[Terry Nardin] the Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott(Bookos.org)

OAKESHOTTt h e p h i l o s o p h y o f

T E R R Y N A R D I N

t h e p h i l o s o p h y o f m i c h a e l o a k e s h o t t

t h e p h i l o s o p h y o f

t e r r y n a r d i n

t h e p e n n s y l v a n i a s t a t e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

u n i v e r s i t y p a r k , p e n n s y l v a n i a

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nardin, Terry, 1942–The philosophy of Michael Oakeshott / Terry Nardin.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-271-02156-X (alk. paper)1. Oakeshott, Michael Joseph, 1901–1990. I. Title.

B1649.O34 N3 2001192—dc21 2001021478

Copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State UniversityAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of AmericaPublished by The Pennsylvania State University Press,University Park, PA 16802-1003

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for thefirst printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the mini-mum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

C o n t e n t s

Preface vii

Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1

1 Understanding 15

2 Understanding and Doing 55

3 Understanding in the Human Sciences 101

4 Historical Understanding 141

5 Understanding the Civil Condition 183

Conclusion 225

Index 237

P r e f a c e

To read Oakeshott with care is to sense that one is in the presence of a peculiarlyphilosophical mind. And the more carefully one reads his works, the more oneis likely to see Oakeshott as making an important contribution to twentieth-century philosophy, even though his ideas are seldom discussed in the literatureof academic philosophy.

There are many reasons for this neglect. Oakeshott was educated in the his-tory of political thought and pursued a career teaching that subject. His homeground is political theory, broadly defined, and his forays into the broaderfields of philosophy and history are motivated in part by a need to solveproblems he encountered as a philosopher of politics or a historian of politicalthought. Consequently, Oakeshott’s writings are most familiar to historians,philosophers, and political scientists interested in political thought, and mostof what has been written about him has been written by such scholars (amongwhom I must include myself). Beyond this, Oakeshott was a remarkably inde-pendent person–a teacher and thinker who shunned honors and notoriety, sel-dom cited the work of other scholars, and persisted in working out his ownideas and formulating them in his own terms instead of entering the terms ofcurrent debate. Partisans have invoked his ideas to advance one side or anotherin the political controversies of our time, but the effort has seldom been suc-cessful because Oakeshott’s concerns are by and large not immediately politi-cal, whatever their political implications may appear to be, but philosophical.It is unfortunate that Oakeshott is still largely known through the morepolemical essays in Rationalism and Politics, and that his most philosophical

writings, especially the early Experience and Its Modes and the late On Historyand Other Essays, have been ignored by almost everyone. For all these reasons,casual references to Oakeshott in both the popular and academic political liter-ature are mostly beside the point even when they are not, as is often the case,merely uncomprehending and hostile. There are books and articles that payattention to the larger philosophical context of Oakeshott’s political thought,some of them quite good, but few have set out to understand Oakeshott’s phi-losophy apart from his thought as a political philosopher. No one, certainly,has attempted to reconstruct that philosophy systematically.

My book does give some attention to Oakeshott’s philosophy of politics–more precisely, of morality, law, and government. But it is primarily concernedwith his ideas on a broader range of questions, including the idea of truth, thevarious forms of knowledge, the relationship between theory and practice,the place of interpretation in the social sciences, the character and importanceof historical explanation, and the definition of philosophy itself. My aim isto provide an interpretation of the philosophy constituted by these ideas thatexplains both its details and its spirit more fully and more clearly than has sofar been done.

To study how a thinker investigates philosophical questions is inevitably tothink about the questions themselves. But this can be done either deliberatelyor incidentally, that is, either more or less philosophically. This book is a workof philosophical interpretation, one that rests upon and is disciplined by thetexts on which it comments and that takes account of their historical context.But it also seeks to restate and sometimes to revise or extend the arguments ofthose texts in a manner that is faithful not only to what each text has to saybut to the implicit coherence of their arguments. Doing this means payingattention to how Oakeshott’s ideas changed over a period of more than sixtyyears while also noticing continuities, reconciling what can be reconciled andidentifying what is irreconcilable. To facilitate this project of philosophicalreconstruction, I have chosen for the most part to organize my discussiontopically rather than to treat Oakeshott’s writings individually and chronolog-ically. In my judgment, the costs of doing so, from the standpoint of the intel-lectual historian, are compensated for by the understanding gained fromcomparing arguments made at different times and in different contexts.

By attempting to reconstruct Oakeshott’s philosophy, I hope that both itspower and its limitations will come more clearly into view. I try to read, aseveryone should, both critically and sympathetically. The writings of a philoso-

Preface

viii

pher typically reveal a system that, no matter how carefully constructed, ismarred by irrelevancies, logical inconsistencies, unexplored implications, andrhetorical exaggerations. To read unsympathetically is to make much of suchblemishes while failing to attend to the overall system. A sympathetic reading,in contrast, will focus on that system, noting the imperfections but keepingthem in proportion, and it will not reject a philosopher’s conclusions simplybecause they are at variance with commonly acknowledged truths. My aim inthis book is to help those who are interested in engaging Oakeshott philo-sophically by providing an appropriate context, which is his philosophy as awhole, within which to understand his particular arguments, their signifi-cance, and their occasional but inevitable failures of coherence.

There are two things a reader might expect from a book of this kind that thisone does not provide. First, it does not provide an evaluation of Oakeshott’sphilosophy from an external standpoint. My concern is to interpret and explainOakeshott’s ideas, not to support or criticize his conclusions according to anindependently grounded standard. Because Oakeshott’s own antifoundationalconception of knowledge is one that depends on internal coherence rather thancorrespondence to an external criterion, it is especially appropriate to see whereOakeshott’s philosophy does and does not make sense in its own terms. Tojudge that philosophy by how well it corresponds to such a criterion would inany case be a difficult undertaking. In addition to mastering Oakeshott’s ownsubtle and subversive thought, one would have to articulate an alternativesystem of ideas and defend its objectivity. At this stage in the history of ourappreciation of Oakeshott’s contribution to philosophy, there is more to begained by attempting to understand the structure and presuppositions of histhought than by judging his conclusions from some other standpoint. Muchof what has been written on Oakeshott does precisely that, and is the worse forit. It is all too easy to dismiss an argument or even an entire philosophy whenit is expressed in an unfamiliar idiom or challenges one’s own assumptions.

Second, the book does not provide a full discussion of the scholarly literatureon Oakeshott. Although I have learned much from those who have explicatedor criticized Oakeshott’s ideas, I mention their writings only occasionally–oftenin the notes, which contain nothing that is necessary to the argument of thebook. In choosing for the most part not to engage this literature directly, I amnot trying to avoid controversy: my interpretations and arguments, if othersdisagree with them, are controversial. But my purpose is to understand Oake-shott’s philosophy, not to endorse or dispute what others have said about it.

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As Oakeshott once put it, the philosopher, qua philosopher, writes to make hisown mind clear. If the reader who chooses to come along finds this personaljourney instructive, both will have gained something.

I want to thank Sarah Tobias, my research assistant when I began working onthis project, for assembling what at the time was a nearly complete collectionof published writings by or about Oakeshott. Thanks are also due the librari-ans in the Interlibrary Loan Department at the Golda Meir Library of theUniversity of Wisconsin–Milwaukee for patiently handling our many requests;to Alison Sproston at the library of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, forcopies of essays Oakeshott wrote for the college magazine; and to Josiah LeeAuspitz and David Boucher, who supplied other rare items. Luke O’Sullivan’sdissertation, “Oakeshott on History” (Australian National University, 1996),pays careful attention to Oakeshott’s work on the history of political thought,much of it still unpublished. The dissertation is an invaluable source of infor-mation and insight, and I thank Dr. O’Sullivan for providing me with a copy.John Liddington kindly shared an early version of his indispensable bibliogra-phy, now available in Jesse Norman, ed., The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott(London: Duckworth, 1993), 107–43. For updates to this bibliography andmuch else of use to those interested in Oakeshott, one can now consult theweb site of the Michael Oakeshott Association (www.michael-oakeshott-asso-ciation.org).

I am indebted to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee for granting me aGraduate School Research Committee award and then a sabbatical leave towork on this project. The School of Social Science at the Institute for AdvancedStudy in Princeton provided a stimulating environment in which to write thefirst draft of this book, and the Center for European Studies at Harvard Uni-versity was generous in making its resources available to me as I revised themanuscript for publication. The readers for Penn State University Press, JosephMargolis and David Boucher, provided excellent criticism and advice. Finally,for help and encouragement at critical stages I want to thank William F. Hallo-ran, David Mapel, Michael Walzer, Timothy Fuller, Noël O’Sullivan, SanfordThatcher, and above all Jane Nardin.

I have incorporated parts of my article “Michael Oakeshott’s World ofIdeas,” Studies in Political Thought 2 (1993), 17–30, with the permission of theeditors.

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A b b r e v i a t i o n s

CPJ “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence,” Politica 3 (1938),203–22 and 345–60.

EM Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1933).

HCA Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975).MPME Morality and Politics in Modern Europe: The Harvard Lectures, ed.

Shirley Robin Letwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).OH On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).OHC On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).PFPS The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, ed. Timothy

Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).RP Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded ed.

(Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991).RPML Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, ed. Timothy Fuller (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).VLL The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, ed.

Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).VMES “The Vocabulary of a Modern European State,” Political Studies 23

(1975), 340.

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) is widely recognized as one of the moreimportant political thinkers of the past century. It is less widely recognizedthat he is one of the more philosophical. Oakeshott is concerned with ourunderstanding of political activity, but he goes far beyond this concern tooffer a critical philosophy of human activity generally and of the disciplinesthat interpret and explain it. And, against a persistent tendency in these disci-plines, he defends the view that inquiry can be independent of practical con-cerns, even when its subject is the thoughts and actions of human beings.

This book is a study of Oakeshott’s efforts, during the course of many years,to articulate a comprehensive, nonreductive, and fully philosophical under-standing of human conduct and of our knowledge of human conduct.Instead of focusing on Oakeshott’s political thought, it is concerned primar-ily with his ideas about the character and forms of knowledge, especially ourknowledge of intelligent human activity. Such an approach is warranted notonly by Oakeshott’s interest in philosophy but also by his depreciation ofpolitics as usually conceived and his rejection of established styles of politicaltheorizing. Even if we accept the view that Oakeshott’s most valuable andenduring contribution is as a theorist of politics, we cannot fully understandthis contribution unless we read his work in the context of a wider range of

Introduction

ideas. The book examines, philosophically, ideas about human experience andwhat might be called “the human sciences” that shape his thought.

Three concepts—modality, contingency, and civility—are central to Oake-shott’s philosophy and therefore to my reconstruction of it. In his first book,Experience and Its Modes (1933), Oakeshott develops the view, already presentin the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and the British Idealists from Green toCollingwood, that ideas are prior to and therefore not merely the product ofexperience. Ideas, moreover, sometimes acquire the character of distinct andself-consistent “modes” of understanding: scientific, historical, practical, aes-thetic, and so forth. To the inherited problem of identifying these modes anddiscerning their relationships with one another, the book contributes a skep-tical and innovative answer. For Oakeshott, modes are not permanent formsarranged, as the Idealists were inclined to argue, in a necessary and hierarchicalmanner; they are historical, mutable creations. Each mode brings to experienceits own criteria of factuality, truth, and reality. Some recognized forms ofexperience or inquiry cannot, however, be regarded as coherent modes; theyare ambiguous unions of ideas belonging to different modes and, as such, asource not of genuine knowledge but of confusion and error.

Oakeshott was especially interested in history as a mode of understandingand inquiry. What distinguishes historical inquiry from other modes, heargues, is that it is concerned not merely to explain the past but to discover it.Positivist theories of historical explanation, which appeared with the emer-gence of history as a systematic discipline in the middle of the nineteenthcentury, assume that historical inquiry aims to account for the occurrence ofevents whose meaning (“character”) is already known. But this, Oakeshottmaintains, is precisely what the historian cannot assume. Historical inquiry isnot a matter of explaining known events, events whose character is simplygiven. It requires historians to infer past events on the basis of evidence thathas survived into the present. To explain an event historically is to relate it toantecedent events so that its character is illuminated by the relationship (whichOakeshott calls a relationship of “contingency”) the historian has identified.Contingency, which must be distinguished from accident on one side andfrom necessity on the other, is therefore central to the conception of causalitypresupposed in historical explanation. And because the historian cannot takefor granted the existence, boundaries, and significance of historical events, itis proper to say that historical inquiry not only infers but constructs a past onthe basis of evidence. Discovery, it turns out, is a kind of disciplined creation.This constructionist theory, expounded most fully in On History (1983), refines

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott

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the view of history as a distinct mode of inquiry that Oakeshott first stated inExperience and Its Modes, fifty years before.

In his magnum opus, On Human Conduct (1975), Oakeshott uses theideas of modality and contingency to identify the forms of inquiry best suitedto understanding human activity. Here, he develops the argument that his-tory, not science, provides the model for explanations in the human sciences.It does so in two ways. First, in all the social sciences and humanities, weexplicitly or implicitly refer to individual, historically-particular practices (cus-toms, traditions, genres, discourses, etc.) in making sense of particular acts,utterances, works of art, and other human performances. But to explain whythese performances and not others occurred, we must go beyond displayingtheir conventional character as expressions of practices and show them tobe the outcome of events to which they are contingently related. Second,although certain aspects of human behavior can be explained scientifically asthe unconscious product of psychological, physiological, genetic, or othernatural processes, such knowledge is irrelevant to understanding human con-duct as “conduct”—that is, as intelligent choice and action. The scientific par-adigm, when applied beyond its proper limits, involves modal confusion.Such confusion, Oakeshott argues, is endemic in the social sciences, whichpersistently confuse scientific with historical inquiry and theoretical under-standing with practical relevance.

Oakeshott puts these ideas about the study of human conduct to work inhis writings on morality, law, and government. In these writings he definesmorality as a noninstrumental practice affecting transactions between intelli-gent and freely-choosing human beings, distinguishes the rule of law frommanagerial rule, and provides an acute examination of our inherited vocabu-lary of political discourse. Central to these inquiries is the idea of civil associa-tion, understood as a mode of human relationship in which the moral life isactualized in a system of laws. But the idea of civil association is, for Oake-shott, more than a tool for understanding the problem of legal order; it is alsoa metaphor for the civilized coexistence of different viewpoints, an emblem ofthe modal diversity of human experience. As a number of careful studies haveshown, much light can be cast on Oakeshott’s political thought by relating itto his philosophy.1 But his political thought also illuminates this philosophy

Introduction

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1. W. H. Greenleaf, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics (London: Longman’s, 1966); JosiahLee Auspitz, “Individuality, Civility, and Theory: The Philosophical Imagination of MichaelOakeshott,” Political Theory 4 (1976), 261–94; and Paul Franco, The Political Philosophy of MichaelOakeshott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

by illustrating how its organizing ideas work when they are used to interpreta particular domain of human activity.

A few of Oakeshott’s ideas—his critique of “Rationalism” as a style of practi-cal thinking or the image (popularized by Richard Rorty) of civilization as a“conversation” between modes of thought—have filtered into general literateculture.2 But these ideas are often misunderstood and other aspects of Oake-shott’s thought remain unknown except within a narrow circle of specialists.Until quite recently, the secondary literature has been preoccupied with thepolitical implications of his ideas and with locating those ideas on a left-rightcontinuum. Only now is attention beginning to focus on Oakeshott’s efforts,historical as well as philosophical, to understand the basic concepts used inthinking about politics. I hope to show that his writings on philosophy, science,history, morality, religion, and art offer arguments that go far beyond a practi-cal, historical, or even philosophical concern with politics to enter broaderdebates about the character of human thought and action, the scope and limitsof the human sciences, and the relationship of these sciences to other kinds ofinquiry and understanding.3 What Oakeshott has to say on these subjects isinteresting in itself and constitutes a significant contribution to philosophy.

This significance can be described in a variety of ways. One approach is toidentify Oakeshott’s contribution as providing an alternative to naturalism thatavoids the common mistakes of twentieth-century antinaturalism. Like Dewey,Heidegger, Foucault, Rorty, and many other twentieth-century philosophers,Oakeshott rejects the naturalist premise that the experienced world consists ofobjects that are real in the sense that their existence is independent of humanexperience and therefore of human concepts and practices. But he does notaccept the conclusion often reached by such thinkers that philosophy, becauseit criticizes the claims of naturalist epistemology, is inherently practical ornormative—“a matter of fulfilling human needs and interests,” as Rorty putsit.4 Oakeshott’s conception of philosophy took shape during a period in


4

2. The conversation metaphor is used by Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and seems to have been propagated mainly fromthat source.

3. Broader treatments of Oakeshott’s thought include Robert Grant’s insightful but briefOakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990); David Boucher, “Human Conduct, History, andSocial Science in the Works of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott,” New Literary His-tory 24 (1993), 697–717; and Harwell Wells, “The Philosophical Michael Oakeshott,” Journal ofthe History of Ideas 55 (1994), 129–45.

4. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), xxvii. I can-not do justice here to Rorty’s complex and deliberately provocative arguments.

which philosophers were especially concerned with rethinking its proper aims.The view he arrived at is a Socratic one: philosophy is not a set of answers toquestions about the nature of the physical world, the foundations of mathe-matics, the good life, or any other subject; it is the activity of questioningitself. It is a way of thinking about such questions and moreover a way ofthinking that is essentially critical or destructive. In holding this view, thoughnot in many other respects, Oakeshott is close in spirit to the strand in twenti-eth-century British analytic philosophy exemplified by the later Wittgenstein,and to a parallel strand in Continental philosophy evident in the writings ofNietzsche or Derrida. In philosophy one does not acquire knowledge aboutthings presumed to exist as the things they are apart from that knowledge;one dispels illusions, uncovers presuppositions, disentangles linguistic confu-sions, clarifies concepts, distinguishes interpretive contexts, or deconstructsontological distinctions. In doing so, one comes to grasp the character andlimits of one’s knowledge. Nothing in this attitude commits one, however, tothe conclusion that the criterion of truth in philosophy is the power of itsinsights to satisfy human desires.

One of the main forms of naturalism in modern times is “scientism,” theclaim that only science can provide genuine knowledge of the nature of thingsand therefore that scientific knowledge is the model or foundation of all knowl-edge. For Oakeshott, science is not a description of the world as it really is butone “mode” of understanding among others. Like history, practice, or art, sci-ence organizes experience according to its own categories and presupposi-tions, including its own distinctive criteria of reality and truth. To insist thatthe categories and criteria of scientific realism are the only terms on whichrational discourse can proceed is to deny the autonomy and significance of allother kinds of discourse. A. J. Ayer’s version of logical positivism is but anextreme example of this argument.5 Because scientism is recurrent in philoso-phy and is still common in the social sciences despite broad acceptance of thecase against positivism, what Oakeshott has to say on this theme remains rele-vant to current debates about the character of scientific knowledge, includingthe place of science in understanding human conduct.

Another way to bring out Oakeshott’s significance for contemporary philos-ophy is to locate his thought in the context of twentieth-century philosophicalhermeneutics. Like other philosophers for whom “meaning” is a crucial idea,Oakeshott can be understood as working through the implications of Hegel’s

Introduction

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5. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936).

program for theorizing the basic categories of human experience. Like Hegel,Oakeshott is critical of the naive “positivity” of inherited religious, moral, andscientific ideas, but, against Hegel, he is skeptical that a completely critical andtherefore permanent and unconditional understanding is achievable or evenintelligible. No matter how thoroughly it criticizes its own conditions, under-standing is always conditional and therefore subject to further criticism. LikeHegel, Oakeshott views all conclusions as historically-conditioned construc-tions. But he rejects Hegel’s view that history is the story of the developmentof “reason” or “mind” through a dialectical process that must yield, as a con-sequence of its progressive logic, ever more complete and coherent under-standings within which the particular constructs of religion, science, and otherforms of experience have their place. For Oakeshott, human understandingshave their histories, but there is no universal history of progressive enlighten-ment, no grand narrative of the cumulative and irreversible evolution ofmind, no teleological march of spirit revealed in the collective self-educationof the human race, no “end of history” in which mankind, having come tounderstand itself fully, will at last be “at home in the world.” If these Hegelianideas are among the defining assumptions of modernism, Oakeshott’s rejec-tion of them can be seen as characteristically postmodern. But like postmod-ernism in general, Oakeshott’s version of it retains Hegel’s commitment tothe proposition that the world is constituted by meanings, and therefore thatall understanding, including scientific knowledge and philosophy itself, isnecessarily interpretive or hermeneutical.

With respect to this issue, one can compare Oakeshott’s version of philo-sophical hermeneutics with the views of other practitioners from Heidegger toRorty. All thinkers in the hermeneutic tradition start with the premise that expe-rience is shaped by meanings and therefore that interpretation is part of experi-ence itself. We naively believe that we experience the world as it really is, unawarethat this experience is mediated by concepts. Because all our perceptions, judg-ments, and theories are interpretations, understanding cannot be divorced fromthe effort to become aware of the interpretive concepts we take for granted. Tounderstand is to understand better something we already in some way under-stand. Hence the supreme importance of interpretation in philosophy, whichmay be defined in this context as an inquiry distinguished from other inquiriesin being more fully committed to questioning the interpretations that consti-tute knowledge in any domain of experience. Each domain has its own special-ized hermeneutics in the narrow sense of rules for interpreting evidence. But, asGadamer in particular has emphasized, philosophical hermeneutics is not a


6

method of generating knowledge in philosophy, conceived as one field amongothers. It is a theory of knowledge according to which understanding in anyfield, including ordinary experience, must be seen as emerging from encountersbetween an interpreter and what is interpreted. Every such encounter yields aninterpretation that can itself be examined in a critical juxtaposition with otherinterpretations. Understanding is a dialectical process in which understandingsare achieved, criticized, refined, revised, and sometimes abandoned, and inwhich an understood world is thereby gradually and provisionally constructed.6

Although he shares this dialectical conception of knowledge, Oakeshott’s philo-sophical hermeneutics departs in significant ways from the versions offered bypragmatism and phenomenology.

In its origins, hermeneutics was understood to be a matter of interpretingtexts, but the idea of a “text” soon expanded to include a variety of text-ana-logues—gestures, rituals, costumes, and other cultural objects. Hermeneuticsbecame the method of a wide range of disciplines concerned with humanconduct and its products, and then (in the philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey)the key to distinguishing the human from the natural sciences. But one couldalso argue, as did Idealists after Kant, that because experience always requiresideas to organize its perceptions, all experience is determined by meanings.For Heidegger and Gadamer, exploring the implications of this basic Idealistclaim, hermeneutics is universal because experience is always mediated byideas, always a matter of language and meaning. But if all knowledge is depen-dent on meanings, it would seem that we cannot categorically distinguish thehuman from the natural sciences, for both are expressed in language andbring concepts to the interpretation of their material. Rorty offers a version ofthis monist view when he argues that because all experience involves meaningand the interpretation of meaning, “anything is, for purposes of beinginquired into, ‘constituted’ by a web of meanings.” It follows that there is nosignificant distinction between matter and mind, nature and consciousness—“no interesting difference between tables and texts, between protons andpoems.”7 Hermeneutics is as necessary to explaining natural phenomena as itis to explaining human actions. It may be convenient for certain purposes todistinguish between the natural and the human sciences, but no purpose-independent validity can be claimed for the distinction.

Introduction

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6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).

7. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1982), 199, 153.

Like others who defend the autonomy of the human sciences, Oakeshottrejects as misconceived the positivist program of explaining human thoughtand action in the same terms that science uses to explain natural phenomena.But he also rejects the hermeneutic claim that because all knowledge involvesthe interpretation of meanings, no distinction can be made between the nat-ural and the human sciences. From Oakeshott’s perspective, the defect in“universal hermeneutics” is that it fails to distinguish two levels of meaningevoked by the actions of any being who can grasp and use meanings. The firstof these levels consists of meanings that the observer brings to the interpreta-tion of a given passage of experience, including the events and processes ofinanimate nature. The second consists of meanings that belong to the experi-ence that is being observed, as happens when this experience involves theintelligent acts of human beings. These meanings include both the self-under-standings of an agent and collective understandings—about which an agentmay know little or be mistaken—that are embedded in languages, traditions,and cultures. Such meanings, which do not exist in what we choose to catego-rize as “nature,” are required to make sense of human conduct insofar as itinvolves intelligent thought and action. To understand human conduct, whenwe conceive it as something more than an outcome of natural processes, wemust pay attention to both levels of meaning. In the human sciences, thethings we explain, as well our explanations, consist of meanings. If all sciencesare hermeneutic, the human sciences are doubly hermeneutic because theyinvolve a level of meaning, and therefore of interpretation, beyond thatrequired in the natural sciences. This is a significant difference between thenatural and the human sciences.8 It is not, however, an ontological difference,because the distinction lies not in the “nature” of the objects we want tounderstand but in how we categorize them.

Another doubtful conclusion recurrent in the hermeneutic tradition is thatbecause understanding necessarily involves interpretation, all knowledge mustreflect the interests of the interpreter. In its more extreme forms, this claimbecomes an unqualified relativism according to which all judgments are sub-jective and without rational justification. A more plausible version is the prag-


8

8. Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor distinguish the human from the natural sciences interms of the doubly hermeneutic character of the latter, but like many philosophers in the herme-neutic tradition they obscure their case by linking it to a Heideggerian assertion of the primacy ofordinary lived experience (Dreyfus) or the related alleged impossibility of “value neutrality” (Tay-lor). Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980), 3–23;Charles Taylor, “Understanding in the Human Sciences,” Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980), 24–38.

matist argument that the justification of any distinction lies in its use. Accordingto this argument, the truth of a proposition depends not on whether it corre-sponds to a given, objective reality but on whether it proves useful in a givencontext. Truth is not a matter of epistemology but of utility, and because whatis useful depends on human values and aims, what counts as knowledge can-not be determined apart from the particular human interests it serves. Allknowledge is practical knowledge because it is a tool for making sense of theworld in relation to human concerns. If we can distinguish different sciences,it is because they respond in different ways to such concerns. Jürgen Haber-mas makes such an argument when he rejects the naturalist claim that scien-tific inquiry yields knowledge of the world as it is, knowledge that is objectivein the sense that it is independent of human concerns. Science, Habermasagues, is knowledge constructed from the standpoint of an interest in control-ling nature to realize human aims. Knowledge of human conduct, in contrast,involves meaning and agency, and this implies an interest not in technologicalcontrol but in transparent communication and the emancipation of humanaction from forms of power that depend on technological control or herme-neutic manipulation.9 For Habermas, there is no such thing as knowledge inand for itself. But even if we grant his point that inquiry is always practicallymotivated, it does not follow that its conclusions are practical. It is triviallytrue that knowledge is the outcome of a social activity, but unless we wish toreduce knowledge to ideology, we must regard this outcome as an “assem-blage of truths” (that is, putative truths—hypotheses or propositions) andrecognize that to reason within a given field is to be concerned with thesetruths, not with the social process that generated them.10 Oakeshott arguesthat even if we regard every conclusion as the outcome of a practical activity,its truth can be judged according to criteria that are independent of the inter-ests of those who produced it.

Habermas’s argument that knowledge in all its forms is inherently practicaldraws on German theories of the primacy of the “life-world,” the world ofordinary, prescientific human experience. According to these theories, whichare central to phenomenology and existentialism, practical experience is not alimited mode of experience but a necessary feature of human existence and

Introduction

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9. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston:Beacon Press, 1971).

10. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1999), 66–67.

therefore the ultimate basis of all knowledge. Heidegger, for example, arguesthat we inhabit a world that we understand immediately in relation to our-selves and our purposes. Everything we think is determined by these purposes.Science and other “objective” forms of knowledge presuppose the under-standing that springs from our immediate practical activities and concerns.They are interpretations of the primordial experience of living. But in Oake-shott’s view, this conclusion awards unjustifiable primacy to ordinary practicalexperience. No experience, no interpretation, can be deemed primary on the(mistaken) grounds that it is not mediated by concepts or that it constitutesthe raw material for all other interpretations.11 Practical activity can be under-stood in ways that are not themselves practical: we can stand outside theworld of practical activity and interpret that world using ideas that belong toanother universe of discourse. To make a decision is to reach a conclusionwithin the practical mode. But that decision can be understood not only prac-tically—as prudent or imprudent, lawful or unlawful, or in some other waygood or bad. It can be understood historically—as a contingent outcome ofantecedent events—or philosophically—as entailed by the ideas it presupposes.It can be regarded as material for a painting, poem, or novel or made an objectof scientific explanation by being aggregated with other decisions to generatestatistical patterns. In each of these modes, knowledge escapes the practicalcircumstances of its creation and succeeds or fails according to the standardsof judgment acknowledged in that mode.

Each mode of understanding, in short, has its own criteria of truth accord-ing to which it determines what is factual and real. In contrast to the arbitraryfoundationalism of those who privilege practical experience, Oakeshott’smodal epistemology is pluralistic. It challenges the conclusion that practice,science, art, or any other mode of understanding enjoys a uniquely privilegedposition with respect to what is true or real. In this sense, it offers a critiquenot only of naturalism but of foundationalism in all its forms. Not only is thiscritique more nuanced and less reductive than the critiques offered by prag-matism, but it reveals pragmatism itself to be foundationalist insofar as itprivileges ordinary lived experience as the source of all knowledge and humanconcerns as the criterion of its adequacy.

It is in this context that we can appreciate Oakeshott’s significance as apolitical philosopher. The study of politics typically proceeds within one mode


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11. On Oakeshott’s rejection of the “primacy of practice” argument, see Horst Mewes,“Modern Individualism: Reflections on Oakeshott, Arendt, and Strauss,” Political ScienceReviewer 21 (1992), 136–37.

or another. It may describe constitutions, votes, policies, or ideologies andseek to explain them historically or scientifically. It may offer judgments orprescriptions—propositions in the practical mode—about these objects.Often, at the risk of modal confusion, it does several of these things at once.And in addition to interpreting political activity and discourse within thesemodes of inquiry, one can seek to uncover its presuppositions and to clarifyits concepts. Such inquiry can be called philosophical, bearing in mind that itis not the only activity that goes on under the label of philosophy.

Any aspect of practical experience can be examined philosophically in thissense of the term. Philosophical inquiry, so conceived, has a recognized placein the fields of moral and legal philosophy. Moral philosophers commonlydistinguish the branch of their field they call metaethics, which investigatesethical concepts and assumptions, from normative ethics, which is prescrip-tive. Similarly, legal philosophers distinguish between analytical and norma-tive jurisprudence. There is no reason why political philosophy, too, cannotbe truly philosophical, critically examining the assumptions that underlie polit-ical discourse to achieve clearer and more coherent definitions of political ideas.But the place of purely philosophical concerns is less widely acknowledged inthe field of political theory than in moral and legal philosophy. Political theo-rists are inclined to see their proper activity as prescriptive reflection and argu-ment. Many would insist that philosophical detachment is impossible and,when claimed, spurious. One reason for reading Oakeshott is that he chal-lenges this widely held view, illustrating in his own work the proposition thatone can theorize politics without engaging in prescriptive political theorizing.

For Oakeshott, to investigate an activity philosophically is not, as such, toengage in the activity being investigated, though one’s philosophizing can, ofcourse, be affected by unacknowledged practical assumptions or concerns.But we can distinguish within the miscellany of concerns that constitutespolitical theory as actually practiced a concern to generate propositions thatare not themselves practical. If the study of practical activity is authenticallyphilosophical, it cannot provide us with ends to pursue. For that reason, Oake-shott argues, a “philosophy of politics” does not fail as philosophy because itfails to provide the practical guidance that is often looked for in “political phi-losophy.” Because philosophy, as the criticism of concepts and presupposi-tions, is skeptical, even destructive, it cannot answer the demand placed uponit to provide practical guidance. To offer such guidance is to make use of prac-tical ideas, not to examine them. It is to presuppose the truth of these ideas,not to question their truth. But, Oakeshott insists, we can study the prescrip-tions of political discourse in ways that are not themselves prescriptive. We

Introduction

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can step outside the world of political debate to investigate its character andpresuppositions. The self-understanding of political theory, as it is commonlypracticed, sadly denies the genuinely philosophical character that it is capableof achieving.

It is his achievements as a philosopher committed to disengaging theorizingfrom practical concerns that will, I believe, ultimately distinguish Oakeshottfrom the political theorists of his time. But one should not exaggerate the dif-ferences between Oakeshott and his twentieth-century contemporaries, sig-nificant though these differences are. Doing so merely reinforces the mistakenjudgment that he is a marginal figure without much to contribute to the philo-sophical questions that concern us. Instead of relegating Oakeshott to a minorrole as the scourge of Rationalism, an articulate defender of conservatism, orone more member of the liberal chorus, we can regard him as carrying on atradition of philosophical criticism in which practically engaged political the-orists also participate, despite their denial that such criticism can be divorcedfrom practical concerns. We can read him as sharing Leo Strauss’s fascinationwith the Platonic view of philosophy as an ascent from the cave of unexam-ined ideas, but without joining Strauss in concluding that political opinioncan be replaced by the philosopher’s knowledge of the unequivocal “nature”of political things. We can read him as joining Michael Walzer in exploring theshared meanings that constitute a community, without resolving, as Walzerdoes, to “stand in the cave.”12 And we can read him as inspiring J. G. A. Pocock,Quentin Skinner, and other contributors to a revived discipline of historicalstudies of political thought by emphasizing the importance of languages ofdiscourse as the context for reading political texts. But, for the most part,Oakeshott did not himself minutely investigate particular texts and contexts;nor was he inclined, like some practitioners of this craft, to reduce the argu-ments of all such texts to mere ideologies.13


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12. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), xiv.13. Oakeshott distinguishes “ideological” writings concerned with claims to rule and the

duties of rulers from those concerned with “instrumental reflection” on the exercise of power orwith “philosophical reflection” that rises above both ideology and expediency. Review ofQuentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Historical Journal 23 (1980),449–50. Oakeshott’s influence on the historical study of political thought is evident in J. G. A.Pocock, “Time, Institutions, and Action: An Essay on Traditions and Their Understanding,” inPreston King and B. C. Parekh, eds., Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to ProfessorMichael Oakeshott on the Occasion of His Retirement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1968), 209–37.

Like Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, Oakeshott examines the tensionbetween governmental power and individual freedom. For Oakeshott, as forHayek, the laws of a free society are rules, not purposive commands, and theyconstrain government while providing a framework in which individuals canpursue their own self-chosen goals. But where Hayek’s concerns are largelyprescriptive, Oakeshott stands back to analyze the history and presuppositionsof the concepts central to the modern practice of individual freedom. ForOakeshott, “the rule of law” is neither a slogan nor an ideal but a mode ofhuman association. Like Popper, Oakeshott seeks to identify the kind of soci-ety within which individual liberty can flourish, but he does not accept Popper’sscientific realism, his teleological view of the “evolution” of human knowl-edge, or his conclusion that scientific rationalism is the key to rational plan-ning: unlike Popper, Oakeshott does not conclude that social engineering isdefensible if prudently exercised, as if the objection to managerial govern-ment were technical rather than moral.

Like John Rawls, Oakeshott sees “justice” as suspended between politicalpractice and philosophical abstraction. Both think that no conception of jus-tice can be acceptable to the philosopher without being transformed throughcriticism of its assumptions, but also that no philosophical conception of jus-tice can entirely escape being an interpretation of the political experience ofparticular communities. But Oakeshott does not share Rawls’s understand-ing of society as a scheme of cooperation conceived, in part, as an enterprisefor distributing substantive benefits, or his view that justice includes princi-ples governing such a distribution. Like Robert Nozick, Oakeshott regardsmorality as a noninstrumental practice premised on the idea that humanbeings are freely-choosing agents and, by implication, on the rights of agentsto recognition and respect. But he does not simply postulate such rights, asNozick does; nor does he conclude that the market and the minimal stateare, even in principle, joint instruments for securing the enjoyment of suchrights. And he does not link human agency and human rights to some set ofbasic goods or capabilities, in the manner of John Finnis or Martha Nussbaum.Like Habermas, Oakeshott articulates a comprehensive vision of morality,law, and government in relation to human experience as a whole—a visionthat is attentive to the diversity of human experience and to the modes ofunderstanding we use to interpret and explain that experience. But he wouldregard as misguided Habermas’s underlying pragmatism or his efforts tosynthesize moral, philosophical, and sociological conclusions within a com-mon framework.

Introduction

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Unlike many of his contemporaries, then, Oakeshott does not think thatpolitical philosophy can establish a determinate foundation for substantivemoral and political principles. Nor does he think that the task of political phi-losophy is to work out the practical implications of such principles. Politicalphilosophy seeks an understanding of justice and other political concepts thatis neither metaphysical nor political. Once one understands that Oakeshott’sproject is philosophical—where philosophy is understood to investigate criti-cally the presuppositions of different modes of human understanding andassociation—one understands why his writings can leave readers who arelooking for substantive political arguments puzzled and unsatisfied. One alsounderstands why the demand for intellectual and moral closure in philosophyis unreasonable, and why the promises of political theory are so often empty.Reading Oakeshott, one acquires a deeper understanding of the character ofphilosophy and its place in the conversation of mankind.


