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PARTISAN REVIEW
enchantments of
Schlaraffenland,
Ihe earth flowing with milk and
honey and the sea transmuted into ginger beer. ... " This outburst of
sententiousness and sarcasm has nothing to do with the argument at
hand, but Oakeshott can't resist using his logical niceties as a stick
to
beat utopian dreamers, whoever they may be.
Once again invoking his distinction, Oakeshott ays that there is
" no place" in civil association for distributive justice. We can agree
that distributive justice, because it implies goals, is categorically
discrete from civil association, but the more interesting and important
question is: are certain interests, distributive justice for one, by their
very nature incapable of being accommodated 'by the rules of civil
association? That is, would an attempt
to
realize such goal necessarily
lead
to
the withering away of politics and the triumph of managerial
government?
It
is this question , or something very much like it, that
Oakeshott does not take up, preferring to belabor the distinction
between civil and enterprise association.
However we finally construe Oakeshott's distinction , it should be
noted that Oakeshott is a theorist with a penchant for sorting things
out into extremely broad categories. In an earlier book,
Rationalism in
Politics,
Oakeshott distinguished (,he " rationalist" in politics from
what I suppose we should call the "traditionalist. " Oakeshott's ration–
alist, though , was a straw man-a bogey responsible for all the evils of
the twentieth century, both a Marxist "engineer" and a fascist
worshipper of the nation-state. Oakeshott's distinction explained so
much that it precluded the possibility of making a discriminating
ana lysis of the varieties of modern political belief.
Oakeshott's essay would have been more persuasive, I think, if
instead of rationalist he had used the word enthusiast as a general
category of opprobium. For one thing, the word is appropriate to
Oakeshott himself, since he is very much a man out of the eighteenth
century, when the word was in its negative heyday. Enthusiasts of
course suffered from enthusiasm-a kind of mental excess that was
disturbing in its mixture of complacency and zeal. Among the several
definitions of enthusiasm that we find in Johnson's
Dictionary,
two are
especially useful as guides not only
to
" Rationalism in Politics" but
to
Oakeshott's work in general: "confidence of opinion" and "exa ltation
of ideas." Oakeshott's argument is less with rationalism as such than
with the rationalist's-more properly the enthusiast's-Hconfidence of
opinion" that his ideas are self-evidently true and therefore are on ly
questioned by those who have sinister reasons for doing so. Oakeshott
would agree, moreover, with Johnson 's remark that " most schemes of
