Oakeshott’s Theory of Tradition Explanation
[A version of this should appear in Collingwood and British Idealism Studies some time. If you’re at a university and it doesn’t subscribe to the journal – nag the library authorities until this unfortunate situation has been rectified!]
Probably the most popular way to read essays such as ‘Rationalism in Politics’, ‘Political Education’ and ‘Rational Conduct’ — in short, the central essays of the book Rationalism in Politics — is to understand them as elucidating a polemical political theory. At their core, however, is a methodological account of how the historian, sociologist or political scientist understands and explains belief or action. On the one hand, this account is a theory of rational explanation, the investigator being said to explain by identifying the reasons for her subjects acting in the ways they did, showing their behaviour to have been a ‘success’ (pp.100, 67).[1] On the other though, Oakeshott’s analysis is at the same time a theory of social explanation, the ‘right’ sort of reasons being said to directly and intrinsically concern the social context, the investigator showing her subjects’ deeds to have been ‘rational’ not because of what those persons believed, but because of how their deeds cohered with the ‘traditions’ from which their actions had originally sprung.
That Oakeshott wished to propound such a dual theory is potentially interesting in itself, since rational explanation models are frequently considered ‘methodologically individualist’ in a way that rules out making direct appeals to social contexts; that the ‘rational’ dimension of his theory includes a denial that the investigator’s explanatory task is to reconstruct original motives sharpens this potential, since it contradicts what is ordinarily thought to be a necessary condition for a reason to be explanatory — namely, that it enters into the agent’s motivational set, or at least, directly concerns her beliefs at the time of acting rather than facts of the world independent of her beliefs.[2]
Despite the unusualness of Oakeshott’s methodological theory though, it has rarely been considered for itself independent of any substantive political theses it allegedly implies or is an implication of. The major exception to this is Peter Winch’s early discussion in his seminal The Idea of a Social Science.[3] Since then however, when commentators have considered what Oakeshott has to say on philosophy of social science issues, they have concentrated upon examining On Human Conduct and/or his philosophy of history essays rather than Rationalism in Politics.[4] The present article, therefore, seeks to begin rectifying this gap, providing an extended elucidation and critical analysis of Oakeshott’s methodological claims in his middle period specifically.
The Nature of Rationality and the Nature of Rational Explanation
Oakeshott’s theory begins with a distinction between two ‘dimensions’ of knowledge, or as he sometimes put it, two ‘sorts’ of knowledge: ‘technical’ and ‘practical’ knowledge (p.12). Here, technical knowledge — knowledge of technique — is said to take the form of codified rules or maxims. Practical knowledge, in contrast, is that which allows a person to actually do something, since while having a grasp of relevant principles may well be useful, it will not lead to any activity by itself — to borrow Kant’s example, the fact that a trainee doctor passes all her examinations with flying colours does not by itself imply she will be a good doctor in practice, having a knack for successfully diagnosing real, concrete cases.[5]
Now one understanding of practical knowledge — an understanding held by Kant indeed — is that it merely concerns the ability to apply a principle, the need to recognise its existence logically arising from how a practical decision to understand a given situation as falling under a rule cannot itself be rule-governed on pain of an infinite regress.[6] For Oakeshott however, the realm of practical knowledge extends much further, concerning not just the ability to apply rules, but the manner and direction of how one acts as well. The fact that the agent has acquired a high level of practical knowledge, then, is what makes for the artistry of the gifted pianist, the style and insight of the skilled chess-player, and the sense of what research questions are appropriate to pursue had by the experienced scientist (p.15).
More formally, Oakeshott defines practical knowledge as having the following attributes: it is non-propositional and cannot be codified, existing only in use; it is a matter of habit rather than conscious reasoning; it is acquired through direct acquaintance with an experienced practitioner at work, ideally in the context of a master-apprentice relationship of some kind (p.15); it is something always had by degree rather than being something that is either had or not had (pp.16-17); and it frequently involves ‘feelings and emotions’ (p.39 n.39). By contrast, technical knowledge is propositional, an abstraction from actual activity, potentially acquired in a context other than where it is applied, and enacted (insofar as it can be enacted) in a ‘cold’ manner blind to the particularities of the concrete situation.
The distinction between practical and technical knowledge made, Oakeshott’s next move is to reject what he saw as the dominant, instrumentalist conception of rationality, a conception (he claims) that fails to properly acknowledge the importance of practical knowledge. According to Oakeshott, the most basic claim or assumption of the instrumental model is that action is rational insofar as it has been performed for the sake of a premeditated purpose, be this purpose achieving a certain end or to engaging in a certain activity for its own sake. What deed is actually performed, the model holds, is thus ideally the product of the reasoner having applied universally-valid principles to the choice of means (pp.102-3). On the logic of the instrumental theory, then, the mind is essentially apart from any particular beliefs the agent may come to have, or indeed, from any particular activities she comes to engage in. Because of this, the instrumental model has a fundamentally asocial understanding of human reason, the ability to ‘reason’ being seen as something essentially innate, with a person’s society thought as something that is always liable to just place parochial blinkers on her (pp.105-7).
