Oakeshott on the Conservative Disposition in the art of government and Classical Liberalism

I am in a stretch of the academic year when I create a lot of work for myself by making my students in my two courses do writing assignments ahead of each session. So, you will have noted that I skip posting a day here and there. Before long I really want to write a piece on the implied theory of gender in Herland because I am very excited to report what my students and I discerned in it.

But I left my notes on my office desk at work, so today’s post is on Oakeshott’s (1956) “On Being a Conservative.” (This is also a very fine work in social ontology and social phenomenology that I have revisited with very warm admiration here.) It’s important for what follows that on Oakeshott’s view, one can be a conservative in the dispositional sense without subscribing to conservatism or nearby creeds that presuppose non-trivial metaphysical commitments (about providence (p. 183)) or natural law (p. 184)). In act, the focus on the disposition allows Oakeshott to reject an account that appeals to fixed “human nature” (p. 173) or its essence.

That is, one does not understand his essay at all if one fails to see that it is very much a polemic against views that are commonly associated with ‘conservatism’! In fact, the essay closes by suggesting “there is more to be learnt about this disposition” from “Montaigne, Pascal, Hobbes and Hume than from Burke or Bentham.” (p. 195) The mention of Burke with that arch-rationalist, Bentham, signals to us that Oakeshott has no truck with the politics of (imperial) nostalgia, and — while he does recognize the significance of the partnership between past and present — he clearly thinks a politics that presupposes “a providential order reflecting a divine purpose in nature and in human history to which it is the duty of mankind to conform its conduct” is a sure way toward imprudent politics.

Before the class meeting I kind of regretted not adding Peter Wehner’s (2020) NYT editorial, “Conservatives Have Only One Choice in 2020” ahead of the last the US Presidential election. In it he prominently quotes a paragraph from Oakeshott (with a link to a somewhat obscure website) on the dispositional nature of being a conservative, before immediately adding the following paragraph:

But conservatism is far more than merely a disposition. It is premised on certain beliefs, including the dignity and equality of individuals, while it is also undergirded by the idea that freedom is impossible without strong civic institutions and responsible personal behavior. It prizes prudence and considers gratitude a virtue. And because of its reverence for our Madisonian system of government — checks and balances, separation of powers — conservatism considers compromise part of our constitutional DNA.

While Oakeshott clearly also embraces prudence and gratitude, the rest of this passage is very clearly rejected by Oakeshott. (And so I was happy I didn’t assign it, although it might have been useful to them to see how US Conservatives have responded to the rise of Trump.) Because of the clear path dependency in Oakeshott’s thought, a conservative adapts to the given circumstances, so perhaps if he had been born stateside, he might have paid more lip-service to the Madisonian system. But he quite clearly treats it as rationalist monstrosity (as one can read in (recall this post) “Rationalism in Politics”).

Crucially, as Rationalism in Politics makes clear, Oakeshott thinks there is no such thing as equality of individuals in the art of governing. What’s needed is either a natural aristocracy or, more likely, an aristocracy of birth (as I noted in my post earlier in the week). Much to my own surprise, on revisiting On Being a Conservative, I belatedly realized it is preoccupied with the art of government, which is the topic of the third (out of four) sections.

Before I get there, it is worth stating the two background facts — Oakeshott calls them a ‘proper starting place’ (p. 184) — that frame Oakeshott’s discussions. These facts are for him contingent features of political reality.

1. Pluralism about values, means, and ends.

   Here’s Oakeshott’s description:

We are apt to entertain a multiplicity of opinions on every conceivable subject and are disposed to change these beliefs as we grow tired of them or as they prove unserviceable. Each of us is pursuing a course of his own; and there is no project so unlikely that somebody will not be found to engage in it, no enterprise so foolish that somebody will not undertake it. (p. 184)

The way he puts it should alert us that he shares what I call the ‘Platonic skepticism about truth in the public sphere’ that one also finds in strains of the liberal tradition (and in his contemporary, Hannah Arendt). Oakeshott explicitly rejects the suggestion that government should command “for truth,” because in the context of pluralism it will generate more not less conflict.

Crucially, left to its own devices such pluralism generates inevitable social and political conflict: “This multiplicity of activity and variety of opinion is apt to produce collisions: we pursue courses which cut across those of others, and we do not all approve the same sort of conduct.” (p. 185, emphasis added) These collisions are important for what follows.

2. People have an “an acquired love of making choices for themselves.” (p 185)

That this love is acquired is another marker that for Oakeshott that there is nothing inevitable about humans to have a desire for individual freedom, independence, or autonomy. More subtly, since we’re in the realm of ‘love’ we’re also in the realm of partiality and passion.

Now, given 1-2, it is incredibly tempting to treat Oakeshott as a kind of classical liberal (with a conservative disposition). This temptation may become overwhelming because he invokes one of the favorite images of twentieth century classical liberalism (and Austrian economics not to mention late Ordoliberalism), where governing is likened to an umpire who enforces the rules. I quote a representative passage:

[Ruling] is a specific and limited activity, easily corrupted when it is combined with any other, and, in the circumstances, indispensable. The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game, or the chairman who governs the debate according to known rules but does not himself participate in it. (p. 187; Oakeshott also invokes and discusses the ‘umpire’ metaphor on p. 189 and p. 194.)

