mightiest king in Christendom—the obvious choice of a pope looking for a sword and shield for the church in the West. Moreover, there was immediate work to be done on behalf of the church—the protection of Christendom against the invading Arabs. In short, there was a function to be performed and the functionary had been invented to perform it. What, then, emerged in the year 800 was this strange medieval figure—an emperor without an empire. For Charles was not ‘emperor of the Franks’; he was, as emperor, ruler of no territory. But he was the chosen partner of the pope in the custody of Christendom and protector of the interests of the church and the Christian faith. Thus, imperator was the title of he who had been chose above all other Christian princes to occupy what might be regarded as an office, in relation to the church, vacant since the death of Honorius.
The office itself might be said to be old—in the sense that ancient Roman emperors, like Theodosius, had been protectors of the interests of the church. But it was really a new office which contained only a dim reminiscence of ancient times. Perhaps, no pope could have thought of creating this office of protector-inchief of the church if he had not remembered past times when there had been an emperor, a successor to Augustus, to perform this function. But what Leo III did in 800 was to make a secular partner for himself; and this was something new. And what he made was a Roman emperor. (3) Now, setting aside the practical convenience of having a powerful protector (and the added convenience to the papacy of having an ‘emperor’ whom the pope had himself chosen and crowned and might therefore be able to control), there lay behind all this what may be called a ‘vision’, which also had in it some reminiscence of the past. It was a ‘vision’ which gathered strength and precision during the middle ages, but remarkably enough it was a ‘vision’ which almost totally neglected the direction which events were in fact taking during the medieval centuries, and did very little to modify that direction. It was a ‘vision’ of Christendom as a single realm, guided, directed, and ruled (under God) by a single spiritual ruler in partnership with a single temporal ruler; a dyarchy of pope and emperor. Each of these joint vicars of God having his own duties to perform, but together composing the government and direction of a respublica Christiana (‘a Christian realm’), or an imperium Christianum (a Christian empire), as it later came to be called. Kings and princes, in their own realms, were to be subordinates, almost agents, of popes and emperors. It is, of course, noticeable that this conception ran counter to the main trend of medieval times which went to the gradual construction of the independent nation states that emerged unmistakably in the sixteenth century. But this does not detract from the supreme importance in medieval politics of this piece
of what may be called ‘visionary’ political thinking. It was the conception of Christendom as a single community. And it was a conception which was capable of drawing sustenance from at least some of the circumstances of the middle ages—the recovery of the ancient Roman law, for example, provoked in some visionaries the notion that here was the common law for the respublica Christiana.
4 The subsequent history of this ‘vision’ and its counterpart in medieval government was full of vicissitudes. The office of ‘holy emperor’ never, of course, became hereditary during the middle ages. According to the ecclesiastical ‘vision’ it was an office bestowed by the pope, but in the course of the tenth century it was more or less appropriated, as of right, by the kings of Germany, and thus became connected with the territories of these kings, namely, Germany, Burgundy, and Italy—although, of course, these territories were not the territories of an ‘empire’. But popes found many of these ‘emperors’ uneasy partners, often unwilling to perform their duties in respect of the church. Gregory VII (in the eleventh century), and his great successors in the papacy, managed for a time to reimpose their control upon the emperors; but by the middle of the fourteenth century this notional ‘empire’ of Christendom had become a German empire, in which certain of the princes of Germany were the ‘electors’ to the office of ‘emperor’. And it thus remained, more or less, until the nineteenth century. The ‘emperor’ was still, in these centuries, often crowned by the pope, and he could sometimes be prevailed upon to fight the battles of the church—but less and less frequently. Indeed, for a long period, it was the king of France, rather than the holy Roman emperor, who answered the call of popes to undertake crusades, to put down heresy and to perform the other functions for which this emperor had been invented. The ‘vision’, it is fair to say, remained a ‘vision’.
5 Now, this vision of an imperium Christianum, Christendom as a single whole ruled jointly by a pope and emperor, left some of the most profound political thinkers of the middle ages quite unmoved. St. Augustine, who could have imagined it in terms of a Roman empire, properly speaking, was indifferent to it. What did it matter under whose rule a Christian lived for the brief life of a mortal man, so long as he was not required to do anything impious? A universal emperor was no better and no worse than a local king or prince as a channel for God’s providential grace. Christendom had no need of political as well as ecclesiastical unity. And St. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, was similarly unmoved by it. His realistic attention was turned to a Europe fast separating itself into sovereign states, and he was concerned with the quality of the government of these states and not with any fantasy of an empire of Christendom. But, before the vision faded, it found some notable protagonists; and of these the most celebrated was Dante, who lived in the second half of the thirteenth century. He was a Florentine poet, and for much of his life a political exile from Florence; and in a book called De monarchia (‘Concerning Imperial Government’) he gave what he believed to be a reasoned explanation of the necessity of the imperium Christianum, a ‘philosophy’ of the respublica Christiana. The most interesting feature of this explanation is that it is carried out entirely in Aristotelian terms. Nobody writing at that time could fail to be profoundly influenced by the Aristotelian understanding of human activity, but Dante performed the tour de force of explaining and defending this peculiarly medieval ‘vision’ of Christendom as a political as well as an ecclesiastical unity in the terms of Aristotelian teleology.
There is, he says, following Aristotle, one universal end in all human conduct, namely, the achievement of that excellence which is potential in human ‘nature’. This end is pursued in all kinds of human associations—in the activity which goes on in a family or household, in that which is characteristic of a village, a city or a kingdom. It is absurd to think that, in each of these different contexts, a different end is being pursued; there is one end being pursued in all, namely, the human eudaimonia; and it is absurd to suppose that this single end can ever be pursued by a man out of relation to any other man. Human beings are, naturally, animalia politica. Further, the conditions of the achievement of human excellence are the conditions which it is the proper function of a ‘government’ to provide—namely, peace, justice, and freedom. Without peace there can be no civilized life; justice is rendering each man his due; and freedom is emancipation from necessity and that opportunity of rational choice which, for Aristotle, characterized a human being. Now, since there is but one end for man, and since the conditions in which this end can be pursued are also universal, it is better that mankind be under the rule of one than under the rule of many different princes and magistrates; peace will be more sure and justice more certain. In short, the oneness of mankind indicates the appropriateness, if not the necessity, of one ruler and regulator of human conditions, the necessity of a single ‘imperial’ political association. This, which I have described in a very simplified form, is the design of the argument which Dante uses to explain and elucidate the centuries old ‘vision’ of the imperium Christianum. The argument does not stop there. It goes on to demonstrate the appropriateness for Christendom of a Roman emperor, notionally the successor Augustus; and it goes on to show that, while human beings may achieve their ‘natural’ end (in the Aristotelian sense) only in these circumstances, they also have a ‘supernatural’ end
(final salvation) which is ministered to by the single ecclesiastical authority of Christendom—namely, the church. Thus, Dante’s De monarchia is an elucidation of this ‘vision’ of an imperium Christianum, governed jointly by pope and Christian emperor, each with his separate functions to peform in relation to the ends pursued in all human activity. It is an Aristotelian–Christian theory of government. And one of the remarkable things about it is that it was written at a time when this ‘vision’ of the respublica Christiana has less to correspond to it in medieval politics than ever before. The De monarchia was, in a sense, already out of date when it was written. Christendom as a respublica Christiana was, perhaps, the greatest of medieval political dreams. But by the end of the thirteenth century Western Europe was fast becoming a collection of emergent independent states, and the political authority of the pope and his emperor was declining.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 4, fos. 295–302. Photocopy of a typescript with autograph corrections.