Moving to critique the instrumental model, Oakeshott’s aim is not merely to show it idealising, theorising a standard of truly ‘rational’ action that is only infrequently reached in actual practice, but to show it incoherent, providing a ‘standard’ that a person can never live up to in principle (p.108). To that effect, his initial point is to claim the model has an erroneous conception of how ends are pursued, since it fails to take account of how an ability to actually do something involves having acquired the necessary practical knowledge, a knowledge that is both local to the activity itself and something that must be learnt. Far from practical rationality being a matter of applying principles of universal applicability, then, it really involves enacting an acquired skill immanent to a certain tradition or ‘idiom of activity’ that it remains indelibly local to (p.119). Thus, there is nothing about being a great cook that particularly sets a person up for being a great scientist, for example, since the skills involved in each are specific to each.
The errors of the instrumental theory go beyond its understanding of means though, since even its initial emphasis upon premeditated ends is a mistake: for in general, a person does not firstly have an end, secondly infer a relevant kind of activity, then thirdly set about engaging in that activity; rather, out of an activity she already participates in, particular ends to pursue may be abstracted (pp.110, 118-20). So, before one can decide to bake a pie, one has to be a cook, i.e. a person who engages in the activity of cookery; and before one can decide to pursue a piece of scientific research, one has to be a scientist, i.e. a person who acts within a tradition of scientific inquiry. The significance of this point is that if ends are things formed in activity itself, then the instrumental theory misconstrues what makes for a ‘successful’ action, defining this as it does as when a premeditated end is efficiently achieved (p.120). For, the real standard of a ‘successful’ action should be seen as whether the agent has acted in such a way ‘that the coherence of the idiom of activity to which the conduct belongs is preserved and possibly enhanced’ (p.122). Far from a person’s society and its constitutive ‘traditions’ being something that impairs her ability to act rationally, then, acting rationally is to act in a way that draws upon, coheres to, and potentially develops a certain ‘tradition’ or pattern of ‘social conduct’ (p.125).
So, what more exactly does it mean to say an act has ‘preserved’ and possibly ‘enhanced’ a tradition? In the case of the mediocre practitioner, Oakeshott’s answer is that such a person’s behaviour will exhibit a pattern more or less replicated in the actions of her peers. Given it is inherent in the very nature of a tradition to always be in flux, though, small incremental changes being made to its essence all the time, it is a major blunder to assume the same patterns of behaviour or ‘rules’ will be constitutive of any given tradition right through its history though (p.61). Negatively, this entails that what it means to be a mediocre practitioner of cookery or science or whatever will vary over time. Positively however, it also points towards what we should say we mean when we speak of an ‘expert’ practitioner: for the expert, Oakeshott infers, is a person whose actions immanently develops her practice. Thus, the very best chefs and the very best research scientists (for example) will produce food and research recognisable as ‘food’ and ‘research’ to their peers yet in a way that advances understanding of what good food and good research can look like.
In sum then, to be ‘rational’ on Oakeshott’s theory is to act in such a way that one’s deeds cohere with the idiom of social activity (‘tradition’) from which they arose; and the more rational — the more successful — one’s actions are, the more this tradition will not just be adhered to, but developed.
From here, Oakeshott moves to apply his conception of practical rationality to theorising what it means for a historian, sociologist or political scientist to understand and explain human conduct. In the first instance, this application is very direct; thus, the investigator’s explanatory aim is said to be to show how the conduct being researched was rational and so a ‘success’ in having maintained, reasserted or at least contributed to the ‘coherence’ of the relevant ‘tradition of behaviour’ (pp.67, 122). Put into distinct stages, the investigator’s task on Oakeshott’s theory, then, is threefold: firstly, to identify the tradition — the particular ‘idiom of activity’ or social context — from which the action or set of actions under investigation had sprung; secondly, to show how that behaviour had cohered with and perhaps developed this tradition; and lastly, to research the history of the tradition itself.
