CONSERVATISM IN BRITAIN
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most notable and influential representative is undoubtedly Professor
Michael Oakeshott, the present occupant of the Chair of Political
Science at the London School of Economics and thus the direct suc–
cessor of Graham Wallas and Harold Laski. Oakeshott, who taught
at Cambridge before his move to London, has a well-deserved repu–
tation as a stimulating and persuasive lecturer, and is also a writer,
albeit a meager one, of a very individual kind, with a style intriguingly
compounded of Arnold, F. H. Bradley, and Henry James. Originally
himself an Idealist by conviction, he has graduated into a kind of
philosophical detachment which regards all sincere and disinterested
thought as valid and all criticism as crude impertinence.
As
a thinker,
as a writer, as a personality, Oakeshott is what it would have been
fashionable only a few years ago to call a "mandarin": ironical, pes–
simistic, uncommitted, scornful of dogmatism and pomposity and
harsh abstraction, sensitive to the charms of the complex, the old
and the obscure. However, as with many of a similar cast of mind,
there is a sort of buried circularity implicit in his thought: so that
starting as the enemy of all forms of utilitarianism and crude func–
tionalism, he has ended up in a species of subtle, rarified but un–
mistakable pragmatism.
Oakeshott's teaching is not easy to define, partly because of
an almost Levantine elusiveness of thought and partly because of
an extreme scarcity of the written word. The relevant writings are a
few articles in the now extinct
Cambridge Journal,
and the inaugural
lecture in London entitled "Political Education": from these how–
ever-though nothing like a doctrine emerges-a certain body of
opinion, a certain outlook on the world can be reconstructed.
The enemy for Oakeshott- and I have already indicated that
his
thought can best be approached through what it denounces and
excludes-is something called Rationalism. Rationalism is a general
and widespread malady of the modern age-which means roughly
Europe since Galileo- but its worst ravages have (if we except re–
ligion) been inflicted in the sphere of politics. Closely linked with
the rise of science though in fact embodying a complete misunder–
standing of scientific method, it can be characterized by the two
cardinal intellectual errors committed by its adherents. In the first
place, in .any given subject or discipline, the Rationalist admits the
existence of only one kind of knowledge whereas
in
fact there are
