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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE RULES OF THE GAME
ON HUMAN CONDUCT.
By Michael Oakeshott. Oxford University
Press. $18.50.
During the sixties it became fashionable to put the word
politics in book titles. Redolent of complex and hidden goings-on, the
word implied the reader would be offered a guide to the action behind
the scenes. One would see things as they really are-with all the
attendant intrigues, deal-makings, power-plays, shenanigans, or
worse. As a result the notion of politics became so inflated as to include
every aspect of human conduct-all the games people play-and thus
to
mean, in the final analysis, virtually nothing. " Politics" took over
sociology, psychology, literature, and even political science, which had
been desperately laboring to become "value-free." It is to Michael
Oakeshott's credit, then, that in his latest work,
On Human Conduct,
he goes against the prevailing doctrinal winds, attempting
to
reduce
the notion of politics to manageable size. The trouble is he goes too far
in the other direction, leaving us with a notion of politics that is
puzzling and arbitrary.
Oakeshott, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the London
School of Economics, is widely regarded as the leading conservative
philosopher, the one contemporary philosopher whom William Buck–
ley likes to quote with approval. Conservatism, though, is a mansion
with many rooms in it, and Oakeshott's has little to do with your
common, back-porch American variety. In Oakeshott's work we do not
find any concern with moral or spiritual renewal , nor do we find any
talk about a so-called organic society based upon a consensus about
goals. Oakeshott in fact denies the congruence of politics with broad
cu ltural, moral , or religious aims.
Oakeshott also denies that he has anything programmatic to offer.
He is, as he says, a philosopher, not a
philosophe-and
a modest
philosopher at that, bent on abating mystery rather than achieving
definitive understanding. Yet in the central essay of this dense exercise
in elucidation, "On the Civil Condition," Oakeshott is anything but
tentative, for he makes a sharp distinction between politics and other
kinds of human activity. Politics, according to Oakeshott, is a consider-
