No Need to Exaggerate in Kind…

Not being aware of Professor Feser until very recently, I now learn he was at some point (and perhaps still is?) a part of the LRC/Mises Institute milieu. A Misesian (or at least Misesian-friendly) ‘conservative libertarian’ who is nevertheless staunchy pro-war and, more generally, a partisan mainstream Republican?  (Three cheers for George W Bush! Don’t be beastly to Sarah Palin — unlike her critics, she knows her logical fallacies!  Those Dems — and Obama especially — are uniquely evil! And, last but certainly not least — vote McCain!)  Well, if that’s what rocks his boat, who am I to query it?*

That said, I’ve just noticed too the following passage in an NRO piece of his from a couple of years ago (link):

Rawls … is often claimed (by Rawlsians, anyway) to have been the greatest political thinker of the 20th century, and to have rescued political philosophy from the dormancy into which it had purportedly fallen before his book A Theory of Justice appeared in 1971. This might come as a surprise to readers of Aron, Hayek, Oakeshott, Popper, and Strauss — thinkers active long before Rawls came on the scene, and whose works exhibit a detail of argumentation, clarity of expression, and breadth of historical, philosophical, and social-scientific learning that Rawls did not match.

Well, I’ve never been a fan of Rawls’ style of reasoning either (especially in his later stuff), but is Rationalism in Politics by comparison really a book that exhibits detailed arguments, clarity of expression, and a breadth of historical, philosophical, and social-scientific learning that puts to shame that found in A Theory of Justice? Maybe it shows greater historical learning (after all, Oakeshott was nominally an historian at the start of his career), but the philosophical grounding is surely just different rather than better, and as for social science, well, there’s certainly nothing like Rawls’ appeal to recent work in psychology and rational choice theory in any of Oakeshott’s writings — in fact, Oakeshott effectively rules this out on principle. To be clear, I’m not saying people should bin their Oakeshott books and read Rawls instead — that would be rather, er, peculiar of a blog subtitled ‘Notes on the work of RG Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott’, no?  Nevertheless, I do think finding one of the two men interesting hardly requires adopting an oppositional attitude to the other.  Still, I’m only quoting from a polemical review I suppose.

Mind you, cf. Feser again, this time in a more recent review (link):

Better to have an openly and even obnoxiously left-wing political philosophy professor who nevertheless requires his students to read Aron, Hayek, and Oakeshott alongside Habermas, Marx, and Rawls, than an unfailingly polite, closet liberal who assigns only the leftist thinkers and gives his pupils no indication that another intellectual tradition exists.

Reading this, my immediate thought was to think, what do you mean ‘another’ intellectual tradition?  For myself, the only man here that really stands out from the others is Marx, partly for his expressed political radicalism and partly since the rest all appealed to the authority of Kant on occasion, though admittedly on different issues and in different degrees (Rawls probably being the most keen to stress his neo-Kantian credentials, followed by Habermas, Hayek and Oakeshott, in that order — Oakeshott never went much further than to limply praise Kant’s ethical individualism).  Admittedly, Marx may be seen to be in a tradition with Habermas to the extent that Habermas himself does (or at least did) see this to be the case — but Rawls too?  It would be much better to group Marx with Oakeshott, given how both saw themselves to be in a tradition with Hegel, or alternatively Hayek to the extent that both were theoretical economists.

* Update: it seems the good professor had something of a conversion in 2004/5.  An article on the LRC site by David Gordon (a person whose internet writings more obviously fall under the label ‘conservative libertarian’) documents matters here.