Why, though, should an investigator adopt (or be understood as implicitly presupposing) Oakeshott’s tradition-centric model of rationality rather than the more orthodox instrumental one, assuming the investigator is attempting to explain behaviour by identifying the reasons for it? For, while it may be true that a person cannot ever literally act according to the instrumental model’s precepts, the model may still be thought methodologically fruitful — for example, Max Weber in his methodological writings may be interpreted as upholding such a position, openly acknowledging his concept of ‘purposive’ or ‘instrumental’ rationality is ideal-typical yet still claiming it to be an absolute presupposition of all successful history and sociology.[7]
In answering this question, Oakeshott identifies two methodological benefits of his conception in particular. The first is that, since ‘rational’ action is not now considered to be a matter of putting into effect a premeditated purpose, the object of an action explanation need not be a reflective act; indeed, in principle, impulsive acts, unreflective acts of obedience to a certain rule or custom, or even ‘spontaneous outbursts’ may legitimately become subject to a rational explanation (p.130). Secondly, where presupposing the instrumentalist conception leads to the investigator having to attempt a reconstruction of her subject’s motives, its tradition-centric rival makes no such demand, it being perfectly acceptable to say a group of people acted within a certain tradition ‘unknown to themselves’ (pp.67, 116). Indeed, acting within a certain tradition without realising it may well be the normal case. For, a person engages in a certain kind of activity only by pursuing particular projects immanent to it; however, no person ‘engaged in a particular task has in the forefront of his attention the whole context and implications of that engagement’, since ‘[a]ctivity is broken up into actions, and actions come to have a false appearance of independence’ (p.118). The fundamental continuity and even existence of a tradition, then, is something essentially for the researcher to uncover rather than for the acting person to have at the top of her mind.
Accepting Oakeshott’s account of how individual actions are to be explained, the question still arises as to how a tradition itself is to be understood. In answering this, Oakeshott’s initial point is to emphasise that a tradition of behaviour is something ‘not susceptible to the distinction between essence and accident’ (p.61). What makes for the identity of a tradition over time, then, is not an atemporal essence but an immanent ‘principle of continuity’, the fact that different aspects of a tradition change at different times allowing an observer to perceive an evolving identity through the constant change (p.61). Because of this, knowledge of a tradition ‘is unavoidably knowledge of its detail’ (pp.62-3), the task of understanding it requiring an ‘ecological’ rather than an ‘anatomical’ approach (p.64).
While Oakeshott does not expand on what he meant by this distinction, presumably the thought is that the appropriate form of explanation to provide when investigating a tradition is an historical narrative rather than, say, a structural analysis.[8] Congruent with this interpretation, his phrasing and terminology here echoes that to be found in his philosophy of history: for in the latter, Oakeshott argues that ‘the distinction between the essential and the incidental has no place in an authentic historical explanation’,[9] and goes on to claim that the historian understands a phenomenon not by relating it to general laws of historical development, but the complex of events that came before it.
Oakeshott’s Examples
While outlining his theory of tradition explanation, Oakeshott provides a number of examples to illustrate it. Of the more important ones, two are used to imply his positive account of rationality is an intuitively reasonable one, a third establishes the broadness of the theory’s scope, another illustrates what may be called the sociologicalising aspect of his analysis (i.e., that any notionally abstract end a person pursues is in fact relative to a specific social context), and the last applies matters to political theory. As each example or application is potentially enlightening in its own way, I shall briefly go through each in turn.
So, to establish his tradition-centric conception of rationality as one his readers should be intuitively familiar with, Oakeshott initially points towards the type of reasoning a barrister will use when disputing the amount of damages awarded to a client: for in arguing her client’s case in court, a barrister will not claim the award contradicts an abstract conception of justice, but that it is out of line with recent precedent. Similarly, if and when a proposal is made to modify the rules of a sport like cricket — for example, a proposal that bowlers should be able to use a particular bowling action that is currently illegal — it will be defended in a fashion analogous to the barrister’s style of reasoning, it being plainly absurd to think that universal principles (such as the ‘human rights’ of bowlers) would be relevant here. Moreover, in such a case, the proposal will typically say nothing about whether it was wrong for the laws of the game in the past to have stipulated as they did on the issue at hand. Instead, the point will simply be that the rules would be more in sympathy with the game as it is currently being played if modified in the proposed way (p.68).
Used by himself for the same purpose as the legal and cricket cases, Oakeshott’s next significant example is that of science; given science is popularly considered the most ‘rational’ of all human endeavours, for my purposes his appeal to it emphasises just how broad he intended his theory’s scope to be.