Medieval Law 1 We have been considering the disposition of medieval ideas about the right of a ruler to rule—the authority of kings. I want now to consider an analogous topic: medieval beliefs about law, and the authority of law. Now, what is meant by ‘law’ is a rule of conduct which demands to be obeyed as a matter of right. It is order induced, not by violence, but by authority. The most fundamental of all distinctions in political thought is the distinction between ‘force’ or ‘violence’ and ‘authority’; between potentia, which is physical, and potestas or auctoritas, which is mental; between ‘might’ and ‘right’. Both ‘violence’ and ‘authority’ may each produce ‘order’; but they produce it in different manners, and the ‘order’ of ‘authority’ has a different quality from the order of ‘violence’. ‘Violence’ exacts obedience by making disobedience physically impossible; but ‘authority’ demands obedience in virtue of a ‘right’ to be obeyed, and it succeeds in exacting obedience when this ‘right’ to be obeyed is recognized to be legitimate and is acceded to. Hobbes understood this better than most political writers. He knew that government must have ‘authority’; and that ‘to have authority’ meant to have been constituted in a manner which was recognized to give it ‘authority’. He knew that a government must also have ‘power’ (potentia). And he knew that the two were different from one another. Thus, a ruler may have both ‘authority’ and ‘power’. But his ‘authority’ is not based upon his ‘power’; it is based upon whatever is believed to be his ‘right’ to rule.
Consequently, when obedience is demanded as a ‘right’, it is always possible to ask the question: What is the ground of your right to be obeyed? And the answer must be, not a demonstration of superior force, but in terms of a belief which makes the ‘right’ acceptable. We have considered some of the beliefs, current in medieval times, which offered themselves as the grounds of a ruler’s right to rule. And if one seeks for a general movement in medieval thought on this subject, it is a movement away from the belief that the ownership of land (‘lordship’) gives the ‘right’ to rule, and towards the belief that a king’s right to rule comes either from a divine endowment, or from a feudal compact. In short, ‘authority’ rests upon opinion; it reflects a belief, found to be acceptable, about how ‘authority’ may be acquired. To believe that a king’s right to rule is based upon a feudal compact is to believe that a feudal compact can endow an office with ‘authority’. Now, what we mean by ‘law’ is an ‘authority’ of this sort. It is a rule of conduct which demands to be obeyed as a matter of ‘right’, and not merely because, if it is not obeyed, conformity will be exacted by force. Consequently, all thinking about law is apt to return, again and again, to the question: Whence comes this authority? All answers to this question will reflect current beliefs about what constitutes authoritativeness. And most answers to this question may be expected to refer to the source from which the law is believed to come, or (if the law is recognized to have been made) from the manner in which it has been made. What were the medieval answers? A ‘statute’ today is recognized to be authoritative if it has been properly made by parliament, because we recognize parliament to have the sole ‘right’ to make a ‘statute’.
2 Now, the peoples of medieval Europe were certain of one thing. They may have been doubtful about to whom they owed their loyalty, and their loyalties may often have been divided; but they knew they had laws. In early times, these laws were, for the most part, not writtendown laws; they were customs of conduct which were recognized as proper to be obeyed. Even in the darkest and most chaotic circumstances, when order was apt to be imposed by violence—that is, by men who merely possessed superior force and had no very well-recognized ‘right’ to be obeyed—the peoples of medieval Europe never lost the sense of being under a ‘law’. Indeed, the difficulty often was, not that there was no law, but that the chaos had invaded the law itself. There often seemed to be a distracting conflict of legal duties. Law, among these people, was, then, older than violence; and often enough ‘violence’ was recognized as breach of law. These peoples came into Western Europe with their tribal laws; they entered territories whose native inhabitants (with whom they mixed) lived under other laws of their own. The circumstances of movement broke up the tribal communities, and small groups of families might find themselves surrounded by peoples with different laws from themselves. The circumstances of settlement, in the end, after many centuries, generated more or less homogeneous territorial communities, each with its own law; but local variety of law persisted, and had not disappeared in some places even in the nineteenth century. Law for medieval peoples was primordial; they might have, as yet, nothing they could recognize as a homeland; they might have almost nothing recognizable as ‘government’; but they had law.
And what they recognized as a ‘community’, in the first place, was a group of people who lived under one law. The differences between communities were differences, not between ‘governments’ but between laws. This applied not merely to communities of one sort, but to communities of all sorts. For example, by the seventh century Western European peoples had become familiar with two great religious communities besides Christians; namely, Jews and Muslims. And they identified these communities as people who had laws of their own—the law of Moses and the law of Muhammad. Religion was recognized as obedience to a law, and consequently Christians, Jews, and Muslims were three ‘legally’ distinguishable communities. Moreover, as the great realms of Christendom emerged, and the legal chaos of the early centuries was modified, these peoples of medieval Europe became familiar with new bodies of law of great variety: • Ancient, customary law, the folk-law; • ‘Feudal’ law; • Law of the king; • Local laws, e.g., the forest law of England and the law merchant (the laws of fairs and markets); • Roman law (rediscovered in the twelfth century in the texts of the great imperial codifiers); • Canon law (the law of the church); • Capitularia of emperors, and ‘statutes’ of kings and parliaments; • Biblical law—the Old Testament and New Testament; • Speculative laws, like the lex natura and the lex divina, discovered in classical writers. And, generally speaking, every law had its own courts in which it was applied to particular cases and administered.
Indeed, it might be said that where there is no court there is no law. For courts are not merely engaged in administering the law; they are the immediate custodians of the law. However, I propose to reserve what I have to say about medieval courts of law until I come to deal with medieval parliaments and the ideas which centred round them. What we have to consider now is medieval beliefs about the authority of law, not about the authority of rulers. The world of medieval European thought was an immensely variegated structure of laws. And this may be taken to reflect the most fundamental of all impulses—the impulse to have rights and duties to know what they are, and to be assured of them. This is escape from the rule of violence. Anyone who made a claim, whether he were pope, emperor, king, ‘vassal’, or merchant, always (in the middle ages) tried to show that it was a claim based upon law. So important was this that laws were often forged in order to substantiate claims. What, in these circumstances, did these medieval peoples think about law? Or rather, what was the course and direction of their thought about law? Because these thoughts had to comprehend and adjust themselves to circumstances of immense changefulness.