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Understanding

Perhaps the only satisfactory view would be one whichgrasped, even more thoroughly than Hegel’s, the factthat what we have, and all we have, is a world of “mean-ings,” and constructed its philosophy without recourseto extraneous conceptions which belong to other views.

—“Experience and Reality” (EM 61)

The greatest difficulty in philosophical reflection is tothrow off the allegiance, which continuously forces itselfupon us, to so-called “fact.”. . . We speak of reflection onor about something, and thereby inadvertently attributethe character of a foundation to what is really only astarting-place.

—“Political Philosophy” (RPML 152)

Oakeshott’s first book, Experience and Its Modes, is concerned with the cen-tral concepts and problems of epistemology, an inquiry often regarded, at leastin modern times, as the core of philosophy. But epistemology is not easily dis-tinguished from metaphysics or from other philosophical inquiries. It is some-times said that epistemology is concerned with how knowledge (true belief)is acquired and justified, whereas metaphysics is concerned with what is realand with the basic categories of existence, but one cannot go far in investigat-ing truth without engaging questions about reality and existence. Or it maybe said that epistemology is concerned with knowledge in general and otherbranches of philosophy with particular kinds of knowledge. But to say this isto beg one of the main questions of epistemology: whether there is such athing as knowledge in general, as distinct from specific kinds of knowledge.An epistemological work, then, is one that must confront other philosophical

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questions as well, and one of these is the character and scope of epistemologyitself.

It might help, in grasping what Oakeshott is up to in this book, to locatehis inquiry in relation to two broad epistemological traditions. The first con-ceives epistemology, as Descartes conceived it, to be a response to skepticism.The skeptic denies the possibility of knowledge, so to answer skepticism oneis forced to define what knowledge is and show that it is possible. Thoughthey claim to be concerned with knowledge in general, philosophers in thistradition focus on certain supposedly elementary ways of knowing, like sensa-tion or perception. The implication is that what holds for them holds formore complex forms of knowledge as well. Traces of this approach, well rep-resented in both analytic philosophy and phenomenology, can be detected inExperience and Its Modes, but the book is more securely located in anothertradition that begins not with skepticism but with the kinds of knowledge weactually have: with ordinary sensory experience but also with mathematical,linguistic, historical, and other kinds of knowledge that are not easily ana-lyzed in terms of such experience. For philosophers in this tradition, a theoryof knowledge must concern itself with the diverse, often complex, forms thatknowledge actually takes; it cannot limit itself to sense-data or treat sensationas paradigmatic. Oakeshott, then, begins his philosophical career standingwith the British Hegelians and German neo-Kantians against whom, around1900, Moore and Russell in England and Husserl in Germany had launchedtheir revolutions.

Oakeshott considers the character and forms of knowledge in many of hiswritings, but nowhere more thoroughly than in Experience and Its Modes. Thebook takes as its subject “experience,” which it defines not only as the activityof a thinking subject and the sensations, perceptions, memories, and otherideas generated by this activity, but as a real world in which these ideas receiveconfirmation from the totality to which they belong. The arguments thatspring from this inquiry, though widely regarded as important for understand-ing Oakeshott’s later thought, are seldom viewed as an important contributionto philosophy. It is helpful in assessing the philosophical as well as historicalsignificance of these arguments to compare them with what Oakeshott has tosay in On Human Conduct. This book begins with an essay examining theassumptions underlying our knowledge of human activity as an expression ofintelligent thought and action. Though it goes over some of the same groundas the earlier work, the essay focuses on the self-conscious and critical activityof acquiring and justifying knowledge that Oakeshott calls “theorizing.” In


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each of these books Oakeshott identifies categories of knowledge and distin-guishes philosophy (“unconditional theorizing”) from other kinds of inquiry,on the grounds that it involves a uniquely self-critical approach to understand-ing. The two therefore share a consistent outlook, despite many differences. InOn Human Conduct, as in most of his later writings, Oakeshott is pursuingthe intimations of ideas articulated in Experience and Its Modes.1

Understanding and Experience

What is it to understand the world? In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshottlinks the idea of understanding to that of experience. Understanding is experi-ence, which must in turn be understood as a unity involving both experiencingand what is experienced. Although “experience,” a word used in the traditionof British empiricism against which Oakeshott is reacting, implies the existenceof something external to a thinking subject, an independent object to be expe-rienced and understood, Oakeshott intends no such separation.

In this respect, “understanding” and “experience” are like “interpretation,”a word Oakeshott thinks is misleading because it presupposes the existence ofand assigns an identity to a “something” that is independent of how it isinterpreted. “Interpretation,” he suggests, implies that the datum to be inter-preted and the interpretations that are made of it exist in two permanentlyseparated worlds, one an intellectually constructed world of interpretations,the other a world of givens that exists apart from all attempts to interpret it.“Interpretation requires something to interpret, but when we speak of it ourlanguage slips under our feet, for there is never in experience an it, an origi-nal, distinguishable from the interpretation, and consequently there can beno interpretation” (EM 31–32). But as the same can be said of “experience”and “understanding,” it is not immediately clear why Oakeshott prefers themto “interpretation,” or why he switches from “experience” in Experience andIts Modes to “understanding” in On Human Conduct.

When a philosopher gives up one term and adopts another, it is often inresponse to the paradoxical need, in moving beyond conventional opinion, toboth use and escape conventional meanings. Because any vocabulary creates

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1. Oakeshott’s well-known definition of politics as the “pursuit of intimations” within atradition of political activity (RP 56–58, 66–69), which is often taken as ideological rather thanphilosophical, echoes his definition of knowledge as the achievement of coherence within a sys-tem of ideas through the “pursuit of the implications” of that system (EM 41).

as well as resolves difficulties, a philosopher may look for new words toreplace those that have come to seem misleading. This impulse can be seen,for example, in Rorty’s repudiation of the term “epistemology” or Heideg-ger’s rejection of “philosophy” itself in favor of “thinking.” It can be seen inWittgenstein’s inauguration of a mode of philosophizing concerned with thepuzzles of language and in the aphoristic style of his Philosophical Investiga-tions and other late writings. In Oakeshott’s case, the temptation to adopt anew terminology is reinforced by an acknowledged preference for writingessays, each of which aims to express in a new way the results of rethinking anold topic.2 This recurrent desire to make a fresh start may seem inconsistentfor a self-proclaimed anti-Cartesian and antirationalist, but there is in fact noinconsistency. To question the assumptions that underlie old questions is inher-ent in philosophy, and what Oakeshott repudiates is not this critical activitybut the further effort to achieve certainty by building a structure of positiveand incontestable knowledge on a presuppositionless foundation.

It is characteristic of philosophy, then, that it should seek to avoid or rede-fine words whose uses in a given context are confused or misleading so thatcriticism of received ideas can continue. Philosophical thinking cannot be per-manently unencumbered, but it can be liberated temporarily from meaningsthat have become attached to particular terms. But the philosopher’s effort tofix the meaning of words is never an end in itself: philosophy aims to defineconcepts, not words. As Oakeshott puts it in an early essay, philosophical def-inition is concerned with classification, not with stipulating meanings.3 Whenhe rejects “interpretation” or substitutes “understanding” for “experience,” heis avoiding a word that has become too encumbered with meanings to do use-ful work. The wish to escape unwanted associations explains why, at the begin-ning of On Human Conduct, Oakeshott uses the odd expression “goings-on”where we expect him to speak of “events” or “phenomena,” and why, when,later in the book, he discusses government according to the rule of law, herelies on the Latin civitas, cives, lex, and jus instead of the English “state,” “cit-izens,” “law,” and “justice.” What seems like pedantry or even mere eccentricityis in fact a philosopher’s characteristic effort to control, as far as possible, themeaning of every word he uses.


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2. With the exception of Experience and Its Modes, the books Oakeshott published duringhis lifetime are collections of essays. On Human Conduct treats the presuppositions, idea, andhistory of civil association in three related essays.

3. “A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy”(unpublished typescript, 1925), 15.

I have used the word “understanding” as an organizing term in this bookfor a number of reasons. Because Oakeshott relies on it in his later writings,where it is often paired with “inquiry,” a deliberate engagement to understandthat begins and ends with an understanding, we may suppose it to reflect hisconsidered view of an appropriate word to use in discussing experience orknowledge. Moreover, the word “understanding” figures prominently in thebroad hermeneutic tradition in which much of Oakeshott’s thinking is appro-priately located. As will become clear in Chapter 3, “understanding” has adiversity of contested meanings both within and beyond this tradition, sousing the word does not necessarily commit one to a specific point of view. Iuse it, as does Oakeshott, as an umbrella term whose precise sense remains tobe specified in each context in which it is deployed. I also speak of “interpre-tation,” an indispensable word that Oakeshott himself occasionally uses,despite his criticism of it in Experience and Its Modes.

Experience as a World of Ideas

The argument of Experience and Its Modes begins with the claim that to expe-rience is to be conscious of something, and to be conscious of something isalways at some level to recognize, distinguish, or identify it as something of aparticular kind—a noise, a rumbling, a heavy truck going by. Such identifica-tions already involve thinking. It hardly matters whether we begin with whatis experienced or with the activity of experiencing, for the distinction is an arti-ficial one. To speak of “experience” is to invoke a single world in which theseabstractions are interdependent. Experience “not merely is inseparable fromthought, but is itself a form of thought” (EM 10).

Objections to this conception of experience usually rest on the argumentthat there are kinds of experience—sensations, perceptions, intuitions, voli-tions, feelings—that are in some manner independent of thought. How Oake-shott responds to objections of this kind is illustrated by his refutation of theview that “sensation” does not involve thinking or judgment.

According to this view, versions of which exist in continental phenomenol-ogy as well as British empiricism, sensory experiences are unmediated bythinking of any kind. But, Oakeshott argues, the idea of sensation indepen-dent of thought is self-contradictory. Such a sensation could be no more thanan isolated, unrecognized, and indeterminate “this,” the momentary state of aparticular sense. There could be no continuing, individual subject whose see-ing, hearing, tasting, or touching the sensation is, or any object to which the

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sensation could be attributed by such a subject. In immediate sensation thereis neither a determinate object nor a determinate subject. But actual experi-ence is not like this, for experience always involves consciousness and so cannever be completely indeterminate. To be conscious of something is alreadyto recognize it and therefore to judge. And to judge is to be a thinking subjectengaged in judging.

What is true of sensation must also be true of perception and other morecomplex kinds of experience. We perceive only what has meaning for us. Theproposition that there must be something prior to judgment on which judg-ment can act, a kind of raw material for thought, is a mistaken inference fromthe fact that in thinking we are always thinking about something, for it is falseto infer that this something cannot itself consist of thought. In thinking weinterpret interpretations, not a pure datum independent of and prior to inter-pretation.4 Everything given in experience is already complex, recognized,mediated, and judged—whether it is sensed, perceived, felt, willed, intuited,or deduced. Sensation and perception differ from other forms of judgmentonly in being less complex, less explicitly reasoned, less precisely formulated,and perhaps less coherent. Every form of experience involves some degree ofjudgment and thought. It follows that philosophy, especially, cannot be whatit is for the empiricists or for phenomenologists like Brentano and the earlyHusserl, an understanding of the world that rests on uninterpreted reports ofwhat is given in experience.

Oakeshott’s arguments cogently restate a view initiated by Hegel’s revisionof Kant and subsequently developed by Wilhelm Dilthey, T. H. Green,Bernard Bosanquet, and many others. According to the line of reasoning pur-sued by these philosophers, because all experience involves thinking, the expe-rienced world is a world constructed by thinking. It is, as Oakeshott puts it,“a world of ideas.” Here he adopts a concept, that of a “world” as distinctfrom a “class,” already common in the literature of British Idealism.5 A world,


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4. “In thought there is nothing analogous to the painter’s colors or the builder’s bricks—raw material existing apart from the use made of it” (EM 19).

5. Those who use the concept include F. H. Bradley in The Principles of Logic (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1883), Bernard Bosanquet in The Principle of Individuality and Value(London: Macmillan, 1912), and R. G. Collingwood in An Essay on Philosophical Method(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). Oakeshott is wary of labels, but at the beginning ofExperience and Its Modes he identifies his work as an effort to restate the first principles of a phi-losophy “known by the somewhat ambiguous name of Idealism,” and he acknowledges a debt toHegel and Bradley (EM 6, 7).

Bosanquet writes, is “a system of members, such that every member, being exhypothesi distinct, nevertheless contributes to the unity of the whole in virtueof the peculiarities which constitute its distinctness. . . . It takes all sorts tomake a world; a class is essentially of one sort only.”6 For Oakeshott, too, theunity of a world of ideas is not the unity that belongs to a class, whose mem-bers share a common element, but the kind of unity in which every element isdistinct yet affected by its place in the whole. The unity of a world is to befound in the relationships among its different parts; it is not a matter of uni-form abstraction.

What we judge to be true is always determined by the coherence of thelarger world of experience within which we judge. Experience gives us ideasthat are related to other ideas. A world of ideas—what Dilthey calls a geistigeWelt—is “a whole of interlocking meanings which establish and interpret oneanother” (VLL 45).7 To accept or reject an idea is therefore to make a judg-ment about whether it fits into the system of ideas we bring to bear on it andin terms of which we seek to understand it. If accepting an idea leads to dis-crepancies in this system, we have encountered an incoherence that demandsto be resolved. To seek to understand is to pursue “satisfaction in experience”(EM 35) by arriving at an understanding that is without discrepancies demand-ing further investigation. So long as there are unresolved questions in a sys-tem of ideas, or aspects of experience that appear to lie outside it, there isincoherence and dissatisfaction.

One is tempted to object that these remarks on coherence are unacceptablyvague. It is clear that coherence is a property of a set of ideas, not of its mem-bers, but the character of these members and their relationship with oneanother remains unspecified. Are we talking about propositions that are con-sistent with one another? That entail one another? That explain one another? Ifthe ideas in question are something other than propositions, in what sense canwe speak of consistency and entailment? And is “satisfaction” (a word usedoften by Bosanquet and other Idealists) to be taken as a formal property ofcoherence or a psychological concept? In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott

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6. “The Concrete Universal,” in Principle of Individuality and Value, 37.7. Johann Gustav Droysen uses the expression “world of ideas” in his Outline of the Prin-

ciples of History, trans. E. Benjamin Andrews (Boston: Ginn, 1893; first German edition 1868),10. The expression geistige Welt is translated as “human world” in Wilhelm Dilthey, Introductionto the Human Sciences, vol. 1 of Selected Works, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

discusses objections that Russell and others had made to Idealist coherencetheory, but he does not define the concept of coherence. This failure can beexplained, at least in part, by his commitment to the view (considered below)that different kinds of knowledge display different kinds of coherence. As thepositivist depreciation of anything other than logic, mathematics, and scienceillustrates, the cost of embracing a precise definition of coherence is apt to bethe exclusion of certain ways of thinking from the category of “knowledge.”For Oakeshott, who is reluctant to privilege one kind of knowledge overanother, the idea of coherence necessarily functions as a metaphor, not a tech-nical concept.

Oakeshott shares the epistemological pluralism characteristic of Idealism,and in fact he takes this pluralism more seriously than many Idealists. He crit-icizes, for example, Hegel’s teleological view that knowledge develops byachieving an ever more perfect coherence over time. Understanding is not aprogressive march toward complete coherence in experience, a sequence “inwhich that which comes later is necessarily nearer the end than that whichcame earlier” (EM 35); it is the outcome, always revisable and therefore neces-sarily impermanent, of an activity guided by the ideals of completeness andconsistency. It is, as Oakeshott explains elsewhere, “not the simple exclusionof all that does not fit, but the perpetual re-establishment of coherence” (HCA11). The pursuit of understanding is a dialectical activity in which reflectionproceeds by “considering something recognized as knowledge and supposedto be true, yet considering it with the assumption that it is not true” (RPML139). The conception of understanding implicit in these remarks presumesthat ideas fit together systematically: that they can be reconciled, redefined,and rearranged so as to eliminate whatever does not make sense, given thepresuppositions of the inquiry in question. But there is no single, necessaryarrangement of ideas—one that actually will, in the course of time, be evermore closely approached. Even though he rejects Hegel’s progressivism, inExperience and Its Modes Oakeshott reiterates the Hegelian view, periodi-cally asserted by critics as well as defenders of the coherence theory, that theidea of coherence implies the idea of complete or “absolute” coherence, acondition in which all discrepancies are resolved. He also affirms the relatedconclusion that philosophy is distinguished from other kinds of inquiry inbeing committed to seeking such coherence. Complete coherence may beunreachable and therefore not an actual goal of inquiry, but it remains animplicit ideal. Whatever else “the absolute” might be taken to mean in philos-ophy, Oakeshott writes, the idea of the absolute as “a world or system of ideas


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which is at once unitary and complete” is indispensable as the criterion of sat-isfactory understanding (EM 47). The absolute, in this sense, is the imaginedend of an endless dialectic of discrepancy and reconciliation. As we shall see,Oakeshott came to regard even this watered-down version of the absolute asmisleading, and in later writings he explicitly denies that philosophy can bedistinguished from other kinds of knowledge as an inquiry that uniquely aimsat comprehensive understanding.

Coherence and Correspondence

Implicit in the preceding discussion is a distinction between coherence withina system of ideas and coherence between different systems. A perception, judg-ment, or argument that makes sense in a particular context, because it is com-patible with all that this context defines as relevant, may cease to make sense ifthe context is problematized. And a body of ideas that is consistent within thelimits of its unrecognized assumptions may constitute the real world for thosewhose experience it shapes. But as soon as those assumptions are identifiedand therefore implicitly called into question, the world they constitute is nolonger the entire world but only one thing within that world which we areimmediately invited to reconcile with other things. Within the limits of itspresuppositions, a system of ideas may be sufficiently consistent and com-plete to compel the belief that it is real, but as soon as those presuppositionsare questioned it becomes merely one system among others. A system whosefoundations have been exposed is no more than a point of view. It is not theworld itself but merely an aspect of the world—a “universe of discourse” butnot the universe.

The pursuit of understanding therefore proceeds at different levels: we canseek rational coherence within a given set of ideas or we can try to reconcilediscrepant sets of ideas, even if only by awarding each its own proper sphere.We respond to experience by attempting to resolve the contradictions we findthere. And the coherence we find is all there is. Oakeshott thus joins Hegeland Green in attacking as self-contradictory the idea of unknowable things-in-themselves. We cannot assert the existence of that about which, by hypothe-sis, we can know nothing. There is, therefore, nothing outside experience bywhich experience can be judged. There is no point in arguing that an idea isacceptable if it corresponds with a criterion that is not itself an idea—that itcorresponds, for example, with experience that is not mediated by ideas, orwith what is outside experience altogether—for what is given in experience is

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already an idea and what is beyond experience cannot provide a criterion forjudging anything. Nor can we rescue correspondence as the criterion ofknowledge by privileging some particular way of thinking as uniquely capableof providing access to reality. If, for example, we take common sense as thecriterion by which to judge the acceptability of historical or religious claims,we are at a loss to explain why this way of thinking should be taken as defini-tive, why it should be the indisputable criterion for all the others (EM 38–39).

In attacking the idea of correspondence, Oakeshott is also attacking theidea of a single, unshakeable foundation for knowledge. There is, in otherwords, an inherent skepticism in Oakeshott’s arguments about understand-ing. If we have reservations about sensory perception, about memory, abouthistorical evidence, and about the conclusions of scientific inquiry, the stabil-ity of the experienced world is well on its way to being undermined. Theworld as we know it rests on premises that we usually do not question andwhich therefore seem solid and reliable. But that we do not question thesepremises does not mean they are unquestionable, that what has served us reli-ably is therefore infallible. No realm of experience provides data that are sim-ply beyond doubt, facts with which a conclusion has only to agree to beestablished as true.

To argue against the idea of foundational certainty is not to reject corre-spondence as a criterion of truth so much as to hold that the correspondenceswe find in ordinary experience or in formal inquiry are always provisional.What we see as correspondence between our ideas and an external, indepen-dent reality is for Oakeshott a correspondence between two sets of ideas, onegiven in what our perceptions, inferences, or scientific methods identify asdata, the other shaping those perceptions, inferences, and methods. In noarea of experience, in no inquiry or science, do we verify or correct a relativeclaim by testing it against an absolute; to understand is always to move withina world of relatives, testing each against the others. The only absolute in thisworld of relatives is the notional absolute of complete coherence, but thisabstract and undefined ideal has no place in any actual inquiry. As a criterionof truth, correspondence is an aspect of coherence.

For Oakeshott, the distinction between so-called coherence and corre-spondence theories of truth is misleading, for we can never do more than lookfor correspondences between different kinds of evidence, checking everydayperceptions against instrumental measurements, the testimony of one witnessagainst that of another. And we examine such correspondences in the contextof a particular kind of inquiry: an autopsy, a jury trial, an experiment in parti-cle physics, or a search for the car keys. We construct knowledge in these


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inquiries by establishing patterns of coherence in what each inquiry defines asrelevant information, reconciling conflicting evidence and reaching a verdict.As we shall see, this pluralist conception of coherence offers a solution to theproblem of distinguishing the human from the natural sciences explored byDilthey and other philosophers at the end of the nineteenth century. Thehuman sciences, Dilthey argued, are defined by their concern to understandindividuals, not to generalize. To understand an individual is to understandits internal coherence, and in fact only an object that displays such coherencecan count as an individual and therefore as an object to be understood. Theproblem facing Dilthey and other defenders of the autonomy of the humansciences was to determine the criteria of individuality that identify the objectsto be investigated in each science. But this problem assumes as many formsare there are sciences. We cannot know how the human sciences are to bedivided and organized until we have ascertained the specific kind of coher-ence that defines the objects of each.8

Because each distinguishable inquiry defines its own objects of inquiry,there can be no such thing as a “brute fact,” one whose existence or characteris independent of interpretive concepts, criteria of identity, or canons of evi-dence and inference. A “fact” is a verdict, the product of judgment, somethingwe are compelled to think by the pattern of our ideas: it is an achievementrather than a given. The view that understanding begins with facts or is ulti-mately validated by them rests on the mistaken belief that facts are indepen-dent of the theory that identifies and connects them. As Oakeshott observesin an essay written long before the publication of Experience and Its Modes,“facts are not facts until they are seen fully, that is, theorized.”9 The differencebetween a fact and a theory is not categorical: a theory is a set of facts relatedto one another to compose a coherent whole, a fact something we are obligedto accept because it is reinforced by other facts.10 What we call “reality” is thetotality of established facts, the cumulative outcome of the conclusions wereach by reconciling identified facts within a system of ideas, and that therebybecomes compelling for us. Words like “fact,” “thing,” “objectivity,” “truth,”

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8. Theodore Plantinga, Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 1980), 27–28, 158.

9. “A Discussion,” 50. The point is developed in EM 42–43.10. Oakeshott’s argument resembles that subsequently made in a narrower context by Thomas

S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1970). Both Oakeshott and Kuhn emphasize the interdependence of theory and fact as well as thepermeability of these categories. For Kuhn, what counts as a fact is determined by the postulates ofa scientific theory, and it is only within a given tradition of scientific inquiry that theory and factappear distinct.

and “reality” stand for experience itself, not for something beyond experience.And experience is not simply given, unmediated by thought; it is already andinescapably an intersubjective world built up from what is understood in dif-ferent moments of experience. Since nothing can be known independently ofexperience, knowledge must be regarded as experience organized into variouskinds of order. It is not the accumulation of information but the achievementof coherence in what we experience as the real world.

The idea of coherence as the criterion of truth, factuality, and reality has sur-vived the end of nineteenth-century Idealism. Dismissed by logical atomistsand empiricists who defined truth as correspondence between propositionsand their referents, “coherentism” (as it is sometimes called) soon reasserteditself within the tradition of analytic philosophy. Although the logical posi-tivists of the 1930s held empirical verifiability to be the criterion of cognitivelymeaningful statements, some, like Neurath and Reichenbach, argued that theconcepts used to describe empirical sense data (“observation terms”) werethemselves theory-laden. And Neurath, with Carnap, eventually rejected thecorrespondence theory of truth in favor of a coherence theory.11 Wittgenstein,abandoning the foundationalism of his early thinking, came to hold thattruths are internal to the language in which they are expressed. Though theydefend the proposition that knowledge is generated from sensory experience,Quine and Sellars argue that because experience becomes knowledge onlywhen it is organized by the mind, correspondence with sense data (“the given”)cannot be the criterion of knowledge; empiricism, they conclude, requiresrather than rejects coherence as a criterion of truth. Putnam, articulating aview he calls “internal realism,” argues that proof and refutation presuppose asystem of concepts within which claims for and against a proposition can bemade. Truth is not “correspondence with mind-independent or discourse-independent ‘states of affairs,’” but an “ideal coherence of our beliefs . . . withour experiences as those experiences are themselves represented in our beliefsystem.”12 Other analytic philosophers who have defended at least someaspects of a coherence epistemology include Strawson, Chisholm, Goodman,Rorty, and Davidson. Coherentism has even invaded the philosophy of sci-


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11. Hilary Putnam, “A Half Century of Philosophy, Viewed from Within,” in Thomas Ben-der and Carl E. Schorske, eds., American Academic Culture in Transformation (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1997), 193–94, and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twenti-eth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), chap. 3.

12. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1981), 49–50.

ence, long a bastion of realism and correspondence theory, beginning in the1950s with the work of Hanson and Kuhn.

Despite these inroads, correspondence theories are still common in main-stream analytic philosophy, which, especially in the United States, continuesto privilege science as the model of authentic knowledge and to understandscience in realist terms. Because they do not regard scientific knowledge asparadigmatic or foundational, philosophers in the phenomenological andhermeneutic traditions, like Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Taylor, are morereceptive to coherence theories. They maintain that ordinary experience, thoughshaped by meanings, is prior to scientific and other kinds of theoretical knowl-edge, and that realism is an illusion that occurs when, unaware of the conceptsthat structure all experience, we imagine that we are perceiving things as theyare “in themselves,” that is, independent of our interpretations. There are nobrute or atomic facts whose character is independent of concepts and thereforeinvariant across different modes of experience. This emphasis on meaning makesinterpretation and the study of interpretation (hermeneutics) central to philos-ophy. Hermeneutics is not merely a method for extracting truth from texts; itis an epistemological theory according to which knowledge is the product of acontinuing interaction between text and context, the knower and the known,the activity of interpreting and whatever that activity takes, provisionally, as theobject of interpretation. Truth is established only in a dialectical process inwhich the two halves of this interaction illuminate each other to achieve coher-ence. Oakeshott’s conclusion that the criterion of knowledge is coherencebetween ideas, not correspondence between ideas and something that is com-pletely independent of ideas, is not, then, the relic of a discredited Idealism buta view that, whatever its difficulties, invites consideration whenever the ques-tion of knowledge arises.

Identity and Individuality

To understand is to identify—that is, not merely to notice or be aware, but tonotice or be aware of something. It is to be able to distinguish things fromtheir surroundings and to recognize and name them. Understanding beginsand ends with identifiable things, “identities,” which are both objects to beunderstood and the terms in which they are understood.

In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott considers the criteria on the basisof which identities—discernable, distinguishable, recognizable “things”—arerecognized. He rejects the view that in deciding what we mean by the word

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“thing” we must begin with the ideas of matter or substance. A thing neednot be a material object, for it can be an idea, performance, practice, or insti-tution. The balance of power, Islam, Gödel’s proof, or the Victorian multi-plot novel are all things in this sense. They are things not because they containa substance but because they behave in a manner that produces “the appear-ance of there being a substance in them” (EM 62). That is, each appearsthrough a range of transformations—the Victorian novel, for example, in par-ticular novels by Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope—as if it were a singlewhole or unity, distinguishable from other things. As Oakeshott puts it (in alater discussion of the topic), what we call a thing is no more than “a certainsort of image recognized as such because it behaves in a certain manner andresponds to our questioning appropriately” (RP 497). It can be grasped as adistinct, unified, integral whole that exists without reference to somethingexternal, as something that has attributes rather than being itself an attribute.

Recognition, identification, and understanding, then, are all connected tothe idea of a thing and therefore to the idea of individuality, understood herein its general and philosophical sense, not as a quality, desirable or otherwise,of human beings. Oakeshott’s conception of individuality—which seems tohave taken shape in his early reflections on the identity of Christianity—iscentral to the theory of understanding he develops in Experience and ItsModes and subsequent writings.13

Oakeshott’s handling of this theme in Experience and Its Modes is a meta-physical tour de force that prepares the way for the concept of the modes asa provisionally distinguishable but neither necessary or permanent forms ofunderstanding. In a few pages (EM 43–45 and 61–66) Oakeshott sketches thefoundations of his claim that all modes of understanding are subject to changeand therefore historical. An individual, he suggests, is a distinguishable some-thing—an idea abstracted and held separate from its environment. To be anindividual is not only to be distinct but also to be able to maintain that distinct-ness. Individuality, then, means both independence and self-completeness. Eachof these criteria presents difficulties, however. If we say that an individual issomething distinguished from its environment, it is hard to say where the envi-ronment ends and the thing begins. There are degrees of abstraction, separa-tion, and distinctness, and therefore we must admit the possibility of degrees ofindividuality. This seems to undermine precisely what the idea of individuality


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13. See the discussion of Oakeshott’s views on religion as a form of practice in Chapter 2and on the history of religion in Chapter 4.

seeks to establish. But if we define an individual as whatever is self-complete,nothing can count as an individual except the whole of all there is—the union ofa thing and its environment. Again, the idea of individuality seems to get usnowhere.

An individual thing, we want to say, is not whatever displays an uncertaindegree of distinctness, a mere quality or attribute, but neither is it the totalityof all that exists. It seems natural to define a thing as an enduring substancethat possesses attributes and can maintain its distinctness, its identity, as its cir-cumstances and even its attributes change. But this is not a satisfactory defini-tion because there is no necessary and final way of distinguishing substance andattribute. What endures may be matter, shape, size, purpose, or spirit—never asingle, fixed, and original “substance.” The idea of a stable substance underlyingthe unstable attributes of a thing—a core of existence that is untouched bychange—is an abstraction, a mere fancy. There is no such thing. Identity con-sists not in retaining a hypothetical substance but in maintaining a characterthat unifies the changes a thing may undergo. But if identity is the mainte-nance of such a character, it is once again a matter of degree, because a partic-ular character can be more or less well maintained. And with this we oncemore come up against the problem of distinguishing between a thing and itsenvironment from which we have been trying to escape.

Oakeshott concludes, then, that one cannot escape from the problem ofcontext. There is no fixed, final, and nonarbitrary way of establishing iden-tity, and consequently there can be no permanent and unequivocal things orcompletely independent individuals. “In experience what is given is, not par-ticular, isolated things, but a world of things; for things, because they areideas, cannot be bare and unconnected” (EM 66). The world is not a worldof brute facts, unquestionable givens, or fixed and unequivocal data; it isconstituted by identities abstracted from the context to which they belong,and therefore about which there is always something more to be asked, moreto be understood. Short of complete understanding, which can never beachieved, every thing is open to question, to reinterpretation and reclassifica-tion, and therefore to being transformed into another thing. This is notCartesian skepticism, a tool for clearing away errors so that one can establishincontestable truths, but a hermeneutical skepticism that follows from theconclusion that all identifications and therefore all things are context-depen-dent. The experienced world of things is a world of meanings and, as Derridawas later to emphasize in propounding the idea of différance (“the move-ment according to which language, or any code, any system of reference in

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general, is constituted ‘historically’ as a weave of differences”),14 meaningsare relatives, not absolutes.

It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of these arguments that Oakeshottshould have continued to reformulate them, for the arguments themselveshave no more claim to permanence than anything else. The theory of under-standing articulated forty years later in On Human Conduct, with which theview just discussed is usefully compared, cannot therefore be regarded as any-thing other than one more provisional effort to understand the character ofunderstanding itself. In this work Oakeshott argues that every attempt at under-standing begins with a “going-on” that is already to some extent understood,just as he had argued in the earlier work that to experience something is alwaysto be aware of, and thus to have distinguished and identified, that which isexperienced. Before it becomes reflective and deliberate, understanding existsas an unsought and unavoidable condition of human existence: consciousnessitself is already, at some level, understanding. Awareness without understand-ing of some kind is impossible: to be conscious is unavoidably to “inhabit aworld of intelligibles” (OHC 1). One can question whether the new expres-sion “world of intelligibles” is an improvement over the old “world of ideas”—Oakeshott’s late writings depart even further than his early ones from plainspeech—but the shift is characteristic.

Identification is the activity of discerning resemblances and differences inwhat is going on. It involves recognizing these resemblances and differencesas characteristics, abstracting them from their contingent circumstances, and“assembling” them to compose a concept. To identify something is not simplyto recognize it as having certain features, for these may be incidental. Nor is itto merely to distinguish one thing from another on the basis of possibly super-ficial differences. It is to attribute to the identified thing an “ideal character,”that is, to specify its character as a composition of characteristics and to graspthe criteria according to which the identification is made.15 Our identificationsare sometimes simply mistaken: it was not in fact you I thought I saw acrossthe street. But different identifications (a birthday present, a promising first


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14. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1982). 12.

15. For Bradley, the identity of a thing “is a character, which exists outside of and beyondany fact which you can take.” F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2d ed. (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1897), 63. Oakeshott’s concept of an “ideal character” springs from the samesource as Weber’s “ideal type”—the nineteenth-century idea of the historical individual (seeChapter 4).

novel) can coexist without correcting one another, for they may pick out dif-ferent attributes or presume different contexts. Identifications may be carefullyarticulated or crudely sketched, and they may be progressively elaborated andaltered without denying the understanding provided by the cruder or lessdetailed accounts (OHC 5–6). And, if an identity can be treated as unproblem-atic and simply to be used (like a tide table), it can also be an object to be inves-tigated and therefore the starting point of an inquiry. Of course, there may beno inquiry and understanding may remain at the level of identification.

Understanding both begins and ends in identification or, as Oakeshott some-times says, in “definition” (EM 52, 147–48; RPML 127–28), for to define athing is to specify its exact character after it has been identified. The spirit hereis Socratic (RPML 130) and also Aristotelian: understanding grows by mov-ing, in a dialectic that involves clarification and redefinition, from “whatappears to be the case” to the principles underlying these appearances.16 Inunderstanding we seek to identify what is going on and to account for what wehave identified. The event or experience that is the subject of our inquiry isitself an intellectual construction, and therefore a product of thought; it is aconclusion that may be reinforced or revised by subsequent inquiry. It is atonce the end of one inquiry and the starting place of another, “an understand-ing waiting to be understood” (OHC 2). Here, as in Experience and Its Modes,it is clear that there is no absolute distinction between a fact and a conclusionor theory: what is designated “fact” always holds that title provisionally and isnever an unquestionable arbiter of theories, and no conclusion, no matter howwell confirmed, is ever unconditional or definitive. Facts and theories alike areonly identities which can always be queried and better understood.

To understand anything, then, is to understand a specified identity. Butmaking an identification is only a tentative stage in the course of understand-ing, for one can always question an attributed identity. To problematize agiven identity is to question the criteria that determine it. It is to understandan identity in relation to what it presupposes (or, as Oakeshott prefers to say,“in terms of its postulates”). A way of speaking someone takes for grantedmay be seen by a linguist as a marker of social class. To question an identity is

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16. “Beginning with things that are correctly said, but not clearly, as we proceed we shallcome to express them clearly, with what is more perspicuous at each stage superseding what iscustomarily expressed in a confused fashion” (Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1216b31–34). ForOakeshott, “definition is the making clearer of something which is already to some extent appre-hended and therefore to some extent clear. . . . We never move from what we are entirely ignorantof to complete knowledge, but from what we know to what we know more fully” (CPJ 347).

to see it as something to be investigated, not a categorical conclusion simply tobe used. When we no longer regard an identity as given, it becomes “an invita-tion to an inquiry designed to expose and specify its postulates, to relate themsystematically to one another, and, by displaying them as the postulates of thisidentity, to make it intelligible” (OHC 12). Such an inquiry is therefore an“escape,” for in questioning how things are presented to us, we are “releasedfrom the prison” of our current understanding (OHC 9). But this inquiry isalso (to use another of Oakeshott’s favorite metaphors) like putting to sea, forin shifting our attention from the features of an identity to its postulates, weembark on an adventure in understanding that must soon carry us far beyondthe familiar shores we had once inhabited (OHC 10). With each such depar-ture we come to occupy a new, though always temporary, level or “platform”of understanding.17

Any understanding, once achieved, can be explored and its conclusions canbe treated, for the purposes at hand, as definitive and unconditional. We neednot question the conclusions we have reached. We can regard these conclu-sions as unproblematic and use them to explore the area of knowledge towhich they belong. In such an exploration the identities we rely on are treatedas facts, that is, as verdicts which, for the moment at least, we do not doubt.Instead of questioning the assumptions underlying our achieved understand-ing, we enter a restricted mode of inquiry in which we rely on the identitiesand definitions, the facts and conclusions, presupposed within that mode andare content to investigate what can be understood within their limits. Andthis brings us to another idea that is central to Oakeshott’s thinking, the ideaof modality.