So, upon making the point that a ‘scientific hypothesis’ cannot appear outside of an ‘already existing tradition of scientific investigation’ (p.56), Oakeshott considers the question of what makes scientific research ‘scientific’. According to the instrumental conception of rationality, what identifies an activity is its being pursued for the sake of a certain end. The history of science, however, shows scientific inquiry not to have had a single end (p.123). Moving to postulate a distinctive ‘scientific method’ in place of the non-existent singular end is not much help here, Oakeshott goes on, since any attempted elucidation of it will necessarily abridge the ‘concrete activity’ of science, an activity that ‘at all points’ will go beyond the supposedly singular ‘method’, especially with respect to the ‘connoisseurship’ of ‘knowing how and when’ the ‘method’ is to be applied (p.123). Apply Oakeshott’s own theory of rationality, however, and it becomes clear that what makes any given piece of scientific research ‘scientific’ is not it sharing an end or method with all other ‘scientific’ projects, but in how the scientists who pursued it had learnt how to behave ‘scientifically’ from their predecessors, with their successors then learning from them. In short, it is the scientific tradition and its immanent principle of continuity that defines what does and what does not count as an engagement in ‘science’, not any a priori standard (p.56).[10]
Now in arguing this, Oakeshott’s approach may be considered to anticipate the relativism of later sociological approaches to the study of scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, the remarks Oakeshott makes about science in Rationalism in Politics are not sociologising themselves. Where he does bring out the potentially sociologising implications of his theory, however, is with a further example: of how a group of Victorian clothes designers, having the aim of creating the most ‘rational’ form of dress for young female cyclists, ended up creating bloomers.
According to Oakeshott, these designers believed themselves to have had a one-eyed focus upon creating a garment that is perfect for the activity of propelling a bicycle, leaving aside the ‘prejudices’ of their time and place as they did so (pp.101-2).[11] Assume the instrumental theory of practical rationality, and what they came up with then had some reason to it by dint of the design having been the product of a premeditated purpose; however, it was not especially ‘rational’ all told, since if the designers had been truly focussed, they would have ended up designing shorts of some sort, not bloomers (p.115). Why did they fail to however? Most basically, because they had tacitly taken account of ‘social custom’, and in particular, the general cultural norms of their time and place concerning the appearance and demeanour of well brought up girls. Precisely because their design had taken account account of these norms, however, it had been genuinely ‘rational’ according to Oakeshott’s tradition-centric conception of rationality, the designers having created a garment in ‘sympathy’ with the ‘traditions’ constitutive of their social context.
Finally, the last example to report is Oakeshott’s application to political theory, this being made with his famous dictum that all successful politics is the ‘pursuit of intimations’ — specifically, the intimations emanating from the political tradition of the politician’s time and place. For Oakeshott then, all successful political leaders should be understood as progressive conservatives however revolutionary (or reactionary) they think themselves to be — the phrase ‘pursuit of intimations’ being ‘neither intended as a description of the motives of politicians nor of what they believe themselves to be doing, but of what they actually succeed in doing’ (p.67). Thus, Lenin believed himself to be implementing the abstract principles of historical materialism. In actual fact however, the early Bolshevik regime was in ‘sympathy’ with the autocratic political tradition of Tsarist Russia, immanently developing it with innovations in the size and severity of the secret police and the like — and it is in those terms that Lenin’s actions as ruler of Russia should be understood, not his own (p.59).
Did Oakeshott Really Provide a Model of Rational Explanation?
All in all, the examples Oakeshott provides are a rather varied lot. As a result, they could be thought to pull in different directions. In particular, one tension possibly exists between the examples (such as science) where the relevant tradition was something ‘internal’ from the point of view of the agents whose actions were being explained and understood, and those (such as bloomers) where it was ‘external’. In other words, where Oakeshott portrayed what counts as ‘good’ scientific research as something immanent to the tradition of scientific inquiry itself, what counted as ‘good’ rational dress was not said to be immanent to any tradition of rational dress designing — rather, it was immanent to the wider culture, a move that if made with respect to science would contradict Oakeshott’s own emphasis (or apparent emphasis) upon the sovereignty of the scientific tradition.[12]
Beyond this, a further possible tension in Oakeshott’s examples lies between those that seek to establish the intuitively reasonable nature of his preferred conception of rationality and those intended to show its explanatory power or scope. For, in the legal and cricket examples, Oakeshott’s assumption was that the barrister and rule change proposer would readily accept his own interpretation of what a ‘rational’ proposal looks like. The rhetorical force of the bloomers and Lenin cases, however, lies in the mismatch between the actual reasons for the acts in question and the reasons the agents believed to rationalise and explain their deeds, a mismatch grounded in how the designers and Lenin would not have wished to say they were acting within the tradition Oakeshott claimed they ‘really’ were.