3 Now, since the first law of which medieval peoples were aware was the unwritten customs of a people, their first attitude towards law was the attitude one has towards a possession: it is there, and it is yours; you may appeal to it. It is steady, whatever else may move. How you came by it is a question which scarcely occurs. Hence, the notion that law is something that has been made, the notion of legislation, was far out of sight. Law was something you inherit; it was old and its authority rested, in the first place, upon its immemorial character. Law belonged to the folk; it was their most cherished possession for it alone stood in the way of the rule of violence; it applied to everyone, the great and the small man alike. It comprised the rules governing the treatment of one man by another. And if there was added to this the notion that law was sacred, then its sacredness, the religious authority attributed to it, derived from its antiquity, and was an indication of its supreme importance. There was, then, in these circumstances, no distinction between actual law and ideal law—law as it is and law as it might be. The attitude to law was an essentially conservative attitude; change was not merely undesirable, it was something that was not contemplated. The authority of law cannot derive from its having been made in a certain manner because it is not understood ever to have been made. Its authority was believed to spring from its antiquity. Nevertheless, law understood in this manner could not merely be neglected; it was something to be cherished. It may be lost or it may suffer corruption. It required that two activities should be continuously performed in respect of it. And in the course of performing these two activities some new ideas about the authority of law emerged.
First, it must be cared for, guarded, protected, preserved, and administered. And the chief activity of those in authority, of kings and rulers of all sorts, was understood to be the custody of the law. Their office was the office of the custodian of the law. And this was particularly so of ‘kings’, whose office in a feudal society was to prevent the local violence of magnates destroying the rights of their subordinates. Secondly, since the law was ancient custom, imprecise, unwritten and unenacted, it often happened that what it required of you was obscure or uncertain. Therefore, the law had, on occasion, to be discovered and restored and made plain. And the method of discovery must be local inquiry—an inquest. The presumption always was that there is a law, and if circumstances have obscured what the law demands, then the business of authority is to conduct an inquiry of those most likely to remember. And this again was the recognized duty of kings. But inquiries of this sort were often equivocal proceedings. The presumption was that the only permissible activities in respect of law were guardianship, discovery, and restoration. Nobody would admit to the sacrilege of changing the law. But, in fact, an inquiry to elicit and to settle the law often resulted in the reformation of the law; the law was, in fact, emended in the process of discovery. Nevertheless, it was done in such a manner that what appeared to have been done was to remove a corruption and not to have instituted a change. And it is only when law came to be written down that, if change was made (as was unavoidably the case with changing circumstances), the recognition that a change had been made became unavoidable; and the immensely difficult step was taken from preserving and ‘discovering’ law to ‘making’ law. And understandably, in these circumstances it was easier to admit a new law if it seemed to be merely an addition to law: what, above all, you will not suffer is being deprived of rights you believe yourself to possess.
There were, however, many things which mediated this step. European peoples were used to their rulers promulgating decrees, although it was always held that these were valid so long as they did not conflict with ‘the law’. And the huge task of reducing multifarious local laws to the common law of a realm, undertaken always by royal authority and by royal judges, was an experience which, while it did not shake the belief that the law was the law of the community, did shake the simple view that law was too sacred to be changed. By the thirteenth century in England, for example, something recognized to be a lex terrae (a law of the land) had definitely superseded the ancient consuetudines (customs) of the people of England. But this ‘law of the land’ was made, in much the same way as thesmos emerged from themis—by constructing one law out of multifarious local laws; and its authority derived as much from the antiquity of its contents as from the manner in which it had been constructed. Moreover, when the time came for reconciling a belief in the fixity of law with the notion of legal innovation, it was this belief that the law belonged to the community, and that kings were its custodians, which conditioned the activity of innovation and generated a process by which law could be recognized as having been legitimately made. The first principle of all medieval legislation was that, while it was initiated by a king, it was valid only if it had the approval of those whose rights and duties are being changed or enlarged, and that it should always appear as the removal of an abuse. In England, for example, no ‘statute’ could be made without the approval of those whom it affected. But, even so, it was a long time before ‘statute’ was recognized as unmistakably superior to the common law. In France, the office of the local parlements was to adjust a law promulgated by a king to local circumstance and record its acceptance.
Thus, when, with the greatest reluctance, medieval people admitted the possibility of making new law (nearly always obscuring the process by thinking and speaking of it as ‘emendation’) they could without great difficulty adjust their thoughts about the authority of law to the new situation. Law was to be obeyed not merely because it was old and sacrosanct, but because it had been approved and consented to by those whose conduct it rules. These ideas of approval and consent only very gradually emerged from the parent ideas of ‘discovery’ and ‘declaration’. To discover the law had required an inquiry, an inquest; to make a law required a not wholly dissimilar process, a parliament: ‘the great inquest of the realm’. And yet the change was, in fact, very great—a change from the belief that law is not at the disposal of each succeeding generation, to the belief that, if the innovation follows a recognized procedure, new and valid law can be made; the change from consuetudines to leges. Consuetudines draw their authority from antiquity. Leges gain authority from the manner in which they have been made.
4 Now, this process in which ancient and unwritten custom and local law was transformed into a lex terrae, and the adjustments of thought about the authority of law which it entailed, was profoundly influenced by ideas acquired from outside the communities concerned. The two great sources of legal ideas which impressed themselves upon this process were the Roman imperial law and the canon law. (1) Roman law had remained as the customary law of some parts of Europe (particularly in the south of France) where the Roman imperial administration had been strongest. And in Spain, in the fifth century, its Visigothic rulers had made codes which were (and were known to be) alloys of Gothic and Roman laws. The Roman imperial law, in the texts of Justinian and others, had not been entirely forgotten. But it was not until its virtual rediscovery in the twelfth century that it began to have a notable effect upon the law and the legal ideas of medieval communities. The texts of the Roman imperial law introduced these peoples to a law far more sophisticated in its terms, its categories and its distinctions, than anything they then possessed. And it came with the still undimmed authority that belonged to anything ‘Roman’. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that it should have been taken in some respects as a model (or at least an aid) in the immensely difficult task of constructing a lex terrae, especially in those parts of Europe where this process was still only beginning in the twelfth century. No lawyer could escape its influence; and even in England where its influence was least notable, it had its effect in detail. Medieval Europe owed to Roman law two important ideas: (1) It introduced the new and unfamiliar idea of lawmaking— the unmistakable idea of legislation. Necessity and Roman law
taught medieval rulers and communities to be lawmakers. (2) It introduced a new and unfamiliar idea of the relation of the king to the process of lawmaking. Law appeared in the Roman texts as the will of an emperor, and as emanating from his limitless imperium. The image of a ruler it presents was that of a lawmaker who was himself above the law— not of a king who was the custodian of his people’s law. Oddly enough, however, even in the twelfth century, there were people learned enough in the Roman law to detect a feature of it which pulled in the opposite direction. How did a Roman emperor acquire this supreme position in respect of the law? Was it not by virtue of the lex regia in which the populus Romanus had endowed him with this supremacy? Did not the Roman law assume that the lawmaking imperium belonged to the emperor only because it had been given him by the populus Romanus? These considerations allowed the Roman imperial autocracy to be interpreted as if it sprang from something like the ‘feudal’ pactum, or treaty, between a king and his subjects which required him to perform his duties as a king and not to infringe the rights of his subjects. From this point of view, then, the penetration of medieval Europe by Roman legal ideas had an ambiguous result. It seemed to proclaim an autocrat, but an autocrat who owed his position to popular approval and authority. It suggested the notion of a ‘government’ capable of remoulding the law of a community; but it qualified this suggestion by the more familiar notion of rulers owing their authority as lawmakers to their subjects. The Roman text: quod principi placuit leges habet vigorem (‘what the king pleases has the force of law’), could be coun-ered by the text: lex est quod populi jubet (‘law is what the people commands’). The Roman law of property was essentially individualistic— it rested upon the notion of ownership. This was fundamentally different from the feudal law of property, which (generally
speaking) recognized only occupation and the enjoyment of the fruits of occupation in return for services of one sort or another. And it was the Roman law which, in this respect, mediated the change from the ‘feudal’ law of property to the modern law of property. The impact of Roman law was something which all European peoples felt, in one degree or another, from the twelfth century; it was therefore a great unifying force. Thus, later medieval Europe enjoyed two sources of unity—the church (the idea of the community of Christendom) and Roman law. (2) The other great source of legal ideas for medieval peoples was canon law—the law of the church. Like all other medieval law, this began as a disordered muddle gathered in from a variety of sources; precepts of the Old Testament and the New Testament, decisions of the great councils of the church, decrees of bishops and popes, odd maxims of the Roman civil law surviving from imperial times. It was the consuetudines, the folk law, of the church. But, as with all other medieval law, there came a time when an attempt was made to sort out this muddle and put it in order. And this was done under the influence of the Roman civil law. One of the earliest canon lawyers to attempt this was Gratian, in the twelfth century. What Gratian produced was not a code of law for the church but a textbook after the style of the old imperial jurisconsults, called the Decretum. But it was the starting point for the lawmaking activities of subsequent popes, for (as we have seen) the popes, at least from the time of Gregory VII, claimed the absolute authority tenantsin-chief make law for the church. Thus the canon law became an increasing body of ecclesiastical law, generated from the edicts and decretals of the popes. And its authority derived from the uncontested authority of the pope as a legislator, his potestas jurisdictionis.