Modality

The idea of modality is the idea of coherence sustained at a particular level.When we succeed in making sense of some aspect of experience, we are inclinedto think of it as real, not as a mere intellectual construct. The world viewed ina certain manner may lack perfect coherence, but if we think that knowledgelies not in abandoning that comprehension but in attempting to explain its


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17. The platform metaphor need not imply superior and inferior vantage points. The plat-forms in a railway station, for example, are usually parallel and on the same level; if on differentlevels, only contingently, not necessarily, so.

anomalies, an understanding has emerged that can sustain the belief that theworld so understood is the real world. Although I may occasionally doubt theevidence of my senses, for example, I rely on the coherence of that evidence toaffirm the reality of the everyday world in which I live. When such coherencereaches the point at which it can perpetuate itself as an autonomous mannerof thinking, we have what Oakeshott calls a mode of experience. Oakeshott’stheory of modality includes the following claims: that a mode is all of experi-ence as understood from a certain point of view, that there exists an indefiniteplurality of modes, that every mode is a historical creation, that each is inde-pendent of the others, and that none is fundamental.

Oakeshott sometimes uses the word “mode” informally to mean any man-ner, style, or idiom of thought or behavior. Mostly, however, he uses it as aterm of art to distinguish ways of thinking or being that are coherent, com-prehensive, and independent from those that are not. A mode of understand-ing, he writes in On History, is “not merely an attitude or a point of view.” Itis “an autonomous manner of understanding, specifiable in terms of exactconditions, which is logically incapable of denying or confirming the conclu-sions of any other mode of understanding, or indeed of making any relevantutterance in respect of it” (OH 2). And there are modes of conduct as well asof inquiry: a “mode of relationship,” for example, is “a categorially distinctmanner of being related which . . . cannot be reduced to any other” (OHC122).18 No matter what the context, modal differences are differences of kind,not degree.

Because modes can be seen as providing categories for organizing experi-ence, we can illuminate Oakeshott’s theory by considering it in relation toalternative conceptions of the aims of metaphysics, the branch of philosophythat explores the basic categories of being and knowledge. According to onesuch conception, which goes back to Aristotle, metaphysics is concerned withthe nature of being itself. What does it mean to say that something “exists”?What are the basic kinds of things that exist? Is the world composed only ofmaterial objects, or does it also include nonmaterial “things” like proposi-tions, actions, or events? Do only particular “things” exist, or can we say thatvarious attributes exemplified in particular things (redness, justice, or other“universals”) also exist? And if being can take different forms, are these differ-ences real or merely apparent? Questions like these are implicit in the distinction,

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18. Oakeshott prefers the neologism “categorial” to “categorical” when he is speaking of cat-egories because “categorical” has ontological implications he wishes to avoid.

explored by Descartes and Spinoza, between substance and the modes it canassume. Metaphysics, then, is concerned not only with being in general butalso with its special forms (material, temporal, rational, divine), and itincludes inquiries into the meaning of identity, the possibility of change, thenature of mind, and the existence of God.

A quite different conception of metaphysics springs from Kant’s effort to rec-oncile the view just described with the empiricist argument, defended by Lockeand Hume, that authentic knowledge rests on sensory experience. Kant’ssolution is that knowledge is the joint product of sensory experience and theconcepts that shape that experience. It follows that the external world thatcauses our sensations and perceptions cannot be known except in terms ofconcepts that belong to the structure of the human mind. Conversely, theseconcepts cannot generate authentic knowledge unless they are applied to sen-sory experience. Because metaphysics, as traditionally conceived, asks questionsthat cannot be answered on the basis of sensory experience, it makes claimsthat transcend the limits of human knowledge. Once this is appreciated, Kantargues, the only kind of metaphysics that remains intellectually respectable isthat which seeks to characterize, in the most general terms, the concepts that themind brings to experience. With Kant, then, the focus of metaphysics shiftsfrom being itself to being as experienced by the human mind. It is a shift fromexistence to knowledge, from ontology to epistemology.

Modality has a place in this new, post-Kantian, conception of metaphysics,but what is at issue are now modes of knowledge rather than of being. There aretwo main ways of proceeding here. The first, which Kant adopted, is to look fora single underlying structure of concepts that determines all human thought. Inthis approach, the aim of philosophy is to identify the most basic categories ofunderstanding—categories like space, time, and causality. The second, followedby those, like Hegel or Bradley, who regard the historical character of knowl-edge as more than merely accidental, is to take seriously the possibility thatknowledge is shaped not by a single scheme of basic categories but by a pluralityof categorial schemes or modes, each of which orders experience according toits own principles. Because ideas are learned, they must be understood at least inpart as the product of history and culture. It follows that epistemology cannotignore the inherited ways of judging, naming, and reasoning within whichhuman cognition takes place.19 The modes are part of this inheritance.


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19. “No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume,and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.” Dilthey, Intro-duction to the Human Sciences, 50.

In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott distinguishes autonomous formsof experience, identifies the defining presuppositions of each, and articulates aconception of philosophy as the enterprise of accounting for experience as awhole. But in venturing a hypothesis about how the modes are related to thewhole of experience and by identifying philosophy as the perpetual search fora conceivable if unreachable “Absolute” that transcends all limited modes ofunderstanding, he seems to move back toward the Kantian idea that all think-ing is shaped by a single and necessary structure of concepts. In subsequentwritings, Oakeshott abandons this concern with totality, redefining the ideasof experience, modality, and philosophy in ways that alter their relationshipsto one another. We will return to the theme of how Oakeshott uses the idea ofa mode after Experience and Its Modes, but we need first to examine how heunderstands modality in that work.

The aim of philosophy, as Oakeshott saw it in 1933, is to achieve completecoherence in experience, to seek a comprehensive understanding of under-standing in which everything has its place. Implicit in this enterprise is theeffort to distinguish the various forms that understanding can take, for ifphilosophy looks for complete coherence in experience, there must be otherkinds of understanding that are satisfied with less than complete coherence.In them the search for coherence, for unconditional or absolute understand-ing, would be arrested, and the outcome of such an arrest would be a condi-tionally self-consistent and self-sustaining mode of understanding thatphilosophical inquiry might recognize, name, explore, and criticize. A modeis a “modification” of “something larger and more generic.”20

If coherence is the criterion by which the adequacy of any understanding isjudged, then any anomaly extends an implicit invitation to consider why itexists and how it might be accounted for. Contradictory reports, discrepantmeasurements, and different readings of a text call for explanation if not rec-onciliation. The desire to make sense of experience generates a pressure towardconsistency. But our efforts to respond to this pressure will never produce asingle, perfectly coherent picture of the world. We can, however, forego thisend and instead seek consistency within the limits of a given point of view.Instead of pursuing a single, comprehensive, perfectly coherent reality, wecan explore some aspect of experience, attempting to make sense of it in itsown terms while ignoring discrepancies between our conclusions and what-ever can be seen from other points of view (EM 70). And this explorationcan be undertaken deliberately or inadvertently. If we are unaware of the

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20. “A Discussion,” 14.

assumptions on which our thinking rests, we remain locked without knowingit in a prison of concepts, mistaking that prison for the world itself. Each suchworld, if it can achieve coherence within the bounds of its presuppositions, isa mode of experience.

In Experience and Its Modes Oakeshott discusses three such modes, whichhe calls “history,” “science,” and “practice.” These, he suggests, are at presentthe most highly developed and self-consistent modes of understanding (EM84). Art and religion, which Bradley and Collingwood had identified as dis-tinct kinds of experience, are subsumed under the category of practice; onlymuch later does Oakeshott promote aesthetic experience (“poetry”) to thestatus of a mode.21 The idea that these modes have emerged from a larger,undifferentiated flow of experience might seem to imply that modality is amatter of degree rather than kind, and therefore to undercut the very idea ofmodality. But there is in fact no contradiction: that distinctions are constructed,and that they can be constructed and used in different ways, does not meanthat they are arbitrary or spurious. Like any other identity or individual, amode emerges out of and must be distinguished from its context, and whetherit is truly distinct, truly a mode, must remain a matter of interpretation. Andbecause each mode is an intellectual construction, it has a history and mightdisappear. Science, history, and practice are not the only modes, and there canin principle be no determinate number of modes.

In subsequent chapters, I will discuss Oakeshott’s changing views of theparticular modes with which he is concerned, as well as some of the difficul-ties these views raise, but it may help in grasping the concept of modality tobriefly sketch the presuppositions that define each mode.

“Practice,” as a mode, is the realm of doing: a present, living, and alwayschanging world of choices and actions, composed of images of desire andaversion, approval and disapproval. This world is organized by our concern tobring what “is” into harmony with what we want it to be. In practical activitywe recognize what is going on as it relates to our own desires, choices, and for-tunes. And in understanding the world in its relation to ourselves we judgethings as friendly or hostile, useful or useless. We respond to our environ-ment, as it is ordered by such categories, by thinking about causes and effectsin an effort to control this environment as it affects us (RP 158–59). As we shallsee, although in Experience and Its Modes Oakeshott conceives practice largely


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21. The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959),subsequently included in Rationalism and Politics.

as a realm of prudential judgments, in later writings he distinguishes betweenprudential and moral judgments with increasing precision.

“History,” in contrast, is experience organized in terms of the idea of thepast. Its aim is to construct, from present evidence, an intelligible and objec-tive world of past experience. Historical understanding emerges from aninquiry that is concerned solely with what that evidence can sustain about aworld gone by, a world that is clearly understood to be distinct from the pre-sent world we inhabit. Historical inquiry seeks to understand this bygoneworld by uncovering contingent relationships among the elements compos-ing it—relationships in which antecedent events cast light on subsequent eventsby being assembled in explanatory narratives. Histories are not “accounts of thepast focused upon our contemporary selves purporting to tell us how we havebecome what we are and containing messages of warning or encouragement,but . . . stories in which human actions and utterances are rescued from mys-tery and made intelligible in terms of their contingent relationships” (VLL33–34). History can even be said to be the entire world understood under thecategory “past.” Everything that exists can be understood as having alreadyhappened: we can imagine a future, but it does not yet exist and may nevercome to be; it is a possibility, not an actuality. And even the present is a fic-tion, an infinitesimal moment between future and past, which, insofar as it isreal, is past.

“Science” is another highly developed mode of understanding, one thatmany of its defenders claim provides definitive access to reality itself. AsOakeshott understands it, however, scientific reality is not the only reality.But neither is scientific inquiry the study of “nature,” understood as a separatepart of reality; it is concerned with the world and everything in it, under-stood, as far as possible, in purely abstract terms involving invariant concepts,quantitative measurements, and mathematical generalizations. And becausescience is the whole of reality conceived in this manner, it includes the studyof human beings, to the extent that this study can be carried on “scientifi-cally.” Science in this sense is concerned with relations between classes ofevents, not (like either historical inquiry or practical activity) with particularevents understood in their particularity. In contrast to historical inquiry, sci-ence is interested in particular, contingent happenings only for what theyreveal about abstract, general relations. And in contrast to practice—andalso to such modal hybrids as “natural history” and “applied science,” whosenames suggest concerns other than purely scientific ones—science as a modeof inquiry demands an “objective” attitude, one that not only resists the biases

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that distort our measurements and inferences, but frames its explanations interms of causes and processes that are identified according to criteria indepen-dent of human interests. In a scientific inquiry, “we are concerned, not withhappenings in their relation to ourselves and to the habitableness of theworld, but in respect of their independence of ourselves” (RP 159). This soundslike a realist conception of science, but it is realist only in the sense that “objec-tive idealism” is realist—that is, the reality it postulates is that which rests onintersubjective consistency among a number of observers, observations, orobservational schemes.

“Poetry”—that is, aesthetic experience—is the world as it appears inmoments of contemplation, where “contemplation” is understood to involveimages that are regarded, not as factual or not factual, but simply as images,detached from other concerns. Practical images imply a future, historicalimages a past, but the images in aesthetic experience exist in a timeless pre-sent. In moments of contemplation, one does not care where these imagescame from or worry about their consequences; one simply reflects on theirassociations and enjoys their presence. In imaginative literature, in music, inthe visual arts, images (insofar as they are aesthetic) are not turned into con-clusions; they are “made, remade, observed, turned about, played with, med-itated upon, and delighted in” (RP 517). All such images can be understood,from the standpoint of another mode, as historically anachronistic, scientifi-cally absurd, morally objectionable, etc. A work of art is “merely an imagewhich is protected in an unusual degree from being read (that is, imagined) inan unpoetic manner, a protection it derives from its quality and from the cir-cumstantial frame in which it appears” (RP 518). An object displayed in amuseum, for example, is one that has been separated from its original contextand use and treated as art. Where their origin or use is unknown or no longerof interest, objects may acquire a new context in which they can invite apurely aesthetic response. The arts achieve modal autonomy, then, when theimages they construct are regarded aesthetically, that is, contemplatively, andin no other way.22


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22. This conception of the aesthetic realm, as Oakeshott acknowledges (MPME 6–7), drawsupon J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London: Arnold, 1924). It also owes some-thing to Bloomsbury and Dada. In art “we are lifted above the stream of life” and “inhabit aworld with an intense and peculiar significance of its own.” Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto andWindus, 1914), 25, 26. For the Dadaists, a work of art can be the most mundane or repellent arti-cle, like the urinal Marcel Duchamp sought to exhibit under the title “fountain.” Removed fromits usual context, any object can acquire aesthetic significance.

Each identifiable mode constitutes a universe of discourse within whichwords and actions have their own special meanings. “Water” and “H2O,” touse one of Oakeshott’s examples, are not two ways of referring to the samething, but symbols used according to different rules in the different worlds ofpractical life and scientific inquiry. Each symbol reflects a different way oforganizing experience. Each belongs to a different aspect of experience—notto a single, unified world of human experience but to experience within a cer-tain point of view. Different modes of experience are not different parts ofexperience; they are different ways of abstracting from undifferentiated expe-rience to achieve intellectual coherence.

It is, however, only from the outside that each mode appears as a point ofview. What is asserted within each mode is asserted as true, not as mere belief.To the degree that they achieve coherence, the judgments that constitute amodal world are true, given the presuppositions of that world. But thesejudgments are not true in all worlds, and therefore they cannot be asserted astrue without qualification. Truth is determined by criteria internal to the worldwithin which it is asserted.

Each mode, then, is an abstract conceptual system constituted and limitedby its premises and displaying only an incomplete and therefore spuriouscoherence. Because they are normally unrecognized, these premises can appearto define not merely a world but the world. Those who fail to realize that theworld as they perceive it is a conditional world—that their understanding ofwhat is true or real rests on presuppositions that can be questioned—mistakea particular mode of experience for the world itself. For them, “the characterof the mode is the character of the world” (EM 74). Each modal world—whether it is the ordinary world of Dr. Johnson kicking the stone, or the sci-entific world of the physicist for whom a stone is energy organized in acertain way—implicitly claims to be unconditional and therefore ultimatelyreal. “An arrest in experience,” Oakeshott writes, “knows no better than toassert itself absolutely; it is impossible that it should not be ignorant of itsown defect, for to be aware of its defect would be to have overcome it, tohave ceased to be this arrest” (EM 330).

In Experience and Its Modes, then, a mode is more than a distinct kind ofinquiry. It is a self-contained world of experience that makes an implicit claimto completeness and coherence. But because it is a mode—that is, an aspectof, or perspective on, experience—it is not, after all, complete. The apparentcoherence of the world as it is represented within a given mode is no morethan the limited coherence of a manner of thinking that rests on premises it

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takes for granted—premises that have not been established because they havenot been questioned.

At this point in the argument of Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott hasbegun to paint himself into a corner. Because the modes are self-containedand ultimately self-contradictory, he argues, criticism must result, in princi-ple, in their being absorbed into a single, comprehensive, and self-consistentsystem of ideas. To say that a mode is a temporary “arrest” in experience is toassert the ultimate unity of understanding. Against the view that practical, sci-entific, and other kinds of inquiry provide access to different parts of experi-ence, each mode of experience is the whole of experience conceived in termsof the presuppositions that define it. When these presuppositions have beenfully revealed, each mode will be seen to be an aspect of a more comprehen-sive system, and the modes will, from the standpoint of this larger system, nolonger be distinct. They will be aspects of a single, all-inclusive “theory ofeverything.” If experience is a river flowing toward perfect coherence, themodes are backwaters. One can turn out of the “main current” (EM 70) toexplore them, but they lead nowhere.23 Because it is satisfied with its ownpoint of view, modal thinking is an obstacle to a comprehensive understand-ing of experience that must be not merely criticized but “destroyed.”

The claim that the modes are destined, in principle, to be absorbed into asingle comprehensive understanding of reality, which Oakeshott defends inExperience and Its Modes, must not be confused with argument, which herejects, that some modes are closer than others to approaching such an under-standing, and therefore that the modes can be ordered hierarchically accord-ing to the degree of truth achieved within them. With respect to this issue,the image of experience as a river and the modes as backwaters is misleading,for it suggests that the modes occupy locations passed successively in the voy-age toward complete understanding. No doubt human beings were con-cerned with practical matters before they learned to think scientifically, butthis temporal ordering says nothing about the logical relationship betweenpractice and science. That one mode emerged later than another is no evi-dence of its superiority as knowledge. And philosophically, no mode of expe-rience can be said to be logically prior to or more fundamental than any other.To say that the modes represent different kinds of imperfection is not to saythat they are stages, historical or logical, in the development of understand-


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23. A better image of the futility of modal thinking: “like the rivers of Persia, [the modes]perish of their own inanition” (EM 83).

ing. On this issue Oakeshott breaks with the Idealist tradition from Hegel toCollingwood, the river metaphor being merely a ghost of Hegel’s conceptionof history as the progressive development of mind or of Collingwood’s hier-archy of forms.24

For Oakeshott, the modes of experience are to be explained not in relationto one another but in relation to experience as a whole. They are selective,abstract accounts of experience that fall short, in different ways, of achievingcomplete coherence. Each mode rests on a foundation that it does not ques-tion and constructs a coherent world on this foundation. Each attempts toreconcile, within the limits of its presuppositions, whatever contradictions itencounters, thereby achieving coherence in its own terms. The modes are self-contained, abstract worlds, and, as such, they are not related to each other atall (EM 219, 327; OH 2). Where arguments are modally distinct, each followsits own logic and neither confirms nor refutes arguments in any other mode.What is true in geometry is neither true nor false morally speaking. A poet’smetaphor is not reinforced by statistical evidence. A legal argument can chal-lenge other legal arguments, but no legal argument can support historical orscientific conclusions. Each mode is a closed system within which conclusionsmay achieve a conditional validity but outside of which they have no validitywhatsoever. What is true in one system is not false but simply irrelevant inanother. The significance of an idea, fact, symbol, proposition, argument, orproof is determined by the system within which it is asserted.

It follows that a conclusion cannot carry its certainty as a conclusion fromone realm of discourse to another. “An idea cannot serve two worlds” (EM 327).A result that makes sense in one context cannot, when removed to another, beemployed to settle disagreements, confirm hypotheses, or construct an argu-ment. Taken out of its proper context, it is simply irrelevant. “It is impossible,”Oakeshott asserts in a much-disputed claim, “to pass in argument from any one

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24. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1977); R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924).Bosanquet hints at a hierarchical conception of modality when he says that to study somethingphilosophically is to understand “its kind and degree of self-maintenance in the world,” therebyrevealing its “rank and significance” in the world as a whole. Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophi-cal Theory of the State, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1923), 2–3. Heidegger’s search for aprimordial (ursprünglich) level of being, a fundamental mode of experience, also presupposes ahierarchy. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State Universityof New York Press, 1996). Oakeshott’s theory of modality, in contrast, has much in commonwith Bradley’s view that all aspects of experience are equally real: “none is primary, or can serveto explain the others or the whole.” Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 429.

of these worlds of ideas to any other without involving ourselves in a confu-sion” (EM 76). One cannot use ideas that belong to one mode in argumentsbelonging to another without committing the fallacy of irrelevance. Andirrelevance is inevitable whenever the attempt is made to combine argumentsbelonging to one manner of discourse with those belonging to another—when,for example, a scientist claims to speak with special authority on a politicalquestion, a historical conclusion is rejected on moral grounds, or in someother way we try to reason “from what is abstracted upon one principle towhat is abstracted upon another” (EM 5). Disputants who engage one anotherfrom the standpoint of different ways of thinking are doomed to argue at cross-purposes. The failure to determine the modal character of an idea, image, orargument can only lead to error.25

One is tempted to object that in pushing the idea of modality to this con-clusion, Oakeshott turns a possibly useful tool into a dogma. Historians, sci-entists, and artists seem to get along, even to flourish, borrowing eclecticallyfrom different disciplines, combining different theories, blurring genres, andcreating new discourses. But even granting this optimistic picture of intellec-tual discourse, it does not follow that modal distinctions are academic, meresymptoms of a sterile purism. If irrelevance is an error, it is something weshould try to avoid, and to avoid it we must be able to distinguish considera-tions that belong to different kinds of discourse. The distinction betweenkinds of discourse is a modal distinction, for a mode is a way of thinking thathas achieved autonomy and internal consistency within the limits of its ownassumptions. The idea of modality, then, can help us avoid the confusion thatarises when we import ideas from one kind of discourse into another wherethey are inappropriate.

A more penetrating objection to the idea of modality is that the emergenceof a mode is, for Oakeshott, a mere fact rather than a necessary stage in thedevelopment of knowledge. If the modes are historical creations, subject tochange and indefinite in number, then their existence is arbitrary from thestandpoint of understanding as a whole. It is simply a given about which phi-losophy has nothing to say. Why, we may ask, is experience arrested at somepoints and not others? Collingwood argues that in treating this question asone without an answer, Oakeshott betrays his conception of philosophy as


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25. What Oakeshott analyzes as modal confusion was subsequently identified by Ryle, moreinfluentially though less precisely, as a “category mistake.” Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind(London: Hutchinson, 1949), 16–18.

the pursuit of complete coherence in experience. By his own principles,Oakeshott is barred from merely noticing the emergence of particular modes;he must try to explain them by providing what in fact he does not attempt toprovide, an account of the modes of experience as necessary parts of a coher-ent whole.26

Anticipating this objection, Oakeshott argues in Experience and Its Modesthat it misunderstands the aim of philosophy, which is to comprehend thetotality of experience. All philosophy need do to realize this aim is “to recog-nize abstraction and to overcome it” (EM 84)—that is, to identify, criticize,and get beyond the presuppositions of particular modes of understanding.Philosophy’s interest in the modes is limited because its job is to escape theirlimitations. It is concerned with a given mode of experience solely for what itcan contribute to the search for comprehensive understanding. This concernmust be distinguished from the effort to determine the degree to which eachmode is defective, and hence to determine “a logical order or hierarchy ofmodes” (EM 84). Where the aim is to understand experience as a whole, whatis important is that error and incoherence should be overcome; the degree ofmisunderstanding embodied in this or that mode is of little interest.

From the standpoint of philosophy, then, what one learns from examininghistory, science, and other modes of understanding is not how they can bejoined together, while retaining their independence, to provide a coherentpicture of reality: they cannot. One learns that the modes offer competing,incompatible versions of reality that must be transcended if reality itself—reality unqualified by the adjectives “scientific,” “practical,” or “historical”—isto be understood. A mode is an abstraction from the whole: not a separatepart but a partial account of the totality of all there is. It follows that thistotality cannot be an aggregate of modes. Each mode is a suspension of criti-cal thought, and so, from the standpoint of completely coherent understand-ing, a failure, and no collection of failures can make a success (EM 328). Andthat is why, so far as philosophy is concerned, the modes must be supersededrather than assimilated.

Still another objection to Oakeshott’s account of modality in Experienceand Its Modes is that it is wrong in asserting that modal thinking cannot know

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26. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946; rev. ed.1993), 156–57. Similar objections are made by W. H. Greenleaf, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics(London: Longmans, 1966), 94–95, and Noël K. O’Sullivan, The Problem of Political Obligation(New York: Garland Press, 1987), 127–29.

its own limits.27 Oakeshott sometimes writes as if to think within a givenmode is to be blind to any other way of thinking and to be incapable of skep-ticism about one’s own assumptions. But to think historically or scientificallydoes not require one to deny that there are limits to historical or scientificthinking. The objection is therefore compelling only if one understands modalthinking to be the thinking of actual scientists or historians. Properly speak-ing, modal thinking is the activity of an ideal-typical scientist or historian, notan actual one, and this ideal-typical activity cannot know its own limits becauseit is, by definition, thinking within those limits. One must not confuse theidea of a mode with its imperfect actualization in the thinking of actual per-sons. Although some actual scientists and historians are naïve realists, othersare perfectly capable of grasping the notion that what appears to be a scientificor historical truth may be context-dependent, just as most people understandthat what seems real in ordinary experience can be illusory. Be that as it may, inlater works Oakeshott explicitly retracts the claim that to think within a givenmode is to be unable to see beyond it. Modal limits on inquiry may arise fromchoice and not merely ignorance: we may put on blinders deliberately, know-ing that we must make assumptions if we wish to reach conclusions and that tocriticize everything at the same time is impossible (OHC 25–26).

Oakeshott also concedes ground on the issue of whether there can be acomprehensive system of modal categories when, in On Human Conduct, hereplaces the distinction between science, history, and practice with a distinc-tion between inquiries that postulate intelligent activity and those that postu-late not-intelligent processes. In doing so, he can be said to have reduced hismodes to two mutually-exclusive categories and therefore to have achieved adegree of systematic order lacking in his earlier discussions of modality. Yetbecause these newly identified modes remain independent of one another,Oakeshott cannot be said to have embraced the idea, so important in theIdealist tradition, of higher and lower levels of reality. I will consider thesenew modal distinctions, and their implications for the questions we havebeen discussing, in subsequent chapters.

Philosophy

Oakeshott’s later writings reconsider much of what he says in Experience andIts Modes about the character and forms of understanding. These writings are


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27. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990), 41. I am grateful to CoreyAbel for helping me understand the issue Grant raises.

less systematic and certainly less “Idealist.” “Experience” is no longer the orga-nizing concept and “the Absolute” vanishes entirely. Modality recedes as anexplicit focus of discussion, though it remains a tool of analysis. And philoso-phy is less sharply distinguished from other kinds of reflection or theorizing.In several essays written between the mid-1930s and late 1940s, Oakeshottemphasizes the inherently dialectical character of philosophy while renouncingthe idea that philosophy seeks total coherence in experience.28 Philosophicalinquiry is still critical and autonomous, but it no longer aims at comprehensiveunderstanding, even as an ideal. And in On Human Conduct he concedes thatphilosophy is not, in fact, categorially different from other kinds of theorizing.All theorizing is to some degree dialectical; philosophy is simply more single-minded in its commitment to the criticism of presuppositions.

Philosophy and Modality

In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott defines philosophy as the search forperfect coherence. To dispel the mystery of experience, to comprehend it fully,we must reconcile the conflicting evidence of different senses, observers, ormodes of thought. We must dissolve incoherence wherever we detect it. Andbecause we cannot, once launched on this enterprise, tolerate unresolved con-tradictions or accept, as conclusions, propositions that are in fact mere postu-lates, we can justify no stopping place short of complete coherence. It is thiscommitment to achieving this absolute coherence that distinguishes philoso-phy from other kinds of thinking. Philosophy is thinking “without reserva-tion or arrest,” reflection that is “self-conscious and self-critical throughout, inwhich the determination to remain unsatisfied with anything short of a com-pletely coherent world of ideas is absolute and unqualified” (EM 3, 82).

Because it critically examines modal thinking, philosophy is independentof any mode. Inquiry within a given mode does not question the organizingassumptions that define that mode, and it cannot question those assumptionswithout abandoning its modal character. The thinking required in practical

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28. The essays are a 1938 article, “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence” (CPJ), andtwo papers, “The Concept of a Philosophy of Politics” and “Political Philosophy.” The unpub-lished papers are included in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (RPML). The editor of thisvolume, Timothy Fuller, assigns these undated papers to the late 1940s, but it can be argued that“The Concept of a Philosophy of Politics” was written at least a decade earlier because it shares asubstantial passage with the 1938 article (compare RPML 127–31 with CPJ 345–50). See RobertGrant, Times Literary Supplement (15 April 1994), 31–32. The existence of a shared passage doesnot settle the issue, however, for Oakeshott might have used material from the published articlein a subsequent paper.

life or in scientific or historical inquiry may be critical to a degree, but it mustsuspend criticism of the assumptions on which it proceeds. And the reasonfor this is clear enough: to become involved in exploring the implications ofthe premises underlying the activity in which one is engaged is no longer toengage in that activity.

Against this view of philosophy as thinking that transcends the bounds ofmodality, it might be objected that philosophy is itself simply another moderesting on its own unexamined postulates. But if philosophy is a mode ofinquiry, what are its postulates? And what shall we call the inquiry that exam-ines these postulates? Oakeshott’s response in Experience and Its Modes clev-erly deploys all the concepts in his Idealist armory. If we regard philosophy asan abstraction from experience, in the manner of other modes, this impliesthe existence of a more comprehensive reality from which each mode, philos-ophy included, has been abstracted. Because the incompleteness inherent inabstraction implies completeness, we are left with the problem of accountingfor that larger reality (EM 351). We can, however, restate this rejoinder withoutusing the problematic idea of complete coherence. The distinction betweenphilosophy and modality follows from the idea of modality itself: conditionalunderstanding implies the possibility of pursuing unconditional understand-ing by critically examining whatever conditions one can detect. As Oakeshottput it many years later, philosophy subjects “every purported achievement ofhuman understanding” to “an enquiry into its conditions” (VLL 34). Its goalis not to replace that understanding with another conditional understanding;it is to free understanding from whatever conditions can be identified andthereby approach the unreachable goal of unconditional understanding.

The character of philosophy does not, however, lie in its actual achievements.To define philosophy in relation to its aims is not to claim that philosophy hasactually realized or ever will realize these aims. To achieve a comprehensive andentirely self-consistent view of experience is impossible (EM 356). The idea ofcomplete or unconditional understanding may inspire inquiry, but no inquiry,including philosophy, can provide an absolutely secure foundation for knowl-edge. The results of philosophical inquiry are never complete or final. Toattempt to premise a philosophical argument on an unquestionable proposi-tion contradicts the character and spirit of authentic philosophy.

This view of philosophy implies the unity of philosophy. The understand-ing sought by philosophy is in principle a single whole, and although theremay be differences within this whole, these are not differences between dis-tinct forms of philosophical knowledge, each resting on its own unrecognized


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assumptions. For in that case the branches of philosophy would be indepen-dent modes, not parts of philosophy. The conventional divisions of philoso-phy, then, are even more arbitrary than the modes, for arguments in onedepend on arguments in the others, so each branch of philosophy must even-tually deal with questions arising in other branches. Logic, metaphysics, epis-temology, and ethics are “barren abstractions” (EM 348) which, if treated asbeyond question, impede the philosopher’s enterprise. Although these claimsmay seem exaggerated, the history of philosophy suggests that the boundariesbetween its diverse branches are continually being redrawn, often in ways thatinitially seem shocking. As Rorty has observed, philosophy is an unstable enter-prise, in danger of being taken over either by the sciences or the humanitiesdepending on whether it asserts its positivist or its interpretivist side.29 Inso-far as any branch of philosophy claims autonomy, perhaps by asserting its tieswith mathematics or some other discipline outside philosophy, it denies itsdependence on philosophy as a whole and therefore its standing as philoso-phy. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the mistake of moral, political, and otherkinds of practical philosophy is to accept arbitrary limits on inquiry that makethem incompletely philosophical.

Oakeshott disputes the common view that its increasing professionaliza-tion has strengthened philosophy. Philosophy, understood as the criticism ofconcepts and presuppositions, is not served if what is recognized as philoso-phy in a given place and time is defined by an establishment that would denyits autonomy by assimilating it to logic, science, ideology, or the history ofideas. Schools of philosophy that take religious, scientific, or other conclusionsas the indisputable foundation of speculation have already betrayed the inher-ently critical character of philosophy. Nor is philosophy served by the pres-sures toward doctrinal conformity that arise in university departments andprofessional associations. Philosophy relies upon no special source of knowl-edge and recognizes no authorities. When philosophers display their learning,or even acknowledge the source of their arguments, they “promote a ground-less trust in books, and a false attitude of mind” (EM 8). And examining one’sassumptions is not something that only professionals can do, nor is it evensomething they are especially good at. Oakeshott was evidently drawn, incon-veniently, into philosophical reflection by curiosity about the premises of hisown work as a historian of political thought. One hears an autobiographical

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29. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1979), 168.

note when, in Experience and Its Modes, he describes philosophy as “a mood”that is scarcely compatible with normal life and the philosopher as “the victimof thought” (EM 2, 83; RP 150). Like Wittgenstein, who ruled Cambridgephilosophy in the 1930s, Oakeshott has a romantic view of philosophizing asa way of life, not an academic specialty.

This attitude toward the practice of philosophy throws light on the virtualabsence of references to other authors in his writings. Oakeshott has beencriticized for merely asserting his conclusions and for ignoring objections.And these failures have been attributed to a patrician disregard for his con-temporaries or, worse, dogmatic indifference to philosophical argument. Butit is clear that this style has been carefully considered and that it follows fromhis view of philosophy as the critical examination of presuppositions. Becausethe philosopher uncovers and rejects assumptions that others take for granted,philosophical thinking creates an ever-widening chasm between philosophicaland nonphilosophical ideas. In undertaking to think philosophically, one isslowly but inexorably separated from those who choose not to question theassumptions on which their own thinking and activity rests. And because evenphilosophers must make assumptions if they are to question other assumptions,the authentic philosopher is separated from any school of philosophy thatrests on shared assumptions. That is why in philosophy the best way todefend a view is simply to elucidate it and why it is futile to attempt to winarguments, even with other philosophers. “Philosophy consists, not in persuad-ing others, but in making our own minds clear” (EM 3).

Oakeshott, it need hardly be said, does not adhere consistently to thisideal. No one could. But understanding it can help us to decode some other-wise puzzling aspects of his philosophical style. And it should provoke us toreflect critically on the practice of philosophy.

Philosophy and Dialectic

After Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott gradually moved away from theview that philosophy is an inquiry that aims at comprehensive understanding.He continued to distinguish philosophy from other kinds of inquiry, definingit some years later as thinking “without reservation or presupposition” (RPML127), but the contrast is less sharply drawn.

For Oakeshott all inquiry, including philosophical inquiry, involves thedialectical transformation of received ideas. This is a view he shares with Plato,Aquinas, Hegel, Gadamer, and other philosophers who emphasize the dialec-


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tical character of thinking. We always begin with an understanding of onekind or another and turn this understanding into something new. Thinking,and especially philosophical thinking, is therefore best characterized as involv-ing interpretation rather than invention or discovery. “The process,” Oakeshottwrites in language evidently borrowed from Collingwood, “is always one ofcoming to know more fully and more clearly what is in some sense alreadyknown” (RPML 128; CPJ 346).30 All reflection springs from the paradox that weboth know and do not know, a paradox that is resolved not by simply adding toour knowledge but by revising it. Philosophy is distinguished from otherinquiries only in being more skeptical of every “stopping place” in this dialecticalprocess (CPJ 348). When a philosopher sets out to reconstruct received ideas,“the process is always one of radical reformulation of the whole of what is alreadyknown” (RPML 128).31

Because it exempts certain conclusions from skeptical criticism, modal think-ing is incompletely dialectical. The scientist or historian challenges receivedopinions and, in so doing, appears to discover a natural world of scientificallyverified processes or to recover a past world of historically verified events. Butthis impression of having moved from mere opinions to objective facts is mis-leading, for facts are only “relatively unshakable opinions” (RPML 141). Theyare not exempt from critical examination. In science or history, reflection maycenter on an unquestioned identity, but philosophy questions all identities. Amode of inquiry, then, only partly subverts the received ideas upon which itboth operates and rests. What distinguishes philosophy from modal thinkingis that it is radically subversive of received ideas. It follows that much of whatis called “philosophy” is not authentically philosophical. If philosophy is inher-ently skeptical, then the defect of Cartesianism, positivism, and other kinds offoundationalism is that, by taking some unquestioned identity as a startingpoint, they set “a limit to the subversion permitted” (RPML 142). It is instatements like these that Oakeshott comes closest to identifying philosophywith Pyrrhonism.

