Michael Oakeshott’s critique of something-he-called-rationalism

Ideally participants in this discussion would have read his relevant essays (collected in the Rationalism in Politics book) but as an introduction this will do and this one is also good.

Clealy Oakeshott means something different under Rationalism than LW. I will call it SOCR (Something Oakeshott Calls Rationalism) now.

SOCR is the the idea that you can learn to cook from a recipe book, following the algorithms. He argues it used to be a popular idea in early 20th century Britain and it is false. Recipe books are written for people who can already cook, and this knowledge only comes from experience, not books. Either self-discovery, or apprenticing. Try to learn to cook from a recipe book and the book will not teach you, but you own failed experiments will, the hard way, you end up rediscovering cooking by a trial and error basis. Apprenticing is easier. The recipe book writer assumes the recipe works on an empty mind, while it only works on a mind already filled with experience. And what is worse, often minds are filled with the wrong kind of experience.

While Oakeshott can be accusing of endorsing “life experience as conversation stopper” his main argument is basically how is knowledge communicable. You have knowledge in your head, much of it gathered through experience, you may not be able to communicate all aspect of it through training an apprentice and even less through writing a book. Doing things is often more of an art than science. Worse, you would expect having the students cup pre-filled by the right kind of stuff, but often it is empty or filled with the wrong kind of stuff, which makes your book misunderstood.

Oakeshott focused on politics because his main point was that following a recipe book like Marxism-Leninism or Maoism is not simply a bad idea, but literally impossible, the doctrine you learn will be colored by your pre-existing experience and you will do whatever your experience dictates anyway. The issue is misleading yourself and others into thinking you are implementing a recipe, an algorithm, when it is not the case.

Oakeshott is basically saying e.g. you can never predict what the Soviet Union will do by looking at the Marxist books they read. However, if you add up the experience of the Tzarist imperialism and the experience of being a very reasonably paranoid revolutionary on the run from the Ohrana and fearing betrayal at every corner, you may predict what they are up to better.

SOCR is clearly not LWR and it is unfortunate the word “Rationalism” appears in both. Since I was exposed to Oakeshott and similar ideas earlier than LW I would actually prefer different terms for LWR, like “pragmatic reason”, but it is not up to me to make this choice, at least not in English, I may try to influence other languages though.

Ultimately, Oakeshott ends up with a set of ideas very similar to LW, such as coming down on the side of the shepherd in The Simple Truth, not on the side of Marcos Sophisticus. In fact, Oakeshotts’ SOCR he criticizes is clearly the later:

>As knowledge of the realm of the shadows is a real and hard-won achievement, the theorist goes gravely astray when he relies on his theoretical insights to issue directives to the practitioner, ridiculously trying to “set straight” the practical man on matters with which the theorist has no familiarity. The cave dwellers, first encountering the theorist on his return, might be impressed “when he tells them that what they had always thought of as ‘a horse’ is not what they suppose it to be . . . but is, on the contrary, a modification of the attributes of God. . . . But if he were to tell them that, in virtue of his more profound understanding of the nature of horses, he is a more expert horse-man, horse-chandler, or stable boy than they (in their ignorance) could ever hope to be, and when it becomes clear that his new learning has lost him the ability to tell one end of a horse from the other . . . [then] before long the more perceptive of the cave-dwellers [will] begin to suspect that, after all, he [is] not an interesting theorist but a fuddled and pretentious ‘theoretician’ who should be sent on his travels again, or accommodated in a quiet home.”

Ultimately both LW and Oakeshott support the cavemen. It is just unfortunate they use the term “Rationalist” in entirely opposite meanings.