Now, the canon lawyers were not only familiar with the texts of the Roman law, but also with the various speculative ideas which Roman lawyers had used to give authority to positive law. The most important of these ideas was the Stoic idea of natural law. This was the belief that there existed a ‘law’, common to all mankind, and available to all mankind by their ‘natural reason’, the law of the cosmopolis, the commands of which coincided with absolute justice and therefore could be used as a model for legislators. This conception had, much earlier, been Christianized; the lex naturalis was thought of as a law implanted in human beings by God himself and representing God’s will for mankind. The law of nature was the law of God; it was absolute in its authority, above kings and emperors and even popes. Here, then, was the notion of an ‘ideal’ or ‘model’ law such as had had no place in the earlier conceptions of folk law. It was a notion which could be used as a criterion for lawmaking, much more speculatively satisfactory than the older notion that made law must not conflict with the ancient customs or that what was Roman was good. Indeed, in the legal thought of the later middle ages, when the authority of ancient custom was beginning to be lost in the authority of the lex terrae, the notion of a ‘natural law’ as the touchstone of justice took the place of the notion of ancient custom. Conformity to ‘natural law’ was something which might be added to the notion of ‘approval by those concerned’ as the mark of true law; it was something which might even be supposed to govern popular consent. And medieval European thought began to fill out this idea of a law of nature with all those rights and duties which were believed to be imprescriptible as belonging to men as men. A late medieval writer, like Marsilius of Padua, is prepared to make a list of the duties which the law of nature imposes upon all men.
They are the things which, as he says, are acceptable by almost all men as honourable and worthy of observance. • That God shall be worshipped. • That parents should be honoured. • That children shall be educated by their parents. • That injuries should be inflicted upon no man. • That a man should be permitted to enjoy what is his own. But here there were the seeds of an intellectual conflict: how to bring together the ideas (a) that just law is conformity to natural law, and (b) that just law is what is approved by the community—a conflict which had great practical consequences in the sixteenth century, and which often appeared in later times.
5 In respect of law, then, the communities of medieval Europe found themselves having to assimilate a number of ideas and beliefs which pulled in different directions. They believed profoundly in the sanctity of law. They believed that the law was the most valuable possession of a community; their great defence against the reign of violence. They were reluctant innovators. They had before them two ‘ideal’ models: (1) A folk law which embraced rulers and ruled alike, and which could not be emended except with the consent of those concerned; (2) A law, emanating from an authority (a pope, or much more rarely, a king) who enjoyed a lawmaking imperium derived from God. With difficulty they emancipated themselves from the authority of ancient custom. And what took its place was law whose authority derived from its having been made in a certain manner—a manner which could plausibly be thought to represent the consent of those who were obliged to obey.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 4, fos. 303–16. Fos. 303, 308, 315 are photocopies of autograph sheets; fos. 304–7, 309–14, 316 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections.
Medieval Parliaments 1 In reviewing the themes of medieval European political thought, I said that it was responsible for two great political inventions. • The invention of kingship. This was the invention of political authority, authority over subjects, distinguished from mere ‘lordship’ or authority based upon the ownership of land, authority over tenants. • Parliaments. And it is about this second invention that I want to say something this morning. Parliaments appeared in every realm of Christendom during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They cannot, as we shall see, be said to have been designed. They emerged as devices of government out of customs and practices far older than themselves. But long before the end of the middle ages some general ideas about their character and authority had got themselves accepted. Indeed, parliaments, from the point of view I am going to take, can be recognized as a particular family of ideas about government. The instruments of government which, in the course of time, came to be known as ‘parliaments’ or (in other European languages) parlements, cortes, Diet, Landtage, Reichstage, etc., were of many different sorts, but they had certain features in common. They were conferences: this was the original meaning of the word parliamentum. They were conferences called by kings or other rulers, such as dukes or counts. They were called to discuss specific matters or to reach specific decisions.
They were composed of persons who owed allegiance to the king or duke concerned. They emerged from certain features of a feudally organized society. And of these features two are more important than others, in this connection. (1) It was the duty of a ‘vassal’ to provide his ‘lord’ not only with auxilium (aid, chiefly military), but also concilium (counsel or advice). And a parliamentum emerged when a king called upon his ‘vassals’ to perform this service of concilium. In a feudally organized society no ‘lord’ could do without the good will and assistance of his ‘vassals’. And the main concerns in respect of which this good will, assistance, and advice were needed were war, the provision of revenue, and the discovery and the settlement of the law. In each of these activities a ‘lord’, and particularly a feudal king, required to mobilize the loyalty and assistance of his ‘vassals’. A king might have at his disposal a curia regis, a council of legal and military professional advisers, but he could not do without the aid and counsel of those without whose support no settled policy could be pursued. (2) The principle that no law should be emended without the consent and acquiescence of all those affected. From one point of view, parliaments were the medieval answer to the problem of how to reconcile belief in the fixity of law with the need for legal innovation. These parliaments were all, in the first place, courts of law, in the medieval sense. Those who were called to them were recognized as suitors of a court: it was their feudal duty to attend. But, being called for one purpose, these conferences of ‘vassals’ were found eligible to serve other purposes; and in the course of time, both their composition and the business they transacted underwent considerable change.