Oakeshott sometimes describes the dialectical process in philosophical inquiryas one of conceptual clarification and redefinition. Beginning with the con-cepts we rely upon in ordinary experience or in a given field of knowledge,

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30. Compare the words quoted in the text with similar words in R. G. Collingwood, AnEssay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 11.

31. I have deleted the word “not” before “always” in this sentence. It is an obvious misprint,incompatible both with the corresponding sentence in “The Concept of a PhilosophicalJurisprudence” (CPJ 43) and with the sense of Oakeshott’s argument.

philosophy undertakes “an extended, detailed and complete exposition ofthose concepts, an exposition which is itself a definition” (RPML 128; CPJ346). It proceeds by removing ambiguities in the concepts it begins with,making those concepts more coherent. And the process continues until it cango no farther. “The aim of philosophy is to arrive at concepts which, becausethey presuppose nothing, are complete in themselves; the aim is to define andestablish concepts so fully and completely that nothing further remains to beadded” (RPML 127; CPJ 345). The idea of complete coherence seems to reap-pear in this formulation, but it is coherence within, not between, concepts.

It follows that philosophical concepts—concepts that emerge from thisdialectical process of redefinition—are necessarily different from the conceptswith which the process begins. “If what is undertaken is a transformation,you must not reject the result if it is different from what you started with”(RPML 129). “Justice” for Plato or “the state” as Hegel defines it are remotefrom the concepts for which those names stand in ordinary discourse. Nor isthis the defect that naive criticism takes it to be. A philosophical concept can-not be judged according to whether it agrees with the concept from which ithas been generated. It cannot be verified merely by reference to ordinaryexperience, for such experience cannot be both raw material for philosophicalreflection and the criterion of its success. It is therefore a mistake to defendphilosophical conclusions by appealing to “our intuitions.” Nor must weexpect agreement between philosophical concepts and those used by scientistsor historians in their own, nonphilosophical, inquiries. This is not to say thatthere is no connection between the concepts with which philosophy beginsand those it ends up with: a philosophical concept must emerge, through acontinuous argument, from ordinary practical, scientific, or historical think-ing. But for those who have not followed the argument, the gap between theconcepts that are taken for granted in some particular sphere of life and thoseof the philosopher may appear complete.

Philosophy as Theorizing

Oakeshott begins On Human Conduct by restating what has become a rela-tively settled view of human understanding. According to this view, philoso-phy differs from other kinds of thinking only in being more skeptical of itsown conclusions. All deliberate thinking (now called “theorizing”) beginswith received ideas, examines them critically, and reformulates them dialecti-cally to generate a new system of ideas. By problematizing the ideas with


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which it begins, theorizing sees these ideas not as unconditional truths but asprovisional conclusions whose validity rests on certain assumed conditions.Skepticism about these assumptions is therefore not limited to philosophy.Any inquiry is theoretical to the extent that it recognizes the conditionality ofits conclusions. Philosophy differs from other kinds of theorizing only in beingmore radically self-critical. A theorist can, however, suspend self-criticism andsimply use the conclusions that have been reached as tools to further explorethe domain of understanding to which these conclusions belong. Nonetheless,the suspension of theorizing to explore what lies within the limits of a givenfield is never more than temporary, and a theorist’s reliance on the conclusionsthat are accepted in that field can never be more than provisional. Those whoallow the defining postulates of their field to limit their thinking fail to realize,and in that sense betray, the full, philosophical character of theorizing.

Oakeshott’s use of the term “theorizing” in this work needs to be clarified.He normally uses it for what he calls the “engagement” to understand. Under-standing, in other words, is not always the result of an active engagement, adeliberately undertaken inquiry. Simply to be human is to inhabit an experi-enced world that is already understood. It follows that understanding isunavoidable and can be possessed without being sought. But understandingis also pursued in a deliberate effort “to inhabit an ever more intelligible, oran ever less mysterious world” (OHC 1). In contrast with understanding ingeneral, then, theorizing is a deliberate activity.

But Oakeshott sometimes uses the word “theorizing” for inquiries thatseek a certain kind of understanding: an understanding of things that springsfrom uncovering their presuppositions. Underlying this narrower usage is adistinction between two kinds of inquiry—a distinction that reflects the dis-tinction, central to Experience and Its Modes, between modality and philoso-phy. In a modal investigation we make sense of identified objects, events,processes, and practices by observing their characteristics and relating thesecharacteristics to one another in various ways. In performing these operationswe make certain assumptions for the sake of getting on with our inquiry. Wedo not question the characteristics we are studying, once we have decidedwhat they are; we take these characteristics for granted and simply use them.They become the actors in our historical narratives, the “variables” in our sta-tistical analyses, or the inescapable facts of a practical situation to which wemust respond. In philosophical thinking, in contrast, we attempt to under-stand the things we identify not by studying their characteristics but byuncovering the postulates that underlie these characteristics. If I ask “What

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time is it?” I am asking a question that presupposes and therefore does notproblematize the idea of time. But if I ask “What is time?” I initiate an inquiryof a different kind, one no longer reflecting an ordinary practical concern butrather the theoretical concerns of a physicist or a philosopher (OHC 9). Thedifferent questions generate different inquiries and imply different kinds ofunderstanding.

This suggests that, for Oakeshott, any engagement to understand is theo-rizing, but that there are two kinds of theorizing: (1) “conditional theorizing,”which “saves the appearances” of the things it studies by assuming theseappearances to be factual and treating them as “data” for analysis or as usefulinformation on the basis of which to act, and (2) “unconditional theorizing,”which does question appearances by looking behind the “facts,” critically exam-ining the categories and measurements on which they depend. Oakeshott isnot consistent in his use of the word “theorizing,” employing it sometimes forboth conditional and unconditional theorizing and sometimes only for thelatter. The best way to reconcile these usages is to conclude that, for Oake-shott, theorizing is not limited to efforts to understand by questioning pre-suppositions. Rather, it includes any effort to understand that is undertakenwith the awareness that, whatever level of understanding may be achieved,there is still more to be understood, and that any achieved understanding isitself a point of departure for further inquiry. In short, the pursuit of under-standing through the criticism of presuppositions—which is most characteris-tic of philosophy—can be suspended without being repudiated. Theorists canuse, as well as examine, their theoretic equipment (OHC 11).

The philosopher or unconditional theorist, however, is entirely committedto an effort “to understand in other terms what he already understands.”These terms are the conditions (postulates) of the something that is alreadyunderstood. One of the conditions of telling the time, for example, is thatevents are ordered in such a way that one event can either precede, coincidewith, or follow another. Telling the time, in the manner we now take forgranted, also presupposes a system of measurement in terms of which we can-not only order events in relation to one another but also measure the intervalsbetween events. The concern of the philosopher is to identify postulates likethese and make sense of them. In a philosophical inquiry, “the understandingsought . . . is a disclosure of the conditions of the understanding enjoyed andnot a substitute for it.” But this understanding is itself unavoidably condi-tional: because all inquiry rests on assumptions it does not question, evenunconditional theorizing cannot transcend its own conditions. One cannot


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both use and repair one’s tools at the same time. Given its inherently self-crit-ical character, philosophical reflection is always tentative, always conditional.It is “an intellectual adventure which has a course to follow but no destina-tion,” and philosophical writing, which finds its most fitting expression in theessay rather than the treatise, is “a traveller’s tale,” the adventure itself recol-lected in tranquillity (OHC vii).

Philosophy, then, is not a special method of thinking, much less a particu-lar kind of knowledge. It is simply thinking made as critical as possible. Allthinking is to some degree critical. What is given in experience “is never solid,fixed and inviolable, never merely to be accepted” (EM 29). What seems fac-tual and real sooner or later evokes criticism, which then transforms it. Themore skeptical and subversive the criticism, the more likely we are to call it“philosophy.” But it is not a unique activity. Philosophy is simply the effort tounderstand, theorizing, pushed to its limits. It is thinking that emerges fromand is continuous with the thinking about which it thinks. All theorizing is anever-ending “engagement of arrivals and departures” in which each achieve-ment of understanding is also a new invitation to understand. Philosophy isnot the pursuit of unchallengeable and permanent truths: “the notion of anunconditional or definitive understanding may hover in the background, butit has no part in the adventure” (OHC 3). To the extent that it can be distin-guished from other efforts to understand, philosophy is defined by its com-mitment to examine the presuppositions of whatever understanding has beenachieved, including the presuppositions of theorizing itself.

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Understanding and Doing

Action or doing constitutes a world, the world of practical activity. Oakeshottreaches two main conclusions about understanding in relation to this world.First, as a world of ideas, practical activity is itself a mode of understanding.Second, though history, science, and other modes involve practical activity(the activity of historians or scientists, for example), this does not deprive theunderstanding each generates of its distinct modal character. The character ofauthentic history is historical, not practical. The same can be said of philoso-phy: philosophical inquiry is a practice, but it generates ideas that are authen-tically philosophical. Its conclusions are distinct from practical conclusions.

Before examining science and history as autonomous modes of under-standing, we need to consider the claim that practical activity can be under-stood in ways that are modally distinct from the kind of understandingimplicit in practical activity itself: the claim that though doing is a kind ofunderstanding, understanding (“theory”) and doing (“practice”) are radicallydistinct. And to do this we need to examine Oakeshott’s efforts to define themost general concepts in terms of which practical activity is understood: con-cepts like fact, value, action, agent, and will. To illustrate how Oakeshott usesthese concepts to make sense of a particular realm of experience, I will con-sider what he has to say about religion. I will also consider the relationship

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between Oakeshott’s early and late writings on the theme of doing, specifi-cally how his discussion of “conduct” in On Human Conduct alters the the-ory of practice as a mode he provides in Experience and Its Modes.

Practice as a Mode

Like other philosophers, Oakeshott uses the words “practice” and “practical”in ways that depart significantly from ordinary usage. What he calls practicalactivity is not necessarily practical in the usual meaning of that term: a personwho is impractical in the sense of being inept or imprudent, or who unrealisti-cally tries to reform the world, is still engaged in efforts to produce or preventchange and therefore inhabits the world of practice. For Oakeshott in Experi-ence and Its Modes, practice is nothing other than “the conduct of life,” so itincludes more than what is ordinarily called “practical.” It includes moral as wellas prudential conduct and, in general, any effort to reduce the distance betweenis and ought. In his later works, Oakeshott assigns additional meanings to“practice” and “practical,” and so we will have to consider these as well.

The defining presupposition of practical activity is that “it belongs to thecharacter of thought to be for the sake of action” (EM 248). This presupposi-tion is seldom seen to be a presupposition, for the world of practical experi-ence—which might, following Husserl, be called the Lebenswelt—is where wespend most of our lives, the world we normally take for granted as “the realworld.”1 It is a world so compelling that to step outside it takes conscious effort.For many it is the only world, reality itself: like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave,they “find it impossible to entertain the idea that this practical world, withinwhich they are confined as if in a prison, is other than the universe itself ” (EM249). But this naive assertion of reality, sometimes echoed in the theories ofphilosophers, is an illusion: practice is a mode, not reality itself.

How is practice distinguished from other modes? Science and history—understood not as actual and therefore modally ambiguous activities but as


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1. For Husserl, the “life-world” is given in immediate experience and therefore prior to the“special” (constructed and objective) modes of cognition represented by the sciences. It is “alwaysalready there” as the “universal field of all actual and possible praxis.” Edmund Husserl, The Crisisof European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwest-ern University Press, 1970), 142. This world should not be confused with Dilthey’s geistige Welt,the world of ideas, mind, or culture; the latter includes, as the world of immediate practical expe-rience does not, scientific, aesthetic, and other differentiated kinds of understanding.

unambiguous modes—are “objective” or “explanatory” in the sense that theyaim to understand objects, situations, or events in terms that are independentof practical concerns. In the aesthetic mode, too, we are detached from suchconcerns. But in practical experience we react to things as they affect us (OH11). Things are large or small, near or far, easy or difficult, threatening or reas-suring. In acting we have in mind a future that is hoped for, feared, or insome other way relevant to our wants, and we explicitly or implicitly evaluatethings in relation to our efforts to improve our situation or to keep it fromgetting worse. Practice, then, can be called “evaluative” rather than explana-tory. The distinction between practice and other modes is not that practiceinvolves doing as opposed to thinking, for doing is itself a kind of thinking.

For Oakeshott evaluation is not a speculative activity but an aspect of act-ing, and acting is the exercise of will. The aspect of thinking most evident inaction is neither contemplation nor explanation but willing. Practical experi-ence is the world understood under the category of will (EM 258). In themode of practice, we want to understand the world so that we can change ormaintain it. Our concern is to alter the conditions under which we or otherslive, or to preserve those conditions against a threatened change. Action, whichalways presupposes some state of affairs to be achieved, springs from anunderstood discrepancy between what is or might be and what we would liketo be the case. This is true even when what we want is to maintain an existingstate of affairs, for in such cases what we want is that particular changes shouldnot occur. The world of practical experience is one in which change, wanted orunwanted, is possible and significant. It is a “mortal world” of growth anddecay, a world of uncertainties and unintended consequences quite unlike thefixed, unchanging world of the historical past or the abstract, hypotheticalworld of physics.

Practical activity, then, involves both what is (fact) and what is desired(value). How, when we are thinking “practically,” do we understand these ele-ments of human action? That action assumes a state of affairs to be alteredimplies a distinctive idea of fact. Science and history presuppose the idea ofpermanent facts: if a scientific or historical fact changes, it is not the fact itselfthat has changed; rather, what was once believed to be a fact turns out not tohave been a fact after all, but only the illusion of fact. In this sense, history andscience presuppose an unchanging reality. Practice, in contrast, presupposes achangeable reality: the world that is presupposed in practical activity is “theworld of what is here and now” (EM 273), and the point of acting is to altersome aspect of that world. Unlike scientific or historical facts, practical facts


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are mutable; they are simply those that present themselves as given in a situa-tion in which we must make a choice. And what is given, regarded as fact, canchange from one situation to another without losing its factual character: yes-terday’s enemy is today’s ally, my comfortable shoes a shabby disgrace. Simi-larly, what is “real” from the standpoint of action is changeable because it,too, is defined in relation to what is wanted: whatever in a particular situationhas to be dealt with is regarded as real. If I want to write a best-seller, thetastes of the reading public and the priorities of publishers are real considera-tions; if I want to write a good poem, reality may assert itself in my limitedimagination or defective grasp of poetic form. Because wants change fromone situation to another, practical ideas are validated by their correspondencewith a miscellaneous and shifting body of circumstances, not with a relativelyunchanging standard of truth. In acting, we swim in a sea of contingencies.

Besides a factual world, which it wants to alter, practical activity presup-poses an imagined world: the world as it would be if our desires were realized.And it presupposes the criteria of good and bad that are implicit in havingdesires. In the vocabulary of Experience and Its Modes, practice presupposes aworld of “value,” an equivocal term, happily no longer fashionable, that implic-itly reduces all practical judgments to judgments of desirability or utility.Oakeshott does not distinguish different kinds of value in this book, and inparticular he does not distinguish the moral quality of an action from its util-ity. This (undifferentiated) world of value is abstract and incomplete, for val-ues are unstable and sometimes incommensurable. This does not mean,however, that they are “subjective.” We can look for coherence between differ-ent sets of values because our ideas of what is good and bad do not express amerely personal point of view; they make claims to truth that can contradictone another. The world of value is an “inter-subjective” world of judgmentsin which value claims can be compared and sometimes reconciled. As Oake-shott later explains in On Human Conduct, objectivity is an attribute not ofcorrect judgment but of reasoned judgment. Misunderstandings can be objec-tive, in this sense, because they belong to a realm of discourse about correctand incorrect judgment (OHC 51–52). But values, though more than merelysubjective, are never “absolute,” that is, unconditional or independent of theircontext. If we understand practical thinking to involve an effort to reconciledifferent values, there is no reason why any particular value should beregarded as fundamental, the criterion of all the others. Every value judgment“must submit itself . . . to the world of value as a whole” (EM 278).


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In practical activity, we attempt not only to reconcile different values butto overcome the discrepancy between is and ought. We try to make whatexists correspond to our desires, either by exchanging what is for what oughtto be or by eliminating those desires. “Action,” it should be noticed, caninclude daydreaming or fantasy, for fantasies are sometimes imaginary achieve-ments and are therefore distinguishable from purely contemplative (“poetic”)images. Like other modes, then, the practical mode both exhibits coherenceand invites its pursuit. But “coherence” has a distinct meaning in this mode.In scientific and historical inquiry, coherence is pursued in thought, but in thepractical mode it is sought in action.

Does the idea of coherence make sense in the context of action? Or is Oake-shott using the word “coherence” so loosely as to turn it into a mere metaphor?Coherence always involves bringing ideas into what, according to the postulatesof a given mode, is an acceptable relationship, of reconciling discrepancies toachieve a modally appropriate consistency. Acting presumes an existing state ofaffairs and an imagined state of affairs we wish to realize. These states of affairsare ideas that action must reconcile to achieve a specifically practical kind ofcoherence. The way things “are” is as much a matter of judgment and thoughtas the way we would like them to be. Coherence in the practical realm, as in anyother, is therefore a matter of reconciling discrepant ideas.

In history and science, coherence is impermanent because new informa-tion may lead us to revise our understanding of what happened in the past orwhat must happen according to the laws of nature. Practical coherence—thereconciliation of is and ought—is also limited and temporary, but for a differentreason. Because there are some things we cannot change, we act in a worldthat we can affect but can never completely control or transform. Even whenwe do succeed in achieving our purpose, the change that we have broughtabout is never final: all changes are subject to further change. What is andwhat ought to be can therefore never be permanently reconciled. As soon asone discrepancy is overcome, a new one appears, and so on ad infinitum. Wemight try permanently to resolve such discrepancies, but the resolutions weactually achieve in practical activity are never more than momentary. In prac-tice “there are no ‘final solutions’” (OHC 45–46).

This aspect of practical experience is summed up in what might be calledthe “irony of practice,” though Oakeshott does not use this expression—in thedepressing (or maybe liberating?) truth that practical activity “undertakeswhat, from its nature, can never be brought to a conclusion” (EM 291). In


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acting we look for a response from others, yet these responses are undepend-able. Acting is therefore always “making a bargain with an imperfectly imag-ined future” (OHC 44). And even if others respond as we wish, our acts mayfail to provide the satisfaction we hoped for. What we do results in a new situ-ation, one in which new desires appear and further choices must be made.Action is necessarily inconclusive and episodic—an aspect of life, Oakeshottobserves, that some have deemed “absurd” and others have endowed withmeaning by reading it as part of a larger plan or story (OH 14n). Absurd ormeaningful, depressing or liberating, this uncertainty is the inescapable predica-ment of practical existence. It is part of the human condition.

But despite its inherent contingency, the practical mode, like any othermode, is not “a shapeless, unspecified encounter with the confusion of all thatmay be going on.” It is a “coherent, self-sustaining understanding of theworld in which a single formal character is imposed upon everything thatreceives attention”—“an autonomous universe of discourse” (OH 20). At thesame time, the impossibility of achieving final coherence in practical experi-ence is a necessary feature of this mode, for to reconcile what is and whatought to be in general and absolutely would deny the gap between is andought that is presupposed by practice (EM 304). In this sense, at least, theworld of practice is one of permanent and necessary incoherence.

Religious Experience

It may be impossible to achieve permanent coherence in the world of prac-tice, but that has not discouraged human beings from making the effort. Andone of the ways in which they pursue this goal is through the practice of a reli-gious faith.

Most of what Oakeshott wrote about religion belongs to the late 1920sand early 1930s. During these years he wrote several papers and many bookreviews on the topic.2 Religious experience also receives careful, if brief, treat-ment in Experience and Its Modes. But after that, with the exception of a fewacute pages in On Human Conduct, Oakeshott mentions religion only in pass-ing. These writings can be read for clues about Oakeshott’s own religiousbeliefs, but it is what they say about religion that is relevant here. The theory


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2. These papers, though not the reviews, have now been collected by Timothy Fuller inReligion, Politics, and the Moral Life (RPML).

intimated in the early essays on religion and argued explicitly in Experienceand Its Modes is that religion seeks coherence in the world of practical experi-ence. It is philosophy, not religion, that pursues coherence in experience as awhole.

Oakeshott’s earliest writings reveal a developing awareness that thinkingabout religion must be distinguished from religious thinking. They show amovement from religious to historical and philosophical concerns and froman interest in the identity of Christian religion to an interest in defining reli-gion more generally. Religion appears successively in these essays as the fun-damental principle of social order, the chief motive for and only sure way ofrealizing the moral life, and the antithesis of worldly realism, before finallyassuming the character Oakeshott assigns to it in Experience and Its Modes asthe completion of practical experience. The question most often posed in thesewritings is one of definition: What is religion? And the successive answersthey offer reveal a characteristic concern to distinguish a self-consistent realmof experience, rather than to tailor a definition that fits whatever contingentphenomena happen to be collected under the label of religion. Religion, forOakeshott, is an ideal character, and the philosophical effort to define thischaracter can yield a conception that departs significantly from received ideas.

Oakeshott’s first attempt to frame a definition of religion appears in “Reli-gion and the Moral Life.” The essay, written in 1927 for a group of Cambridgedons who met weekly to discuss theological questions, distinguishes threeviews of the relationship between religion and morality: that religion is iden-tical with morality, that it is the sanction of morality, and that it is the comple-tion of morality.

Oakeshott judges the first view, the “identity thesis,” to be obviously mis-taken, even though there are similarities between religion and morality thatmake it plausible. The most important of these similarities is that both presup-pose human agency: to submit to God’s will is moral only if it expresses ourown will. God can impose a moral order on us only through our own sense ofright and wrong. This insight reveals the defect of the second view, that reli-gion is the sanction of morality, which holds that to be moral is to obey God’scommands. This view of moral conduct has it backwards, Oakeshott thinks, forit suggests that we behave morally only insofar as we obey God. But because weare autonomous agents, it can be said with more truth that we obey God onlyinsofar as we behave morally. In fact, if moral conduct is choosing for oneself,“the notion of an external moral law, the will of God, is an immoral notion”(RPML 43). Morality is the premise, not the consequence, of religious belief.


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Even so, there is more to morality than autonomy, and this additional ele-ment is the moral knowledge that makes it possible for human beings to reactin ways that are not only freely chosen but “adequate” (RPML 44) to the sit-uations in which they find themselves. It is true that moral conduct, as aproduct of human understanding and effort, can never be completely ade-quate, but completeness can be sought in the practice of a religious faith. Theimplied third view—that religion is the completion of morality, a way of tran-scending its inadequacies—may strike us as obscure where the other views aretransparent. But it would not have seemed obscure to the readers for whomOakeshott was writing, for what might be called the “completion thesis” wasa familiar part of Idealist thought.

When Oakeshott writes that morality is “an endless practical endeavour”(RPML 44), he echoes the conclusion of Bradley’s Ethical Studies (a new edi-tion of which had appeared in 1927, the same year as Oakeshott’s essay). Bradleyworks through a series of conceptions of morality, only to conclude that themoral point of view is inherently incomplete. “Morality,” Bradley writes, “is anendless process, and therefore a self-contradiction.”3 As Oakeshott puts it,“morality tells us to realize that which can never be realized; the moral life is a‘vain search after the true good’” (RPML 42). This perpetual lack of moral clo-sure is experienced both individually (because the situation one brings about bychoosing morally always demands a new response, which results in an endless,uncompleted series of oughts) and socially (because the moral sense of a com-munity, which springs from these individual choices, can never cease changing).And, Bradley argues, because it is self-contradictory, morality looks for a solu-tion to something beyond itself: morality “does not remain standing in itself,but feels the impulse to transcend its existing reality.”4 Religion responds to thisimpulse by providing what morality cannot: that the good be both real andachievable. From the standpoint of religion, we achieve goodness not by ourefforts to become better (that is the paradox of morality) but “by losing our-selves in God” (RPML 42). “Completion” is achieved by faith, not by reasonedargument, in a process of atonement. It is a union of the individual self and thedivine will, the sinful and the divine, the part and the whole.5

If faith is central to religious experience, it follows that religious truth ispractical, not theoretical. What is “real” in religion cannot be established by


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3. F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1876; 2d ed., 1927), 313.4. Bradley, Ethical Studies, 313.5. Bradley, Ethical Studies, 320–24.

scientific, historical, or philosophical argument. Religion for Bradley is not amatter of knowing, as knowledge is ordinarily understood, but of doing: it isthe experience of “religious consciousness,” which requires us not merely tothink but to act.6 Oakeshott shares Bradley’s view of religion as an aspect ofpractical experience. As he writes in “The Importance of the HistoricalElement in Christianity” (1928), the “value” of religious ideas is pragmatic,not a matter of ultimate truth (RPML 68). Religious consciousness springsfrom our felt wants:

One of these felt wants, one to which the religious consciousness isparticularly sensitive, is the need for an almost sensible perception ofthe reality of the object of belief. Religion demands not that thenecessity for the existence of what it believes in should be proved, forthat is an academic interest, but to be made intensely aware of theactual existence of the object of belief. . . . The thoughts of religionmust . . . strike the mind and compel not merely acquiescence butaction. (RPML 71)

Hence the importance of ritual, even idolatry, in some forms of religious prac-tice. The historical story of Christianity, which appeals to the senses and theemotions, provides those for whom it carries conviction with “the requiredactuality of the object of religious belief” (RPML 73).

The main difference between religion and morality, then, is that the formermakes real an ideal that the latter can merely hope for: as Bradley puts it,“what in morality only is to be, in religion somehow and somewhere reallyis.”7 It is religion that keeps us engaged in the endless search for moral perfec-tion because it provides a motive for our efforts “to invent and to refine in themoral life” (RPML 45). Religion can provide the motive for moral conductbecause it “shows the whole from which this endless ‘ought to be’ is an abstrac-tion” (RPML 45). If morality is the endless search for the perfect good, weneed a conception of that good toward which to strive, and it is religion thatprovides this conception. Implicit here is the Aristotelian identification ofthe perfect with what is complete or whole: “Religion, then, is the comple-tion of morality, not in the sense of a final end to an historical series, but as


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6. “Religion is essentially a doing, and a doing which is moral.” And again: “Religion ispractical; it means doing something which is a duty.” Bradley, Ethical Studies, 315, 333.

7. Bradley, Ethical Studies, 334. The Catholic doctrine of the “real presence” of the bodyand blood of Christ in the sacrament of communion provides an aptly named example.

the concrete whole is the completion of all the abstractions analysis may dis-cover in it. Religion is . . . the whole of which morality is an aspect, and inwhich mere morality perishes, that is, is discovered as an abstraction” (RPML42). As Oakeshott restates it, the Bradleyian view of religion as the comple-tion of morality looks like an early version of the theory of modality: here,morality is treated as a distinguishable “mode” of religion, just as practicalactivity will later be treated as a mode of experience as a whole.

In “Religion and the Moral Life,” Oakeshott does not conclude (as he doeslater in Experience and Its Modes) that religion is the completion of practicalexperience as a whole, and not only of “moral” experience, because he doesnot in this essay explicitly distinguish morality from other kinds of practicalactivity. He has not yet arrived at the view, later so important, that moral con-duct is a matter not of pursuing good ends but of respecting the moral prac-tices that constrain this pursuit. In this essay, he does distinguish between theeffort to bring about good ends through action and the effort to meet an idealof conduct in acting, but he identifies the latter as religious. To put it differ-ently, the contrast between the instrumental and the noninstrumental, whichOakeshott’s later work presents as a distinction between the outcome-oriented(“prudential”) and the conduct-oriented (“moral”), first appears as a contrastbetween the worldly and the religious.

In “Religion and the World” (1929), written two years after “Religion andthe Moral Life,” Oakeshott moves toward the view that religion is the com-pletion of practical experience from a position that seems, at first, to contra-dict it: that religious sensibility is wholly opposed to the sensibility of thosewho are immersed in the concerns of daily life. In this essay, he contrasts reli-gious consciousness with the self-congratulatory realism of those who cannotsee beyond the experienced world they take as fact.

This idea of a sharp separation between religion and the world, which hasbeen part of Christianity from the start, has been interpreted in different wayswithin that tradition. The early Christians construed the difference temporally,as a distinction between the present order and the world to come. But the newworld did not come, and there emerged in Christian thinking a dichotomybetween material and spiritual existence, between the natural and the super-natural, in which the two realms are seen not as sequential but as coexistent.To live religiously meant to live as much as possible spiritually and to rejectthe ordinary world of material activities. But implicit in this dichotomy is athird view: that “the world” of ordinary human concerns is a set of beliefs andvalues, a particular way of thinking, and that to live religiously is to reject


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these worldly beliefs and values. Religious faith, according to this view, doesnot depend on the existence of a supernatural realm from which material inter-ests and activities have been excluded; it is itself a spiritual realm “in whicheverything is valued, not as a contribution to some development or evolution,but as it is in itself ” (RPML 30). Religion is “for itself,” not for the sake ofsomething else (RPML 34). This is an understanding of religion Oakeshotthad encountered in the writings of anthropologists as well as theologians.8

The defining element of worldliness is a pragmatic attitude based on beliefin the reality and supreme importance of whatever presents itself in practicalexperience. The worldly point of view presupposes a standard of worth accord-ing to which things are valued only for their contribution to producing somefuture, external, contingent result. “The future is the Moloch to which the pre-sent is sacrificed, and the life which leaves behind it actual accomplishments isvalued more highly than that which strove to be its own achievement” (RPML31). The ideals of worldliness are ambition, productivity, and achievement; itschief virtue is prudence. These beliefs are inimical to religion: “Could anynotion of life be more empty and futile than this idea that its value is measuredby its contribution to something thought more permanent than itself—a race,a people, an art, a science or a profession? This surely is to preach an illusiveimmortality, to make humanity a Sisyphus and its life the pointless trundlingof a useless stone” (RPML 32). Though religion has often been interpreted inprudential terms, it is worldly, and therefore irreligious, to live prudently forthe sake of future benefit. To be religious is not to accept a doctrine or contractfor future salvation: “it is to be ‘saved’ here and now, delivered from the tread-mill of egoism and the Faustian tyranny of ‘achievement,’ which in anotheridiom has been the bane of European politics.”9

This sharp contrast between religion and the world would seem to dividereligion from practical experience. If religion is the antithesis of worldliness,on what grounds can we assign religion to the domain of practical experi-ence? The answer, of course, is that the practical domain includes more thanprudential considerations. The effort to satisfy our wants is an important partof the world of practice, but it does not exhaust its content. The respect for


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8. Reviewing Joseph Needham, ed., Science, Religion, and Reality, Journal of TheologicalStudies 27 (1926), 317–19, Oakeshott mentions Malinowski’s view that there is no real conflictbetween science and religion because, unlike magic, religion is, Malinowski says, “a body of self-contained acts being themselves the fulfillment of their purpose” (317).

9. Robert Grant, review of Oakeshott, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, Times Liter-ary Supplement (15 April 1994), 31.

things apart from their use that characterizes religion (and, Oakeshott willargue, morality) is also an aspect of practical experience. Worldliness is an atti-tude within the world of practice, not coextensive with it. But religion, thoughitself an aspect of practical experience, is not simply another aspect of the prac-tical world. Religion can resolve the contradictions of prudential and evenmoral striving. It is not a kind of practice but the “completion” of practice.

These arguments are briskly restated in Experience and Its Modes. Oake-shott here distills his explorations of the religious consciousness in two dis-tinct claims.

The first is that religion is practical activity. Oakeshott rejects the view thatreligion is not part of the practical world because it requires one to put asidethe concerns of this life: retirement from “the world,” even when it takes theform of suicide, is itself a way of living and therefore remains in the world ofpractice, properly defined. Religion belongs to the conduct of life, and itlooks to another world only to determine what our conduct shall be in thisworld (EM 293–94).

Oakeshott’s second claim is that religion differs from other forms of prac-tice only in degree. Religion is not a distinct mode of practical activity butsimply the attempt to reconcile the “is” and the “ought to be” carried as far aspossible. In religious experience we discover a kind of integration—a clarityabout what belongs to our life and a determination to follow it without reser-vation—that is more thorough and more reliable than that provided byworldly prudence. But it would be misleading to say that religion providesthis frame of mind; we should say that those who achieve this frame of mindhave achieved religion. “Whenever the seriousness with which we embracethis enterprise of achieving a coherent world of practical ideas reaches a cer-tain strength and intensity, whenever it begins to dominate and take posses-sion of us, practice has become religion” (EM 295). But religion, as thecompletion of practice, remains in the mode of practice and, like any otherkind of modal thinking, is ultimately a distraction from the quest for uncon-ditional understanding. All roads lead to Athens, not Jerusalem.

This view of religion, stripped of the rhetoric of completion, is reaffirmedmany years later in On Human Conduct. There, religious faith is understoodas providing a deliverance from the ultimate futility of action (“the deadlinessof doing”) because it is related not to contingencies but to the integrity of aperson’s character. As in the early writings, religion is a response to the humancondition, one that can be expressed in different ways. The character of a per-son’s faith, the way he or she seeks to escape life’s contingencies, is itself a his-


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torical contingency, one often shaped by an inherited religious tradition. Eachreligion has its own images of the divine and of what it means to be a humanbeing, and each offers an “idiom of faith” reflecting the civilization to which itbelongs (OHC 86).

To provide the serenity it promises, a religious faith must do more thanprovide a way of accepting life’s burdens, disappointments, and calamities. Itmust speak not only to our suffering but to our conduct, insofar as we areresponsible for anyone’s suffering. Serious wrongdoing is an offense againstGod and must be expiated if the offender is to be redeemed. But, for Oake-shott, religion is concerned above all with the hollowness and futility ofhuman existence. Human activity is essentially episodic, its ultimate pointless-ness “concealed in the illusion of affairs,” its achievements fragile and evanes-cent. “What is sought in religious belief is not merely consolation for woe ordeliverance from the burden of sin, but a reconciliation to nothingness”(OHC 83–84):

“Religious faith is the evocation of a sentiment . . . to be added to allothers as the motive of all motives in terms of which the fugitiveadventures of human conduct, without being released from theirmortal and their moral conditions, are graced with an intimation ofimmortality: the sharpness of death and the deadliness of doing over-come, and the transitory sweetness of a mortal affection, the tumultof a grief and the passing beauty of a May morning recognized nei-ther as merely evanescent adventures nor as emblems of better thingsto come, but as aventures, themselves encounters with eternity” (85).

What is striking about this passage is not merely its poignancy but the surfac-ing of an aesthetic element in the argument itself. Here, religious experience,which is actualized not only in piety but in moments of “numinous aware-ness,”10 seems suspended between the practical and the poetic. Its power isnot merely practical but includes the power to turn conduct into art: to trans-form, if only for a moment, the temporal world of actions, consequences, andjudgments into a timeless world of contemplation.

Religious experience may acquire a poetic dimension, but it does so withoutshedding its practical character. It is not an independent mode of experience,being both an idiom of practice and (if we take the aesthetic interpretation


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10. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (Claridge Press, 1990), 107.

seriously) modally ambiguous. Authentic religion is in any case, as we haveseen, never a matter of mere prudence: Oakeshott’s view of religion is certainlynot that of Hobbes, for whom religion is the response of prudence to “fear ofwhat is beyond the power of prudence to find out” (HCA 32). Authentic reli-gion shares with morality the quality of being noninstrumental. Linking itwith aesthetic contemplation simply reemphasizes an already emphatic dis-tinction between the religious and the pragmatic.

By locating religion in the mode of practice, which he did long beforedeciding that poetry and practice are modally distinct, Oakeshott distinguishesit not only from science (its Victorian rival, with which it has largely ceased tocompete) but also from history and philosophy. This sorting out is evident inhis reflections during the mid-1930s on the identity of Christianity. We cannotsay what Christian faith is without knowing what it has been, and to do thatwe must engage in historical inquiry. But the historical conclusions we arriveat are not, as such, religious conclusions, and religious conclusions can neverbe truly historical: Christians may insist on the religious significance of cer-tain historical events, but “the importance of these events is a religious and nota genuinely historical importance.”11 Nor can we define Christian religion,much less religion generally, without engaging in philosophical inquiry. Butphilosophical conclusions are no more religious than historical conclusions. AsOakeshott puts it in On Human Conduct, “although a faith is an understand-ing, a theoretical understanding of a faith is not itself a faith” (OHC 81).

