CONSERVATISM IN BRITAIN
553
had from minds like that of Professor Kirk, for assimilating them–
selves into the ranks of the old and the established, that he should
become, on the most elevated possible level, the Emily Post of po–
litical life?) What Oakeshott seems to be saying is "Now after
all
this cant and braying, after all the ideologies and the neologisms,
after all the big words and the big talk ,and the little learning to be
got out of it all, now let's tum to politics and look at them as for
better or for worse they really are." And the real trouble with
Oakeshott is, it seems to me, that judged by the very standards to
which he appeals, he is just wrong. It might be that politics ought
to be what he says they are, it might even be to the credit of human
nature if they were. But they aren't. Human beings in politics think
in abstract terms and regard problems as capable of solution: they
have visions of society, and they devise policies and project revolu–
tions to realize them. They start, it is true, from inherited beliefs but
often enough only to criticize and reject them: as for their tradi–
tional peculiarities, they find them useful enough for jokes and for
tourism but (save in a few countries which are no model for civilized
life ) they do not live by them. What they live by, what they are
prepared to suffer for, what they will even die for, are just those
abstractions and dogmas and ideologies which Oakeshott despises. Of
course Oakeshott is not unaware of all this, and he accepts it-as
he'd damn well better. But he accepts it much as Margaret Fuller,
I am sure, accepted the universe: face-savingly. And having once ac–
cepted it he has his own way of dealing with it. The desire for uni–
versality, for rationality, for which there is so much evidence through–
out all the particular histories of political mankind, goes for him into
oratio obliqua
rather than
oratio recta.
Every revolt against tradition
and particularity in any country becomes, once it has really arrived,
part of the tradition and the particularity of that country: it is from
then onward just another item that the wise statesman must consult
and explore in his pursuit of 'intimations': what it never is, because it
is never ,allowed to be, is an effective argument against this whole
narrow parochial anti-rationalistic conception or style of politics. The
final stage in this kind of reasoning, one that Oakeshott like
all
true
traditionalists embraces with a certain kind of perverse fervor, is the
paradox that all past revolutions are right, and all projected revolu–
tions are wrong. And here is one of those rare occasions
in
politics