At what point a ‘parliament’, properly speaking, emerged is, therefore, impossible to say. But in general it may be said that it emerged out of a conference of ‘lords’ and ‘vassals’ designed, not to do something new, but to do better or more expeditiously what was already being done in other ways. It became an unmistakable ‘parliament’ when it began to do things which had never been done by anyone before. Thus, ‘parliaments’ were the meeting place, or confluence, of a number of different activities current in a feudally organized society which combined to compose a recognizably new instrument of government. Beyond this general character, the parliaments which appeared during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in each of the realms of Europe had special characteristics, both in respect of how they emerged and of what in the end they became, and of the beliefs which attached themselves to them.
2 Let us consider the manner in which they emerged, and find out what this tells us about their character and the ideas they generated. I want to consider three examples. (1) The simplest and earliest example is that of the cortes of Spain. Spain in the twelfth century consisted of six independent kingdoms—Navarre, Leon, Galicia, Castile, Aragon, and Portugal. And from early in the century it was the custom of the kings of each of these realms each to call meetings, composed of all their tenants-in-chief and of all the bishops of the realm, on certain occasions. An assembly of this sort was called cortes, which means ‘court’. The king ‘held court’ with those who, in virtue of the lands they held, owed him immediate allegiance. The occasions were, at first, comparatively rare and were to deal with specific business. For example, in 1140 the cortes of Portugal was assembled to confirm the doubtful title of Alphonso I to the throne; and in 1160 the cortes of Aragon was assembled to swear allegiance to the heir apparent to the throne. That is to say, these were occasions when it was thought wise to mobilize the allegiance of the chief subjects to a king. The cortes was a royal instrument of government; a device of monarchy. But later it became the custom to summon the cortes of these kingdoms at regular intervals (perhaps twice a year, and usually on the occasion of a Christian festival like Easter) to transact business of a more routine nature, such as to get acquiescence to legislation, to consider matters of war and peace, and to get consent to the imposition of taxes. On these occasions it was found advisable to call, not only the nobles and bishops (who were called individually), but to call, also, representatives of the towns.
Now, the significance of the addition of townsmen to the cortes was this. First, the towns of Spain were ancient Roman municipalities which, even in Roman imperial times had enjoyed self-government and which had retained a large measure of independence until the eleventh century. They had municipal governments. Secondly, even when they lost their independence, they (like the other towns and cities of medieval Europe) were outside the feudal organization. Feudal tenures, and the obligations and rights which went with them, were never appropriate to town life, in spite of the fact that the terms of feudal laws were often applied to them. Thus, a cortes without representatives of the towns would be an assembly of the king’s subjects which left out a significant class of them. Thirdly, towns were centres of wealth, and if revenue were to be raised other than by the collection of the customary feudal dues, this was the most promising source from which it might come. But because in each town there existed a municipal government, they were in a position to choose and to send official representatives to the cortes. Thus, as a partner with the king in government, the cortes of the Spanish kingdoms were recognized to be assemblies of what were called the ‘estates’ of the realm: the bishops composed the ecclesiastical ‘estate’, the tenants-in-chief were the ‘estate’ of the nobility, and the townsmen composed a third ‘estate’. The bishops and the nobles were all called individually and were, thus, not ‘representatives’ of anyone; the townsmen were present in the cortes as representatives, not of their localities, but of their ‘estate’, i.e., their class, or kind of person. But the character of all European parliaments was conditioned by the fortunes of the monarchy in which they had place. And as the monarch in each of these kingdoms in Spain increased his power, so the cortes turned more and more into an instrument of opposition, of remonstrance and of resistance to the king,
criticizing his policy and remonstrating about his extravagance. And consequently they were called with more and more reluctance. And when, first by the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon by marriage, and then by the destruction of the independence of the other kingdoms by conquest, a single kingdom of Spain emerged, the cortes of the defunct kingdoms became the guardians of that provincial independence which has remained in Spain to this day. Thus, within the particular setting of Spain, the cortes were both assistants and critics of royal government: and this is the dual character of all medieval parliaments. (2) The emergence of the cortes in the kingdoms of Spain was comparatively simple, and they were the earliest ‘parliamentary’ institutions to appear in Europe. Turning to England, the process of emergence and the result are both infinitely more complicated. In general, the English ‘parliament’ may be seen to emerge from three different and not even closely connected circumstances, and was the meeting-place of a variety of different legal and political beliefs. (a) By the beginning of the twelfth century, the government of England had come to be carried on by the king, the set of legal and administrative officials which composed his ‘household’, and a council of magnates, selected tenants-in-chief, the curia regis. The officials had been divided, according to the nature of their business, into various ‘courts’, the most important of which were the Court of Exchequer, the Court of Chancery, and the Court of King’s Bench. The work of these courts was administrative and judicial, but (in the then state of the law) they were constantly faced with problems to which there was no ready answer. Consequently, they each on occasion turned to the king’s council for help, advice, and sometimes for a definite ruling.
In its first use, the word parliamentum stood for the king’s council (curia regis) in its capacity as a deliberative body giving advice, and perhaps authoritative rulings, to judges and administrators. This is the first strand of the three which were twisted together to compose the English ‘parliament’. The second strand was this: (b) The work of the king’s courts of justice consisted of two related activities. First, to determine the law, and secondly, to hear cases which were, in a large part, complaints from people who had duties (payments or services) forced upon them by their feudal superiors which they believed had no legal authority. That is to say, the chief business of the king’s courts was to protect the otherwise unprotected from illegal exactions. And the institution of the justices in eyre, who traveled the country, brought the king’s justice in reach of all in the assize courts. The aggrieved person came before the court and asked for a ‘writ’, that is, an official pronouncement commanding, in a set legal form, that the illegal exaction should cease forthwith. And the theory was that for every wrong there was an appropriate ‘writ’. (Thus, in later times a ‘writ’ of habeas corpus was designed to prevent illegal imprisonment.) For every wrong there is a writ to put it right. But wrongs may be many and with minute differences between them; and it was, in fact, impossible to devise ‘writs’ to meet every wrong. To meet this situation, a new procedure was devised; the aggrieved person could proceed by petition or plea, in which he described informally the precise wrong he had suffered (which might be of such a character as not to correspond to any known writ) and asked for his grievance to be redressed. These petitions or pleas were heard in the king’s courts. But, since some were particularly complicated (the law often being obscure), and since others might involve whole local
