Our societies are characterized by advanced cognitive division of labor. Let’s take this as a foundational stipulation for the present digression.
In a famous (1947) essay, “Rationalism in Politics,” Michael Oakeshott amplifies and revisits a problem famously associated with Schumpeter: that one drawback of the practice of democratic elections is that we have a tendency to elevate people into power who, while they may excel at persuasion and party-management, have no clue how to run things once they have achieved power.
With characteristic virtuosity, Oakeshott notes that the Schumpeterian problem I am hinting at precedes elective democracy (which is a very new phenomenon). It’s a problem that is characteristic of unstable political environments in which ‘new men,’ mercenary adventurers, and revolutionaries make a grab for power without having the expertise to run things. He implies that the new (we might call it ‘instrumental’) political science that Machiavelli makes infamous, while responding to fragmentation and wars of Renaissance Italy, meets the rather widespread demand for technical advice on how to govern.
To put this as a serious Foucault-inflected joke: on Oakeshott’s account, the ‘art’ of government as something to be instructed in technical or scientific manuals is invented once being a ruler cannot be taken for granted by a small number of families. So, modern political science is the off-spring of political instability. While this is undoubtedly anachronistic and fantastically bad historiography, it is not wholly implausible if we look at historical periods of flowering of political science (say, during the Hundred Schools of Thought period, in the aftermath of the fall of Ashoka’s empire, etc.)
Now, part of Oakeshott’s point is that the uptake of the art of government confuses technique with the cultivated judgment that can only be born from disciplined experience. And so precisely in circumstances where a cultivated art of government is most needed — a new kid on the block in power — political science will likely make it worse. This is especially so when exact technique, and the algorithmic following of rules, is mistaken for good judgment. (Oakeshott cites Michael Polanyi’s contrast between tacit and explicit knowledge approvingly.)
Oakeshott wrote a generation before the Best and Brightest managed to blunder their way through the Vietnam war, but surely his critique of what he calls ‘rationalism’ must have been revelatory for a generation of left and right wing students of politics. This is especially striking because Oakeshott kind of implies that at least in war-making, which in modern times is subject to extensive social planning (he is explicitly aware of the Hayekian argument), what he calls ‘rationalism’ might give the appearance of success.
Oakeshott clearly implies that aristocracies or societies that breed a governing class, or societies in which citizens have leisure (say due to slavery or income from empire) will do better at politics because in these the judgment cultivated over multiple generations becomes available to rulers-decision-makers. I hope I don’t scandalize anyone if I am unconvinced because such societies seem not immune against massive folly.
It doesn’t follow, of course, that the problem he (echoing Schumpeter) diagnoses for elective democracies like our own isn’t real, and that what he calls ‘rationalism’ (and the mind-set/education that facilitates it) doesn’t make it worse.
Now, in his famous essay, Oakeshott implies that the problem he diagnoses is entirely without remedy. And because so many friends I admire have warmly encouraged me to read Oakeshott’s essay, I thought it useful, perhaps, to say something about his blind-spots.
The parts of social life that need government are often administered by bureaucracies. Interestingly enough, and the way I recall it (haven’t gone back to double check it) in Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow. work with a contrast between self-governing polities that are characterized by public deliberation and more imperial, top-down bureaucratic polities. I don’t think they will object if I note (and perhaps they note it themselves) that conceptually hybrids are possible. I mention their book, because it is one of the few works in recent political theory that takes the fact of bureaucratic life very seriously. (Don’t try to refute me with scholar.google citations to Max Weber and bureaucracy.)
Bureaucracies are useful because, in virtue of being rule following, they are predictable and so solve many kinds of coordination problems (and reduce transaction costs). If they are relatively impartial and neutral, they also generate reasonable expectations (and so facilitate a species of justice). In addition, bureaucracies are mechanism to embed domain-specific expertise systematically into administrative practices. Yes, bureaucracies are also good at generating taxes for government, and are expansive in spending this very income.
As the previous paragraph indicates, a well-established bureaucracy solves part of the knowledge problem of new rulers. For it (the bureaucracy) is a means to internalize generation spanning knowledge and skill. This is especially so, if the heart and soul, the DNA of the bureaucracy can survive the periodic purges associated with regime change (or new leadership). Obviously (nod to Weber), the interest of the bureaucracy need not coincide with the rulers’ and/or the public interest.
Oakeshott could acknowledge all of this, but he could respond, more subtly, that even if a bureaucracy has the capacity for good judgment that is acquired through experience and tradition, it is by no means obvious it is either always willing to share it with those in power (Nick Cowen and I have just published a paper that analyzes this problem in the context of dictatorship and unaccountable/concentrated leadership) or, even when it is so willing, it is not obvious that ‘'new men’' know how to act on its guidance. This problem is, in fact, theorized in Part I of More’s Utopia (that is usually skipped by would be rationalists).
In addition, bureaucracies are especially useful (Bruno Latour noted) in the context of domesticated political problems, that is, where certain issues are no more contested and where they are decomposable in analytically distinct sub-routines or challenges (or puzzles to be solved). Graham Harman’s little book on Bruno Latour is especially good on this topic. That is, while they are, in principle. a partial remedy for the problem of memory and expertise that political novices generate, bureaucracies do not solve the problem of good judgment in the context of either political contestation or new political challenges.
Now, certain extreme free market types deny that any art of government is possible; they want to claim that the market or case law is sufficient to deal with novel problems. In his famous article, Oakeshott treats this (not without justice) as ideological, and wishful thinking. I think he is right about this, although I do not share his stance. In fact, to end on a autobiographical note, my turn to Foucault — who uniquely in the twentieth century addressed the nature and content of a (liberal) art of government —, is a bet that Oakeshott was right about the diagnosis of our political problem, but not very helpful to tackle it.
I liked the essay, but the part about aristocracies, or, more broadly, management by family tradition, strikes me as something that could only be written in England, and not much later than 1950. Experience with political dynasties in Australia has not been encouraging, and the same goes in spades for the US.
I read “Rationalism in Politics” today, having recently finished teaching a Politics, Philosophy and Economics course framed around the idea of “wicked problems”. This idea first emerged in urban planning in the late 1960s, to describe problems that weren’t amenable to the rational-technical solutions Oakeshott had criticised about 15 years earlier.
In an important sense, all political problems are (at least nowadays) wicked problems. If all that was required was lots of technical expertise (as with landing humans on the moon), the problems would already have been solved, or reduced to bureaucratic routine.