BOOKS

The Music of Politics

BY HENRY FAIRLIE T BEGAN to read Professor Oakeshott's collec- I tion of essays* in Yugoslavia; I completed it at the Conservative Party conference at Llandudno; it seemed just as relevant among the Communists as among the Conservatives. I take this to be a compliment to a political philosopher, but it is quite possible that Pro- fessor Oakeshott will think that it is not. It is never quite clear whether he thinks that a political philosopher should have any influence on politicians or the activity of politics. For better or worse, nevertheless, he has had an influence, although he would be as surprised as I was to read in a recent issue of New Society the

statement that it is the progressive Conservatives who are fond of quoting him.

This question of the function and, therefore, the influence of a political philosopher is at the root of much of the controversy which Professor Oakeshott's writings arouse. Often—for his writ- ing is warm and insinuating, and makes one feel that he is saying more than he is actually saying —he may seem to be advocating a kind of political activity when he is only describing it. In fact, in the notes which he has added to his famous inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics (which is reprinted here) he makes this clear:

But, in general, the reader is advised to re- member that it is concerned with understanding or explaining political activity which, in my view, is the proper object of political educa- tion. What people project in political activity, and different styles of political conduct, are con- sidered here, first merely because they some- times reveal the way in which political activity is being understood, and secondly because it is commonly (though I think wrongly) sup- posed that explanations are warrants for political conduct.

The note might have been added especially for the benefit of Mr. R. H. S. Crossman, but he seems to have missed it.

But none of the notes was needed to make the point. The earliest of the essays, and the title-piece of the book, is a brilliant tour de force which had much the same effect in 1948 as Mr. Attlee's remark at the memorial service

to Sidney Webb that his monument was the world we saw around us—a world, as Mr. Mug- geridge gloomily reflected, shivering in the Abbey, of cold war, fuel shortages, refugee camps and food rationing. The essay is a scorn- ful, epigrammatic, coat-trailing (most of the

people whom Professor Oakeshott appears to trip up in fact trip over his coat as he trails it before them) account of the rationalist posi- tion in politics. But, at the beginning of the essay, he makes his frequent disclaimer:

My object is not to refute Rationalism; its errors arc interesting only in so far as they reveal its character. We are considering not merely the truth of a doctrine, but the sig- nificance of an intellectual fashion in the history of post-Renaissance Europe.

The rest follows.

And the rest is, even on re-reading the essays in a collected volume, near-music. Like The Magic Flute, Professor Miller has said; rather, would say, like a Handel organ concerto, for this is keyboard music, and the improvisations are dazzling:

And if, with as yet no thought of analysis,

—what a pleasing trill, there—

we glance below the surface, we may, perhaps, see in the temperament, if not in the character, of the Rationalist, a deep distrust of time, an impatient hunger for eternity, and an irritable nervousness in the face of everything topical and transitory.

The improvisation plays much too beautifully to be forgotten. Twenty-six pages later: To explore the relations between politics and eternity is one thing; it is something different, and less commendable, for a practical Poli- tician to find the intricacy of the world of time and contingency so unmanageable that he is bewitched by the offer of a quick escape into the bogus eternity of an ideology.

To have a collection of the essays is to have,

not just an LP, but an album of this kind of magic.

The axioms and the epigrams tumble out on to the pages:

Changes are without effect only upon those who notice nothing, who are ignorant of what they possess and apathetic to their circurn- stances, and they can be welcomed indis- criminately only by those who esteem nothing, whose attachments are fleeting and who are strangers to love and affection.

The total change is always more extensive than the change desired.

Politics is an activity unsuited to the young, not on account of their vices but on account of what I at least consider to be their virtues.

It is more important for a society to move together than to move either fast or far.

Custom is always adaptable and susceptible to the nuance of a situation. This may appear a paradoxical assertion; custom, we have been taught, is blind. It is, however, an insidious piece of misobservation. Custom is not blind, it is only 'blind as a bat.'

Observations like these are only illuminations in a formidably arranged argument of, sometimes

destructive, sometimes creative, force.