communities, it became the custom to present these legal pleas or petitions, not to an ordinary assize court, or even the King’s Bench court, but to a court composed of the curia regis reinforced by all the available judicial officers—in short to a high court of parliament. This is the origin not only of private acts of parliament, but of a great deal of what was at first thought of as the emendation of the law and later as legislation. It embodied the belief that there is no legal tangle that cannot be unraveled; no wrong which cannot be redressed; and that what a judge can’t do by issuing a ‘writ’ a parliament can do in another less formal way, by hearing a plea and responding to a request to put right a wrong. (c) The third strand is less easily identifiable, but it is in some respects the most important. It reflected the duty of the king’s ‘vassals’ to give him concilium, and the necessity of a feudal king (even one in so strong a position as that of the king of England) of getting the good-will of his ‘vassals’ by consulting them on important matters of government, and obtaining their approval. It was the right and the duty of a vassal to deliberate with the ruler. But this component of a ‘parliament’ had two sides to it. First, it exhibits a parliament as the curia regis reinforced by an assembly of the chief ‘vassals’ of the king, and thus becoming what it was often said to be, the ‘common council of the realm’. And although the people called to this council were all the tenants-in-chief and all the bishops, the social structure of England was sufficiently complex for there to be a lesser nobility who were ‘represented’ by some of their number: the knights of the shires. But secondly, the office of a feudal king is the office of an overlord who must govern according to the law and not infringe the rights of his subjects. If he departs from the duties of his office, it is the place of his chief ‘vassals’ to bring him to book, to
admonish him and to extract from him a proper recognition of the promises made at his coronation. And on occasion, during the reigns of King John and Henry III, the barons of England were obliged to take action of this sort. The most notable of these occasions was that on which the Magna Carta, a reaffirmation of feudal rights, was presented to King John and his agreement to it extracted. The assembly of tenants-in-chief which met on the island of Runnymede to impose the Carta upon John was called a ‘parliament’. And Magna Carta itself provided for a periodic meeting of magnates to oversee the activities of the king. Thus, ‘parliament’ stood, not only for the duty of vassals to give advice and support to kings, but also the right of ‘vassals’ to extract from kings redress, not merely for their particular grievances and wrongs, but for the misgovernment of the realm, if it occurred. These, then, are the complicated circumstances from which the English parliament emerged. By the reign of Edward I it had become the most notable instrument of government in England. It came to meet regularly, twice a year. Its business proliferated, because it was found suitable to participate in many of the activities of governing. And its composition changed. But it never lost its original character as a court of law; and so far as the middle ages are concerned, its main business remained that of a court of law—hearing petitions, dispensing of justice, and expediting matters of administration; activities which imperceptibly passed over into legislation. But if it is correct to think of parliament in England, even during the middle ages, as a participant in lawmaking, it must be remembered that the principle on which it became a necessary partner in lawmaking was already there, long before it emerged— the feudal principle that a man’s rights may not be altered without his consent. What promoted the importance of parliament in this respect was not the emergence of a new principle; indeed, when this principle was formulated, often enough it was a sentence from
Justinian’s Codex of Roman law which was quoted: quod omnes similiter tangit, ab omnibus comprobetur—‘what touches all should be approved by all’. The importance of parliament grew out of the fact that the circumstances of the later middle ages called more and more for the emendation of the law, and that parliament offered itself as a ready manner in which the consent of all could be presumed to have been obtained. If we ask, What made it plausible to recognize the consent of parliament as the consent of the whole realm and in what particular concerns was this consent required?, the answer is to be found in the extension of the composition of parliament which took place in Edward I’s reign, and in the king’s need for a wider constituency from which to draw financial support. The earliest English parliaments were composed of bishops and nobles summoned by name. It was preeminently a ‘feudal’ assembly; and it entailed no element of ‘representation’. All the individuals whom it was thought proper and necessary to consult were present. It was the curia regis reinforced by the immediate ‘vassals’ of the king—who, indeed, had a feudal obligation to give concilium to the king. But, gradually, it became the custom, especially when financial matters were to be deliberated upon, to summon representatives of the shires and the towns. This was done by a writ to the sheriff (the king’s personal officer in the counties) commanding him to see that two knights from each of the thirty-five shires should be nominated at the meeting of the shire court, and two burgesses from each of eighty boroughs should be nominated by the town government, and that they should attend an assembly at Westminster on a certain day, having full and sufficient potestas to consent, on behalf of their constituents, to what should be decided in parliament. The execution of this writ was the seed from which the House of Commons grew.
The knights of the shire were ‘representatives’ of the ‘freeholders’ of the counties, all of whom had a duty to attend the monthly sessions of the shire court; the burgesses were ‘representatives’ of the free men of the towns. There was nothing that could be called an ‘election’, there was no competition to go to Westminster— quite the reverse, it was regarded as a burdensome duty. In parliament, these representatives were, on occasion, asked to consent to the levying of taxes. This was a recognition of the feudal principle that no man could be required to part with what is his own except with his own consent. But, in the middle ages, their main activity became the presentation of petitions on behalf of their communities or on behalf of individuals—an activity which recognized parliament as fundamentally a court of justice. And it became a convention that the redress of grievances should precede the vote of taxes. But, with such an assembly available, it came to be used for any purpose for which it might seem suitable. Policy and affairs of war and peace (except when they hung upon finance) were not discussed in parliament, which only very slowly became a deliberative assembly. But in 1302, when it seemed necessary to the king to rebut in the strongest terms the claims of superior authority made by Pope Boniface VIII, the reply to the pope was sent not only with the authority of the king but also with that of parliament. This was, perhaps, the earliest occasion when the king in parliament ‘spoke for England’; it was a notable occasion when the king mobilized the support of his subjects in an affair of policy. And parliament acquired a new dimension. Now, it will be seen from this that the English parliament, even in its emergence, was an immensely more complicated institution than the cortes of Spain. It did not, in the first place, call upon any new principle. The principle of consent was already there in the organization of a feudal society; and the possibility of one man ‘representing’ others and both speaking and consenting on their behalf presented
no puzzles or difficulties. Men ‘represented’ others long before anyone began to think about ‘representation’, or to talk about a principle of representation. The statement of Chief Justice Thorpe in 1365 that ‘parliament represents the body of the whole realm’ could be accepted without difficulty by those versed in feudal law. Rex in parliamento—‘the king in parliament’ was clearly an authority suitable to ‘speak for England’. But it was, also, recognizably a superior legal entity to that of the king alone. The king, of course, could dispose of his own rights (as he sometimes did by royal charter), but he could not dispose of the rights of others. To do this he required the consent of those others. And parliament was the means he had of getting that consent. Before the end of the middle ages, the ‘parliament’ which met periodically at Westminster had acquired the character of an assembly composed of the nobility and representatives of the towns and shires. And the representatives had the authority to pledge the consent of their localities to what was agreed in parliament. It was a court of law to which pleas and petitions were presented and which had the authority of a court to redress the wrongs complained of. It was a legislative assembly without whose consent no man could be deprived of his rights or be given new duties. The principle here is: no man may have his rights and duties changed without his consent given through his representatives. It was an assembly capable of authorizing the collection of taxes. The principle here is: no man may be deprived of his property without his consent given through his representatives. It was a deliberative assembly; an assembly capable of giving advice to the ruler in matters of policy, and supporting him in the conduct of policy.