One might object that Oakeshott’s account of religion is an unsatisfying,external one that is unconcerned with what believers actually believe or withquestions of religious truth. But the objection fails to distinguish betweenmodally different claims. A philosophy of religion examines the presupposi-tions of religious experience and is, for that reason, intrinsically critical. It can-not simply reassert what faith accepts as given. Assertions of religious truth canbe made within a body of religious beliefs, but in that case they are themselvesmatters of religious belief—claims to be proved by the testimony of faith orwhatever other means of establishing truths are recognized within a particularsystem of religious belief. An argument that seeks to prove a religious claim onother grounds—by appealing, for example, to historical evidence or scientificreasoning—is not, as such, a religious argument. This conclusion is unavoid-able if religious experience is, as Oakeshott argues in Experience and Its Modes,


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11. Review of H. G. Wood, Christianity and the Nature of History, Cambridge Review 56(1935), 248.

an aspect of practical experience. It follows from the distinction betweenadhering to a faith and understanding that faith in other terms, between reli-gion and the study of religion. The understanding of religion that is sought byphilosophy, which defines it by uncovering its presuppositions, cannot be theunderstanding that religion itself provides.

Religious belief is not to be confused with theology, which is theoreticalinquiry into a faith, carried on from within that faith. Religious beliefs canbe theorized and this theorizing can generate a theology, but a theology isneither a religion nor a philosophy of religion. For Oakeshott, theology is anexample of inquiry gone astray through modal incoherence (EM 335n). It isnot, like scientific or historical inquiry, an investigation carried on within thelimits of a distinguishable and provisionally coherent mode of understand-ing. Theology inhabits a no-man’s-land between the conditional theorizingdemanded by the conduct of life and the unconditional theorizing of philoso-phy. Because it begins with certain articles of faith, it necessarily rests onpremises it cannot question. It aspires to a philosophical understanding ofreligious beliefs without having to challenge those beliefs. Therefore, despiteits efforts to transcend practical concerns, theology can never become fullyphilosophical.

From Practice to Human Conduct

Oakeshott’s investigation of practical activity in Experience and Its Modes ispenetrating but abstract. It goes a long way with a few elementary concepts:the ideas of fact and value (what is and what ought to be), of human actionas an effort to reconcile the two, and of the necessary failure of this effort.What it lacks is a detailed analysis of the elements of human action and of thecontexts in which action occurs. Oakeshott provides such an analysis in OnHuman Conduct.

In this work Oakeshott renews the attempt to define practical activity thathe began in Experience and Its Modes and carried on in essays written duringthe 1940s and 1950s, some of which are collected in Rationalism in Politics.But instead of building upon these earlier investigations, Oakeshott makes afresh start. Instead of continuing to treat practice as a mode of experience, heanalyzes human activity as comprising individual performances and the “prac-tices” (plural) they perform. And instead of relying on general ideas like“value” or the distinction between “is” and “ought,” he provides a nuanced


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account of morality and law as practices. These shifts are important in under-standing Oakeshott’s philosophy of the human sciences, for they signal a con-cern to specify the proper subject matter of those disciplines. What are welooking at when we study human beings, their choices and actions, theirideas, artifacts, and institutions? What modes of inquiry are appropriate tounderstanding these things? How are the objects we study related to the cate-gories we use in studying them?

Actions and Agency

The concept of “action” is ill-defined. It encompasses not only bodily move-ments (including speaking) but the internal “movements” that constituteintending, willing, and choosing. And these are in turn related to desiring,believing, knowing, and thinking; to perceiving, sensing, experiencing plea-sure and pain, and so on. We never quite know where to draw the line betweenaction specifically and experience in general. But no matter how we go on todelimit the concept of action, we always start with some inherited ideas aboutwhat it means to be human—ideas that come not only from the theories ofphilosophers, theologians, and cognitive scientists, but from the stories ofparents and poets, journalists and historians, and, at an even more basic level,simply from seeing and hearing, hoping and fearing, deliberating and decid-ing. Because these various levels of understanding are related, our view ofaction can never be “pre-theoretical,” in the sense of being independent ofconclusions about it. But we can attempt to articulate a concept of action thatincludes only its most general features. And an obvious way to do this is tobegin with ordinary experience in what is, ironically, its least general form:our own experience.

Like many other philosophers who have trodden this ground, Oakeshottmoves from our ordinary understanding of action—people making choices insituations that seem to them to demand a response—to conclusions about thecharacter of action and agency. To theorize action—or “human conduct,” asOakeshott’s new vocabulary would have it—is to begin with an identity: “ahuman being responding to his contingent situation by doing or saying thisrather than that in relation to an imagined and wished-for outcome” (OHC32), and to investigate the presuppositions of this identity: a thinking agent, asituation believed by an agent to require a response, deliberation about whichresponse to choose, and a context within which that choice is made consisting


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of prudential, religious, moral, and other practices that are taken account of(or ignored) in choosing and that give meaning to the chosen act.

These presuppositions of human conduct reveal it to be an exhibition ofintelligence. The first presupposition of conduct, accordingly, is a humanbeing whose conscious and self-chosen actions are what the word “conduct”primarily designates. A human being, here, is a “reflective consciousness”(OHC 36), an agent making choices in an understood situation that he or shemight attempt to alter. And the conduct of such a being is “behavior deter-mined, not by nature, but by art” (RP 466). This idea of reflective conscious-ness distinguishes human conduct from behavior defined as a nonreflectivemanifestation of underlying biological or psychological processes, not fromconduct that is unreflective in the sense of being habitual, thoughtless, or irra-tional. This does not mean that to count as “conduct” everything we do or saymust be done or said self-consciously or intentionally. We may not be fullyaware of what we are doing. We may not know, for example, whether we arespeaking grammatically or choosing prudently. But no matter what we do,whether we act deliberately or impulsively, we are responding in a manner wehave learned, and therefore “intelligently,” to a situation as we understand it(OHC 89). The concept of action, in other words, is one that rests on a dis-tinction between intelligent conduct and not-intelligent behavior.

For Oakeshott, “intelligence” is a fundamental ordering category of under-standing, and it is therefore critical in defining the scope of the human sci-ences. Viewed as an expression of intelligence, human conduct is thinking andacting that involves meanings that can be understood and must be learned. Thisis not to say that what we interpret as intelligent activity cannot also be inter-preted in other ways. But to understand human activity as intelligent conductimplies a kind of inquiry that is categorially different from the kind of inquirywe engage in when we explain it as the outcome of a process that does notinvolve intelligence. Oakeshott’s theory of action is incompatible with behav-iorist or other reductionist theories that do not view human action as a choicebetween understood alternatives. An act, understood as an act, that is, as anindividual performance, is what it is because of its meaning to the agent,which is in turn related to meanings defined by the practices upon whoseresources the agent draws. Understood as an act, a homicide can be a crime,an offense against God, an instance of justifiable self-defense, an expression ofanomie, or a horrifying spectacle. It is something we make sense of accordingto recognized conventions and standards of judgment. It is never simply a


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causal outcome, a mere discharge of biological or psychological energy. Tounderstand human action as intelligent choice is, in other words, to under-stand it in a particular way—a way that can, if precisely specified, help us todistinguish the modes in which inquiry into human conduct, understood asconduct, is properly carried on.

Implicit in Oakeshott’s definition of human conduct, then, is a view of itsproper study. As we shall see, by locating human conduct in the category ofintelligence, Oakeshott commits himself to certain conclusions about whatkinds of knowledge are possible in the humanities and social sciences. Aninquiry into human conduct that begins with agents and action cannot, forexample, be a scientific inquiry, if by “science” we mean a way of understand-ing human behavior that looks beneath the surface phenomena (as it regardsthem) of thinking and choosing to discover the biochemical or other processesthat produce these phenomena. It must be a kind of inquiry that does not dis-miss as mere illusion the very things it seeks to explain. This does not meanthat human beings cannot be understood “scientifically,” only that thoseaspects of human activity that involve intelligence and meaning cannot beunderstood in scientific terms. The issue is not one of method but of categor-ial relevance.

To theorize human conduct we must begin with a person who acts: athinking being who can be distinguished from other such beings. Humanconduct understood under the category of intelligence presupposes a “free”self or agent capable of diagnosing a situation and choosing a response. To beable to act at all, is (according to this theory) to exercise a kind of freedom:not freedom from coercion or convention but the sort of freedom withoutwhich talk of agency and choice would be self-contradictory and unintelligi-ble. Oakeshott calls this freedom the “freedom inherent in agency” (OHC37). It is “the ‘freedom’ (so to call it) of which a human being cannot divesthimself or be deprived without temporarily or permanently ceasing to behuman” (VLL 18). Oakeshott at times refers to “free agents” and “free agency,”but the “free” in these expressions is redundant, as is the “human” in humanconduct—we are speaking, here, of conduct as intelligent action and of agencyas intelligence in acting.

The freedom inherent in agency has to do with the conditions intrinsic toaction, not with various conditions that might constrain what an agent cando. It has nothing to do with “autonomy” or “individuality,” which is thequality of being self-directed. The existence of this freedom is not revealed ina person’s success in achieving his or her aims, nor can someone who fails to


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achieve these aims be said to lack it. And it is perfectly compatible with beingconstrained by commands or obligations. The freedom inherent in agency isnot freedom from constraints on choice, but rather “freedom from naturalnecessity” (RP 466). Freedom, as a presupposition of human conduct, is apostulate both of obedience and command, of the slave as well as the master(OHC 235). The only kinds of constraint that reduce agency are those, likephysical compulsion, that push human behavior beyond the limits of intelli-gent action.

According to this view of conduct, I am, as a human being, a consciousindividual intelligence. I have arrived at a certain understanding of myself andmy situation. Whether correct or not, this understanding is something I havelearned and, however unoriginal it may be, it is my own understanding. Mybeliefs, emotions, affections, convictions, and aspirations belong to me andconstitute my identity. My understanding of my own situation leads to actionwhen I find this situation to be unsatisfactory in a way that calls for me torespond. In this sense, therefore, I cannot be said to be an “agent” withrespect to a situation I do not find unsatisfactory or about which I can donothing. When I act, it is because I am unhappy in a particular way that seemsto me to invite a particular response. Because my situation is what it means tome, my actions are the result of my own understanding (even if others judgeit to be a misunderstanding). My action is, therefore, the outcome of an intel-ligent engagement. This intelligence in doing is the “will,” and will is nothingmore than the exhibition of intelligence in acting. The idea that the will is freeis implied by the idea of action, for to act is to choose, and to choose is to exer-cise will (EM 270; OHC 39). And it is proper to call my action “free” becauseit is my own response to my situation, as I understand it: it is an expression ofthe independence I enjoy as a person able to think and choose. Actions, inshort, are choices persons make to remedy what is deficient in their situations,as they understand those situations and their deficiencies, and the meaning orintention of an action lies in that choice.

Conduct, then, presupposes an agent, and agency is “free” (that is, intelli-gent but not necessarily unconstrained) choice and action. But action entails afurther activity: the deliberating we do in choosing an action. Whether self-conscious or subconscious, prolonged or abbreviated, this deliberation, likechoice itself, is presupposed by action. And deliberation, in turn, opens uppossibilities that may lead us to understand our situation in new ways andeven to change our minds about our goals. Because acts are responses tounderstood situations, we deliberate about alternative concrete performances,


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not about alternative ways to attain an independently determined end. In act-ing, we choose not an end, nor a means to an end, but an act with a specificmeaning or intention. Of course, what is achieved may not be what we expect:an agent “may be seeking a satisfaction, but what he chooses is an action” (OHC40), and an action may fail to achieve its end or have unintended conse-quences. Finally, despite appearances, we are not limited to choosing amonggiven alternatives, because we may invent actions as we deliberate: “deliberat-ing is not merely reflecting in order to choose, it is also imagining alternativesbetween which to choose” (OHC 43). There is in every situation an unlimitednumber of choices, each a different act with its own meaning, and none deter-mined by the situation in the sense that no other choice is possible.

Those inclined to deny these propositions may mistake, as necessary deter-minants of action, interests or pressures that may seem compelling but that anagent can in principle resist. A soldier ordered to commit an atrocity mayimagine that he has no choice but to obey the order, but in fact he is free torefuse to comply. He might argue with his superior, shoot him, or run away.The probable consequences of these alternatives might be so grim that itwould be hard to choose them, but they are nonetheless actions the soldiercan consider and might in fact choose. Similarly (to use Oakeshott’s ownexample), a person without money in hand to discharge a debt might decideto pay it in installments, to get money to repay it by refinancing or embezzle-ment, to contest it, or to ask the creditor to forgive it. He might choose tocommit suicide or simply to do nothing. And so on, in ways that are limitedonly by one’s imagination. There is in this analysis of conduct a dash of exis-tentialism, with its conception of the freedom enjoyed by human beings asthe freedom to determine, within wider limits than we ordinarily recognize,one’s own “way of being” by responding to one’s circumstances in self-chosenactions.

For Oakeshott, then, the presuppositions of human conduct include (1)intelligence or reflective consciousness as the definitive criterion of agency;(2) situations regarded as calling for a response and involving an imaginedfuture condition to be achieved by acting; and (3) deliberation and choice aselements of action. But this list is neither definitive nor exhaustive, for there isno fixed number of presuppositions, and those that have been identified canbe analyzed and classified in various ways. Such analyses have generated anentire branch of philosophy, the “theory of action,” concerned with the signif-icance of alternative ways of describing actions, the relationship between theconcepts of action and intention, the criteria for distinguishing acts from their


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consequences, the question of whether reasons for actions can be “causes,”and so forth. And it is clear that these concerns soon lead to others and intoother regions of philosophy. Oakeshott’s discussion of the idea of human con-duct is therefore in no sense a comprehensive exploration of the topic. It mustbe understood as an effort to clarify the assumptions underlying his owninvestigation of the civil condition as a mode of human association. In doingso, he pays particular attention to an aspect or presupposition of human con-duct we have not yet considered: the contextual conditions of action he calls“practices.”

Practices

So far, we have focused on human conduct understood in prudential terms:agents responding to contingent situations by choosing actions intended tobring about desired outcomes. But we must also consider the context in whichsuch choices are made. Part of this context is provided by other agents whoseresponses will affect the consequences of choosing. In acting we not onlyaffect and are affected by other agents indirectly; we also interact with them indirect encounters or transactions. Like actions, transactions between agentsbegin in a diagnosis and end in a new situation for each of the parties. Buttransactions cannot occur unless there are ways for agents to communicatewith one another and procedures by which they can reach agreement. Transac-tions therefore presuppose “more durable relationships between agents whichare not themselves transactions but are the conditional contexts of all suchtransactions” (OHC 54). These more durable relationships are “practices.”

As we have seen, there is an additional reason for giving practices animportant place in any theory of conduct. Unlike behavior, understood as theoutcome of not-intelligent processes, action involves intelligent choice. Philoso-phers sometimes make this point by saying that unlike behavior, action is“meaningful” or that it is the result of beliefs and desires that are “intentional”in the sense that they contain propositions. (The belief that mountaineering isdangerous, for example, contains the proposition “mountaineering is danger-ous.”) It is these propositions, which have meaning and which express whatan agent believes or desires, that make our beliefs and desires, and thereforeour actions, what they are. To explain a bit of repeatable behavior, all we needto know are the conditions under which that kind of behavior is likely tooccur. But to explain an action, which is a particular contingent performance—an agent’s chosen response to an understood situation—we must understand


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what action it is, what distinguishes it as a particular performance, and this inturn requires that we understand what it means to the agent. To explain anaction, in other words, is to be able to interpret it in terms of the agent’s beliefsand desires, for it is these beliefs and desires, these intentions, which make itthe action it is. But as soon as we say this, we must realize that it is not theagent alone who determines the meaning of his actions. Beliefs and desires areideas, and ideas, together with the language in which they are formulated, areshared with other human beings. The meaning of an action, then, depends onshared meanings, and systems of shared meaning are “practices.”

In Experience and Its Modes the word “practice” is used as a synonym for“practical experience,” that is, for everything as it appears in the practicalmode. In On Human Conduct the word “practice” is never used in this way,and we find instead the plural “practices.” But the idea of a practice, as a wayof doing things, a set of understood conventions forming part of the circum-stantial context of action, can be found in Oakeshott’s work long before thepublication of On Human Conduct. It is implicit in the word “tradition” (asin “a tradition of behavior”), which Oakeshott favors in Rationalism in Poli-tics (RP 8–9, 59, 61–62). But even before the publication of that book, Oake-shott was beginning to speak of practices rather than of traditions, for despitehis effort to turn “tradition” into a philosophical term, its utility for this pur-pose, or at least for the purpose of communicating with others, was beingundermined by its ideological connotations. Oakeshott first uses the word“practice,” in the sense of a manner of activity, in a 1958 essay, “On the Activityof Being an Historian,” in which he writes that “a direction of attention, as itis pursued, may hollow out a character for itself and become specified in a‘practice’; and a participant in the activity comes to be recognized not by theresults he achieves but by his disposition to observe the manners of the ‘prac-tice’” (RP 151). A practice, then, is a pattern of conduct emerging from theactions and responses of intelligent agents—doings condensed into ways ofdoing, into habit, custom, skill, prudence, and procedure.

In this new vocabulary, “practical” pertains not to the realm of action ingeneral but only to practices. Oakeshott, noting the ambiguity of the word(OHC 57n), proposes to use it (within the covers of On Human Conduct) tostand only for participation in a practice. One advantage of speaking ofhuman actions as “conduct” rather than “practice” is that it allows us to side-step the obscurities and pretensions that have accumulated around the words“practice” and “practical” and cognates like praxis and “praxeological.” Oake-shott thinks too much has been made (by Hannah Arendt, for example) of


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Aristotle’s distinction between making or fabricating (poiesis) on the onehand, and acting or doing (praxis) on the other12—not because there is nodifference between making, which results in an artifact, and acting, whichmay seek a response in the performances of other agents, but because produc-ing an artefact does not exclude the response of others as a desired outcome: Imay choose to make something that others will buy or praise me for making(OHC 35). Conduct, therefore, includes making as well as acting, or, to put itdifferently, making is a kind of acting that yields, besides various satisfactionsand responses, a fabricated object that is not itself conduct.

Another advantage of the word “conduct” is that it contrasts with “behav-ior” to suggest that we are dealing with intelligent performances: we speak ofthe behavior of an electron but not its conduct. It reminds us that humanconduct can be explained as conduct only by using concepts like deliberationand choice, not concepts like instinct or genetic inheritance. And in this wayof thinking, practices are both the outcome of and the context for intelligentconduct: human inventions that must be understood to be used and must belearned to be understood.

A practice can be understood as a kind of relationship, one “signalled bythe names of the personae concerned” (OHC 57): friends, colleagues, or speak-ers of English, teacher and student, parent and child, doctor and patient, andso on. It a relationship that can be explained, at least in part, by pointing tothe kinds of considerations found in its customs, conventions, or proce-dures—considerations that agents may observe in acting but which they mayalso neglect or violate.

The suggestion that practices are considerations that agents take account ofin acting is easily misunderstood, and Oakeshott is careful to specify what isinvolved in “subscribing” (as he puts it) to a practice. Unlike a particular requestor command (like “please shut the door”), which dictates an actual substantiveperformance even though it may permit a choice of means, a practice “pre-scribes conditions for, but does not determine, the substantive choices and per-formances of agents” (OHC 55). To express this elusive distinction betweendictating particular choices and prescribing conditions to be respected by agentsin choosing, Oakeshott sometimes writes that practices are “adverbial condi-tions” of action or that they “adverbially qualify” performances. A practice willinstruct us to behave lawfully, speak politely, or dress fashionably without speci-fying the actual performances that count as responding adequately to those


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12. Nichomachean Ethics, VI, 4–5.

adverbial conditions. A practice may seem to prescribe particular acts—“wearblack”—but this is an illusion, as those who are the wrong age or live in thewrong city soon discover. Practices, in other words, presuppose and thereforerespect agency: the choice of what to think, feel, say, or do remains with theagent and is not specified by the practice, and the considerations embodied inthe practice are used by rather than imposed on the agent. What we learn inlearning to be able to participate in a practice, then, is “not what to do or say,but the arts of agency” (OHC 59).

The considerations composing a given practice may be expressed in theform of rules, but a practice is not itself a set of rules. What analytic philoso-phers, following Wittgenstein, call “rules” are sometimes more aptly character-ized as “practices.” A rule is the product of an effort to specify the considera-tions composing a practice, and is best understood as an abridgment of thatpractice. Furthermore, rules must be distinguished from argumentative andpersuasive statements (such as advice, requests, pleas, warnings) and fromimperatives (orders, commands, directives, prohibitions). Unlike rules, eachof these is a communication addressed in a particular situation by one personto another; each constitutes a transaction in which an agent seeks a particular,substantive satisfaction. Requests or commands may be authorized or regu-lated by rules (the police, for example, may ask your permission to searchyour house, but they cannot carry out the search without a warrant if yourefuse), but they are not themselves rules. A genuine rule, in contrast, is notaimed at a particular respondent; it does not have a named recipient but a“sphere of concern” or jurisdiction within which it applies (OHC 125). Thus,though one can “obey” a command, one cannot obey a practice, only “sub-scribe” to it.

There are different kinds of practices, different dimensions along whichpractices can vary. Some govern only a narrow range of conduct, others con-stitute a way of life. Some are informal, others elaborately institutionalized orritualistic. A practice can be analyzed into its component practices or com-bined with others to compose a more inclusive practice: Oakeshott’s quaintexample is teaching and scholarship united in the practice of a university.Practices are themselves the outcome of innumerable individual performances,and they are “subject to historic vicissitudes and local variations” (OHC 57).Most are the unplanned by-products of performances aimed at somethingother than establishing a practice, and even practices that are expressly insti-tuted cannot avoid being affected, altered, or even transformed by the actionsto which they relate. Oakeshott’s essays and lectures on the history of political


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thought vividly illustrate the uses to which the concept of a practice (andrelated concepts like a tradition or language of discourse, thought, or conduct)can be put.

Human conduct, then, is the activity of agents responding to situations bychoosing actions in contexts provided by various practices. Of these,Oakeshott is especially concerned with “moral” practices (a subject I explorein Chapter 5). He also considers the implications for the social sciences of thedistinction between understood practices and quantitative generalizations(see Chapters 3 and 4). Here, however, I want to return to the question ofhow conduct, which involves both practices and performances, is related tothe activity of theorizing—in other words, to what is commonly called therelationship between theory and practice. I do not want to suggest that thedistinction between theory and practice is fundamental for Oakeshott: forhim, the idea of modality is more important. But modality has implicationsfor the theory-practice debate that are worth considering.

Theory and Practice

“All thought exists for the sake of action. We try to understand ourselves andour world in order that we may learn how to live.” So begins Collingwood’sSpeculum Mentis, published nine years before Experience and Its Modes.13

Contrast this with Oakeshott’s announcement at the beginning of his ownbook that, though we sometimes look to philosophy for guidance on how tolive, “philosophy is without any direct bearing upon the practical conduct oflife” (EM 1). Some thought is for the sake of action, but authentic philosophyis not. A philosophical inquiry may grow out of some practical concern, butonce under way it has its own concerns and the conclusions it generates arephilosophical, not practical, conclusions. The concerns of philosophy arewholly distinct from those of practice. The same can be said of the relationshipof science and history to practical activity. If we call the concerns of historical,scientific, and philosophical inquiry “theoretical,” not only are theoretical


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13. Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 15. Oakeshott presents theclaim, antithetical to his own, that all understanding is ultimately practical, in these words: “Allthought exists for the sake of action; action is the consummation of experience, and we try tounderstand the universe only in order to learn how to live” (EM 317). The similarity between thissentence and the quoted sentences from Speculum Mentis suggests that Oakeshott is respondingto Collingwood here. For further discussion, see Grant, Oakeshott, 30.

propositions without relevance for practice, and practical judgments theoreti-cally irrelevant, but the effort to combine ideas drawn from one of theserealms with those from the other must end in confusion.

In explaining these provocative claims, Oakeshott attacks the commonview that theory generalizes from practical experience and serves, in turn, as aguide to action. About the “unity of theory and practice” so often asserted bypolitical theorists he is playfully dismissive: “Is not this a somewhat decrepitanimal, hardly able to stand up much less . . . clear a fence with a rider on itsback? Lead it gently to the knacker’s yard.”14 From the standpoint of Oake-shott’s modal theory, the belief that “all thought exists for the sake of action”is a belief within the world of practice about how theorizing and doing arerelated; as such, it merely reinscribes the practical point of view. Its prevalenceis evidence of the power of practical thinking.

In this section I will explore Oakeshott’s account of how practical activity isdistorted by abstract theorizing (an account for which he is famous), but I ammore concerned with the reverse distortion, that of theorizing by practicalconcerns. From the standpoint of philosophy, Oakeshott’s most interestingarguments are those he directs against the asserted ontological primacy of prac-tice, for these arguments, if sound, explain how it is possible to think, evenabout human conduct, in ways that are independent of practical concerns.

In arguing that theory and practice are independent and mutually irrele-vant, Oakeshott reshapes the perennial theme. In On Human Conduct, heredefines the key terms so as to clarify distinctions that the familiar terminol-ogy obscures, distinctions that are also obscure in his own earlier work. As wehave seen, he analyzes the concept of practice into performances (actions) andpractices (activities and expectations that spring from and modify perfor-mances). But he also forswears the words “theory” and “practice,” speakinginstead of “theorizing” (used deliberately as a transitive verb, as in “theorizinghuman conduct,” to emphasize that a theory is not “another thing” but a rein-terpretation of its object) and of “doing” or “conduct.” 15 This new vocabularyis designed to avoid certain recurrent confusions in the theory-practice debate.As Oakeshott observes in an important footnote, the vocabulary of “theorizing”goes back to the ancient Greeks. Its elements are a going-on, a spectacle (thea);


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14. “On Misunderstanding Human Conduct,” Political Theory 4 (1976), 355.15. Oakeshott uses “theorizing” as a transitive verb in a very early work, “A Discussion of

Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy” (unpublished typescript, 1925):“To theorize a thing . . . is to rehearse it in the mind and in so doing to create it again in such away that all its ‘intimae essentiae’ stand out” (49; see also 50).

a spectator concerned to understand what is going on, a theorist (theoros); theactivity of seeking to understand, theorizing (theoria); and what emerges fromthis activity, an understanding or theorem (theorema) (OHC 3n).16

Theorizing, for Oakeshott, is the effort to understand something for itsown sake and not in order to act. This claim can, in one way, be taken as a def-inition of theorizing. But because the claim is precisely what is challenged bythe counter-claim (advanced not only by Collingwood but by a variety ofpragmatists, instrumentalists, Marxists, and critical theorists) that all think-ing, and therefore all theorizing, is for the sake of doing, a definition canhardly settle the question. It can, however, help us frame the question moreexactly. Oakeshott’s seemingly paradoxical claim is that theorizing, includingtheorizing about action, is an autonomous activity not to be confused withacting or with preparing to act. The business of a theorist of conduct is togenerate theorems or propositions about conduct, not to perform or pre-scribe actions (OHC 33). If theorizing and doing involve different modes ofunderstanding, to theorize about doing is not itself “practical.” Clearly, a greatdeal hangs on the meanings we assign to words like “theorizing,” “activity,”and “practical.” Let us try to understand what Oakeshott is getting at by con-sidering some objections against the proposition that theorizing and doingare distinct.

Theorizing as Doing

One objection that springs to mind is that theorizing is itself a kind of activityand therefore belongs to the world of practice. This objection can take differ-ent forms, one of which is that practical experience is not a mode of experi-ence but a necessary feature of human existence and therefore the foundationof all human understanding. A version of this argument can be found in thewritings of pragmatists who hold that ideas are instruments used by humanbeings to satisfy their wants and that all truth is practical truth (EM 264,318–19; OH 20n). Another version of what might be called the “primacy ofpractice” argument is advanced in the traditions of Lebensphilosophie, phe-nomenology, and existentialism—for example, by Heidegger, who holds that


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16. This note condenses material Oakeshott presented to participants in one of his seminarsat the London School of Economics in the late 1960s, some of which is reproduced in Martyn P.Thompson, “Michael Oakeshott: Notes on ‘Political Thought’ and ‘Political Theory’ in the His-tory of Political Thought 1966–69,” Politisches Denken: Jahrbuch 1991 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991),103–19.

practical understanding is “primordial” and inescapable.17 Human beings areborn into a “life-world” of objects, including other human beings, which theyunderstand in relation to themselves and their purposes, and everything theythink or do is governed by these purposes. The “things” we encounter in ordi-nary experience—Heidegger’s favorite example is a hammer—are what theyare in relation to human purposes. They are things we use, or at least under-stand in terms of their use, not objects we observe from a purpose-indepen-dent (“objective”) standpoint. They are experienced as “ready-to-hand,” notmerely “present-at-hand.” Experience, moreover, is shaped by prudential anxi-ety (“care”). All other modes of understanding build upon and extend (orcorrupt) an understanding of the world constituted by practical experienceand concerns. What appear to be distinct modes of understanding (scienceor art, for example) are therefore but “disguised versions” of practical under-standing (OH 10, 20–21). Even philosophy is a kind of prudence, a “self-car-ing” or “extreme existential engagement.”18

Oakeshott suggests that this conclusion—that theoretical understandingremains a mode of practical understanding—awards an unconditionality topractical experience in the face of evidence that it is itself a limited and condi-tional mode of understanding. The conclusion rests on nothing more sub-stantial than the claim (asserted, in different ways, by Descartes, Husserl, andothers) that the objects composing the practical world—unlike those of sci-ence, history, and other kinds of self-conscious or systematic reflection—areexperienced directly or immediately. But experience (sensation, perception,intuition, apprehension) always involves judgment and is therefore never“immediate” (EM 16, 21–26, 252–53). For Oakeshott, no mode of experiencecan be said to be unmediated by thinking and therefore independent of ideas.Practical understanding, like any other mode of understanding, makes senseof experience in terms of its own distinct concerns and ideas. Practical experi-ence may come earliest in the life of a human being—even though “some of


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17. Oakeshott himself in one place remarks that “practice is primordial” (PFPS 6), but bythis he means only that the political practices of a society are more important than the writings ofits political theorists in shaping its understanding of politics because political theorizing is para-sitic on the practices it theorizes. This has nothing to do with Heidegger’s claim that all thinkingis itself originally and inherently practical.

18. Care (Sorge) is an organizing concept in Being and Time. The claim that philosophy, likeall thinking, is a response to the basic existential situation of human beings (Dasein) is implicit inBeing and Time and made explicit in other prewar writings. Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heideg-ger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 172,177.

our earliest experiences are not practical, governed by usefulness, but poeticand governed by delight” (OH 23n)—and it may be universal to humanityand (contingently) necessary for human survival. But this priority, if it has anysignificance, is circumstantial, not logical: practical experience does not pro-vide the raw material out of which other kinds of understanding are con-structed, but is put aside when we think scientifically or in other modallydistinct ways.

Physics, for example, uses concepts that are unrelated to the objects ofeveryday experience. History, properly speaking, is concerned with what hap-pened in the past, not with the present relevance of past events. In everymode of inquiry we interpret what is going on in relation to the conditions(the categories or presuppositions) that define that mode, “unconcerned withwhat previously and in terms of other conditions we may have found there”(OH 24). Each mode supplies its own criteria of factuality, truth, and realityand uses them to construct its own characteristic understanding of what isgoing on. The inevitable result of attempting to transfer ideas from one modeto another is modal confusion.

But even if the notion of “immediate experience” were less problematic,the argument that all modes of experience reduce to practical experience isself-refuting. If theorizing is nothing but doing, then to make this claim(“theorizing is nothing but doing”) is to perform an action, not to state aproposition. To assert the primacy of practice is therefore pointless, for it canonly be “an action performed by the claimant in pursuance of a current practi-cal purpose” (OH 22). It is not a true statement about the world, becausethere are no such statements.

Theorizing is nevertheless unquestionably a kind of doing. A theorist is ahuman being who acts and responds to the actions of other human beings,and therefore “every engagement to understand, whatever its modal condi-tions, is a practical performance” (OH 24). Each such engagement is theactivity of an agent, moved by particular desires and intentions, undertakingone study instead of another, and generating products—books, patents, copy-rights, and the like—that can be bought, sold, used, or destroyed and thatnecessarily take their place in the world of practical objects. But the conclu-sion sometimes drawn from these observations, that “every engagement tounderstand is nothing but a practical activity” (OH 25), is based on a misun-derstanding. Though all activity is practical activity, it does not follow that allknowledge is practical knowledge. A theory is a conclusion (a “theorem”), theproduct of theoretical activity but not itself an action. Theorizing is indeed an


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activity, but, qua theorizing, it is an activity that eventuates in a theorem, notan action. A theorist may conduct a study and publish its results. But theseactivities and objects must be distinguished from the understanding that isachieved or expressed by them. A copy of the Critique of Pure Reason as aphysical object, like Kant’s writing it as a performance, belongs to the worldof practice, but its argument belongs to philosophy. To make an argument isto perform an action, but what is argued, the argument itself, is a theorem,and the activity of the theorist, qua theorist, is to discover theorems, not to per-form the actions of speaking or writing in which these theorems are expounded.And this is true even when the subject of theorizing is practical activity: “thetheorist of conduct is not, as such, a ‘doer’, and the theoretical understanding ofconduct cannot itself be theorized in terms of doing” (OHC 35).

Doing as Theorizing

The objection that there is a necessary unity of theory and practice because the-orizing is a kind of doing is, then, less compelling than it first appears. But anargument linking theory and practice can also be made the other way around:that theory and practice are united because doing is itself a kind of theorizing.Doing or practice, it can be argued, always involves thinking, and becausethinking is what theorizing in essence is, practical activity invariably involvestheorizing. The trouble with this objection, of course, is that it stretches theidea of theorizing, for we do not usually regard “theorizing” and “thinking”as synonyms. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which doing does involve theo-rizing, even on Oakeshott’s definition of theorizing.

As we saw at the end of Chapter 1, Oakeshott uses the term “theorizing” intwo ways: as an inquiry into the implications of a set of ideas whose basic out-lines are treated as given (“conditional theorizing”), and as an inquiry into thepresuppositions of a set of ideas—an inquiry in which what is ordinarily takenas given is now treated as problematic (“unconditional theorizing”). Thesesenses of “theorizing” are reconciled by the qualifying adjectives (conditionalor unconditional) by which they are distinguished: “theorizing” is any inves-tigation, whether of givens or of the presuppositions underlying givens, andthe two forms it can take are shown to be related in that conditional theoriz-ing is a suspension of unconditional theorizing, and unconditional theorizinga departure from conditional theorizing.

With these definitions in hand, let us consider the kind of understandingthat is implicit in practice. In what sense of the term “theorizing” can we say


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that doing involves theorizing? In doing there is always understanding: toidentify a situation as one that requires an action (what should we do now?)is already to have reached an understanding. Moreover, the understandingachieved in this identification may be expressed not merely in a description ofthe situation, or even in a statement about how it should be handled, but inthe performance of an action that is a response to what is going on. Onemight respond to feeling chilled by putting on a sweater, turning up the heat,or making a cup of tea. Or one might respond with an argument (that youshould make the tea because I made it last time), for to speak is to perform anaction. One’s response may follow from a conscious judgment interveningbetween the sensation and the action, but this is not a necessary part of respond-ing, for one might also respond without making a conscious judgment. Doing,in short, not only presupposes but is itself a kind of understanding. Evenwhen it does not involve a deliberate effort to understand, then, doing can beseen as a kind of conditional theorizing, for the appearances composing agiven situation can be “explored in conduct” (OHC 7). It is true that wewould not ordinarily say that we “theorize” simply by acting, but the philoso-pher cannot privilege what we “ordinarily” think and say. Just as knowledgecan be tacit rather than explicitly stated, so the activity of knowing can beinformally rather than deliberately pursued. One can think through a prob-lem without being aware that one is doing so: everyone has had the experi-ence of solving a problem while doing something else.

A more serious difficulty arises when Oakeshott writes that “the under-standing exercised by an agent in conduct is not itself a theoretical under-standing of conduct” because “it is exhibited in the performance of actions,not in the formulation of theorems” (OHC 89). Here he seems to contradictthe claim that theorizing is a way of exploring appearances in conduct. Whathe must be taken to mean, to avoid inconsistency, is that conduct does notinvolve unconditional theorizing because to respond to an identified situa-tion with an action is to treat the identification as unproblematic—that is, toaccept it as given, as being an adequate diagnosis or verdict to be used. To actis not to forget one’s reservations but to put them aside in order to choose, totake the plunge into the swirling river of events. When Oakeshott says, in OnHuman Conduct, that “in ‘doing’ an agent casts off a mooring” and that thebeginning of action is “courage to put out to sea” (OHC 40), we are remindedthat he also describes thinking or theorizing in these terms (OHC 10; RPML152–53). The metaphor is apt for both and simply emphasizes that theorizing isa kind of doing, and doing a kind of theorizing.


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Doing, then, involves a kind of conditional theorizing, for we explore theimplications of our practical knowledge when we respond to a situation withan action. But, as we have seen, theorizing can be conditional in ways that arenot practical in this sense. Historical and scientific inquiry are forms of condi-tional theorizing, for each seeks to comprehend the world within limits that itdoes not itself question: historians, for example, use and therefore do notexamine the idea of the past, while scientists presume the existence of observedregularities and natural laws. The “theorizing” that we engage in when wedraw conclusions from practical experience is simply another kind of condi-tional theorizing.