The effect, of course, has been not to under- mine—Professor Oakeshott would never clairt that political philosophy should do anything so rash—but to expose the rationalist position. But

this is not, I think, his intended or his real con- tribution. We must always remember that he is concerned more with the teaching of the activity

of politics than with the activity of politics it- self : he is concerned with how people receive their knowledge of politics.

This, after all, is the central point in the title- essay : the difference between the technical knowledge on which the rationalist relies and the practical knowledge of the 'conservative.' It informs his brilliantly (and deliberately) provo- cative passage, in which he defines rationalist politics as the politics of the inexperienced, who need a crib, as Machiavelli's new prince needed a crib. It is the theme, obviously enough, of his inaugural lecture on 'Political Education' and of his essay on The Study of Politics in a Uni- versity.; but it is the theme also of his assault on the pursuit of perfection in politics, 'The Tower of Babel,' with its characteristic opening reflection that the pursuit of perfection is 'an activity suitable for individuals, but not for

societies.'

Here is the secret of his hold over young people, and the secret, too, of the completeness

with which he has turned the tables on the whole of the school of thought popularly represented by Laski. What he has to offer emerges most

clearly in a passage on ideology : Ideology can be taught best to those whose minds are empty; and if it is to be taught to one who already believes something, the first step of the teacher must be to administer a * RATIONALISM IN POLITICS. By Michael Oakeshott. (Methuen, 35s.)

purge, to make certain that all prejudices and preconceptions are removed, to lay his founda- tion upon the unshakable rock of ignorance. r, again, he puts it more positively : It is a characteristic of practical knowledge that it is not susceptible of formulation of this kind. Its normal expression is in a customary or traditional way of doing things, or, simply, in practice. . . . It is, indeed, a knowledge that is expressed in taste or connoisseurship, lack- ing rigidity and ready for the impress of the mind of the learner. There is the real contrast which Professor Oakeshott points: the kind of knowledge which requires the mind which is empty, and the kind of knowledge which demands the impress of the mind of the learner.

Professor Oakeshott, because he will not hold out extravagant promises of what human life can hold, is sometimes -foolishly dismissed as a cynic. One could refute this by passage after passage, but one will do:

For most there is what Conrad called the `shadow line' which, when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things, each with its fixed shape, each with its own point of balance, each with its price; a world of , fact, not poetic image, in which what we have spent on one thing we cannot spend on another; a world in- habited by others besides ourselves who cannot be reduced to mere reflections of our own emotions. And coming to be at home in this Commonplace world qualifies us (as no know- ledge of 'political science' can ever qualify us), if we are so inclined and have nothing better to think about, to engage in what the man of conservative disposition understands to be poli- tical activity.

Those who know the man will not be surprised by the affection in his writing.

But there is more than affection to notice. Although Professor Oakeshott is deeply con- cerned with the condition of society, with 'the general arrangements of a collection of peoples who, in respect of their common recognition of a manner of attending to its arrangements, corn- Pose a single community,' he does not talk of society with either the mysticism or awe of, say, Burke. I must confess that I find this a relief: It is pleasant to have a political thinker who Can consider the working of a traditional society with appropriate reverence but without ob- scurantism. Conservative political writing needed to be released from the language of Burke, and it is this, because he himself is a natural stylist, that Professor Oakeshott has done. In fact, the accusations of mysticism or ob- scurantism which are sometimes made against Professor Oakeshott are the least justified. Read- ing the essays together one realises how his con- cern throughout is with 'human beings impelled by an acquired love of making choices for them- selves': and his human beings are never to be overwhelmed or overawed by the society of which they are members. 'He is a libertarian,' he writes of the late Professor Henry C. Simons,

not because he begins with an abstract definition of liberty, but because he has actually enjoyed a way of living (and seen others enjoy it) which those who have enjoyed it are accustomed . . to call a free way of living, and because he has found it to be good.

To _ begin with this recognition of the indi- vidual's enjoyment of the things familiar to him to start with the individual though not, like al edrationalists, to end with him—is a necessary an perhaps profound contribution to Conserva- tive thought today.