(3) The parlements which appeared in France have features which distinguish them from all others. (a) France in the twelfth century was a kingdom only in the sense that it had a feudal overlord, called king, but who exercised only a very tenuous overlordship over his ‘vassals’ (the great dukes and counts) and could exact from them only an intermittent allegiance. Each ruled his own lands, and the king (as count of Paris) ruled his lands, like the others. France was a kind of feudal federation of principalities. This king was the count of Paris, and he was elected by his fellow lords. Nevertheless, the count of Paris, as king, had kingly duties. He had a curia regis to conduct the affairs of the kingdom. And like other monarchs of the twelfth century it fell to him to provide a ‘royal’ justice; that is, to provide a court in which complaints about the illegal exactions of his great ‘vassals’ could be heard. He was also, by the twelfth century, a legislator, engaged in the task of generating a lex terrae for the whole of France. Like other monarchs in this situation, he found it useful for the conduct of judicial, legislative, and political affairs to reinforce the curia regis (which dealt with the affairs of his kingdom as distinct from those of his county of Paris) with magnates (bishops and barons) and lawyers. But although this reinforced curia regis dealt with the affairs of his kingdom, the persons who composed it were all drawn from his own county. This reinforced curia regis became known as the parlement of Paris. It was, essentially, a court of law. Its business was the discovery and settlement of law; inquiry into abuses, the redress of feudal wrongs, and the hearing of appeals from the courts of the king’s ‘vassals’. From the middle of the thirteenth century it had come to sit four times a year; it had a president who was not the king himself; and so far as the king’s own legislative activity was concerned, it had the duty of verifying, of declaring to be valid, and of
recording royal edicts. That is, it had the supremely important duty of inquiring into the conformity of royal edicts with the customary law—because customary law was still believed to have prescriptive authority. But the edicts and ordinances of such a king, although verified and declared valid in the parlement of Paris, were not easily to be accepted in the lands of his great ‘vassal’ dukes and counts. And, as counterparts to the royal parlement of Paris, there appeared local parlements in each of the great duchies and counties. By the end of the thirteenth century there were eleven of them. They, like the parlement of Paris, were courts of law and were composed of lawyers and others whose main qualification was a knowledge of the local law—the law of Toulouse, or Anjou, or Brittany, or Burgundy, and so on. The business of these parlements was to examine the royal edicts, to inquire into their conformity with local law, to remonstrate if the conflict were significant, to adjust them to local circumstances, and to register or record them. Thus, France had twelve parlements, of which the parlement of Paris was, in most matters, superior, because it was nearest to the king. They were all, strictly speaking, courts of law; their main business was not to try cases, but to discover the law and to record it. They were composed of lawyers. They were in no sense ‘representative’ institutions. And they played no part in authorizing taxation. They belong to the history of the lex terrae of France as it emerges from local custom. (b) Now, altogether separate from these parlements, it was the custom, from the eleventh century, for a duke or a count to reinforce his council of administrators by assemblies of his own ‘vassals’, to discuss questions which were agreed to concern all, questions of politics and taxation. These assemblies came to be composed, not only of the lay and ecclesiastical ‘vassals’ of the dukes and the counts, but also of representatives of the towns.
In short, these assemblies were recognized as assemblies of the ‘estates’ of the duchy or county—the nobles, the ecclesiastics, and the townsmen composing the famous tiers état (‘third estate’). Now, the existence of these provincial assemblies of the estates provided the opportunity for the emergence of an assembly of the same sort for the whole kingdom. And at a crisis in the affairs of the kingdom, in 1302, the king, Philip IV, called in Paris the first meeting of the ‘estates’ of the realm, as assembly which came to be known as the états genereaux: ‘the states-general’. The occasion was that of the publication of Pope Boniface VIII’s bull, unam sanctam, in which he claimed an authority over the affairs of the realms of Christendom which, if it had been admitted, would have turned the kings of Christendom into mere lieutenants of the pope. It was an occasion when, as we have seen, even the king of England thought it wise to mobilize all the loyalty of his subjects and to reply to the papal claim, not only on his own authority, but also on the authority of parliament. In France the same procedure was followed in replying to the pope. This states-general, or meeting of the estates of the realm, was composed of the nobility and the bishops of the realm and ‘representatives’ of the towns. The great ‘vassals’ of the king, the dukes and the counts, themselves appeared. But, unlike the English parliament, the states-general was in the nature of a ‘congress of ambassadors’, an assembly representing the great, still semi-independent, provinces of France. But its meetings were rare; it never acquired any settled procedure; it was in no sense a court of law and had nothing to do with the authorization of legislation. It never became a normal instrument of government, but its value was recognized as a possible means for the king to get consent to taxes. Thus, in France, law and legislation became the business of the king and the parlements and particularly the parlement of
Paris; politics and finance became the business of the estates—a separation of functions which had momentous consequences. It cannot be said that there was any design in this; it must be understood as the product of the peculiar circumstances of France. But the result was that a strong ‘parliamentary’ partner with the king in the government of France never appeared in the middle ages. Indeed, although ‘parliaments’ of various sorts appeared everywhere in medieval Europe, none except the English parliament managed to establish itself as a permanent partner with the king in government. And the reason for this is perhaps that it was a single, allpurpose assembly; and that it was not an assembly of the estates of the realm.
4 Now, a parliament is an institution which may be seen to reflect certain general beliefs. But I think it is true to say that parliaments were the means by which certain old ideas about government were enlarged and more firmly impressed upon medieval peoples, rather than that they represented or generated any entirely new beliefs. The chief beliefs concerned may, perhaps, be stated as follows: (1) That every man has rights and among these rights is the right to be protected by law against the infringement of his rights. Parliaments (above all in England) were devices by which wrongs (wrongs suffered by individuals and by whole local communities) could be redressed more expeditiously, and less at the mercy of the formalities of a ‘writ’, than before. The ‘writ’ which required the sheriff to see that representatives of the shires and towns came to Westminster was a ‘writ’ which opened the door wider to procedure by plea and petition instead of ‘writ’, and closed the gap between ‘discovering’ and administering the law and making new law. For making new law was recognized first as the redress of wrongs. (2) That every man has a vested and legitimate interest in the present condition of his rights, which should not be changed without his consent. Here what parliaments provided was an enlargement; they provided a manner in which this consent could be given or presumed to be given. The legitimate interest in the preservation of one’s current rights led, in some places in Europe, to an extraordinary ‘parliamentary’ deadlock. The liberum veto in the Polish diet, whereby unanimity was required for any decision—every man having the right to refuse to consent, and without the consent of each and all nothing could
be done—was, no doubt, an eccentricity. But it was an eccentricity based upon the universally held assumption that rights may not be altered except with the consent of each holder of those rights. What the English parliament generated was the recognition of the necessity of reaching decisions in which many men were participators; the necessity of compromise; and in doing so they went beyond the immediate range of feudal ideas. Other parliaments never achieved this, and consequently did not survive. (3) That what was a man’s ‘own’ may not be taken away from him or curtailed without his consent. It was this principle of private property which lies behind the settled view in the middle ages that to pay a tax was to surrender what belonged to you and therefore requires your consent. The theory of medieval taxation is that (where it goes beyond the dues and services which belong to the tenure of land) the king may not impose a tax unless he has reached an understanding with every man who will be required to pay. And parliaments were a device for reaching this understanding and getting the required consent. (4) That there are some persons who have a right to oppose misgovernment, not by rebellion, but by calling the attention of a ruler to his errors and by notifying him that he will not get the necessary support if he rules in neglect of the rights of his subjects. (5) But, on the other side, we may notice that medieval parliaments neither rested upon, nor generated, the belief that their participation in government concerned the formulation and conduct of policy. They did not discuss policy, and their influence upon it was remote and indirect: it was confined to the authorization or the refusal of that part of the resources necessary to conduct policy which was in their control.