If, however, we take the conditions (presuppositions) that delimit a partic-ular kind of theorizing and make them the subject of an inquiry—an inquiryin which we query rather than use these conditions, and in which the task weundertake is continually to interrogate the presuppositions of whatever levelof understanding we have achieved—the exploration becomes an exercise ofunconditional theorizing. The claim that doing is not a kind of theorizingmust therefore be qualified: the kind of theorizing we have in mind when wesay that doing is itself theorizing is the limited investigation, the conditionaltheorizing, that is inherent in doing itself. It would include both the “explo-ration in conduct” that occurs whenever we learn from experience and thekind of reflection that goes on when we make prudential, moral, legal, andother kinds of practical judgments and arguments. It would not, however,include the conditional theorizing characteristic of scientific and historicalinquiry as modes of thought, or the unconditional theorizing of philosophyunderstood as an activity limited to examining presuppositions and definingconcepts. Such theorizing is explanatory rather than prescriptive.

The Distortion of Doing by Theorizing

To question the assumptions underlying an activity is to move beyond theconventional understandings that shape it. But that one has acquired a newunderstanding does not mean that this new understanding can be substitutedfor the old. It is an understanding of a different kind and is, for that reason,irrelevant to the concerns that have been left behind. It follows that the “theo-retical” understanding of human conduct that comes from questioning itspresuppositions cannot replace “practical” understanding. Practical activity isdistorted if theoretical knowledge about prudent or moral conduct is con-fused with knowing how to behave prudently or morally. That is why “a phi-


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losophy which pretended to offer something practically useful would be aphilosophy living beyond its means,” and why “we should listen to philoso-phers only when they talk philosophy” (EM 355).19

It is a common mistake, Oakeshott maintains, to regard the knowledgeimplicit in conduct as something less than real knowledge, or to believe thatscientific knowledge offers a better guide to conduct than practical experi-ence. And it is a characteristic mistake of theorists to think that the knowledgeat their disposal qualifies them to instruct those who lack it. Such belief is anillusion: it signals confusion between the presuppositions of conduct itselfand the principles of good conduct, and involves the further mistake of think-ing that good conduct depends on being able to elicit correct performancesfrom explicitly articulated principles (OHC 26). Those who have learnedpractical wisdom—who know how to conduct themselves in activities like sail-ing, child-rearing, or scientific research—are like the cave-dwellers in Plato’sallegory (interpreted here most anti-Platonically by Oakeshott), who are will-ing to acknowledge the cleverness of one who has been outside the cave, butrightly doubt the relevance of the returned traveler’s new ideas to “the realworld” in which they live. “What the cave-dwellers resent is not the theorist,the philosopher . . . but the ‘theoretician,’ the philosophe, the ‘intellectual;’ andthey resent him, not because they are corrupt or ignorant but because theyknow just enough to recognize an impostor when they meet one” (OHC30–31).

The lesson of the cave (as Oakeshott understands it) can be generalized, forit is not only philosophy that is misapplied in practical life but also the condi-tional theorizing of scientific or historical inquiry. Science and history are justas likely as philosophy to distort conduct if their conclusions are taken out ofcontext and imported into the world of doing.

To apply “science” to conduct implies a misunderstanding of both domains,for though science and practice are forms of conditional theorizing, they reston different assumptions. When we apply scientific knowledge in making prac-tical choices, we are not, as such, engaged in scientific theorizing. Science andpractice are shaped by different aims, concepts, and presuppositions and there-fore generate different worlds of fact, truth, and reality. A scientist may bemotivated by practical concerns, but genuine science (which must not be con-fused with technology) emerges only when scientific thinking frees itself from


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19. Oakeshott makes a similar point in a review of Hans Driesch, Ethical Principles in The-ory and Practice, Journal of Theological Studies 32 (1931), 327.

the assumptions underlying such concerns. Science, as a mode of understand-ing, presupposes a world of abstract relations whose truth is independent ofhuman concerns, not the world of concrete objects that is the context of humanactivity. To the degree that chemistry, physics, or economics are really sciences,they have, qua science, no bearing at all on human conduct: the scientific ideasthat seem relevant to practice are no longer scientific ideas, properly—that is,modally—speaking, for they have been removed from the abstract world of sci-entific generalizations and have turned into crude practical analogies.

The view that science “works,” that it actually has practical utility, is basedon a misunderstanding of the relationship between scientific knowledge andpractical activity. Riding a bicycle may illustrate the principles of mechanics,but bike riders do not “apply” these principles, and skill in riding a bike is notto be confused with being able to explain them. A knowledge of physics mayhelp us grasp the motions involved in cycling, but it is useless in mastering theskill: scientific principles “belong to a separate performance, the performanceof explaining” (VLL 53). It may seem as though we use scientific conclusions todevelop new medicines, build bridges, or put satellites in orbit. But the “sci-ence” that is used in technology is not the pure or theoretical science that is theparadigm of science as a distinct mode of inquiry and understanding.

What is applied is never science in this modal sense. What actually haseffects and can sometimes produce a desired result in practice is not a scien-tific theory itself but the way we use that theory. Because this use is a series ofactions, what is going on when we apply a theory is not theory affecting prac-tice but practice affecting practice. What we actually use is not a scientific the-ory, a set of abstract and explanatory theorems, but an adaptation (of practicalbut not scientific interest) of these theorems to the contingencies that con-cern us. If a practical problem involves new or arcane knowledge, it mayappear to be one for the scientist rather than the practitioner. But a person whodesigns nuclear weapons is, in that capacity, engaged in the same kind of inquiry,modally speaking, as one who makes a pipe bomb. When we apply what weknow about how objects behave or how processes can be controlled in a givenpractical situation, we identify certain effects as “results,” others as “miscalcu-lations,” “side-effects,” or “unintended consequences.” These expressions rep-resent practical, not scientific judgments. A concept like causation plays a verydifferent role in practical efforts to forecast the weather or to determine tortliability than it does in scientific theorizing. The scientist who turns to solvinga practical problem is no longer engaged in “science” as a mode of inquiry. To


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solve the practical problem, he or she uses ideas that belong to practical activ-ity—not scientific theories but their practical analogues.

What can be said about the irrelevance of science to practical activity canalso be said about history. Historical understanding appears to affect practicallife when historical experience, or rather what purports to be historical experi-ence, is relied upon in making practical decisions—when, for example, poli-ticians defend a policy as reflecting the lessons of history (EM 316). But whenwe invoke the past in this manner, we are not learning from history; we areengaging in a “retrospective politics” in which events are resurrected todeliver a message regarding our own concerns. The historical past has no suchmessages for us: historical events “have no over-all pattern or purpose, leadnowhere, point to no favored condition of the world and support no practicalconclusions” (RP 181–82). The imagined past to which we look for guidanceis not the complicated, problematic past of authentic historical inquiry but apast of “emblematic characters and episodes, abstracted from record in areading which divests them of their contingent circumstances and theirauthentic utterance”—stereotypes that “become available to us, not in a pro-cedure of critical inquiry but merely in being recalled from where they lie,scattered or collected, in the present” (OH 38). This past is a repository oficons and lessons—Moses leading his people to the promised land, Chamber-lain announcing his triumph at Munich—that provide us with a vocabulary ofpractical discourse, not access to an authentically historical past.

Oakeshott’s conclusion that science and history, as modes of understand-ing, are irrelevant to the world of practice follows directly from the idea ofmodality. Each mode is composed of ideas which, because they are defined inrelation to other ideas within that mode, cannot appear in any other. Ideascannot be transplanted from one mode to another, and it is always an illusionto think that one has achieved a successful transplant. The efforts of Marx,who sought to convert the abstractions of economic science first into anexplanation of historical contingencies and then into a program for practicalaction, are an illuminating paradigm of modal confusion and error.20


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20. Oakeshott discusses the Marxist effort to substitute demonstrative truth for judgment inpolitical deliberation in “Political Discourse” (RP 70–95), an essay based on a broadcast talk,“Political Laws and Captive Audiences,” in G. R. Urban, ed., Talking to Eastern Europe (Lon-don: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), 291–301. Another discussion of Marxism is “Official Philos-ophy,” Cambridge Review 56 (1934–35), 108–9.

As Oakeshott puts it with respect to aesthetic experience, “contemplativeactivity is never the ‘conversion’ of a practical or a scientific image into a con-templated image; its appearance is possible only when practical and scientificimagining have lost their authority” (RP 514–15). In practical activity we donot use, borrow, apply, convert, or reconstruct scientific, historical, or poeticimages. Rather, those images are superseded by practical images which, eventhough they appear the same, are images of a different kind because they obeydifferent rules. If this point is hard to grasp, it is because we are not used tothinking of science or history in modal terms—the “science” and “history”that seem so readily applicable to practical life are already themselves depart-ments of practical activity, not genuine history or science. In practical activity,the impulse of scientific or historical inquiry is suspended, not extended; todo something, in the sense of engaging in thinking that eventuates in anaction rather than in a theorem, is to put aside the concerns of the scientist orhistorian for those of the engineer or social reformer, to lay down the theo-rist’s tools and take up the practitioner’s.

These modal distinctions help us to grasp how conduct is distorted by the-orizing, whether it takes the form of scientism, historical mythologizing, orthe spurious practical wisdom of the political theorist. Oakeshott’s name forthe distortion of practical activity by the misguided effort to apply what lookslike useful theory is “Rationalism.” His account of the Rationalist style ofthinking in Rationalism in Politics, his best-known book, anatomizes the typ-ically (though perhaps not uniquely) modern disposition to reduce practicalreasoning to rules of conduct. These rules are often thought to be the result ofscientific, historical, or philosophical inquiry, but they are really distillationsof practical activity.21

Rationalism is a disposition to reject habit and convention, to privilege“reason” over experience. And for the Rationalist, reason means technique(RP 16). Rationalism rests on the premise that real knowledge of humanactivity is knowledge that can be stated clearly and converted into methods orrules, that is, into technical knowledge. Implicit in the Rationalist conception


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21. Because Oakeshott’s concern with “Rationalism” is usually identified with the essaysdating from the late 1940s and the 1950s that he published as Rationalism in Politics, it is worthnoting that the theme of Rationalism (and even the word itself, with a lower-case “r”) makes abrief appearance in an essay that antedates Experience and Its Modes: “The New Bentham,”Scrutiny 1 (1932–33), 114–31, now easily consulted in the expanded 1991 edition of Rationalism inPolitics. A rationalist is defined there as one who “believes that what is made is better than whatmerely grows, that neatness is better than profusion and vitality” (RP 139).

of knowledge is a rejection of any understanding that is traditional rather thanreflective: knowledge that cannot be formulated in rules and that exists onlyin use (RP 12). Technical knowledge is “information,” facts that can be easilylearned, recalled, and applied; traditional knowledge, in contrast, resides inthe kind of expertise or judgment that can only be acquired and used by par-ticipating in a practice.22 Oakeshott has been criticized for rejecting the use-fulness of technical knowledge, but this is a mistake. For Oakeshott, practicalactivity often calls upon technical knowledge, which is a distillation of tradi-tional knowledge, as well as upon traditional knowledge itself. What it cannotdispense with is experience, “know-how,” and a feel for the traditions within(and against) which judgment, skill, and even creativity are exercised. Allrequire a practitioner to move beyond the narrow realm of explicitly formu-lated principles.

For Oakeshott, practical wisdom in the exercise of prudence or moraljudgment does not depend on the existence of rules from which an agent canobtain instruction about what to do. There are such rules, but they cannot bemechanically applied because it takes more than an understanding of the rulesto put them into practice. You have to know how to fly an airplane to makesense of a flight manual: you not only have to know the rules but also how touse them, how to “illustrate them in conduct,” and there are no rules for howto do this.

Oakeshott’s point is a familiar one. Kant, for example, holds that to judgeis to subsume a particular under a universal, to see it as an instance of a gen-eral rule. But judgment cannot be reduced to rules, for it still requires judg-ment to apply the rules of judgment. It follows that judgment must be learnedthrough experience.23 An agent may seize upon an explicit rule or principlefor guidance in some situation, but, Oakeshott insists, “he cannot engage inthis operation until he has chosen his principle and there is no principle to tellhim how to do this; and since all such principles are equivocal, it will providehim neither with a reason for acting nor with a response to his situation.Moral and prudential principles may indirectly illuminate the theater of con-duct, but they can neither direct nor ‘justify’ an adventure of doing” (OHC 91).


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22. In Rationalism in Politics, Oakeshott often calls the latter “practical knowledge,” but Ihave not used that expression here to avoid confusing practical (that is, traditional) knowledgewith the mode of practice (which includes traditional as well as technical knowledge).

23. Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, but it does notApply in Practice,’” in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings, 2d ed. (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991), 61.

The rules of an activity are like the grammar of a language; to know how touse a rule, one must already know how to speak this language. “It is only infantasy that . . . to understand [a practice] is to know one’s way around a rule-book” (OHC 91).24

Oakeshott’s conception of rationality in conduct should now be clear. Wecome to understand an activity by practicing it and therefore learning how it isdone. The rules we abstract from a particular practice, and which seem to gov-ern it, are in fact abridgments of the practice itself and neither exist in advanceof nor govern it (RP 121). We act rationally not by “applying” rules to conduct,but by learning from experience. Experience is necessary not only as a sourceof the ideals, purposes, rules, and precepts that may be abstracted from practi-cal activity, but in making use of these abstractions. To know how to conductoneself in an activity is always to know more than can be stated in the form ofrules. Rationality in conduct, then, involves faithfulness not to the rules thatmay be abstracted from an activity but to the activity itself and to our knowl-edge (which we cannot always formulate as rules) of how to conduct our-selves. It involves a kind of knowledge or capacity that is “capable of carryingus across those wide open spaces . . . where no rule runs” (VLL 54).

A chief mistake of Rationalism is to assume that conduct is only rationalwhen it is guided by “theory,” that is, by general ideas that we can formulateas propositions or laws. Because no activity is ever fully coherent, theorizingcan help to reveal its incoherence. But the insight we acquire as a result of the-orizing is already one that has been removed from its context. If practicalideas are abstracted from the activities they guide, the mistake is not serious,for it amounts to forgetting that such ideas can only be used by those whopossess experience in that activity. If, however, one tries to carry on an activityaccording to ideas belonging to a different practice, one faces a graver prob-lem, for what makes sense in one practical context may be inappropriate inthe other. In fact, alien ideas can only be used by being “reinvented” withinthe practice at hand. And if the ideas to be used belong not only to a differentactivity but to a different mode of understanding, then a radical transforma-tion will be required to achieve the illusion of relevance.


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24. Noël O’Sullivan argues that, for Oakeshott, Rationalism is self-contradictory because itdenies the premise of action itself, which is a gap between is and ought. The Rationalist “fails to rec-ognize the inevitability of this gap, persisting in the foolish attempt to achieve a once-and-for-allunification of the ideal and the actual.” Noël O’Sullivan, The Problem of Political Obligation (NewYork: Garland Press, 1987), 233. On this interpretation, religious experience (as Oakeshott under-stands it in “Religion and the Moral Life” or Experience and Its Modes) is inherently Rationalist.

The biggest gap of all is the gap between unconditional (philosophical) the-orizing and the kinds of conditional knowledge required in the conduct of life.To attempt to extract practical guidance from an authentically philosophicalunderstanding of practical activity is to treat what is philosophically problematicas if it were established. In making practical use of a philosophical concept, oneis not applying a theory; one is constructing a practical analogue, an ideology,and applying that. Where political theory is understood as applied philosophy,Oakeshott suggests, what is applied is not “theory” but a form of practice. As heputs it in reviewing Walter Lippman’s The Public Philosophy, political theories ofthis kind are best viewed as “conduct itself in another idiom.”25 Political philoso-phy can only yield conclusions that are relevant to practical politics if reflectionis subordinated to politics. “Where there is genuine philosophy there can be noguidance; if we seek guidance, we must ‘hang up philosophy’” (RPML 155).Philosophical theorizing disappears when its definitions and theorems are putto use where they have no proper business to perform.

Moral philosophers have long sought to identify the most general principlesunderlying particular moral rules and the judgments based on them—the prin-ciple of the mean, “the Golden Rule,” the categorical imperative, the principleof utility, and so forth. But, properly understood, these principles are not them-selves moral precepts; they are the product of efforts to systematize a receivedbody of moral ideas. Appearances notwithstanding, they do not provide a cri-terion by which particular, contingent acts may be judged morally right or wrong,nor is knowledge of them required to act morally (VLL 53). They are philo-sophical definitions of right and wrong, criteria for identifying whether a par-ticular precept is or is not a moral precept, not themselves precepts of conduct.Yet the literature of “normative” or “applied” ethics is full of efforts to extractprescriptions from what are, philosophically speaking, essentially definitionalor explanatory principles. To do this is to do philosophy in a way that under-mines the activity, and it is to this side of the question that I now want to turn.

The Distortion of Theorizing by Doing

Paralleling the error of Rationalism is a converse and equally destructive mis-take: the disposition to allow theorizing to be governed by practical concerns.


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25. “The Customer Is Never Wrong,” Listener 54 (1955), 302, now reprinted in Religion,Politics, and the Moral Life. That Oakeshott’s view of philosophy as conceptual criticism resem-bles that of the “ordinary language philosophy” of the 1950s has often been noted.

Oakeshott’s conviction that understanding languishes under the tyranny ofpractice is evident as early as 1925, when he wrote (in a fit of practical fervor)that “we shall never discover the secret of the self or of anything else, if we arenot prepared to go beyond the conceptions which are necessary for practicalconduct” (RPML 52). Art, he suggests a few years later, is especially suscepti-ble to damage by practical demands. It is separated from “the world” notbecause it has nothing to contribute to but because “to be free from the worldis the condition of [its] contribution” (RPML 96). Scientific inquiry, too, iscompromised by a failure to exclude extraneous concerns: from the standpointof science, the practical utility or moral acceptability of its conclusions is irrel-evant. Oakeshott’s arguments for the independence of theorizing from practi-cal life become progressively more nuanced as the years go by, but he neverabandons his commitment to resisting efforts to reduce all voices in the con-versation of mankind to the voice of practical being, of which Heidegger’sself-absorbed Dasein is but an extreme example.

Oakeshott argues the case for the autonomy of theorizing most fully inrelation to two inquiries that are central to human understanding: history andphilosophy.

Historical inquiry yields a distinct kind of understanding, and this distinct-ness is itself a historical achievement. Historical inquiry has suffered fromrecurrent attempts to define it as the explanation of events on the basis ofgeneral laws—attempts that are motivated by a wish to reduce history to abranch of science but that display an inadequate understanding of both sci-ence and history. It has been even harder to free history from the influence ofpractical concerns. Oakeshott’s criticism of E. H. Carr’s account of theBolshevik Revolution illustrates the theme: the tendency, especially pro-nounced in the study of contemporary history, to write history backwards,siding with the victors in historical struggles, ignoring lost causes, andemploying moral and political ideas to frame historical interpretations.26 Inhis essays on the character of historical inquiry, Oakeshott attempts to distin-guish the past as it is understood by historians (“the historical past”) from thepast as it is seen in practical activity (“the practical past”). He argues that his-tory emerges as an autonomous mode of inquiry and understanding onlywhen these two conceptions of the past are clearly differentiated.27


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26. “Mr. Carr’s First Volume,” Cambridge Journal 4 (1950–51), 350.27. Oakeshott’s extends his discussion of how practical concerns distort historical inquiry,

initiated in Experience and Its Modes, in “The Activity of Being an Historian” (RP 151–83), “Pre-sent, Future, and Past” (OH 1–44), and many book reviews.

The practical past is a past that corresponds to a present world of practicalexperience. The world of practice is the world of present activity, but pastevents are often relevant to this world and we can, therefore, have a practicalinterest in them. In the practical mode we are not interested in what an eventmight once have signified or in what it can tell us about another time andplace, but only in its present significance. A lawyer, for example, is (qualawyer) interested in a will only for its present consequences, and may be saidto have a practical attitude toward all such evidence of past events. And ingeneral we are interested in artifacts, records, stories, memories, and othersurvivals not as evidence from which to reconstruct a world that has disap-peared but because we can use them to make sense of our own identities andpredicaments (OH 16–18). Our living, practical present in this way generates aparallel conception of the past, the practical past. “We call upon the past tospeak to us in utterance related to the present; and what appears is a practicalpast” (RP 162). This practical past is constructed according to demands aris-ing in the present world of practical life, not according to the principles of his-torical scholarship.

Because the world of practical experience is so compelling, we find it diffi-cult to see “historically” any past event, person, situation, or institution webelieve to be related to our present circumstances or self-understanding. Butwhen we adopt a practical view of the past, we destroy historical understand-ing by substituting for its true object, the historical past, a past imagined interms of present conceptions and concerns. And if, in addition, we insist thatthe practical world is the only “real” world, we must deny the possibility of anindependent historical past, because the only possible past would be a pastexamined for its relevance to present practical concerns. If this is the only pos-sible past, then history as an independent form of inquiry is impossible.

Philosophy, too, is compromised when it is made to serve practical inter-ests. As we have seen, Oakeshott defines philosophy as the effort to transcendmodal thinking through the never-ending dialectical criticism of presupposi-tions. It is the activity of unconditional theorizing. This conception of philos-ophy implies its separation from, rather than continuity with, other kinds oftheorizing. Authentic philosophy comes into existence only when theorizingposits, as a principle of inquiry, a refusal to proceed on the basis of founda-tional assumptions, insofar as these can be identified. Such assumptions aremade in historical inquiry, in the sciences, and in practical activity for the sakeof getting on with the task of understanding what can be understood withinthe limits of those assumptions. But in philosophy, to accept such limits is toabandon dialectical criticism for other concerns.


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Because it must, by definition, question conclusions reached in other modesof inquiry, philosophy cannot find its own foundation in these conclusions.And this means that it cannot accept, as the criterion of its validity, that itshould correspond to common sense or to any other form of practical experi-ence. A political philosophy, for example, is often understood to be a rea-soned system of ideas (an ideology) corresponding to the facts of political lifeand providing guidance for political activity. But to hold this view of politicalphilosophy is to accept a nonphilosophical criterion of philosophical ade-quacy. It is, absurdly, “to suggest that a fully thought-out concept must con-form to a concept which we have not troubled to think out at all” (RPML136). If we view political theorizing as inherently practical, we are forced tochoose between its being philosophical and its being “true.” The argumentthat political theory should mirror the generally accepted “facts” of politicallife and that it should, on the basis of these facts, prescribe ends for politicalaction implicitly asserts the nonphilosophical character of such theory. In phi-losophy, “the criterion is never conformity with our ordinary view of the mat-ter” (RPML 135).28

Philosophy assumes its distinctive character only when it is purged ofmodal concerns, including, above all, “an extraneous desire for action” (EM1). But this is least likely to occur when action itself is the subject of philo-sophical inquiry. The confusion between philosophy and practice—betweenthinking philosophically about practice and thinking practically—is greatestwhen the philosopher deals with morality, law, and other aspects of practicallife. Moral and political philosophy are subjected to incessant demands thatthey contribute to the solution of practical problems or that they reflect (ornot reflect) this or that practical attitude.

Though he qualifies it in various ways, Oakeshott never abandons the viewthat “a philosophy of practical experience” can have nothing in common with“a so-called practical philosophy” (EM 249), and that practical concerns are


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28. Oakeshott criticizes Locke for confusing practice with philosophy by making commonsense the criterion of philosophic truth. Locke’s Second Treatise, he suggests, is not a work thatarticulates a theory of politics but “a work of ‘political theory’—the questionable enterprise ofrecommending a political position in the idiom of general ideas.” Locke, one of the more skilledof such political moralists, “recognizes no firm distinction between explanation and prescrip-tion; he moves, often inadvertently, between these two disparate worlds of discourse, giving aspurious air of principle to his recommendations and a false suggestion of practical applicabilityto his explanations—exactly the sort of work to make a profound impression upon mankind.”Review of P. Laslett, ed., Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Historical Journal 5 (1962), 100.See also “John Locke,” Cambridge Review 54 (1932–33), 72.

irrelevant to philosophy, where their propensity to “obtrude” is merely a dis-traction.29 When we fail to separate thinking about practice from practicalthinking, when we bring into philosophy considerations that belong to prac-tical activity, we invite confusion. Oakeshott calls the understanding thatresults from this mixture of inquiries “pseudo-philosophy.” Although this epi-thet reflects a polemical intent, the argument behind it is of more than merelyhistorical interest.

To understand what Oakeshott means by “pseudo-philosophy” one mustkeep in mind that in Experience and Its Modes he does not see philosophy as amode: a limited, conditional manner of theorizing. What he understands inthis book to be authentic philosophy is what he later calls “unconditional the-orizing,” the criticism of modal postulates. Pseudo-philosophical theorizing,in contrast, is theorizing that proceeds partly within and partly outside agiven mode of inquiry. Ethics, for example, goes beyond making practicaljudgments to examine general principles, but it has not abandoned its practi-cal aims and therefore remains bound by the assumptions of practical activity.Ethics seems philosophical because it criticizes received ideas of right and wrong.But insofar as it insists on remaining practically relevant, it cannot be fullyphilosophical. By subordinating itself to the demands of practical life, by plac-ing the search for usable “truth” above the criticism of presuppositions, itbrings its investigations to premature closure and in doing so fails to earn thetitle “moral philosophy.”

Because it falls short of modal autonomy, a pseudo-philosophical inquiry isnecessarily indeterminate. A mode of inquiry has an identity even if its coher-ence is only provisional. But an indeterminate inquiry lacks a specific identityand so cannot achieve even the conditional coherence of a mode (EM 332).Because they mix practical and philosophical concerns, ethics and political the-ory not only exhibit the kind of practical error Oakeshott calls “Rationalism,”they fail to achieve the fully dialectical character of authentic philosophy.

To make moral judgments or to rationalize them into a system of princi-ples is to use moral ideas, not to identify and criticize their presuppositions.Arguments that are relevant in moral theorizing are not relevant to theorizingabout morality because they rest on different assumptions. Either activity canbe pursued alone, but they cannot be combined because the second questions


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29. In relation to other modes, the alleged priority of practical understanding is “obtrusive,not intrusive” (OH 24). That is, practical thinking does not enter into (intrude upon) otherkinds of thinking but pushes them away.

what the first takes as given. If moral philosophy is to achieve coherence, it mustgive up one or the other of these concerns. And without question, Oakeshottmaintains, what it should give up is the effort to recommend ends and to pre-scribe conduct, the effort to “organize, integrate and complete our world of val-ues and to apply its conclusions to our conduct of life” (EM 340). A genuinephilosophy of moral life provides “not a moral judgment about which of manyends is preferable, but a purely logical judgment about which of many analysesis true” (RPML 125). If ethics is to be concerned with prescribing ends, it canavoid confusion only by severing its connection with philosophy. To do this,however, would be “to abandon . . . what is strong and disciplined in the ethicaltradition for what is merely popular and pedantic” (EM 340). It would be, ineffect, to surrender the effort to understand moral judgment and conduct. Andthe same, of course, can be said of political theory.30

The most common objection made to this sort of conclusion—by Marxagainst Hegel, for example, by Nietzsche and Foucault, by Habermas againstGadamer, and by many other critics of morality, patriarchy, liberalism, law,science, and culture itself—is that understanding itself requires criticism ofthe social structures within which knowledge is produced. Such critics explainreceived understandings, from the theories of science to the presuppositionsof ordinary lived experience, as ideologies, rationalizations, or discourses ofoppression. But they hold open the possibility that we can achieve, throughcriticism, knowledge that achieves an acceptable standard of science, rationalself-understanding, or undistorted communication. Theory must be critical,and this means that its concerns are never purely theoretical; they are andshould be practical. To hold that theory and practice are distinct, the criticaltheorist argues, is to ignore the distorting effects of power in the constructionof knowledge, especially in those disciplines that are directly concerned withpractical life. But this is not an objection to the distinction between theoriz-ing and doing, as Oakeshott has formulated it. What is being claimed for criti-cal theory is not that moral philosophy is indistinguishable from moralizing,


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30. Many commentators on Oakeshott have noticed similarities between his views on theautonomy of philosophy and those expressed by Hegel in section 23 of The Philosophy of Right.But Oakeshott does not rely on Hegel for arguments condemning the reduction of political phi-losophy to “normative theory,” nor does he subscribe to Hegel’s historicist view of philosophy as“its own time comprehended in thought.” For a rare contemporary effort to defend the philo-sophical in political theorizing, see Jeremy Waldron, “What Plato Would Allow,” in Ian Shapiroand Judith Wagner DeCew, eds., Theory and Practice, Nomos 37 (New York: New York Univer-sity Press, 1995), 138–78.

but that it is distorted by considerations of interest and power. The linkbetween theory and practice that is asserted is a contingent, not a conceptualone. But it is the latter, not the former, that Oakeshott is concerned to deny. Toargue that all theorizing is “distorted” by practical interests is in fact to agreewith Oakeshott’s argument that theoretical knowledge and practical concernsare distinct. It implies at least the notional possibility of undistorted knowl-edge, knowledge determined by considerations other than practical ones.

The main defense of the “unity of theory and practice” in moral and politicalthinking is one we have already considered: that efforts to understand practicalexperience and practical understanding speak to and depend upon one anotherbecause they are, in the end, the same kind of understanding. They compose acommon world of discourse. But there is no reason why we cannot study prac-tical judgments in such a way as to generate knowledge that is categorially dis-tinct from those judgments themselves; no reason why we cannot ignore theprescriptions of a morality and reflect upon its character. Such reflection is “theengagement of a moral philosopher as distinct from that of a moralist” (OH133). Oakeshott’s understanding of this engagement, perhaps because it is dis-tant from the current self-understanding of moral and political philosophers,helps to illuminate one of the hazards of their enterprise.


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Understanding in the Human Sciences

Oakeshott’s efforts to theorize human conduct rest on the conclusion, exploredin the preceding chapter, that conduct can be understood in ways that do notinvolve the kind of understanding required in conduct itself. Theorizing,though a practical activity, can generate knowledge that is not itself practical.Unlike those who assert the inherently practical character of knowledge, andespecially knowledge of human conduct, Oakeshott thinks reflection can bedetached from practical concerns and acquire a purely explanatory character,and he devotes special attention to two forms that explanatory reflection cantake: scientific and historical inquiry.

From first to last, Oakeshott’s writings reveal a desire to clarify how scien-tific and historical knowledge are related to each other and to other kinds ofknowledge. What are the presuppositions of science and history? Are theyreally distinct? Uniting scientific and historical inquiry under the label “explana-tory” suggests that the two can be seen as aspects of a single explanatorymode, not as categorially distinct, and many philosophers have reached pre-cisely this conclusion. One of the tenets of positivism, for example, is that his-torical explanation is governed by the same logic as explanation in the naturalsciences. But the unity of scientific and historical knowledge is also assertedon the hermeneutic side by those who maintain that all knowledge rests on

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human constructs and involves interpretation. On this view, the natural sci-ences, no less than history, are hermeneutic disciplines. Still another puzzle isthe kind of understanding provided by sociology, linguistics, literary criti-cism, religious studies, and other fields in the humanities and social sciences.Few of these fields fit comfortably within the category of science as defined bythe natural sciences, but neither can they be considered “history” in any straight-forward sense of that term. Where, modally speaking, should we locate thesedisciplines?

In investigating such questions, Oakeshott is following a well-trodden path,so to understand his conclusions it is useful to know something about theircontext. Because he thought about the connections between history, the nat-ural sciences, and other disciplines over a period of many years, and becausehe read widely in the history of philosophy, this context is both vast and inde-terminate. But we can understand much about Oakeshott’s philosophy of thehuman sciences by locating it within a debate that has been going on since themiddle of the nineteenth century (and which has, of course, its own antecedents)over the grounds on which the study of human beings can be distinguishedfrom the study of nature. In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott analyzes thepresuppositions of science as a distinct kind of inquiry and defends the effortsof psychologists and economists to develop a science of human behavior,although he also criticizes the modal ambiguity of many such efforts. And inOn Human Conduct he explores how, even on the premise that all inquiryinvolves interpretation, the natural and the human sciences can be shown tobe categorially distinct.

The Problem of the Human Sciences

With the emergence in the nineteenth century of history as a self-consciousdiscipline, it became possible for philosophers to consider the epistemologicalstatus of historical inquiry and its relation to the natural sciences. Their inves-tigations were complicated, however, by the ill-defined character of both his-tory and science. “History” stood not only for the rigorous study of the pastbut for many other inquiries into human behavior, beliefs, customs, artifacts,and institutions—inquiries that by the end of the century were being identi-fied collectively as the “historical,” “human,” or “cultural” sciences, and thattoday are divided between the “humanities” and the “social sciences.” And “sci-ence” meant not only the study of nature but any inquiry that sought general


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and systematic knowledge, no matter what its subject matter might be.Philosophers were aware of Aristotle’s dismissal of history, with its concern forparticulars, as inferior to poetry, which expresses universal truths—a dismissalechoed in Schopenhauer’s charge that history cannot be scientific because sci-ence generalizes and history does not. Many of them, impressed by theachievements of the natural sciences, regarded these sciences as the model of allknowledge that deserves the name. The problem for those who rejected this“positivism” was to demonstrate the possibility of a distinctly historical formof knowledge that could be made coherent in its own terms. Drawing inspira-tion from Vico, Goethe, Herder, and Kant, the antipositivists sought to iden-tify criteria by which history and other disciplines concerned with humanactions and accomplishments could be distinguished from the natural sciences.

Positivism, in this context, is the claim that human behavior can be explainedin the same way that nonhuman phenomena are explained within the naturalsciences, that is, on the basis of knowledge derived by induction from observ-able facts and expressed in the form of general laws. This claim is central tothe arguments of Auguste Comte, who coined the term “positivism,” and J. S.Mill, whose defense of the methodological unity of the natural and the “moral”sciences (as he called the study of human behavior) provoked Dilthey and oth-ers to develop alternative theories of the human sciences— and, a century afterits publication, still provided a point of departure for Winch, Gadamer, andother hermeneutic critics of the positivist program.1 Defending what has cometo be called the “covering law model” or “deductive-nomological explanation,”positivism determined the agenda of debates about the philosophy of historyand the social sciences in the middle of the twentieth century. It underlies thebehaviorist and rational choice movements within the social sciences and theeven more ambitious programs of sociobiology and cognitive science. Thatthose who defend the autonomy of the humanities still march under the ban-ner of antipositivism is further evidence of positivism’s resilience.

One of the first to respond to the positivist attack was the German histo-rian J. G. Droysen. Like his famous contemporary Ranke, Droysen wanted tojustify the autonomy of the emerging discipline of historical studies, and hedid so by arguing that history and nature required categorially different kindsof understanding. And like Hegel, whose philosophy of history influenced hisown, Droysen followed Kant in distinguishing the natural and the human


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1. John Stuart Mill, The Logic of the Moral Sciences (London: Duckworth, 1987), first pub-lished in 1843 as the sixth book of Mill’s A System of Logic.

realms—the “starry heavens above and the moral law within,” the first a realmof necessity, the second of freedom. Both history and nature must be under-stood empirically, but the methods of historical inquiry are not those used inthe natural sciences. Historical inquiry constructs a coherent body of knowl-edge on the basis of its own specific presuppositions, continually correctingand enlarging that knowledge through the critical examination of historicalevidence. History is a science not because it emulates the ideas and methodsof the natural sciences but because it is a disciplined way of representing itsown distinctive subject, the historical past. The historian’s task, then, is toarticulate a method that, however different it may be from the method of thenatural sciences, is no less scientific.2

The ensuing debate over the character and autonomy of historical inquirycentered on two criteria for distinguishing the human from the natural sci-ences. The first is that the human sciences are distinguished by their focus onindividuals. The idea of the individual is central to nineteenth-century Ger-man historical thinking. “Individuality,” which refers to things of any kind andnot only to human beings, is a recurrent theme from Goethe and Humboldtat the beginning of the century to Dilthey and Meinecke at its end. It seemedevident to historians that their subject matter was the deeds of individual per-sons and the character of individual events, institutions, nations, and cultures.The proposition that the natural sciences are distinguished from history andthe human sciences by their different attitudes toward individuality receivedits canonical statement in Windelband’s suggestion that the natural sciencesare “nomothetic,” the historical sciences “ideographic.”3 The empirical sciences,Windelband argues, can be divided into those concerned with generalizationsabout recurrent phenomena, which they seek to formulate as laws of nature,and those concerned with the unique character of individual occurrences,which they seek to describe. The distinction between the natural and the his-torical sciences, then, is that the former provide knowledge by framing gen-eral laws, the later by describing particular events. Windelband rejects the viewthat the natural and the human constitute different subject matters, arguingthat psychology, as a nomothetic discipline, must be classed among the nat-ural sciences.