In the language of analytic philosophy, the underlying difference here is in Oakeshott apparently presupposing an ‘internal’ conception of reasons for acting in the barrister and cricket examples but an ‘external’ one in the bloomers and Lenin cases, where ‘internal’ reasons are ones arising from just the agent’s beliefs about the world and ‘external’ reasons are ones arising from facts about it irrespective of the agent’s beliefs at the time of acting. Given this, Oakeshott’s problem here is that while the very idea of internal reason statements does not offend many a person’s commonsense, that of external ones frequently does, being questionable on two basic points: on whether the reasons identified are genuinely practical, having a normative status from the point of view of the agent, and of whether their identification is genuinely explanatory.
In Oakeshott’s case, the first issue here may be especially seen to arise with the distinctly unintuitive manner in which he elaborates the relevant examples — in particular, recall how Lenin was said to have acted in ‘sympathy’ with a Tsarist political tradition that Lenin himself despised (p.59). Surely it is absurd, a critic may object, to say a person had reason to act in a certain way if he did not have any beliefs that implied this was what he ought to do? Explaining herself, the critic may go on to suggest that Oakeshott here had just got caught up in the vagaries of ordinary English, in which speaking of a reason to postulates agency where speaking of a reason for may not. Thus, in uttering the sentence ‘the reason for your new car breaking down was an electrical fault’, I do not presuppose your car to have had a point of view from which having an electrical fault was a reason to break down — or at least, insofar as I do presuppose such a thing, I am anthropomorphising the vehicle. In such a sentence, then, the phrase ‘reason for’ may be freely interchanged with that of ‘cause of’: ‘the cause of your new car breaking down was an electrical fault’. That one may speak of the existence of a certain tradition being the ‘reason for’ a person acting in the way she did, then, need not imply it had given her reason to act in that way — rather, it was just the ‘cause of’ what she did. Insofar as this is the case, however, then the explanation forthcoming has not been a ‘rational’ explanation at all.
Are the reasons identified in an Oakeshottian tradition explanation really only ‘reasons for’ and not ‘reasons to’ though? On balance, I propose not, since in the case of politics at least (and notwithstanding some prevarication), Oakeshott does say that for an agent to recognise her actions as ‘rational’ only relative to the tradition they actually sprung from makes for better — more sure-footed — practice, the denial of tradition being the basic error of ‘rationalism’.[13] From this, it may be inferred that acknowledging one’s actions to be in ‘sympathy’ with a certain tradition, and in particular, the tradition that they really are in sympathy with, does indeed produce reasons to act in certain ways: namely, ways that are especially in sympathy with the tradition concerned. So, while the reasons identified as explaining why a person behaved as she did can be ‘external’ ones in the sense of their concerning a tradition that the agent need not have recognised herself to be in, a presupposition of the explanation is that even those reasons would in principle become internal ones if the agent were to gain both clarity of mind and proper knowledge of her situation. They are, then, reasons to from her point of view, even if she does not realise it at the moment of acting.
What, though, of the second issue, of whether Oakeshottian external reason statements are genuinely explanatory? That this question arises is because many philosophers have thought identifying a normative reason only explains upon the assumption that there is some sort of psychological mechanism connecting the agent’s belief that such-and-so ought to be done with her actually doing it. As Bernard Williams declared in ‘Internal and External Reasons’, a paper that launched much debate over the status of practical reasons in analytic philosophy:
The whole point of external reason statements is that they can be true independently of the agent’s motivations. But nothing can explain an agent’s (intentional) actions except something that motivates him to act. So something else is needed besides the truth of the external reason statement to explain action, some psychological link; and that psychological link would seem to be belief.[14]
So, is there an Oakeshottian argument to be found against this sort of objection?
Turn to Rationalism in Politics itself, and on first blush, an appeal to the workings of the ‘concrete mind’ near the end of ‘Rational Conduct’ seems promising:
What establishes harmony and detects disharmony is the concrete mind, a mind composed wholly of activities in search of harmony and throughout implicated in every achieved level of harmony (p.130).
Disappointingly though, Oakeshott does not elaborate as to what he means by the phrase ‘concrete mind’. The reader is thus left guessing as to what exactly is supposed to be doing the ‘establishing’ and ‘detecting’ here — a homunculus, or perhaps a leprechaun? Alternatively, maybe the idea is that there is a non-intelligent causal mechanism at work? Either way, the ‘concrete mind’ seems a bit too omniscient, securing coherence all too well. For, if the ‘concrete mind’ were to automatically tie behaviours to their traditions, then a person consciously pursuing the intimations could not produce a better result than her merely ‘pursuing’ them in effect. If that is so though, then the argument I just suggested for why Oakeshott’s model of practical rationality involves ‘reasons to’ and not just ‘reasons for’ has had the rug taken from under its feet.
