Oakeshott on Hayek and the Machiavellians (with some Orwell)
Oakeshott’s (1957) “Rationalism in Politics” starts with an epigram or a maxim from Vauvernauges, Les grands hommes, en apprenant aux faibles à réfléchir, !es ont mis sur la route de l'erreur. [Great men, by teaching the weak/feebleminded to reflect, have put them on the road to error.] He returns to the maxim, quoting it again in French, seemingly explaining its significance to his argument.
By a pardonable abridgment of history, the Rationalist character may be seen springing from the exaggeration of Bacon's hopes and the neglect of the scepticism of Descartes; modern Rationalism is what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of men of discrimination and genius. Les grands ltommes, en apprenant aux faibles a ri!flechir, !es ont mis sur la route de l' erreur. But the history of Rationalism is not only the history of the gradual emergence and definition of this new intellectual character; it is, also, the history of the invasion of every department of intellectual activity by the doctrine of the sovereignty of technique.—p. 17 (in the 1962, Methuen edition of Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays.)
Descartes and Bacon are the great (“men of discrimination and genius”) and whose ideas get distorted in the reception by the feeble-minded and it is this unintended distortion that creates a new kind of man (the Rationalism), who embraces the sovereignty of technique based on a misunderstanding about the nature of true skill/knowledge.
So, as I showed yesterday, while Oakeshott argues for the political need of an aristocracy of birth to rule, he recognizes that there is another natural aristocracy of intellectual worthy (grands Hommes) that are the teachers of mankind shaping human minds. (Where this leaves religion I explore soon.) As I noted, Oakeshott argues that there is a demand from inexperienced rulers for the distorted account of skill/knowledge (including the art of government), who also lack resources (especially time) to master anything but the distorted account.
However, it turns out that Descartes and Bacon themselves are preceded by Machiavelli. As Oakeshott puts it, “the first of these needy adventurers into the field of politics was provided for on his appearance a century earlier by Machiavelli.” (p 24) Yet, the uptake of Machiavelli anticipates that of Descartes and Bacon, and is based on a distortion: “But, like the great progenitors of Rationalism in general (Bacon and Descartes), Machiavelli was aware of the limitations of technical knowledge; it was not Machiavelli himself, but his followers, who believed in the sovereignty of technique, who believed that government was nothing more than 'public administration' and could be learned from a book.” (p. 25; emphasis adedd)
Machiavelli is presented as a specialist rationalist offering a teaching in the art of government. (Oakeshott does not claim that Machiavelli inspired Bacon and Descartes’s project of general Rationalism, but in the case of Bacon that is not a silly speculation altogether.) Machiavelli’s teaching is distorted by what we may call ‘Machiavellians’ who skip on teaching the practical or tacit knowledge that accompanies any true skill. It is these Machiavellians that supply the purported teaching in the art of government that generations of inexperienced rulers require. As I hinted yesterday, notice the role of incentives in Oakeshott’s argument:
His need of it is so great that he will have no incentive to be sceptical about the possibility of a magic technique of politics which will remove the handicap of his lack of political education. The offer of such a technique will seem to him the offer of salvation itself; to be told that the necessary knowledge is to be found, complete and self-contained, in a book, and to be told that this knowledge is of a sort that can be learned by heart quickly and applied mechanically, will seem, like salvation, something almost too good to be true.—p. 23
It is worth asking how the birth of rationalism in politics could emerge and be victorious in it, if a system of aristocracy that preceded it knew how to rule. Presumably, it is characteristic of the art of government that one knows how to conserve (see what I did there?) one’s (family/stem of) rule.
In fact, as I hinted above, anticipating Anscombe on the rise of modern moral philosophy (and some of Alasdair MacIntyre’s narratives), Oakeshott inscribes his narrative of the birth of rationalism in politics in a wider narrative of the (fuller) victory of rationalism in religion. In Oakeshott’s telling this victory precedes the one in politics. Oakeshott gives a hint of what he takes to be a symptom of the victory in religion, that is, Spinozism: “it is certainly closely allied with a decline in the belief in Providence: a beneficient and infallible technique replaced a beneficient and infallible God.” (p. 18) And it gave rise to “the greatest of all cribs to a religion, Paley's Evidences of Christianity.” (p. 25) In general, Oakeshott treats the influence of utilitarianism (in politics and religion) as instantiating the impact of rationalism. To what degree the rise of rationalism within religion is an effect of endogenous circumstances or not, is left a bit unclear. (I return to this some other time.)
