Michael Oakeshott on religion, aesthetics and politics

324 Pages·2016·1.64 MB·English

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LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
2004
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Elizabeth Campbell Corey
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
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Corey, Elizabeth Campbell, "Being otherworldly in the world: Michael Oakeshott on religion, aesthetics and
politics" (2004). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 569.
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BEING OTHERWORLDLY IN THE WORLD:
MICHAEL OAKESHOTT ON RELIGION, AESTHETICS AND POLITICS

A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the
Louisiana State University and
Agricultural and Mechanical College
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

in

The Department of Political Science

by
Elizabeth Campbell Corey
B.A., Oberlin College, 1994
M.A., Louisiana State University, 1999
M.A., Louisiana State University, 2001
December, 2004
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is my great pleasure to be able to thank the people who have made this
dissertation possible. My greatest debt is owed to Professor Ellis Sandoz, who has
provided consistent support—both moral and financial—since I entered the Ph.D.
program in 1998. His procurement of Earhart scholarship funds made it possible for me
to focus solely on my studies both at LSU and during a year abroad at the University of
Heidelberg in Germany. I am therefore also grateful to the Earhart Foundation for its
consistent support over these last six years.
I am also indebted to the other members of the LSU Political Science Department
who served as members of my Ph.D. committee. James Garand spent countless hours
with me as we engaged in substantive research together, and his ability to introduce
students to the professional academic world—that is, to the world of conferences and
publishing—is remarkable. James Stoner was my teacher in most of my substantive
political philosophy courses, and his insights and penetrating questions remain a model
for me of how the intellectual life ought to be conducted. And Cecil Eubanks was an
invaluable resource in teaching me “how to teach.” As my teaching mentor he was both
a model for my own conduct in the classroom and an insightful but gentle critic of my
first attempts at teaching undergraduates.
Special thanks also go to two teachers and friends, whom I was fortunate to get to
know during my years as a graduate student. Timothy Fuller’s expertise in Oakeshott
studies and his willingness to advise my work from afar has been vital in the writing of
this dissertation. And Robert McMahon deserves a much more sincere thanks than I can
give here, both for introducing me to Oakeshott and for being a model of a humane
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scholar. His advice on the subjects of academic reading and writing have been formative,
and he will no doubt continue to be a mentor for me in the years to come.
I also owe, of course, a great debt to my parents, who have helped me in countless
ways over the years, and who have stood by both me and my husband as we concurrently
pursued graduate degrees. The consistent encouragement they have given has been
invaluable.
Finally, my greatest debt of all is owed to my husband, David Corey, without
whom this dissertation would not have been written. Our discussions on the subject of
Michael Oakeshott and on political philosophy more broadly conceived have been
formative in my intellectual development. And his gentle encouragement that I finish the
dissertation in a timely manner was precisely what I needed to see the project to
completion. It has been just the impetus I needed to arrive at this happy occasion of
expressing my gratitude to all those who have been important to me over these past six
years.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.........................................................................................................................ii

ABBREVIATIONS.................................................................................................................................v

ABSTRACT..........................................................................................................................................vi

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................................1

CHAPTER 2 OAKESHOTT AND AUGUSTINE ON THE HUMAN CONDITION..........................................27

CHAPTER 3 FUTURE, PAST AND PRESENT........................................................................................63

CHAPTER 4 OAKESHOTT’S RELIGIOUS THOUGHT............................................................................98

CHAPTER 5 OAKESHOTT’S AESTHETICS...........................................................................................130

CHAPTER 6 THE TOWER OF BABEL AND THE MORAL LIFE..............................................................167

CHAPTER 7 RATIONALISM AND THE POLITICS OF FAITH..................................................................207

CHAPTER 8 SKEPTICAL POLITICS AND CIVIL ASSOCIATION.............................................................232

CHAPTER 9 RATIONALISM AND GNOSTICISM: OAKESHOTT AND VOEGELIN....................................250

CHAPTER 10 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................287

WORKS CITED.....................................................................................................................................310

VITA...................................................................................................................................................317
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ABBREVIATIONS

EM Experience and its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1933.

HCA Hobbes on Civil Association. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975.

MPME Morality and Politics in Modern Europe. Edited by S. R. Letwin. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

OH On History and Other Essays. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.

OHC On Human Conduct. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

PFPS The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism. Edited by Timothy
Fuller. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

RP Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Edited by Timothy Fuller.
Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991.

RPML Religion, Politics and the Moral Life. Edited by Timothy Fuller. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

SJ “Shylock the Jew.” Caian 30 (1921): 61-67.

SPDCE The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1953.

VLL The Voice of Liberal Learning. Edited by Timothy Fuller. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989.

WIH What is History? Edited by Luke O’Sullivan. Exeter: Imprint Academic,
2004.

WP “Work and Play.” First Things 54 (1995): 29-33.