Because of this, the vague idea of the concrete mind, I suggest, should be abandoned. What is ultimately of far greater importance, perhaps, is Oakeshott’s much more general emphasis upon acquired habits — recall how one attribute of practical knowledge he identified was of its being both acquired and applied in habitual action. What guarantees some sort of fidelity to a tradition, then, is the agent having acquired certain habits. Now, to say a person has become habituated to perform certain behaviour is merely to say she has become disposed (not causally determined) to act in the way concerned, an empirical claim that does not deny her having free will, and so, the ability to choose and perhaps even innovate in concrete situations. Saying a person acted in the way she did because a tradition had given her certain habits, then, still allows for how the conscious pursuit of the tradition’s intimations, a pursuit that at the very least involves the choice of what particular intimations to pursue, would have produced a better result than the ‘rationalist’ denial of them.
Admittedly, this answer will not leave every possible critic satisfied; indeed, Winch’s main objection to Oakeshott’s theory in The Idea of a Social Science was that its overriding emphasis upon habit involves a naturalistic denial of the category of action inconsistent with Oakeshott’s declared aim of theorising the explanation of human conduct. [15] On the other hand though, it links Oakeshott’s views to those of more recent philosophers. Thus, John McDowell has argued for an external reason theory that identifies the normativity of practical reasons not in what the agent believes at the time of acting, but the moral habits she has been socialised to have;[16] and with respect to tackling the Winch objection specifically, one might relate Oakeshott’s position to Karsten Stueber’s ostensibly ‘Winchian’ theory of tacit rule following, since this identifies the normativity of a rule in ‘second order’ habits to judge relevant cases in ways congruent with it.[17] Thus, while Oakeshott’s quasi-naturalism and Winch’s resolute conceptualism do on the face of it contradict each other, the way Stueber has sought to defend and elucidate the latter has been one that a defender and elucidator of Oakeshott’s position may well have taken — so perhaps Winch’s original criticism was not so fundamental after all.
Understanding a Tradition
In evaluating Oakeshott’s theory, I have up until now considered it at the level of what it has to say about understanding and explaining individual actions, finding its conception of reasons for acting, while certainly more problematic than Oakeshott himself assumed, not implausible either. Further difficulties arise, however, concerning his concept of a tradition and how to understand it, and in particular, over the question of what justifies claiming an action or sequence of actions is best understood as having cohered to this rather than that tradition.
Once more, the Lenin example is one that particularly points towards the problem. So, recall that Bolshevism was used to illustrate the dictum that politics is the pursuit of intimations, Oakeshott asserting that Lenin’s actions as leader of the early USSR are best understood as having been in tacit ‘sympathy’ with the autocratic political tradition of Tsarist Russia, pace Lenin’s own belief that the October Revolution had fundamentally broken with Tsarism. In striving for rhetorical effect, Oakeshott goes on to claim that Lenin believed his actions to have been guided by the abstract principles of historical materialism and nothing else, Lenin as a result making for a ‘rationalist’ of the highest order. A better reading of the actual history, however, shows Lenin as a person who very self-consciously thought of Bolshevism as but the latest development of class-conscious working-class activism, a development befitting Russian circumstances whilst learning from the revolutionary proletarian tradition, a tradition extending from French Jacobinism, through to English Chartism, the Paris Commune, the St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905 and (negatively) German Social Democracy.[18] Pace Oakeshott then, his disagreement with what Lenin himself believed was not on whether Bolshevik rule embodied the continuation and development of tradition, but on what particular tradition it was a continuation and development of; and given such disagreement, what we need is a standard by which the opposing claims may be evaluated against one another.
In the hope of finding one, the obvious place to turn is the essay in which Oakeshott both elaborates his idea of the pursuit of intimations and gives Bolshevism as an example, namely ‘Political Education’. And, promisingly enough, a postscript new to its republication in Rationalism in Politics does indeed reply to, if not my methodological objection exactly, then a normative sibling: specifically, that given any individual country is likely to contain many different traditions, what particular tradition is the one that its political leadership should try to act within? Disappointingly though, Oakeshott’s reply to that question is to identify the relevant tradition as that which is involved in the evolution of the country’s ‘legal structure’ (p.69). Providing no justification for this claim other than to refer back to his initial stipulative definition of what ‘politics’ is (namely, ‘the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together’ — p.44), Oakeshott does not touch on the deeper methodological issue of why in general an investigator should suppose this rather than that tradition best makes intelligible a given actor’s deeds.[19]
On the other hand, commonsense might suggest my question here pedantic — for why not just say that any given action or set of actions may be explained relative to more than one tradition? Thus, an historian of Bolshevism in power may well understand it as being both a continuation of the autocratic Tsarist legacy and strongly influenced by Lenin’s understanding of the political tradition he was acting within. Similarly, an argument common amongst Lenin’s Marxist opponents was that the tyrannical nature of Bolshevik governance was the result of Russian circumstances being unripe for full-scale socialist transformation (the intimations pointing merely to the establishment of a ‘bourgeois democratic republic’), in combination with Lenin’s obstinate belief that the Jacobins and their example were a constituent part of the proletarian revolutionary tradition.[20] For both present-day historians and Lenin’s contemporaneous Marxist opponents, then, Oakeshott’s claim that the Bolshevik regime should be understood simply in the context of the pre-existing political tradition of Russia is hyperbole; nonetheless, the fact of this tradition may still have some explanatory power, with a further key factor being what Lenin himself believed was the tradition he acted within. Instead of identifying merely the one tradition, then, a better understanding of the actual history requires identifying at least two — which hardly weakens Oakeshott’s general emphasis upon tradition, surely?