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2. Johann Gustav Droysen, Outline of the Principles of History, trans. E. Benjamin Andrews(Boston: Ginn, 1893).

3. Wilhelm Windelband, “History and Natural Science,” trans. Guy Oakes, History andTheory 18 (1980), 175. Another translation is in Theory & Psychology 8 (1998), 5–22. This is Windel-band’s inaugural address as rector of the University of Strasbourg in 1894.

Critics of the individuality criterion objected that many of the human sci-ences, not excluding history itself, seek to generalize about the objects theystudy. Individuality, they argued, must be distinguished from mere particular-ity. Bradley, for example, suggests that every individual thing is a mixture ofparticularity and generality (a “concrete universal”). And Dilthey, aware thatindividuality involves generality, used the idea not to distinguish the humanfrom the natural sciences but to differentiate between the human sciences.Although all the human sciences are concerned with individual things, somegeneralize by comparing these individuals and others particularize by examin-ing a single individual and its relation to other individuals. For Dilthey, theproblem of defining the human sciences arises not only from their ill-definedboundary, considered as a group, but from their internal diversity. Unlike thenatural sciences, the human sciences do not form a “logically-constituted whole.”Some are generalizing, others are individualizing, and all reflect a diversity ofconcerns arising from their connection with practical life.4

The other criterion of demarcation that emerged in the nineteenth-centurydebate is that the human sciences are distinguished from the natural sciences inthat they are concerned with mind, not matter. To deal with the objection thatpsychology, though concerned with mind, is closer in its aims and accomplish-ments to physics than to history, defenders of the human sciences distin-guished the study of mental processes, which can be explained in terms ofgeneral laws, from the study of mental content—beliefs, desires, arguments,and ideas, which must be understood in terms of their individual characteris-tics to be identified at all, even if one goes on to compare and contrast themonce they have been defined. The required distinction is between psychologi-cal and hermeneutic understanding. Droysen, for example, gives a psycholog-ical interpretation of understanding (Verstehen) as a procedure for makingsense of the experience of other human beings by evoking one’s own innerexperience, and he identifies “the method of understanding” as the method ofthe historical sciences. But he is also aware that because each person’s experi-ence goes on within, and is therefore structured by, an inherited world ofideas, “psychological interpretation” must be supplemented by “the interpre-tation of ideas.”5 Dilthey reaches a similar conclusion: his early writings treat


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4. Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, vol. 1 of Selected Works, ed. RudolfA. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 73. This is a trans-lation of Dilthey’s 1883 work and related unpublished material.

5. Droysen, Outline, 91, 30.

psychology, which he takes to be a discipline concerned with immediate livedexperience, as the foundation of the human sciences. Our present subjectiveexperience, Dilthey later came to think, is determined by our own past experi-ence and by actions and institutions that constitute an objective cultural world.And it is hermeneutics, not psychology, that gives us access to this world.

Dilthey is concerned not only with history, understood as the study of thehuman past, but also with the character of all the disciplines that describe,explain, and judge “mankind”—with “economics, jurisprudence, politics, thestudy of religion, literature, poetry, architecture, music, and of philosophicworld views and systems, and, finally, psychology.”6 He calls these disciplines,collectively, the Geisteswissenschaften, which is how the expression “moral sci-ences” had been rendered by the German translator of Mill’s Logic. In accor-dance with German usage, Dilthey defines a “science” (Wissenschaft) as anysystem of clearly defined concepts and well-grounded propositions, and hecondemns as shortsighted and presumptuous the views of those who taketheir definition of science from the natural sciences and conclude that historyand the other humanistic disciplines are not sciences. But for Dilthey, whorecognized the difficulty of the task he had set himself, Geisteswissenschaften(usually translated back into English as “the human sciences”) is merely “theleast inappropriate” of the names commonly applied to the disciplines thatstudy human activity.7

Dilthey initially regarded his effort to define the human sciences as part ofa larger effort to articulate a unified “philosophy of life” covering all aspectsof human experience. This philosophy would start by recognizing that thephysical and mental aspects of human experience can be separated only byabstraction. Matter and mind, in a human being, are not different parts ofreality but aspects of that being regarded as an intelligent organism. The activ-ity of speaking, for example, involves physical motions and semantic content,and to understand it we must take account of both. What is not clear, how-ever, is how the physical and the mental are to be combined in a single theory.Dilthey struggled for years with the difficulties inherent in this program. Do


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6. Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Construction of the Historical World,” in W. Dilthey: SelectedWritings, ed. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 170. This work,originally published in 1910 and translated here only in part, represents Dilthey’s mature thoughton the character and scope of the human sciences.

7. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 57. The arguments of Comte and Mill“truncate and mutilate historical reality in order to assimilate it to the concepts and methods ofthe natural sciences,” 49.

the Geisteswissenschaften encompass all the disciplines concerned with humanlife, including those that study its material aspects? Or, as the contrast with theNaturwissenschaften implies, do they include only disciplines that are con-cerned with mind—that is, with the semantic and cultural, but not the physicalor biological, aspects of human behavior? In his later writings Dilthey, some-what hesitantly, takes the second path.

With Dilthey’s conversion to hermeneutics, the meaning of Geist migratesfrom the inner, private experience of individual consciousness to what Hegelcalls “objective mind,” the outer, public world of collective consciousnessexpressed in language, art, and other practices that make communication andunderstanding possible. In literary history or literary criticism, for example,we are concerned not with processes in the mind of an author or a reader, butwith “a structure created by these processes,” an intellectual object that mustbe understood in “the sense in which Montesquieu spoke of the spirit of thelaws.”8 Accordingly, the Geisteswissenschaften are inquiries into mind-createdobjects. Human conduct becomes the subject matter of the human sciencesonly when we seek to ascribe meaning to the gestures and words, the activi-ties and traditions, in which human experience finds expression. As a methodof the human sciences, hermeneutics involves treating all human expressionsas if they were texts. The objects of this interpretation, its texts and text-ana-logues, include not only written and spoken words but an immense variety ofactions, artifacts, practices, beliefs, laws, and other cultural expressions. Andthe techniques of interpretation that are needed make sense of these expres-sions are similarly diverse.

The positivist response to the theory of “understanding” (Verstehen) thatDilthey developed (with others, like Simmel and Weber, who were thinkingalong the same lines) was to object that hermeneutics cannot provide an objec-tive method for the human sciences because it must rely on intuition to makesense of human expressions, and because the propositions it generates aremere hypotheses that still need to be confirmed by other methods. But theseobjections confuse interpretation with other kinds of understanding. Herme-neutic understanding does not depend on empathy (Einfühlung), a proce-dure in which historians, anthropologists, or literary scholars re-create intheir own minds the thoughts and emotions of those whose expressions theyare studying. Hermeneutic understanding is not, like empathy, a psychologi-cal concept. It rests on the premise that thoughts and emotions are ideas and


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8. Dilthey, “Construction of the Historical World,” 174–75.

that ideas depend on the shared meanings that constitute languages and othercultural practices. Hermeneutic understanding must therefore be distin-guished from empathy and imaginative reconstruction. It also follows thatthe second positivist charge—that empathy is a heuristic device for generatinghypotheses, not a mode of explanation—is irrelevant to hermeneutics, whichverifies interpretive hypotheses according to its own highly developed meth-ods of confirmation. The existence of such methods further deflates the chargethat the human sciences cannot be objective. Because cultural expressions arepublic and can be examined by anyone, objectivity according to the canons ofhistorical, literary, and other kinds of scholarship is possible.9

The hermeneutic criterion can be used to distinguish the human sciences notonly from the natural sciences but also from the arts and aesthetic experience.Neither the arts themselves nor aesthetic experience, which can be a response tonature as well as to art, would seem to belong to the human sciences, for theseare explanatory disciplines. Both, however, belong to the geistige Welt of humanmeanings and can become the concern of various explanatory inquiries. Thedistinction required here is between artistic activity and aesthetic experienceas human conduct, on the one hand, and art history, literary criticism, musi-cology, and so forth, as inquiries into particular kinds of artistic activity, onthe other.10 These inquiries may themselves have an aesthetic dimension: ahistorical narrative can be read for the imaginative pleasure it yields, and aes-thetic judgment can be important in writing history. But as inquiries, thehuman sciences presuppose the existence of cultural objects from which theyare themselves distinguished.

A parallel argument can be used to distinguish the human sciences frompractical concerns. The argument uncovers a deeply rooted mistake in the her-meneutic tradition. By reducing all experience to practical experience (whichthey understand to be the realm of ordinary experience, “life,” “praxis,” “val-ues,” or common sense), Dilthey, Rickert, Croce, Collingwood, Heidegger,Habermas, Taylor, and many other antipositivist philosophers argue that theGeisteswissenschaften aim at a theoretical understanding of human conductthat is also practically relevant. But if the human sciences are distinguishedfrom the poetic arts, they are also distinguished from the practical. Though


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9. Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1971), 5–6, 30, and Gurpreet Mahajan, Explanation and Understanding in the HumanSciences (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 3.

10. “Poetry was composed before poetics arose, as people talked before there were grammarand syntax.” Droysen, Outline, 105.

these sciences study practical experience, it does not follow that they cannotgenerate knowledge that is detached from the values, interests, and other prac-tical concerns that compose ordinary lived experience. One reason antiposi-tivists so often assert the inherently practical, or as they sometimes say,“value-laden,” character of the human sciences is that in opposing positivismthey believe themselves compelled to disagree with the positivist claim thatknowledge can be “value-free.” But positivism might be correct on the issue ofobjectivity even if it is mistaken in claiming that there is no real differencebetween explaining human and natural phenomena. Although the humansciences have, historically, united theoretical and practical concerns, it does notfollow that these concerns cannot be distinguished analytically. Combiningthem is a source of modal confusion, and often of politicization and intellec-tual corruption, not an inherent, much less desirable, aspect of theorizing inthe humanities and the social sciences. The hermeneutic tradition can thereforebe accused of failing to question the premises of the sciences it seeks to theo-rize. A philosophy of the human sciences must be aware of the self-understand-ing of those sciences, but it cannot uncritically accept their presuppositions.

Since Dilthey, philosophers have advanced many versions of the herme-neutic criterion as a basis for distinguishing the human from the natural sci-ences. One is that the human sciences explain human action in relation to anagent’s reasons for acting, whereas the natural sciences seek causal explana-tions.11 Another, which is based on Wittgenstein’s view that reasons makesense only in relation to particular linguistic practices or forms of life, is thatexplanations of human conduct presuppose rules. A theoretical understand-ing of human conduct must pay attention to the self-understanding of thosewhose conduct is being explained, and this self-understanding cannot bedescribed except in terms of the meanings that human beings share with othermembers of the communities to which they belong, meanings expressed in therules of those communities.12 According to still another version of the herme-neutic criterion, the human sciences are concerned with “intentional phe-nomena,” which in the jargon of philosophy means not only intentions in theordinary sense of the term but all states of mind that, like a belief, are directedtoward an object and have propositional content regarding that object. Because


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11. It is sometimes argued that reasons can be causes, but of a different kind than those thatoperate in nature. Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” in Essays on Actions andEvents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

12. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Rout-ledge, 1958), 87–89.

it involves beliefs, desires, and other intentional phenomena, human actioncannot be explained without referring to this propositional content. Naturalprocesses, in contrast, can be the subject of propositions (scientific hypothe-ses), but they do not themselves contain propositions.13

In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott offers a version of the hermeneutic cri-terion that distinguishes between expressions of intelligence and manifesta-tions of not-intelligent processes. The disciplines that study human conduct,as expressed in particular languages, literatures, moral traditions, and otherforms of cultural activity, he suggests, are those that “used to be called the‘human sciences’—Geisteswissenschaften—in order to make clear that their con-cern is with human beings as self-conscious, intelligent persons” (VLL 34),not with human beings understood, as they are in the natural sciences, as organ-isms whose behavior is the consequence of underlying biological processes.Before discussing the theory of human conduct that Oakeshott develops fromthis distinction, however, it will be helpful to consider his earlier investiga-tion, in Experience and Its Modes, of science as a mode of inquiry and its rela-tion to historical inquiry in explaining human behavior. For that theory isbest understood as the outcome of an effort to reformulate the conclusions ofthe earlier work.

Scientific Understanding

Like Dilthey, Oakeshott wrote little about the natural sciences. But neitherthinker can be called antiscientific. Their shared concern is to refute exagger-ated claims on behalf of science by defining the limits of scientific understand-ing and defending the autonomy of historical inquiry. In Experience and ItsModes, Oakeshott attacks the belief (common at the time and still held bymany philosophers, scientists, and social scientists) that scientific knowledge isthe model of all knowledge. His argument is in the tradition of Nietzsche’sclaim that science is an interpretation, not a description of the world as it“really” is.14 “Science” is not a synonym for “knowledge.” It is nothing morethan a provisionally independent and self-consistent system of ideas, one modeof understanding among others. From the standpoint of scientific realism,


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13. Franz Brentano, “The Distinction Between Mental and Physical Phenomena,” in Roder-ick M. Chisholm, ed., Realism and the Background of Phenomenology (Atascadero, Calif.:Ridgeview Publishing, 1960).

14. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1985), 65.

Oakeshott’s rejection of the foundational claims of science looks naive, wrong-headed, even antirational.15 But for those who refuse to privilege scientificknowledge as the model of all knowledge, scientific realism is itself naive andirrational—a kind of narrow, arrogant, even barbaric, fundamentalism. To insistthat a single external reality is the criterion of rational discourse is to assert thatthere is only one such discourse: that which consists of stating propositionswhose truth lies in their correspondence to meaning-independent facts. No onefamiliar with post-Kuhnian conceptions of science will find Oakeshott’s view ofscience as one mode of understanding among others surprising, even if theterms in which he makes the case against scientific realism are unfamiliar.

Scientists, Oakeshott argues, are apt to fasten uncritically on some conven-tional and superficially plausible philosophy of science. But the scientist, quascientist, is not the best judge of what science is, because conclusions aboutthe character of scientific knowledge do not rest on scientific inquiry and arenot themselves scientific conclusions. To define science is a philosophical under-taking and scientists are not especially well equipped to engage in it.16 ButOakeshott’s own conception of science seems to have been inspired by theviews of a scientist, Arthur Eddington, a professor of astronomy at Cambridgefrom 1913 to 1944 and himself a philosophical Idealist. Eddington famouslyillustrated the difference between the world of everyday experience and theworld of modern science by distinguishing the table at which he writes fromthe physicist’s table, the first a solid and enduring thing, the second mostly emptyspace and rapidly moving particles. Commenting in 1926 on one of Eddington’sessays, Oakeshott observes that it offers an account of physics that applies toall the sciences. “The scientific conception of the universe is the most abstractof all conceptions, it is of a universe consisting solely of physically measurablerelationships, and physical science is a closed system created by the study ofthese relationships,” Eddington wrote.17 This is a fair statement of Oakeshott’sown view of science as a mode.


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15. “Realism and a correspondence conception [of truth] are essential presuppositions ofany sane philosophy, not to mention any science.” John R. Searle, The Construction of SocialReality (New York: Free Press, 1995), xiii.

16. Oakeshott offers a similar caution about relying on the efforts of artists to define art: wemust avoid uncritically appropriating the “rough and ready vocabulary of artists” in constructingan aesthetic theory, for the reflections of artists on art have no special authority in the realm ofaesthetic theory. Review of J. Chiari, Realism and Imagination, British Journal of Aesthetics 1(1960–61), 198–99.

17. Quoted by Oakeshott in his review of Joseph Needham, ed., Science, Religion, andReality, Journal of Theological Studies 27 (1926), 318. This view of science differs from the onethat Eddington later defended.

For Oakeshott, the chief distinguishing feature of scientific knowledge isthat its ideas are quantities. Science substitutes precisely defined concepts forcommonsense categories and exact measurement for direct sensory experience.Its theorems state mathematical relationships among concepts, and its obser-vations are measurements assembled, corrected, and stabilized in statisticalgeneralizations. Scientific observation and theorizing are inherently quantita-tive because general, observer-independent, and replicable theorems dependon unambiguous and invariant concepts and on precisely measured observa-tions. Scientists do sometimes use imprecise concepts and measurements, butthis is an expedient, not an ideal. The ideal in scientific inquiry is to make obser-vation independent of the observer and to formulate theorems with mathemati-cal precision. Nor is this merely an incidental feature of science. Scientificknowledge is defined by its impersonality, uniformity, precision, and commu-nicability—not, as both scientists and nonscientists often assume, by beingabout an objective material world.

Science, so conceived, must be distinguished from other inquiries with whichit is often confused. It must, for example, be distinguished from what used to becalled “natural history,” the study of animals, plants, and nonliving things as theyappear when we depend on ordinary methods of observation. The objects of nat-ural history are “specimens” of nature studied “in the field” or collected in muse-ums, zoos, and botanical gardens. Natural history remains in the practical modeinsofar as it relies on the approximate categories and common names that denotethe objects and reflect the concerns of everyday life. Even when it introduces newnames and classifications, natural history remains descriptive rather than explana-tory. It may provide a starting place for scientific inquiry, but it fails to achieve theabstract and relational character of authentic science.

The view, which positivist philosophers of science have borrowed fromnaturalists, that science studies an existing, objective world of nature belongsnot to science as a mode of understanding but to common sense. Science, forOakeshott, is not simply a rigorous version of common sense. “Science beginsonly when the world of ‘things’ opened to us by our senses and perceptionshas been forgotten or set on one side” (EM 186). Inquiry is not scientific solong as it relies on crude classifications that help us to organize the world ofordinary human experience but do not take us beyond that world. It followsthat science must be distinguished from technology, which, like commonsense, is concerned with solving practical problems.

Science also differs from natural history in being freed from any connec-tion with historical time. Natural history is concerned with events as well as


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things; it investigates the natural rather than the human past. But scientificpropositions are not statements of fact about observed past events; they arehypothetical statements of relations between quantities, like E=mc2. Scien-tific time is the abstract time of a mathematical equation (t1...t2...tn), not theconcrete time of a historical narrative (May 8, 1995). “The world of scientificgeneralization is a world ignorant alike of past and future as such, it knowsnothing of historical time, and recognizes time only within its world, as ameans of relating its own concepts” (EM 228). The reality that is asserted in ascientific theory is the reality of timeless “laws of nature,” not of temporalevents. For an observed event to serve the aims of science, it must be trans-formed into an instance of a general rule, a transformation that is achievedonly when events become numbers and historical narrative gives way toabstract, quantitative relations. But observed events cease to be individual his-torical facts as soon as they become instances of a general rule: “the scientificway of thinking . . . begins where the historical way ends.”18

Scientific knowledge, then, is abstract and hypothetical, not concrete andcategorical. A statement about the existence of individual things or the occur-rence of individual events is not a scientific statement. Science as a mode ofunderstanding does not begin with given (“natural” or “material”) objectswhose existence, properties, and relations it then tries to explain. The objectsof science are defined by scientific theories; they are “the product, not thedatum, of scientific thought” (EM 190). And the world of such objects isnot “the physical world” of popular understanding but the physicist’s worldof abstract and often counter-intuitive ideas, of mathematical constructs liken-dimensional space and wave-particle indeterminacy: “a world of pure,quantitative abstractions which can be neither seen, touched nor imagined”(EM 195). Since Oakeshott wrote these words in the 1930s, physics and cos-mology have generated ever more puzzling “objects,” like black holes andsuperstrings, which cannot be given an ordinary realist interpretation. Suchconcepts are not names for things but tools for making quantitative sense ofexperience. Scientific theory postulates physical objects, which it needs tosimplify the laws of experience, as (in Quine’s words) “convenient intermedi-aries . . . comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.”19


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18. Oakeshott, “History and the Social Sciences,” an exchange with M. M. Postan, in TheInstitute of Sociology, The Social Sciences (London: Le Play House Press, 1936), 80.

19. W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1953), 44. Quine’s view may be contrasted with the naive realism of Dr. Johnson’s famous refuta-tion of Berkeley or the equally question-begging assertion of a prominent physicist that “the

On this understanding of science, the most “scientific” explanations are thesimplest, most general, and most quantitative. Underlying these desiderata ofscientific explanation is a demand for conceptual consistency. The use of con-sistent, objective, concepts in science lends plausibility to realist philosophiesof science, for it is easy to see such concepts as referring to “things” that existindependently of the terms in which they are defined. But for Oakeshott, con-ceptual consistency is a presupposition of science, not its product. It is anaspect of the specific kind of coherence that distinguishes science as a mode ofunderstanding.

In a scientific inquiry, Oakeshott argues, we do not verify theories againstan accumulation of given, theory-independent facts to which they must corre-spond. Rather, we look for coherence within a system of scientific ideas, someof which are the product of theoretical reasoning and others of observation,measurement, and data analysis. The collection and analysis of data goes onwithin a theoretical framework of concepts and hypotheses. Observations aresignificant only in relation to such a framework. What counts as disconfirm-ing evidence depends on the rules provided by that framework. A curve, forexample, may pass through no data points and yet be said, according to therules of statistical generalization and inference, to be supported by the evi-dence (EM 206). Discrepant observations can lead a scientist to reject ahypothesis they fail to support, but scientists often reject observations that areincompatible with an accepted theory, treating contrary evidence as taintedand irrelevant. Because its validity is supported by the theory to which itbelongs, a hypothesis may be retained in the face of contradictory evidence ifit is necessary to the coherence of that theory. Scientific inquiry proceeds bycollecting the evidence that particular theories call for, not by the mere accu-mulation of information. To formulate a scientific hypothesis is always toextend an existing theoretical understanding: it is to imagine what the worldwould be like if it were better understood. A hypothesis is not “a self-gener-ated bright idea” (RP 51) that directs scientific inquiry from outside; it is aninference made in the context of an already existing inquiry. It can guideresearch only as an integral part of the scientific inquiry within which it is sig-nificant. Scientific evidence, too, is theory-dependent, as Hanson and Kuhnwere to emphasize thirty years after the publication of Experience and Its


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laws of nature are real in the same sense (whatever that is) as the rocks on the ground.” StevenWeinberg, “The Revolution That Didn’t Happen,” New York Review of Books 45 (8 October1998), 52.

Modes: evidence depends on observations, observations on measurements,and measurements not only on standards of measurement but on the theory-determined concepts to be measured. Theories and observations are aspectsof a unified system of scientific knowledge and can be distinguished only inrelation to each other. In the end, observation and explanation are the same,for “what is not proved is not discovered” (EM 181).

The view that scientific inquiry reconciles theoretical and empirical propo-sitions, not theoretical propositions with nonpropositional facts, is supportedby the way science interprets observations statistically to confirm or disconfirmhypotheses. In the social sciences, statistical methods are often linked withmere empiricism, so it may come as a surprise to find Oakeshott defendingthe importance of statistical reasoning in science. The view that statistics isessential to science is not limited to empiricist conceptions of science, however,because the connection between scientific propositions and confirming evi-dence is intrinsically statistical. Scientific observations are aggregated to con-trol measurement errors and other kinds of nonsignificant variation. Scientificinquiry depends on stable measurements, which it obtains by computing aver-ages, differences, correlation coefficients, and estimates of statistical signifi-cance. Statistical generalization is more than simply a way of summarizing aseries of observations; it enables the scientist to express the precise characterof these observations. What statistically consolidating a set of observationsachieves is not “accurate” measurement, which implies an external world thatthe measurement best represents, but invariable (“reliable”) results (EM 206n).In scientific inquiry we are not interested in describing a particular situationby collecting information about it, but in relating one class of observations toanother. Because science is concerned with general relations, it is concernedwith patterns of evidence, and these patterns are statistical.

Scientific inquiry presupposes invariant concepts, abstract relations, test-able hypotheses, and reliable measurements, observations, and statistical gen-eralizations, and it seeks to make them consistent with one another. But, inthe Idealist analysis of Experience and Its Modes, science can never be morethan an incomplete and conditional set of ideas, for even when coherence isachieved according to the presuppositions of scientific inquiry, there remains acategorial gap between the knowledge defined by these presuppositions andother kinds of knowledge. The world as science understands it is not the wholeof reality but merely an aspect of this whole. Scientific knowledge is confinedto general relations between quantities; scientific propositions are formal andhypothetical. They are “never more than the assertion of the dependence of a


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consequent upon a condition not asserted to be realized” (EM 215). Scientificunderstanding is coherent only within the limits of its own presuppositions,which distinguish it from other kinds of understanding. Science has a place inour efforts to know the world, but that place is not to serve as the criterion ofknowledge itself. Scientific knowledge can be reconciled with the knowledgethat comes from ordinary experience, from history, or from the arts, not byshowing its superiority but only by defining its limits.

Any effort, like Oakeshott’s, to characterize science as a distinct way of seek-ing to understand the world and therefore as a single, unified enterprise mustmeet the objection that the various sciences differ significantly from one another.Science, it can be argued, is not one thing but many things, not a mode ofinquiry but a multiplicity of separate inquiries. The diversity of explanatoryparadigms that characterizes physics, chemistry, and the biological sciences,not to mention psychology and economics, is more evident than the unitythat comes from a shared commitment to objectivity and scientific method.In Oakeshott’s view, however, differences between scientific disciplines are notnecessary or categorial but reflect their different subject matters. Science as amode is not determined by its subject matter any more than history is, butdifferent sciences, like different branches of history, can develop differentlyaccording to the demands of their material. These differences are also the con-tingent outcome of historical circumstances. Chief among these circumstancesis the distortion of scientific research by practical concerns. Because they areaffected by funding priorities, institutional constraints, and other extrascien-tific pressures, scientific disciplines are seldom organized according to theirown theoretical principles. Many are practically driven “semi-sciences” (VLL33). In every science one must distinguish the search for abstract theoreticalunderstanding from efforts to solve practical problems. Practical concerns maymotivate the search for knowledge, but they can also obstruct it. Physiology,for example, “has become a science not on account of its connection with med-icine, but in spite of it” (EM 233). Science and medicine are connected inmany ways, but their aims are different: science is concerned with theoreticalcoherence, clinical medicine with what works in practice, even if the sciencebehind it is not well understood. But despite the contingencies that shapeparticular disciplines, the sciences are unified insofar as they rest on the assump-tion that the world can be understood in terms that are abstract, general, objec-tive, quantitative, invariant, hypothetical, and transparently communicable—that is, mathematically. This assumption, which defines scientific thinking, ismore than a methodological commitment; it is a commitment to the idea of


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science as “a single, homogeneous (but fortuitously divided) whole” (EM243)—an internally diverse but distinguishable mode of understanding.

Because scientific understanding is defined by its presuppositions and notby its subject matter, there is no reason why at least some aspects of humanactivity cannot be understood scientifically. A science of human behaviorwould abstract from that activity data bearing on hypothetical relationshipsamong theoretically defined concepts. Like other kinds of genuine science, itwould be concerned with abstract relationships, not concrete individuals, andwould be implicitly if not explicitly mathematical. When we turn to what arenow called the social sciences, however, we see much that does not belong inOakeshott’s picture of science because it is descriptive and interpretive, notabstract and quantitative. The work of social scientists is often ethnographicor historical. The generalizations with which they are concerned are notalways quantitative generalizations. And many social scientists are interestedin evaluation and prescription—in unmasking interests, condemning institu-tions, and recommending policies. In short, the social sciences as they arepracticed today display a multiplicity of intellectual and practical concerns anda confusion of inquiries.

For Oakeshott, the worst misunderstanding in these disciplines arises fromthe failure to distinguish different modes of understanding. As he explains inan essay written many years after Experience and Its Modes, “by the modality ofan enquiry I mean the conditions of relevance that constitute it a distinct kind ofenquiry and distinguish it both from an inconsequential groping around in theconfusion of all that may be going on and from similarly distinct enquiries butof other kinds. These conditions of relevance are of course formal, but wherethere are none, where there is no specifiable modality, there can be no enquiryand so no consequential conclusions” (OH 2). Theorizing in the social sciencesis obstructed when explanatory and evaluative inquiries are run together or thescientific and historical modes of inquiry are combined. As Oakeshott writes,rather colorfully, in Experience and Its Modes, “the conjunction of science andhistory can produce nothing but a monster” (EM 168). The social sciences can-not achieve theoretical coherence if they persist in confusing the categoriallydistinct concerns of scientific, historical, and practical understanding. Theirfailure to achieve coherence is not, however, a necessary failure. “What is pecu-liar in these sciences is nothing inherent in their character, but merely the prej-udices by which they have suffered themselves to be hindered” (EM 178).

If a true science of human behavior is possible, there can be no categorialdistinction between that science and the natural sciences. Science is concerned


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with general, quantitative relationships, and if these relationships can belooked for wherever there are patterns of order to be observed, then from theperspective of the mode of inquiry involved, the distinction between the nat-ural sciences and disciplines that study human behavior in the scientific modeis arbitrary. It may be hard to formulate general, invariant, quantifiable andobjective concepts about human behavior. But the scientific study of humanbehavior encounters no difficulties that are not also difficulties for the naturalsciences (EM 219–20). The difference between the natural and the social sci-ences, insofar as the latter are inquiries in the scientific mode, is not a modaldifference.

Among the social sciences, economics and psychology come closest tomeeting the modal criteria of scientific inquiry. Anthropology, sociology, andpolitical science, in contrast, remain largely historical disciplines.

Economics and Psychology

The scientific mode as it appears in the study of human beings is most easilydiscerned in economics, not because of the quantity of numerical informationavailable to economists but because economic theory rests on abstract andinvariant concepts, like marginal utility and comparative advantage, which itrelates mathematically to one another. If we look at all that goes on under itslabel, economics is hardly more than “a meaningless miscellany of scientific,historical and practical ideas and arguments” (EM 220). But this does not meanthat we cannot identify areas of scientific coherence within this miscellany.There are, in other words, to be found amid the confusion of inquiries called“economics” at least some that meet the criteria of knowledge that define thenatural sciences. Authentic scientific inquiry elucidates a coherent system ofgeneral, unchanging relationships by constructing theories in terms of whichmathematical models are formulated, hypotheses articulated, data collected,statistical patterns identified, and inferences drawn about phenomena notactually observed. When economics proceeds in this mode, it is fully scientific.

As always in modal analysis, the philosopher’s concern is not to describethe various pursuits that are carried on under a name like economics, for theseare pursuits that may have little in common beyond the name itself. The chal-lenge is to abstract an ideal character from these diverse pursuits and to iden-tify its defining characteristics or presuppositions. Modal analysis does notaim to account for all that is going on in a particular field at any given moment,but to construct an intellectually coherent identity out of a confusion of


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observables. To demand that the concepts defined by this process of abstrac-tion should simply “describe” that confusion is to mistake definition fordescription. It is, in effect, to bar the theorist from criticizing the concepts thatare taken for granted in a given field, even when those concepts are eclectic,incoherent, or distorted by extraneous beliefs and interests. “To center thoughtupon a mere name not only will never produce a homogeneous world of ideas,but it will tend also to establish in our minds a pseudo-relationship betweensets of ideas which do not and cannot belong together” (EM 220).

As it is actually practiced, economics has not completely separated itselffrom the practical and descriptive concerns out of which it developed, and ittherefore includes both scientific and nonscientific ideas. From one point ofview this is an advantage; in economics, as in other fields, there are those whothink, with Clifford Geertz, that “blurred genres”—which combine, evendeliberately confuse, different kinds of inquiry—are stimulating and produc-tive. But Oakeshott does not share this optimistic view of the heuristic valueof modal anarchy. In his judgment, descriptive and normative economics, farfrom strengthening economic theory and making it more relevant, simplystand in its way. Economists who explain historical events, or offer predic-tions and recommendations about current affairs, require knowledge aboutthe contingent circumstances surrounding past or present economic decisions.But such knowledge does not belong to scientific economics—that is, to a sys-tem of mathematical theorems—precisely because it is concrete, contingent,particular. The Nobel laureate partners in the hedge fund that crashed becausethe Russian government chose to stop paying its foreign debts were not dis-credited as economic theorists. Their economic theories would not have beenstrengthened by including information about Russian politics. The ideas thatbelong to scientific economics are those that cohere with one another in aneconomic theory and with what that theory defines as the relevant data, notthose that help us make practical decisions in particular, contingent situations.Scientific economics is a branch of mathematics, not an empirical guide to thebehavior of actual economic agents or the performance of actual economies.20

It is, therefore, a misunderstanding of science to make success in predictingevents in the world of practical human experience the criterion of scientific truth.Doing so confuses science with practice. The prediction (or “retrodiction”) of


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20. Alexander Rosenberg, “If Economics Isn’t a Science, What Is It?” in Michael Martin andLee C. McIntyre, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge: MIT Press,1994), 661–74

scientifically defined observations is a valuable tool in scientific inquiry, whichis concerned with coherence between theoretical and observational proposi-tions, among other kinds of coherence. But a science, qua science, does notaim to predict events described in practical rather than in scientific terms.“Science, as such, has nothing to say about ‘events’ in the world of perception,and a scientific generalization can no more be vindicated by a demonstrationof its applicability to a certain occurrence than it can be called in questionbecause it fails to predict the future” (EM 228). By defending policy-relevantprediction as the criterion of successful economic theory, advocates for “posi-tive economics” reveal the unscientific character of their positivism.21 Eco-nomics is authentically scientific only when it substitutes an impersonal worldof general and timeless relations for the familiar human world of persons andpractices, wants and satisfactions.

Oakeshott is unconvinced by arguments purporting to show that econom-ics cannot be scientific in the sense defined. The claim that because it dealswith human behavior economics can never be an “exact” science rests on a mis-conception: all science deals with probabilities, and in this respect the theoremsof economics do not differ from those of physics or genetics. “The behavior of aparticular electron is not less unaccountable, not less ‘capricious’ than thebehavior of a man of flesh and blood” (EM 224–25). If concepts like supply,demand, price, elasticity, and utility cannot be measured as precisely as tem-perature or angular momentum, this may have implications for the success ofeconomics as a science, but not for the kind of inquiry it is undertaking. Noris it a telling objection that economics fails to meet the test of genuine sciencebecause its generalizations are limited (to market economies, for example).No scientific generalization, even in physics, has an unlimited range. And, aswe have seen, it is not an objection to the scientific character of economicsthat it lacks reliable generalizations that can serve as a basis for policy, for theclaim that economics is a science does not rest on its ability to predict contin-gent events but on its ability to generate a coherent system of abstract, gen-eral, relational, and quantitative theorems.

A similar debate surrounds psychology. Just as economics is not scientificwhen it is concerned with individual events or entities (whether actual persons,households, companies, or economies), or with the demands of economic pol-icy, psychology is not scientific when it is concerned with individual personal-


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21. Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in Essays in Positive Eco-nomics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 3–43.

ities or the requirements of clinical practice. But even when it seeks to gener-alize, psychology might seem to be something other than a science, modallyspeaking, because it is concerned with mind rather than with nature, withintelligent conduct rather than not-intelligent processes. Psychology is some-times supposed, for this reason, to be one of the “human sciences”: a disci-pline intent on interpreting individual human thoughts and actions ratherthan explaining observed behavioral regularities. Those who see psychologyas either individualizing or hermeneutic are, however, a minority among eitherpsychologists or philosophers. Psychology had come by the end of the nine-teenth century to be regarded as one of the natural sciences, not only by posi-tivists but by Windelband, Rickert, and others who conceived the humansciences as disciplines concerned with individuality. Psychology was classedwith the natural sciences because it was understood to aim at generalizations,not to be concerned with describing the mental qualities of particular individ-uals, much less the semantic content of their actions and utterances. A centurylater, psychology is still viewed as a natural science concerned with “mentalprocesses” that are themselves explainable by biochemical processes, not ahumanistic discipline concerned with “substantive human thoughts, beliefs,emotions, recollections, actions and utterances” (VLL 36). This understand-ing of psychology is not a misunderstanding. But, like economics, psychologyas it is currently practiced is only partly scientific, for it still incorporates con-cerns that belong to other modes of understanding. Psychology remains, inother words, a categorially-ambiguous undertaking.

The idea that psychology studies individual personalities may seem naive,but it is implicit in psychoanalysis, psychological biography, criminology, andother fields that draw upon psychological generalizations to diagnose, explain,and sometimes alter the behavior of particular persons. Such inquiries involvemodally indeterminate mixtures of historical and practical concerns. They arenot scientific, in Oakeshott’s sense of the term, because the idea of the indi-vidual personality, which they presuppose, is a practical or historical idea, nota scientific one. If by “science” we mean a mode of inquiry that generalizes,there is no such thing as a science of individual behavior. The study of indi-vidual personalities, like the study of particular national economies, is really akind of natural history, not part of an authentic science. Much of what iscalled psychology (especially in clinical psychology and psychotherapy) isconcerned with actual, living personalities and is therefore still in this presci-entific or permanently nonscientific condition. But there is also an authenticscience of psychology, one that has severed its ties with natural history and


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clinical practice and thereby achieved a more general and quantitative under-standing of behavioral regularities.