(6) Lastly, the practice of calling parliament entailed, in the end, the practice of ‘representation’. But I think it would be hard to find anything that could be called an ‘idea’ or theory of representation in the middle ages, though some thought was given to the problem of how, and in what sense, one man could be said to ‘represent’ another.
5 Now, this review of the beliefs which were associated with medieval parliaments and their place in the activity of governing and the experience of being governed leads us back to medieval kingship: medieval government. It enables us to understand a feature of the office of king which, so far, I have only referred to; a feature which may be supposed to correspond with the necessities of government itself. A medieval ruler was recognized to have two tasks: 1. He was the custodian of the rights of his subjects; the judge who could redress the wrongs they suffered, who could take the initiative in emending the law, and who preserved the peace of the community. And here a feudal king often found himself redressing the wrongs which the ordinary man might suffer at the hands of his feudal superiors; his task was often to hold the balance between the nobility of his realm and the ordinary free man. 2. He was custodian of the interests of his realm, with the task of defending these interests against external enemies. He was the man who initiated and conducted policy. These two tasks were recognized to require different sorts of potestas for their performance. And the names these different sorts of potestas were given were, respectively, jurisdictio and gubernaculum: the authority of a judge or custodian of the law, and the authority of a guide, a ‘helmsman’ or a ‘pilot’. And, in medieval England at least, this distinction came to be embodied in the distinction between ‘the crown’ and ‘the king.’ Jurisdictio belonged to ‘the crown’; gubernaculum belonged to ‘the king’ personally. His rights of jurisdictio were all those rights which the king required in order to perform his duties as custodian of the law.
These were the ‘rights of the crown’. And in England, by the time of Edward I, ‘the king in parliament’ (rex in parliamento) was identified as ‘the crown’. It was these rights which the royal judges exercised on behalf of the king. It was in respect of having these rights that a king could be thought of as ‘the fountain of justice.’ That is to say, a parliamentum was the recognized partner of a king in the exercise of his potestas jurisdictionis. His rights of gubernaculum were different. In respect of these he was not bound by law; their virtue was precisely that they enabled him to move in a region where there is no law—in the conduct of foreign policy, for example. It was in virtue of his gubernaculum that a king negotiates with other kings, and can act as a guardian, in a more general sense, of his realm. Gubernaculum belonged to him, personally, as king. Sometimes, but rarely, his gubernaculum conflicts with his jurisdictio. In the pursuit of policy he imposes upon his subjects liabilities or duties which go beyond what the law allows, especially in time of war and in defence of the realm. But if this is so, he must be prepared to show good reason for it; he must be prepared to show that he is acting ex justa causa, and to demonstrate the necessity of the unwonted demands he is making on his subjects. This, no doubt, is a subtle distinction. But two things are obvious: 1. That a ruler denied the rights of gubernaculum would be ill able to deal with the emergencies of politics and ill equipped to guard the interests of the realm. 2. That a rule in which jurisdictio was constantly being invaded by gubernaculum, a rule in which a king constantly governed on the edges of the law, appealing always to his personal, gubernatorial, ‘prerogative’ rights, would constitute a serious breach of the notion of medieval kingship.
A profound student of medieval politics (Gierke) has said that the modern state emerges from the medieval realm when the famous Ciceronian tag, salus populi suprema lex, becomes the dominant principle of government. That is, when ruling is recognized not as jurisdictio supplemented by gubernaculum, but as gubernaculum inspired by an ad hoc judgment about what the utilitas publica requires. Or, in other words, when rulers regard their own realms and their own subjects as the objects of ‘policy’.
Editorial Note LSE 1/1/21, file 4, fos. 317–34. Fos. 317, 327–8 are photocopies of autograph sheets; fos. 318–26, 329–34 are photocopies of a typescript with autograph corrections.
Medieval Political Philosophy (1): Augustine 1 Our study of the political thought of medieval times has been concerned with the practical understanding which medieval people had of the institutions of government with which they were familiar: lords, kings, popes, parliaments; laws and courts of law. And with the practical answers they found for such questions as: • Who is my ruler and whence comes his authority to rule? • Where do my loyalties lie? What are my duties? What are my rights? • What sort of a society do I belong to? At a slightly higher level of generality, there is a vast medieval literature of political reflection and criticism, still concerned to explore the workings of political institutions, but doing so on a more extended scale. There are treatises on the duties of rulers, like the Policraticus of John of Salisbury (1150). There are the defenders of civil and imperial prerogatives against the claims of the church—like Dante and Marsilius of Padua. There are writers like Sir John Fortescue, in the fifteenth century, whose book called The Governance of England is the first genuine interpretation of the British constitution. And there are innumerable controversial political writers. All this I propose to leave on one side, because I want to end what I have to say about medieval politics by saying something about medieval political thought at a more philosophical level.
Generally speaking, philosophers are concerned, not with answering practical questions, like: Where do my loyalties lie? but with the presuppositions of practical questions—like, What does it mean to say that one has an ‘obligation’? And, in respect of politics, all the details of philosophical reflection may be seen as contributing to answering the question: What is the place of civil society and the activities which keep it going on the map of the universe? You will remember that when the thinkers of the ancient world asked themselves this question—Plato or Aristotle, for example— they put it in the form: What is there in ‘human nature’ which indicates that polis-life is necessary for the good human life? In other words, they recognized polis-life as a particular kind of human life, and they tried to relate it to what they understood human beings to be. And, further, they set out their conclusions in an abstract argument designed to display their relationship. And this is a way of thinking and speaking which we easily understood because, whatever adjustments we may have made in it, it is our own way of thinking and speaking. Now, a medieval thinker, considering this question, may almost be defined as a man who assumes that a form of human life, like being in a civil society, is to be accounted for, not by relating it to human ‘nature’, but by relating it to divine ‘nature’. In other words, the question he asks himself is not: What is there in the nature of human beings which accounts for civil society? but: What is the place of civil society in the universe which God has designed? In short, the characteristic assumption of the medieval thinker is the image of the universe which by the fourth century A.D. had been generated out of three centuries of reflection and meditation and which has come to be identified as ‘Christian’.
And further, instead of stating his conclusions in an abstract argument, he was much more likely to put them in the form of a dramatic story. It is true that in considering these matters, writers from the thirteenth century onwards returned to the idiom of abstract argument, but throughout the middle ages the relationship of God to the world, and of man to man, never ceased to be dramatic. Now, in order to illustrate this medieval way of thinking about civil society and its place in the intellectual map of the universe, I propose to say something about St. Augustine’s writings on this subject.
2 Christian thought about politics and government began slowly and in an unmistakably practical mood. In early times, Christians composed small communities of families whose manner of life and whose relation to the world around them sprang from one over-mastering conviction—the conviction that soon (at least in the life-time of the young or middle-aged) Christ would reappear, and an immense and long-promised transformatio