In actual fact though, there is a crucial difference between the two explanatory factors identified here. For, the Menshevik critic of Lenin who emphasised the latter’s Jacobin fixation believed this fixation unwarranted, Jacobinism for the Menshevik not being a genuine part of the political tradition Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike (qua fellow Marxists) acted within and sought to develop. When explaining Bolshevik despotism by highlighting what Lenin thought his tradition was, then, the Menshevik did not intend to make any explanatory appeal to the facts of the tradition concerned: rather, it was simply Lenin’s belief about his tradition that explained Bolshevik terror. Because of this, there is no need to postulate the workings of a mysterious concrete mind here; indeed, it is not Oakeshott’s tradition-centric conception of rationality being presupposed at all, but a variant of the instrumentalist one, the reasoning of the explainer, roughly speaking, going as follows: given both the abstract end (namely, communism) Lenin desired to achieve and the beliefs about his tradition that he held, those bad things that he did in government were ‘rational’, and so, ones he actually performed. In short, then, it is possible to make an explanatory appeal to the concept of ‘tradition’ without actually implicating Oakeshott’s theory at all.
With this in mind, the purely stipulative nature of Oakeshott’s identification of ‘the’ political tradition of a place is particularly unfortunate, since if his reason externalism is to work, the reality of the tradition that is to do the explaining needs be very real indeed: for if it is not, then any purely internalist rival premised upon the instrumental conception of rationality should surely be preferred, assuming there is the evidence to suggest that the historical agents in question really did believe what the explainer claims they believed.
Conclusion
In this article, I have sought to expound Oakeshott’s theory of tradition explanation before providing a critical (yet sympathetic) analysis of it. To that effect, I began by recounting Oakeshott’s emphasis upon practical knowledge, his critique of the instrumental model of rationality, his outline of a tradition-centric alternative, and the distinctive account of rational explanation he directly built upon the latter. My central interpretative claim was then to identify Oakeshott’s account of practical rationality as one that propounds an ‘external’ rather than ‘internal’ conception of reasons for acting, an identification that suggests the task for the defender of Oakeshott’s account of practical reason is twofold: to show how his conception genuinely amounts to a model of practical rationality, theorising reasons to and not just reasons for, and to show how it implies an account of rational explanation that is genuinely explanatory — to provide, in sum, a conception of reasons that is definitely normative but not only normative.
To this, I suggested Oakeshott does indeed provide plausible answers. With respect to the first issue, I argued that once one accepts that the conscious pursuit of a tradition’s intimations should make for better practice compared to their rationalist denial, it may be inferred that an Oakeshottian reason for action is indeed a ‘reason to’ from the agent’s point of view, even when she did not realise it at the time of acting. As for the second problem, I proposed that Oakeshott’s emphasis upon tradition-centred action being essentially habituated behaviour points towards a satisfactory answer, one that might be worked out by drawing upon more recent analytical work by McDowell and Stueber in particular.
In moving to consider Oakeshott’s conception of tradition itself, new difficulties were found though, concerning two issues in particular: of how one is to adjudicate between different proposed tradition explanations when they conflict (is such-and-so action best explained relative to tradition A or tradition B?), and of how a rational explanation may involve the concept of tradition without actually implicating Oakeshott’s tradition-centric model of rationality at all. While these issues do not necessarily invalidate Oakeshott’s theory, they do suggest that the instrumental model of rationality — notwithstanding any imperfections it has as an account of how the acting agent should understand the concept of behaving ‘rationally’ — still has validity as a methodological notion.
All in all then, Oakeshott’s theory of tradition explanation is, I think, an interesting one, being at the very least something that makes for a nice complement to his philosophy of history, since it outlines an account of sociological thinking that does not deny the latter, and indeed, implicates it in the claim that the course of a tradition’s development is to be explained with an historical narrative. Nevertheless, the theory is significantly incomplete in key areas, and in claiming illegitimate other sorts of rational explanation, has imperialistic pretensions that are extremely dubious.