One deliberate effect of the category ‘rationalism’ is to put many approaches to politics on the same side (as ideology, as governance, as program, etc.). This is illustrated by an amusing passage:
But, while formerly it was tacitly resisted and retarded by, for example, the informality of English politics (which enabled us to escape, for a long time, putting too high a value on political action and placing too high a hope in political achievement - to escape, in politics at least, the illusion of the evanescence of imperfection), that resistance has now itself been converted into an ideology. This is, perhaps, the main significance of Hayek's Road to Serfdom - not the cogency of his doctrine, but the fact that it is a doctrine. A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics. And only in a society already deeply infected with Rationalism will the conversion of the traditional resources of resistance to the tyranny of Rationalism into a self-conscious ideology be considered a strengthening of those resources. It seems that now, in order to participate in politics and expect a hearing, it is necessary to have, in the strict sense, a doctrine; not to have a doctrine appears frivolous, even disreputable. And the sanctity, which in some societies was the property of a politics piously attached to traditional ways, has now come to belong exclusively to rationalist politics.—pp. 21-22
From Oakeshott’s (1947) perspective, in the struggle between rationalism(s) and traditionalism(s) Hayek belongs — notwithstanding his criticism of eternal saint-simonism and species of rationalism — much closer to the ruling fashion of rationalist politics than Oakeshott’s own preferred traditionalism. Crucially, then, and this is a topic that Foucault revives, from Oakeshott’s perspective Hayek offers an impoverished or deficient art of government. (Perhaps, Hayek fits the species ‘near-Rationalist’ that Oakeshott introduces on p. 1.)
Let me wrap up. Yesterday, I asked who Oakeshott is writing for. In the text, he clearly assumes that his reader is not tempted by “National Socialism or Communism.” But echoing Hayek’s plea to his social democratic friends he is writing for those who consider as “more plausible” the “project of offering no place to any form of education which is not generally rationalistic in character.” (32) These would not be very tempted by Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, which is I think the only then contemporary programmatic work mentioned in the text.
But there are sufficient hints of whose program he is worried about. Above I highlighted that Oakeshott treats Machiavelli’s followers — the Machiavellians — as those who ruined politics by making rationalism seem inevitable to the art of government. A few years before James Burnham had published his influential (1943) The Machiavellians, defenders of freedom, a kind of prequel to the widely admired and discussed (1941) The Managerial Revolution. Both were discussed (recall and here) by Orwell in an equally significant essay (1946), “Second Thoughts on James Burnham.”
In fact, it is pretty clear that Oakeshott is writing to those who, while opposing “National Socialism or Communism,” may be attracted to Burnham’s vision for the ruling class (and now I quote Orwell’s summary) “If it is to stay in power a ruling class must constantly admit suitable recruits from below, so that the ablest men may always be at the top and a new class of power-hungry malcontents cannot come into being. This is likeliest to happen, Burnham considers, in a society which retains democratic habits – that is, where opposition is permitted and certain bodies such as the press and the trade unions can keep their autonomy.”
While much of Oakeshott’s argument in his essay can be understood as claiming (instrumentally) that this vision will fail in virtue of the fact that it is based on an ersatz skill not a real art of government. (Orwell had sad the same thing but in a different register.) Oakeshott’s more fundamental argument is that today’s Machiavellians offer a form of idolatry. This charge is presupposed in a related charge, “Like the politics of the Rationalist (from which, of course, it is inseparable), the morality of the Rationalist is the morality of the self-made man and of the self-made society: it is what other peoples have recognized as 'idolatry'.” (p. 35) And so, to develop yesterday’s point a bit more fully lurking in its gloomy final lines of “Rationalism in Politics” is the gloomy prediction that English victory in WWII was merely apparent and, absent a return to the true path of tradition, a prelude to the death of an already “corrupt and unhealthy” nation.