Oakeshott and Anarchism

One thing from an intellectual standpoint Oakeshott is pretty weak on, I think, is his essentially unargued rejection of anarchism, a rejection particularly noticeable given the way he talks about ‘tradition’ in Rationalism in Politics.

So, a main aim of RP is to reject the idea that ‘tradition’ as such is something antithetical to reason, Oakeshott’s basic argument being that since all reasoning is in reality contextual reasoning, then ‘tradition’ should be seen as providing both form and content to reason.  Those who think of tradition as essentially a constraining force, then, are making a sort of category error, since tradition (properly understood) is constitutive, the relation or ‘tie’ between any given tradition and the actions which it conditions being conceptual rather than empirical (to use the jargon of other philosophers); in the terms of OHC, rather than commanding any particular ‘substantive actions’, tradition merely ‘adverbially conditions’ them.

If this is all so though, then the basic rationale for government put forward by Hobbes and Kant – that it is required to achieve the order necessary for substantively ‘free’ action to be possible, it being in the personal interests of even rational egoists to jointly submit to a state – is implicitly rejected, or so it seems to me: for, on Oakeshott’s scheme, tradition (the ‘idiom of practice’ in OHC-speak) already provides the necessary order, doing so without compulsion.

Now if Oakeshott clearly believed in an objective moral order, then perhaps he could have argued that the state is morally necessary to limit evil in the world, or at least, have argued that if moving to a stateless condition would knowingly facilitate evil, then anarchy should be rejected on deontological grounds – hypothetically, one might think of a libertarian who would be a principled anarchist but for an ardent belief that abortion is murder, finding as a result any potential transition to anarchy immoral whenever anti-abortion laws are in place that are not merely a dead letter.  Whatever Oakeshott’s private convictions, in his public persona as a political philosopher at least this way of justifying the state was not available to him, his work never even hinting at at.  Far from asserting the existence of an objective moral order, then, Oakeshott was a man who collapsed the concept of morality into that of his notion of tradition, writing of ‘moralities’ plural and considering them subject to an inevitable (if gradual) change over time that rules out the possibility of there being any universal standards to adjudicate when the intimations of one morality clash with those of another.

In forswearing the most obvious conceptual means to even entertain a principled argument for the state, then, anarchism as an idea should have had some sort of appeal to him.  Frustratingly though, the existence of the state acts as an absolute presupposition in Oakeshott’s work.  Thus, the theory of civil association as per On Human Conduct is firmly fixed upon the nation-state, notwithstanding how Oakeshott had no time for nationalism; and in ‘On Being Conservative’, he derives the need for positive law from the need for government to be able to govern efficiently, leaving the need for government in the first place as an unargued assumption.*

Having said that, there is this curious remark near the end of OHC in which anarchist theory is mentioned.  Here, Oakeshott first asserts that ‘modern European so-called “anarchism” is a somewhat muddled response to a state understood as an enterprise’, before adding a footnote that claims that insofar as anarchists’ critiques of the state are not nonsensical, they are critiques of law that is purposive rather than instrumental – in other words, they are variants of Oakeshott’s own critique of the state in the mode of an enterprise association, not the state as such.  Declaring Proudhon to be ‘by far the most intelligent explorer of the idea of “anarchy” in modern times’, the footnote then concludes by claiming Proudhon’s positive vision to be that of civil association in all but name.

Leaving aside the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ aspect here (the enemy in question being that of Marx), I am not sure how to parse this.  At the very least, the idea that the only coherent vision of anarchy is one not of ‘anarchy’ properly speaking but of a civil association state seems to be an idea that is sorely lacking in imagination.  Moreover, in failing to show why civil association is desirable in itself and not just relative to compulsory enterprise association, Oakeshott gives succour, I think, to those who would deny or fail to see the crucial importance of the civil/enterprise association distinction in the first place.

* On the possibility of government arbitrating disputes without the use of legislation, Oakeshott writes:

the diseconomy of such an arrangement is so obvious that it could only be expected to occur to those inclined to believe the ruler to be supernaturally inspired and to those disposed to attribute to him a quite different office – that of leader, or tutor, or manager

My point is simply: what justifies having an ‘office’ here at all?