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a study of the thought of Michael Oakeshott with particular
emphasis on his writings about the character of religion and aesthetics. The dissertation
as a whole makes the case that a certain moral vision—one informed by religious and
aesthetic considerations—lies at the center of Oakeshott’s thought and informs his
political philosophy. The dissertation begins as an examination of Oakeshott’s debts to
St. Augustine and to British Idealist thinkers such as F. H. Bradley, and moves to a study
of Oakeshott’s own views on religion and aesthetics. It turns next to a consideration of
Oakeshott’s two essays entitled “The Tower of Babel,” making the case that Oakeshott’s
views on aesthetics and morality are intimately linked in a certain kind of moral
personality. It is this moral personality—one that is creative and unique to each
individual—that Oakeshott finds most praiseworthy. Such a moral character underlies
his political theorizing, in that such persons are those who can fully embrace Oakeshott’s
“politics of skepticism” and his idea of civil association. The dissertation concludes by
comparing Oakeshott’s conception of “Rationalism” to Eric Voegelin’s idea of
“Gnosticism.”

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

I tried research one summer. . . . A friend of mine, a boy from Pittsburgh named Harry
Stern, and I read up the literature and presented the problem. . . . But then a peculiar
thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the
laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in
yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside
we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an
afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I
became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the
floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry’s attention to the
presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. He was absolutely unaffected by
the singularities of time and place. His abode was everywhere. It was all the same to
him whether he catheterized a pig at four o’clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at
midnight in Transylvania. He was actually like one of those scientists in the movies who
don’t care about anything but the problem in their heads—now here is a fellow who does
have a “flair for research” and will be heard from. Yet I do not envy him. I would not
change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more
aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

The substance of civilization is a myth, “an imaginative interpretation of human
existence, the perception (not the solution) of the mystery of human life.”

Oakeshott, “Leviathan: A Myth”

For much of his career, Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) was known as a political
philosopher of a distinctly conservative stripe. Identified by journalists as an articulator
of Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the 1980s, Oakeshott was presumed by many to be yet
another defender of Tory policies and of the status quo.1 The New York Times, with its

1 Patrick Riley, “In Appreciation: Michael Oakeshott, Philosopher of Individuality,” Review of Politics 54
(1992): 649. Robert Devigne offers an interpretation of Oakeshott as primarily a political conservative in
Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994).

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characteristic acumen, labeled him a “right-wing guru.”2 Still others went so far as to
imply that Oakeshott was a “crypto-fascist.”3
In terms of philosophical labels, Oakeshott has been characterized as one of the
last members of the tradition known as “British Idealism.” Following in the footsteps of
F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, Oakeshott is recognized for having written in 1933
a difficult and somewhat obscure book of philosophy in which he sets forth the idea that
there are discrete “modes” of experience: science, history and practice.4
Still others recognize the Oakeshott of the 1940s and 1950s, author of
Rationalism in Politics and proponent of “antique and irrelevant” ideas that fail to take
account of the crisis of modernity.5 Some readers have taken Oakeshott’s opposition to
“Rationalism” as evidence of his aversion to rational thought, casting him as someone
who has no real interest in understanding the nature of human conduct.6 But perhaps
most surprising of all is the recent appropriation of Oakeshott by postmodernists such as
Richard Rorty, who applaud Oakeshott’s “non-foundational” political philosophy and see
him as a fellow traveler.
Commentators thus offer multiple characterizations of Oakeshott: conservative,
liberal, philosopher, opponent of rationality, postmodernist, polemicist, and skeptic.
How, if at all, might these views be reconciled? Or, to pose a more fruitful question,

2 Quoted in Riley, “Philosopher of Individuality,” p. 649.

3 Ibid., p. 664.

4 The book is Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). Hereafter EM.

5 David Kettler, “The Cheerful Discourses of Michael Oakeshott,” World Politics 16 (1964): 489.

6 Walter Berns, review of Rationalism in Politics by Michael Oakeshott, American Political Science
Review 57 (1963): 671.
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which, if any among them, describe the true Oakeshott? Since several of the
characterizations above are exact opposites and thus impossible to reconcile, we might
begin by noting that commentators writing on Oakeshott often reveal more about
themselves—about the prejudices they bring to their subject—than about their subject
itself. Nevertheless, Oakeshott’s thought is extraordinarily hard to classify. He is
conservative, but his conservatism is grounded neither in natural law nor in an appeal to
history. He is a polemicist, critiquing numerous aspects of the modern world, and yet on
the whole he is very much a defender of modernity from a philosophical standpoint.7
It is, I believe, taking the easy way out to argue that there are “multiple”
Oakeshotts: early, middle and late. The early Oakeshott, it could be argued, was
concerned with religion, aesthetics and Idealistic philosophy, while in his middle phase
he gives up these interests to write contentious analyses of modern political phenomena.
Finally, the late Oakeshott returns to pure philosophy, producing his most systematic
work in 1975, a series of three long essays on the character of human beings and political
association entitled On Human Conduct. But this facile division of Oakeshott’s life and
work into “stages” merely dodges the question of how best to understand a thinker whose
work covers subjects as diverse as religion, philosophy, politics, poetry, history,
education, and horse racing.8
My thesis is that Oakeshott’s output does represent (to borrow a phrase from
Oakeshott’s Idealist vocabulary) “a coherent whole.” For as Oakeshott himself observes

7 Efraim Podoksik makes this case in his recent book, In Defence of Modernity: Vision and Philosophy in
Michael Oakeshott (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003).

8 Oakeshott co-authored a book with G. T. Griffith on the subject of horse racing entitled, A Guide to the
Classics, or, How to Pick the Derby Winner (London: Faber and Faber, 1936).

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