Notes
[1] All pages references within the main text will be to Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, second edn., ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991).
[2] In contemporary philosophy of action, this is frequently referred to as the ‘belief-desire model’ made orthodox by philosophers such as Donald Davidson. For a critical introduction to the general issues here, see Rowland Stout, Action (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2005); for a good discussion of them made in the context of relating Collingwood’s ideas to contemporary philosophy, see Giuseppina D’Oro, ‘Collingwood, Psychologism and Internalism’, European Journal of Philosophy, 12 (2004), pp.163-177.
[3] Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge, 1958), pp.53ff. As Stephen Turner observes, Oakeshott is the fourth-most referenced author in the book overall and the most-referenced living author at its time of publication — Stephen Turner, ‘The English Heidegger’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35 (2005), p.363.
[4] E.g. David Boucher, ‘Human Conduct, History and Social Science in the works of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott’, New Literary History, 24 (1993), pp.697-717; Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2001), ch.3; Terry Nardin, ‘Oakeshott’s Philosophy of the Social Sciences’ in Corey Abel and Timothy Fuller (eds.), The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), pp.220-37.
[5] Immanuel Kant, ‘On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, But It Is of No Use in Practice’ in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.279.
[6] ‘[T]o a concept of the understanding, which contains a rule, must be added an act of judgement by which a practitioner distinguishes whether or not something is a case of the rule; and since judgement cannot always be given yet another rule by which to direct its subsumption (for this could go on to infinity), there can be theoreticians who can never in their lives become practical because they are lacking in judgement’ (ibid.).
[7] Cf. Max Weber, Roscher and Knies, trans. Guy Oakes (New York: Free Press, 1975), pp.187-8; Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1, trans. eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), pp.4-7, 22-6.
[8] Cf. what Stephen Toulmin was to claim as ‘the general historiographical lesson of Darwinism’, that ‘in the development of historical entities or populations, it is not the current structure and relationships within that population which require to be explained as “functional”, but rather the changes taking place in them which require to be explained as “adaptive”’ — Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p.349.
[9] Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), p.129.
[10] See also Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Idea of a University’ [1950] in Timothy Fuller (ed.), The Voice of Liberal Education (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p.95, in which Oakeshott claims it ‘obviously’ so that science fits his theory and its radically historicist moral.
[11] I leave aside the rather crude historical inaccuracies of Oakeshott’s discussion; for those, see D. H. Monro, ‘Godwin, Oakeshott, and Mrs. Bloomer’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974), pp.611-24. As Monro shows however, a more accurate history of bloomers would show the designers to have accepted something very much like Oakeshott’s tradition-centric conception of rationality all along.
[12] While I would not agree with the details of his argument, cf. Leslie Marsh, ‘Constructivism and Relativism in Oakeshott’ in Corey Abel and Timothy Fuller (eds.), The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), pp.238-62.
[13] For a recent explication of Oakeshott’s account qua normative theory of political and social action, see Gene Callahan, ‘Michael Oakeshott on Rationalism in Politics’, The Freeman (Jan. 2009), available online at <http://www.thefreemanonline.org/
featured/michael-oakeshott-on-rationalism-in-politics/>.
[14] Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons’ in R. Harrison (ed.), Rational Action: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p.22.
[15] Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, pp.60-2.
[16] John McDowell, ‘Might There Be External Reasons?’ in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). For a discussion of the relation between Oakeshott and McDowell’s theories (if not exactly on the issues I am considering), see Stephen Turner, ‘Tradition and Cognitive Science’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 33 (2003), pp.67-72.
[17] Karsten R. Stueber, ‘How to Think about Rules and Rule Following’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35 (2005), pp.307-323.
[18] See, for example, V. I. Lenin, ‘The Third International and Its Place in History’ [1919] in Collected Works (4th English edn.), vol.29 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp.305-313.
[19] Even in the politics case one may object that identifying the relevant tradition with a certain ‘legal structure’ is dubious, since formal structures only ever partially reflect how actual life proceeds. Oddly enough, when writing as a philosopher of history, Oakeshott would be the first to make such a point. Thus, in one piece from the early 1950s, he criticises a work of E. H. Carr on the grounds that Carr ‘takes Elizabethan legislation at its face value, presenting it as the structure of Elizabethan society, whereas, then as now, the main activities of men are carried on in the gaps in this ideal structure’ — Michael Oakeshott, ‘The New Society’ [1951] in What is History?, ed. Luke O’Sullivan, (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), p.226.
[20] E.g. Julius Martov, ‘The Ideology of “Sovietism”’ [1919] in The State and the Socialist Revolution, trans. Herman Jerson (New York: International Review, 1938).