Before I diffuse the temptation, it is worth emphasizing that like the classical liberals and, say, Walter Lippmann, Oakeshott does de-politicize ruling. For him the ruler is more like a judiciary functionary whose skill is knowledge of the (fairly stable) rules and know how in applying them rather than the ‘crafty’ politician who tries to capture spoils for himself and friends. In addition to this skill (and accompanying skills of maintaining the rules and cautiously extending/revising them where necessary), the ruling virtue in this art of government is impartiality. Regular readers know I find this judiciary model of legislation and, especially, ruling a serious mistake. It is an unattainable ideal.

So, it looks as if Oakeshott ends up implying that the art of government involves the resolution of coordination problems and, thereby, reduce conflict and friction in society and reduce transaction costs. (It’s tempting to see whether Oakeshott and Coase knew each other.) For Oakeshott, “governing is recognized as a specific and limited activity…the rule of those engaged in a great diversity of self-chosen enterprises…it is concerned with…activities only in respect of their propensity to collide with one another;…its business is to keep its subjects at peace with one another in the activities in which they have chosen to seek their happiness.” (p. 189) So, there is much to be said for treating Oakeshott as a fellow traveler with classical liberalism.

But, despite this non-trivial affinity, Oakeshott is not a liberal. Let’s leave aside (but note) that Oakeshott keeps his distance from affirming the dignity and equality of individuals (and with “moral right and wrong” altogether (p. 189)), and that he explicitly denies that private property is a natural right (p. 187), while recognizing that the conservative will value the institutional arrangements of private property (p. 191), that (more importantly) he also keeps his distance from emphasizing security.

Arguments from omissions are always a bit suspect and fragile, so instead let me focus on Oakeshott’s insistence that the point of the art of government is, fundamentally, to “sustain the loyalty of its subjects” (p. 190). As he puts it earlier, “generally speaking… [those with conservative dispositions] recognize that the appropriate attitude to a government of this sort is loyalty (sometimes a confident loyalty, at others perhaps the heavy-hearted loyalty of Sidney Godolphin), respect and some suspicion, not love or devotion or affection.” (p. 177) And while I would never claim that liberals are intrinsically disloyal, it’s not a virtue we emphasize in our political writings.

Now, one may wonder, first, why governing as conceived by Oakeshott — one that attempts to lower the emotional and ideological affect and polarization of society — would generate any loyalty at all. And this is related to an associated puzzle. When Oakeshott first introduces loyalty, it is in the context of explicating what the conservative disposition amounts to in personal relationships. He writes, “A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a certain manner, who supplies certain wants, who has certain useful abilities, who possesses certain merely agreeable qualities, or who holds certain acceptable opinions; he is somebody who engages the imagination, who excites contemplation, who provokes interest, sympathy, delight and loyalty simply on account of the relationship entered into.” (p. 177) These relationships are nurtured by the conservative disposition. And so one may well think that Oakeshott wants to model political life as a kind of (civic) friendship (in the way familiar from Plato, Rousseau, and nineteenth century socialists.) And that does not seem to fit the affinity with the classical liberal art of governing at all. So, one may well think there is a deep tension here.

Now, here it really matters that the art of governing is conceptualized as skilled activity. For Oakeshott, in all skilled activity the conservative disposition is manifested in a fondness for particular tools—themselves the work of craftsmanship and skilled activity. There are quite a few passages that evoke in me Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. The former association is not wholly far-fetched because Oakeshott has a tendency to quote Dao-ist parables in his footnotes.

Now when Kantians invoke tools they mean to suggest they are not sources of value and not proper ends. And they are invoked to emphasize their dispensability. It’s clear that for Oakeshott, the conservative attitude disposition toward tools is not like this at all. For Oakeshott tools are intrinsic to social life, but in virtue of their embodied craftsmanship objects that may generate all kinds of feelings of care and admiration, perhaps even aesthetic appreciation. He doesn’t say this in the text, so this is a bit speculative. But it is important to see that for Oakeshott the conservative disposition is one that generates care for friendships and activities as ends in their own right. That much is pretty clear in Oakeshott.

That is to say, seeing governance as an instrument is not to make it subject to cold calculation of public administration, but rather it is to discern the craftsmanship, care, and skill involved in it. And that helps explain why it might generate loyalty in a public. (I return to this below.)

If that’s right, we can also understand why for Oakeshott the skill in governing is not the same as the skill in maintaining friendship, not even analogous. That is, while they draw on the same disposition, the skill itself is quite different in practice. The quick to say that is that while neutrality is very important to Oakeshott’s art of governing it would be disastrous in friendship. So, Oakeshott’s view of the art of governing is not one of the cultivation of (civic) friendship. So, there is no tension in his thought.

To be sure, and I view the idea that a public might recognize the skill in the art of governing and so generate the affects that will support loyalty as both wishful thinking and at odds with some of Oakeshott’s other views. While, it is undoubtedly true that Oakeshott thinks the conservative disposition is latent in a populace and often activated in their affairs. There is no reason to think we can count on the people to recognize the skill involved in governing. In fact, Oakeshott’s argument in “Rationalism in Politics” depends on the fact that this is not so. That in a democracy rulers and people alike will be clueless in these matters. I view it as wishful thinking because it presupposes — that good government will make space for the discernment by the governed and appreciation of skilled activity in the rulers — what needs to be an effect over time.

I meant to make some connections to Foucault, but this digression has gone on long enough.