The objection that psychology cannot be scientific because it seeks to under-stand consciousness or other mental phenomena raises more difficult issues.For Oakeshott, this objection misconceives the character of scientific inquiry.The claim that psychology is a science does not rest on its ability to provideknowledge of sensations, emotions, or other mental states; it rests only on thesuccess of its efforts to understand human behavior in quantitative terms. Thenonscientific parts of psychology explain mental phenomena using nonquan-titative concepts like “consciousness,” “memory,” and “personality.” Scientificpsychology, in contrast, is concerned with observable regularities in behavior,which it expresses in quantitative propositions. These propositions are framedin terms of concepts, like instinct, drive, and reinforcement, that refer to psy-chological processes, not to conscious thought and action. Scientific psychol-ogy has developed extensive links with genetics, biochemistry, and neuro-science, which suggests that its theorems might some day be expressed as (andtherefore reduced to) theorems belonging to these other sciences. As long aspsychology confines itself to explaining human behavior in relation to naturalprocesses, it can avoid modal confusion.

Such confusion occurs whenever the propositions of scientific psychologyare used to explain particular beliefs rather than the process of believing orlearning, or to explain particular actions, choices, and intentions rather thanbehavioral regularities. In the movement from abstract quantitative relationsto particular beliefs and actions, processes are confused with practices, mecha-nisms with meanings, causes with the reasons agents use to explain their ownand other people’s conduct. A person’s beliefs, judgments, commitments,arguments, and tastes are, as Oakeshott puts it, “ideas he has learned (butmight not have learned) to think” (OHC 22), and to reduce these ideas tophenomena like genetic inheritance, biological urges, or infantile experiencesis to forego the effort to understand them as ideas. It is tempting to explainideas—especially ideas we wish to dismiss—as nothing other than expressionsof psychological forces. But psychologists do not explain their own ideas inthis dismissive way. To engage in a psychological inquiry is to think, argue,and in other ways to move with self-awareness in a world of meanings that iscategorially distinct from the world of physiological or neurological processes.Scientific psychology may be able to explain behavioral regularities as mani-festing such processes, but its explanations are categorially irrelevant to thejudgments, arguments, and actions that comprise human conduct, if by these


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we mean the “chosen responses of self-conscious agents to their understoodsituations which have reasons but not causes and may be understood only interms of dispositions, beliefs, meanings, intentions and motives” (VLL 35).

Like scientific economics, scientific psychology is hindered more by itsconnection with practical contingencies, and by the modal confusion thisconnection produces, than by the inherent resistance of human behavior,properly conceived, to scientific explanation. “Where psychology is a science,its conclusions will have the same character, significance and validity as theconclusions of any other science” (EM 241).

Anthropology and Sociology

Oakeshott discusses economics and psychology in the chapter of Experienceand Its Modes that is devoted to science as a mode. But he discusses anthropol-ogy in the chapter on history because, unlike economics and psychology,which can be genuinely scientific, anthropology is inherently historical. All thedisciplines concerned with human activity straddle the realms of historicalindividuality and scientific generalization, but there is little room in anthropol-ogy for the latter. What explains the essentially historical character of this field?

Despite the desire of some anthropologists to generalize their conclusions,anthropology cannot escape historical description because it studies the beliefsand practices, the cultures, of particular peoples, and these cultures and peo-ples are historical individuals. Though anthropologists sometimes generalizeabout languages, kinship structures, or religious beliefs, they are also commit-ted to studying actual cultures and to using methods, like archaeology,ethnography, and “thick description,” that are both individualizing and her-meneutic. Because their concepts do not for the most part lend themselves toquantitative treatment, anthropologists rarely express their conclusions ingeneralizations that go beyond what they have observed. Nor can anthropol-ogy give up these concepts and go beyond the stage of description, as eco-nomics and psychology have, and still retain its identity as a separate field.The interpretation of actual, historical ways of life, based, if possible, ondetailed ethnographic fieldwork, is essential, for if anthropology were to gen-eralize, it could longer distinguish its conclusions from those of the othersocial sciences or, in the case of physical anthropology, the biological sciences.As an abstract, relational, and quantitative science of human behavior, anthro-pology lacks a distinctive theory of its own, and therefore, to the extent that itbecomes scientific, it is absorbed into other fields and vanishes.


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It used to be argued that anthropology can produce truly scientific gener-alizations, while retaining its autonomy, through what used to be called thecomparative method. But, Oakeshott reasons (stating a proposition that holdsbeyond the boundaries of anthropology), comparison is pointless unless wecompare independently generated instances of the same phenomenon. Com-paring religious rituals, for example, cannot yield valid generalizations if theserituals have influenced one another, or if the meaning of religion in one cul-ture is radically different from its meaning in another. Even if we can assumethat our observations are independent and that we are collecting instances ofthe same thing, these instances are often too few to permit significant statisticalinferences. Because, like science, it assumes “a world of repetitions and recur-rences” (EM 167), the comparative method remains largely inapplicable toanthropology. The idea of an anthropological science is, in short, illusory:anthropology is historical or it is nothing.

The course of anthropology since the 1930s, when Oakeshott discussed itin Experience and Its Modes, seems to bear out his analysis. He suggested thenthat if anthropologists were to grasp the essentially historical character oftheir inquiries, they would shift their emphasis from similarities to differences.“The anthropologist, intent upon developing the pseudo-scientific character ofhis subject, has in the past concentrated upon the observation of similarities;but history is regulated by the pursuit of differences. . . . The institution ofcomparisons and the elaboration of analogies are activities which the histo-rian must avoid if he is to remain an historian” (EM 167, 168). During the pasthalf-century, anthropology has moved toward history and away from science,Lévy-Strauss and structuralism notwithstanding. Cultural anthropology, espe-cially, has become a self-consciously hermeneutic discipline. Focused on thestudy of cultural texts, it has become a model of interpretive social science.And its recent partial conversion, under the pressures of postmodernism andcritical theory, into a branch of “cultural studies” has not altered this interpre-tive character, despite its confusion of explanatory and practical concerns.

Sociology, too, is more historical than scientific, although because of itsamorphous character this is less obvious than in the case of anthropology.Oakeshott criticizes sociology in terms similar those Dilthey used around 1905.For Dilthey, who by this time had discarded his earlier conception of thehuman sciences as a comprehensive philosophy of life, sociology is defectivebecause it attempts to encompass all human activity in a single universal sci-ence. Its goal is therefore far more ambitious than that of the natural sciences,which, though they aim to understand the same material world, recognize the


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independence of separate sciences like physics, geology, and biology. For thenatural scientist, the unity of science is an ideal, not a working premise. Becausehuman activity takes different forms, it must be approached in different ways.It is appropriate, therefore, to speak of the human sciences, but “sociology,”Dilthey insists, “is not the name of a science.”22

For Oakeshott, the uncertain identity of sociology is reflected in the ambigu-ous words “social” and “society” that designate its subject matter. These termssometimes identify a residual class of phenomena left behind after those thathave been successfully theorized by specialized fields like economics and psy-chology have been removed. But the miscellaneous contents of a residual classcannot form the subject of a coherent theoretical inquiry. More often thewords “social” and “society” are used to refer to the sum total of all humanactions and relationships, and the inquiry they postulate is a general science ofsociety that successfully integrates the conclusions of all the other social sci-ences. In this case, however, what they identify is a fiction, for nothing coher-ent can be identified under this general, all-embracing conception of society.

“Social” and “society” make better sense when they stand for relationshipsand practices. A society may be an association of persons united in the obser-vance of certain rules: professional associations, clubs, churches, even statesare societies in this sense. In such cases, to speak of a society is to speak of anidentifiable historical individual. But an expression like “human society” is nothistorical in this sense; it is merely a vague abstraction about which nothingsignificant can be said. Social relationships are shaped by the diverse practicesin which persons stand toward one another as partners, citizens, or litigants.Relationships like these are defined by the terms they impose on those whoare joined in them. All are “human devices, autonomous manners of beingassociated, each with its own specified conditions of relationship,” not “thecomponents of an unspecified, unconditional interdependence or ‘social’ rela-tionship, something called a ‘society’ or ‘Society’” (VLL 34–35). There is nosuch thing, Oakeshott insists, as a social relationship that is not a relationshipof a specific kind: “human conduct is continuously and decisively ‘social’ onlyin respect of agents being associated in terms of their understanding andenjoyment of specific practices” (OHC 87).

Leaving aside the preoccupation with practical matters that causes modalconfusion in all the social sciences, there are, then, two obstacles facing a sci-ence of sociology. The first is that it lacks a focus that distinguishes it from


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22. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 497–500.

other social sciences. When sociology adopts the methods and assumptions ofscientific inquiry, it is not easily distinguished from economics or psychologybecause there exists no well-defined realm of distinctively “social” phenom-ena. The second obstacle is that sociology is unable to free itself from beingconcerned with a subject matter, human conduct, that is unsuitable for “scien-tific” consideration. No autonomous science of sociology, should it emerge,could have anything to say about the beliefs, actions, and relationships ofindividual human beings, or the specific practices, the systems of shared mean-ings, in terms of which they are associated.

For the most part, then, anthropology and sociology would seem tobelong to the “human sciences” understood as either individualizing or her-meneutic disciplines. If the achievements of these fields in the scientific modeare not especially impressive, it is because they are disciplines concerned withcontingent human practices and with human actions made intelligible interms of such practices: “respectable and somewhat attenuated engagementsin historical understanding” (VLL 36).

Political Science

Despite its unfortunate name, political science is no more a science, modallyspeaking, than any other field within the social sciences. It is true that politicalscientists have for some time been engaged in analyzing data from elections,opinion polls, and legislative decisions. And they have successfully applied deci-sion theory and related mathematical models and techniques, first developed byeconomists, to the study of bargaining, voting, and other activities involving“rational choice.” But despite these efforts, political science remains a miscellanyof inquiries including (besides statistical analysis and mathematical modeling)institutional description, historical narrative, conceptual analysis, moral argu-ment, policy analysis and advocacy, and efforts to predict particular events.

Political science is therefore not a discipline, if by this we mean a mode ofinquiry based on shared theoretical and methodological premises. It is at besta loosely organized field identified by its concern with government and poli-tics, but this concern (itself ill-defined) does not guarantee modal consistency.“A mode of understanding cannot be specified in terms of a so-called subjectmatter; here, as always, the conditions of understanding specify what is to beunderstood” (OH 5). “There is,” Oakeshott observes, “no specifically ‘political’explanation of anything” (RP 212). The frequent references by political scien-tists to “political analysis” and “the discipline” are evidence not of unity but of


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wishful thinking or uneasiness within the field. Moreover, there are reasonsfor thinking that political science lacks even a coherent subject matter. AsOakeshott concludes in Experience and Its Modes, there is “nothing in politicsto distinguish it finally from what is non-political, what is economic or reli-gious” (EM 102), economics and religion being, like politics, activities involv-ing values and beliefs, choices and policies, institutions and power. Oakeshottpublished many essays that do not question the common opinion that there issuch a thing as politics, and he made repeated attempts, often in unpublishedwritings, to define the character of political activity. But in On Human Con-duct and other late writings, he offers no philosophy of politics at all, choos-ing instead to identify his enterprise as one of articulating a philosophy ofhuman conduct in general and what he calls “the civil condition” specifically.He allows politics a place in this philosophy but defines it so narrowly that itscarcely resembles ordinary conceptions.23 About politics as the subject of adistinct and coherent discipline, then, Oakeshott remains skeptical.

The field of political science nevertheless has an identity of sorts, for it isorganized as a profession, with associations, journals, and an established placein the departmental structure of universities. And the concerns of this field aresometimes brought together by their practical interest. But the result of thisaccumulation of concerns is a confusion of inquiries, not modal coherence.Political science can free itself from modal ambiguity only by distinguishing itsexplanatory concepts from those that belong to the prescriptive languages ofpolitical debate. These prescriptive concepts have no place in the study of poli-tics, despite their importance in “political theory”—an expression often quali-fied by adjectives like “conservative” and “liberal” that belong not to philoso-phy but to the vocabulary of political debate. This “so-called ‘political theory,’”Oakeshott complains, is not a theory of politics, an effort to explain; it is “itself aform of political activity . . . to be explained, historically or philosophically” (RP34; VLL 331). When theorizing in political science is tailored to the demands ofpractice, it becomes a part of practice and ceases to have explanatory value.“Normative political theory,” then, is an oxymoron. Ironically, Oakeshott sideshere with positivist defenders of a value-free political science against such her-meneutic philosophers as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, who insist onthe inherently normative character of political science.

Can we, nevertheless, identify within political science explanations that aregenuinely scientific in the modal sense? Oakeshott thinks we can, but it is clear


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23. I discuss Oakeshott’s definition of politics in the Conclusion.

that he is not impressed with the scope or power of such explanations. In a1930 review of a book devoted to arguing the case for the scientific study ofpolitics, Oakeshott suggests that if it wishes to be scientific, “political sciencemust . . . be quantitative,” and he chides the author for failing to recognize theimportance of statistics in this enterprise.24 Many years later he writes that “thenow vast literature concerned with what is currently called ‘the science of poli-tics’ should, perhaps, be recognized to have broken new ground here andthere,” but insofar as the study of politics succeeds as science it must abandonmost of its traditional concerns (OHC 311). Among these is the concern to pre-dict particular events such as the outcome of an election or a judicial decision.As with forecasting the weather or the stock market, such predictions requireinformation about innumerable contingencies, much of it necessarily externalto any theory. Predicting the future is an unavoidable part of practical life, butit is irrelevant to science as a mode of inquiry and understanding. In short,there is room for efforts to formulate mathematical theorems about voting sys-tems, legislative coalitions, arms races, and other “political” phenomena, but asin the case of economic and psychological theorems, these theorems can bemade relevant to history or current affairs only by abstracting them from thecontext of scientific explanation and transforming them into generalizations ofdoubtful value in understanding, explaining, predicting, or responding to anaction or event, given the innumerable contingencies that must be taken intoaccount in each of these engagements.

Orders and Idioms of Inquiry

In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott relies on a version of the hermeneutic cri-terion to distinguish the human and the natural sciences: the former, he sug-gests, are concerned with intelligent conduct, the latter with not-intelligentprocesses. To understand something as an expression of intelligence is to ascribemeaning to it and to invoke an inquiry that interprets this meaning. The dis-tinction between the intelligent and the not-intelligent is more basic than thedistinction between history and science because it determines the domains ofthe human and the natural sciences. And it is more comprehensive becausewhile history and science are merely two among an indefinite number of modes,


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24. Review of G. E. G. Catlin, The Principles of Politics, Cambridge Review 51 (1929–30), 400.

the categories “intelligent” and “not-intelligent” are exhaustive: all experiencemust be understood under one or the other of these categories.

The significance of this new distinction is that the natural sciences are cate-gorially barred from having anything to say about human activity as an expres-sion of intelligence. As we have seen, “science” includes inquiries in economicsand psychology that seek to explain human behavior as the outcome of under-lying processes. But these inquiries are not concerned with “human conduct”defined as intelligent choice and action. Science, as a mode of inquiry, is con-cerned with not-intelligent processes, including those that affect the behaviorof human beings as living organisms, not with human ideas, practices, andperformances. The distinction here is between “behavior,” which does notdepend on an agent’s own understandings and is not under the agent’s con-trol, and “conduct,” which does involve such understandings and implies thepossibility of voluntary choice. Only inquiries that attend to the character ofhuman conduct as conduct—interpretive inquiries concerned with the mean-ings, intentions, and contexts that make an individual practice or performancewhat it is, and thereby explain human activity without explaining it away—canbe called inquiries into human conduct, and only the “human sciences” meetthis criterion.

In Experience and Its Modes, science is a distinct mode of inquiry. But sci-ence (Wissenschaft) can also be defined as any systematic inquiry, whatever itsmode. Adopting this more inclusive conception in On Human Conduct,Oakeshott calls any reasonably coherent set of theorems “a science” and speaksnot of “science” but of “sciences” (OHC 14, 17–20, 25). In the expression“human sciences,” Geisteswissenschaften, the word science conveys this moreinclusive meaning. But the expression is unfortunate because, paradoxically,the sciences to which it refers seek an understanding of human conduct that isnot, in modal terms, a scientific understanding. As Gadamer puts it, “thehuman sciences are connected to modes of experience that lie outside science:with the experiences of philosophy, of art, and of history itself.”25 The study ofhuman beings includes fields like human genetics, physical anthropology, andexperimental psychology that do not belong to the human sciences, defined ashermeneutic disciplines. Because they explain human behavior as the outcome


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25. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. [English language] ed., trans. JoelWeinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989), xxii(emphasis added).

of underlying psychological, biological, or chemical processes, these disciplinesdo not yield explanations that depend on the idea of conduct understood asintelligent choice and action. When economics and psychology explore theimplications of their concepts in mathematical models and statistical analyses,they too must be classed with the natural sciences. Insofar as they are con-cerned with human conduct as the performances and practices of intelligentagents, Oakeshott suggests, the human sciences belong to the “humanities,”and distinguishing them from the humanities was “an unfortunate mistake”(VLL 34).

Because this view of the human sciences rests on the distinction betweenthe categories “intelligent” and “not-intelligent,” that distinction calls for fur-ther elucidation. For any inquiry to get under way as a distinct and coherentengagement, it must decide whether what it wishes to understand belongs inone or the other of these categories. To identify something is already to havechosen its category, that is, to have recognized it either as an expression ofintelligence or as a not-intelligent object or occurrence. It is, moreover, to havechosen the kind of inquiry to be undertaken, for the category into which theidentity falls dictates the kind of understanding required. These categoriesdetermine what Oakeshott calls the “order” of an inquiry. When we identifysomething as expressing intelligent conduct, we imply an order of inquiry dif-ferent from that which is implied by identifying it as the product of a not-intelligent process. And no inquiry can yield conclusions that make sense ifthe identities it investigates are categorially ambiguous: “a categorially unam-biguous identity is the condition of every significant adventure in theorizing,and the recognition of the category of the identity concerned is the first stepin every such adventure” (OHC 15). For Oakeshott, the expression “social sci-ence” as it is commonly used confuses the scientific and historical modes ofinquiry, and we can now see that this confusion involves the categorial errorof attempting to explain intelligent conduct as the outcome of non-intelligentprocesses. No significant understanding is possible where “rules are misidenti-fied as regularities, intelligent winks as physiological blinks, conduct as ‘behav-ior’ and contingent relationships as causal or systematic connections” (VLL 35).

In the first category are things recognized as exhibitions of intelligence andtherefore as human conduct, or as artifacts, ideas, arguments, practices, andthe like understood to be products of human conduct. These things invite aninquiry that employs the concepts of thinking, learning, and choosing, andthat pays attention to meanings. In the second category are things, like athunderstorm or a field of wildflowers, that are recognized as not being exhi-


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bitions of intelligence. Phenomena like these are understood by discoveringthe processes that determine them—genetic, ecological, chemical, or otherprocesses that do not involve thinking, learning, or choice.

If I recognize a pile of eroded stones on a hillside in Tuscany as the ruin ofa Roman fort, I have placed it in the category of expressions of intelligence,and my putting it there implies a range of possible inquiries into the conductit expresses. One such inquiry might be a study of Roman military practices.And the ideas I would use in attempting to find out more about this fortwould be ideas about beliefs, customs, decisions, technologies, and the like—ideas related to human thought and conduct. I might see the ruin as providingevidence for a history of Roman settlement or as illustrating the influence ofEtruscan ideas on Roman engineering—each a distinguishable inquiry, butinquiries of the same “order.” But if I am interested in the stones for the evi-dence they provide regarding a hypothesis about glaciation, I am abstractingidentities categorially different from any that are implied by the word “fort.”These identifications point toward a range of inquiries that belong to a differentorder. They make no use of the ideas needed to discuss intelligent activity butrely instead on ideas like sedimentation and striation that pertain to processesrather than to practices.

To avoid misunderstanding, several things need to be said about the dis-tinction between identifying a thing as an expression of intelligence and iden-tifying it as the manifestation of a not-intelligent process.

First, the distinction, though categorial in the sense that each of these iden-tifications excludes the other, is not an ontological one. Oakeshott is not say-ing that there are two kinds of things in the universe—mental things andphysical things—but rather that one constructs the world differently depend-ing on whether one assumes that what one is trying to understand is or is notan expression of intelligence. The kind of “thing” we are dealing with—intelli-gent or not-intelligent—is not a given but a choice. A field of wildflowers maybe seen as an outcome of human behavior (a meadow made by clearing a for-est, an empty lot neglected), just as a brick may be seen not as an artifact but interms of the chemistry of its material components. A rain shower may beunderstood, correctly or incorrectly, as intelligent conduct (God answering thedrought-stricken farmer’s prayers), and we may explain an aspect of humanbehavior—for example, the uncontrolled swearing in Tourette’s syndrome—asa neural malfunction and therefore as part of a not-intelligent process. Like thedistinction between modes, that between process and conduct is “a distinctionwithin the engagement of understanding, a distinction between ‘sciences’”


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(OHC 14). The inquirer’s task is not to discover a uniquely correct descriptionof what is going on, but to be clear about what category the description belongsto and the order of inquiry it implies.

Second, to say that the distinction is a categorial one is to say that explana-tions that reflect these different ways of understanding the world are mutuallyincompatible. To see the world as the product of intelligent conduct and tosee it as the result of a not-intelligent process is to see it in mutually exclusiveways. The kind of understanding provided by one order of inquiry cannot betranslated into that provided by the other. One can understand an intelligentactivity (like writing a book) as the causal product of certain not-intelligentprocesses, but it cannot be understood as these processes. Propositions con-cerning these processes cannot explain the views an author is expressing ortheir circumstantial relation to other views. Such propositions may explainthe biochemistry of thinking and writing, but they cannot explain the ideasthat are being thought and written down. They have nothing to say about thesemantic content—the meaning, significance, or truth—of these ideas.

The claim that arguments are nothing more than the outcome of biochemi-cal or other processes is, in fact, self-refuting, for this proposition (which is alsoan argument) must then itself be a manifestation of such a process, not a propo-sition with truth value. But if it has truth value, so do other propositions, andthe fact that they are the result of a process is irrelevant to choosing betweenthem on the basis of their truth or falsehood. The process does not invalidatethe argument or, what is the same thing, the argument remains distinct fromthe process that produced it. It cannot, therefore, be replaced by or reduced tothat process. Each is governed by its own laws—the process by the causal lawsthat are its mechanism, the argument by the rules that are its standards.

A similar point can be made about hedonistic or rational choice explana-tions of human conduct. Such explanations assume that human beings aremotivated by wants and conclude that all conduct can be explained as effortsto satisfy these wants. Yet those who make these claims about human motiva-tion do not merely seek to satisfy their own wants: like Marx and Engels, whocriticized the “ideology” of their epoch from the standpoint of a “science”able to transcend the errors of that ideology, they “assume a relationshipbetween themselves and those whom they address which is . . . that of personscapable of considering the truth or falsehood of a theorem” (VLL 27).Motivational explanations of ideas are irrelevant to their validity.

Third, although to identify a thing as either intelligent or not-intelligentdetermines the “order” of the inquiry appropriate to it, it does not determine


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what Oakeshott calls the “idiom” of the inquiry. Within each order there aredifferent idioms of inquiry—different disciplines or “sciences.” Choosing theright category is therefore only the first step in an inquiry, for there may stillbe “contingent ambiguities” within a categorially unambiguous identity. Theseambiguities must be resolved before the identity can be investigated, formany different kinds of inquiry are possible.

Having identified an object as an expression of human intelligence, andtherefore having chosen to understand it as something to be interpreted andexplained in terms of concepts like belief, intention, choice, and action, westill need to determine whether we are trying to understand the object as, say,evidence of a historical event, an example of an architectural style, or an objectthat has meaning within a system of religious belief. Each identificationpoints to a different kind of inquiry. Within each category, in other words, wemay distinguish various idioms of inquiry that, although distinct, do not cat-egorially exclude one another and between which translation is conceivable.An authentic idiom is one that can be made provisionally coherent in its ownterms. Each such idiom remains independent insofar as it rests on premisesthat are exclusively its own. But it need not be distinguished absolutely fromother idioms. One idiom might conceivably be reducible to another withinthe same order: the principles of physiology, for example, might be restatedin chemical terms or political philosophy shown to be an extension of moralphilosophy. But an authentic idiom of inquiry will avoid the kind of incoher-ence that exists in a field that offers a categorially ambiguous understandingof its subject matter.

The human sciences, then, are distinguishable but not necessarily inde-pendent inquiries concerned with the ideas, actions, customs, and cultures ofhuman beings. Each begins by identifying these phenomena as expressions ofhuman intelligence and is therefore an idiom within the order of inquiriesthat is determined by this presupposition.

What is the relationship between the idea of orders and idioms of inquiryand the idea of modes of experience? If by a “mode” we mean a distinct andreasonably self-consistent kind of understanding, then the distinction betweenthe categories of intelligent conduct and not-intelligent processes, each ofwhich generates an order of inquiry, is itself a modal distinction. But the dis-tinction between idioms of inquiry is also, according to this definition, amodal one. The modes defined by these new distinctions are not, however,those identified in Experience and Its Modes. In that work, Oakeshott identi-fies history, science, and practice as modes, but he defines philosophy as an


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activity that, by criticizing modal presuppositions, moves beyond modalthinking to a more general, less conditional, understanding. We can now see,however, that Oakeshott’s original treatment of the modes as parallel andindependent ignores certain relationships between them.

Looked at in one way, the historical and practical modes share a concep-tion of human conduct that distinguishes them from the scientific mode.Each assumes that what is going on involves intelligent choice and attempts,in its own way, to make sense of conduct on that assumption. But looked atanother way, practice, which is evaluative and prescriptive, can be contrastedboth with science and with history, which are explanatory. This distinctionbetween prescriptive and explanatory inquiries appears often in essays Oake-shott wrote after Experience and Its Modes. In a 1938 article on the philosophyof law, for example, he distinguishes the concern to understand law as a par-ticular kind of human activity, which is a philosophical concern, from thepractical concern (such as a legislator might have) to use particular laws toprescribe conduct—a distinction that is obscured, he argues, by the word“jurisprudence” (CPJ 203). And in several essays from the 1940s and 1950s onthe study of politics, Oakeshott distinguishes the prescriptive languages ofpolitical discourse from the “explanatory languages” that are appropriate tothe academic study of politics (RP 34, 212–13, 216). Science, history, and phi-losophy are explanatory rather than prescriptive.

Therefore when, in On Human Conduct, Oakeshott distinguishes “intelli-gent” and “not-intelligent” as alternative categories for explaining experience,he is making clear something that is merely implicit in Experience and ItsModes. And the consequence of this new distinction is to redefine the modes.Practice is replaced by “human conduct,” that is, transformed from a mode ofunderstanding to an object of understanding: intelligent thought and action tobe interpreted and explained. History becomes the study of past conduct andundergirds a set of related explanatory inquiries collectively, though ambiva-lently, designated “the human sciences.” And science is redescribed as aninquiry that attempts to explain the world under the category of not-intelligentphenomena. It might be said, then, that the distinction between two orders ofinquiry, one that explains identified goings-on as expressions of intelligence,the other that explains them as a result of not-intelligent processes, is implicitin Oakeshott’s original distinction between the historical and scientific modes.The modes have been redefined through philosophical criticism, but they havenot been discarded or destroyed. It is worth noticing that Oakeshott refers to


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history and practice as modes in On History, which he published eight yearsafter On Human Conduct.

Nor has the idea of modality itself vanished in the new analysis; it has onlybeen refined. The categories “intelligent” and “not-intelligent” define mutu-ally exclusive orders of explanation. And within each order we can distinguishidioms of explanation that are merely different. But if modality marks thepoints at which differences of degree turn into differences of kind, then both“order” and “idiom” are modal concepts.

Interpretation and Individuality

All understanding, Oakeshott argues in Experience and Its Modes, is con-cerned with meanings. Reality, as we encounter it in our efforts to under-stand, “is what we are obliged to think; and, since to think is to experience,and to experience is to experience meaning, the real is always what has mean-ing” (EM 58). When, in On Human Conduct, he defines the categories “intel-ligent” and “not-intelligent,” he does not deny this basic idea but merelyrefines it by distinguishing two kinds of meaning in understanding: thatwhich belongs to the object to be understood and that which the observerbrings to the study of the object. Intelligent things have meaning in bothsenses, not-intelligent things only in the latter.

The doubly hermeneutic character of knowledge concerning what weidentify as an expression of intelligence permits us to distinguish Oakeshott’sversion of the hermeneutic conception of the human sciences from the viewthat there is no significant distinction between the human and the natural sci-ences. Rorty, for example, dismisses the distinction between the natural andthe human sciences, together with the mind-nature distinction itself, as arbi-trary and insignificant.26 According to this line of argument, all human experi-ence is intentional or semantic; that is, the only possible relationship of humanbeings to experience is through meanings. But if all experience involves mean-ings, then all experience requires interpretation if it is to be understood.Hermeneutics becomes as relevant to our experience of nature as to our expe-rience of human conduct.


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26. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1979), 343–56.

If this were all there was to be said, the distinction between the natural sci-ences and the human sciences would be superfluous. “Universal hermeneu-tics” takes Vico’s celebrated dictum—that the study of human beings must bedistinguished from the study of nature because human beings can know whatthey have made—and extends it from the human to the natural world, for tosay that the world is experienced in terms of human categories is to makenature itself a product of mind. The geistige Welt, which is the inherited worldof meanings into which every human being is born, is a world composed notof physical objects but of shared beliefs or ideas. It is “a world . . . of ‘expres-sions’ which have meanings and require to be understood because they arethe ‘expressions’ of human minds. . . . The starry heavens above us and themoral law within are alike human achievements” (VLL 45). But if both thenatural and the human worlds are human achievements belonging to thesame geistige Welt, on what grounds can we distinguish between the naturaland the human sciences? As Robert Grant puts it, “if the geistige Welt is reallya unity, why does it require two distinct kinds of study?”27 And the answer, itshould by now be clear, is that although all understanding involves meaningsand is therefore hermeneutic, to understand human conduct involves payingattention to two levels of meaning. The human sciences require a second levelof interpretation, beyond that needed in the natural sciences viewed as sys-tems of ideas, because the object of inquiry as well as the inquiry itself is com-posed of meanings.

We can explain an earthquake using the principles of geological science(which in turn uses ideas from physics, chemistry, and the other natural sci-ences), and we require only these principles. But to explain human actions wemust take into account the self-understandings of those human beings whoseactions they are. It is, in other words, the self-consciousness inherent in everyact that distinguishes a human act from a natural event. And this self-under-standing is not idiosyncratic; it is built upon the intersubjective meanings thatconstitute human practices. Explaining it requires an interpretive, not a natu-ralistic, mode of understanding. The natural sciences generate theories thatare themselves systems of meaning, but these theories ignore the element ofmeaning that may be present in the objects they are intended to explain. Ifour concern is to understand a process, the choice of an interpretive scheme(a theory) that excludes meaning, at the level of the object to be explained, isproductive and indeed necessary. But intelligent conduct as such cannot be


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27. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990), 42–43.

explained by natural, and therefore not-intelligent, processes. To think other-wise is to be categorially confused.

There is, moreover, a connection between understanding something as anexpression of intelligence and being concerned with its individuality—a con-nection that illuminates the relationship between the two criteria for distin-guishing the study of human activity from the study of nature identified bynineteenth-century theorists of the human sciences. To understand somethingas an expression of intelligence is to see it as an individual object having, likethe al-Aqsa mosque or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, its own character andsignificance. To grasp the properties of a natural object, in contrast, is to com-prehend the properties of the class to which it belongs. Where our concern isscientific, we are not concerned with the individual object before us but withthe kind of figure it represents. We are concerned with a type, not its tokens.But in the human sciences our concern is to understand individual humanperformances—particular acts, utterances, gestures, languages, texts, genres,traditions, institutions, cultures—not the class “human performances.” Humanconduct, understood as expressing intelligence, consists of the performancesof particular persons, believing this or that, engaged in various schemes andtransactions, choosing to do one thing instead of another. And it includes therelationships and practices that are constituted by, while also providing a con-text for, these performances. To understand actual, significant performancesand practices, in contrast to the psychological, economic, or other processesthat may be abstracted from them, calls for a kind of inquiry that is distinctfrom the scientific study of human activity. It is, Oakeshott argues, a kind ofhistorical inquiry. History, he suggests, is the proper science of individual per-formances and practices.

There is much about this view of historical inquiry as central to the studyof human conduct that needs to be clarified, above all the relationship betweeninterpreting practices and explaining performances. Does it make sense todescribe both kinds of inquiry as historical? Is history one among a number ofhuman sciences or is it coextensive with the human sciences? Or should wesay instead that there is a historical dimension to each of the human sciences?Before dealing with these questions, I want to look more closely at the idea ofa “performance” and at the view of history as especially concerned with explain-ing performances. I shall return to the question of the place of history in thehuman sciences at the end of Chapter 4.

To understand a performance we must first understand the performer, an“agent” who thinks and therefore can make mistakes, who understands and


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so can misunderstand. An agent, qua agent, is not a biological or psycholog-ical entity whose actions are explained by biological or psychological proc-esses. There is for Oakeshott, as we have seen, a significant difference betweenunderstanding human conduct as intelligent activity and understanding not-intelligent identities like digestion or the motions of planets. Performancesbelong to the first category, processes to the second. But a performance is anindividual event as well as one that has meaning. It is an actual, particularoccurrence—a distinct event that can be understood as the unique outcomeof other events and therefore as something other than an illustration of a classof similar events. Human conduct, understood as intelligent performancesrelated to other performances that they elicit or to which they respond, con-sists of individual occurrences connected to one another not causally but inthe kind of relationship that Oakeshott calls “contingency.” And the kind ofinquiry that seeks to discover such connections is not scientific but historicalinquiry.

“Contingency” can be a misleading term because it stands, in the histo-rian’s jargon as well as in plain English, for what is merely accidental andtherefore, as Collingwood observed in criticizing nineteenth-century histori-cal positivism, for unintelligibility. And to define contingency as accident is,in fact, to assume an underlying positivism, for it implies that contingentevents are those that cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of naturalprocesses. For Oakeshott, however, “contingency” is not a relationship of acci-dent. The explanation of human conduct as comprising choices and responsesto choices excludes explanation in terms of not-intelligent processes. It neveruses the idea of accident to account for events that cannot be explained by thelaws governing such processes.

To understand what people are thinking and doing is to pay attention totheir acts as intelligent performances and to relate those acts to other such per-formances. The acts that are related to one another in this way, that is, contin-gently, are linked in a sequence of understood (or misunderstood) occurrencesto compose a narrative within which each act has its place. Contingency, then,far from standing for accident and therefore for unintelligibility, makes anoccurrence intelligible as a significant event in relation to other significantevents.

This account of human conduct and its proper understanding has severalelements that need to be made explicit. First, a contingent relationship, likethat between Spinoza’s voicing unorthodox views and his excommunication,is a temporal or sequential one. Second, the acts or other events that are con-


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tingently related are congruent with one another in the sense that what comesafter is understood to be a response to what went before. To understand mywriting this book as an individual performance is to understand it as an invi-tation to which your reading this sentence is, in some way, a response. Third,the elucidation of this congruence between my actions and yours dependsupon an understanding of their context. And because there are many possiblecontexts for an action, there are many ways of elucidating its meaning. Everyperformance, every utterance or gesture, invokes an idiom or language (apractice) that is part of its context and that is relevant to understanding it. Butthe meaning of an action is not exhausted by its relation to the various idiomsinto which it may fit; it is also a particular act whose meaning depends onother acts to which it responds and which it provokes. Therefore, finally,actions that are contingently related must be understood to throw light onone another and thereby render one another more intelligible.

To understand human conduct as a connected series of intelligent acts is tosee these acts as composing a story (OHC 105; VLL 34). But unlike a fictional,religious, or hortatory narrative, this kind of story, sometimes called a “his-tory,” has no unconditional beginning or end and offers no moral or lesson. Itresults, moreover, from an inquiry that is not itself a practical inquiry: the his-torian who wishes to understand a performance is “not concerned to under-stand the performance merely in order to respond to it” (OHC 106). Likeother stories, it is concerned with details, and its meaning lies in these details:the individual occurrences that are related in a historical narrative acquire sig-nificance from their contingent connections with other occurrences. Historicalinquiry, insofar as it is concerned with actions at all, aims to understand partic-ular performances (recorded exploits) as they are circumstantially related toother performances. And no performance can be understood solely throughmere observation: “the authentic characters of performances which have sur-vived are what they are in terms of their transactional relationships with oth-ers, and they may emerge only in an inquiry in which they are made tointerpret and criticize one another” (OH 51). What distinguishes the kind ofexplanation provided by a history of contingently related acts from otherkinds of explanations, and specifically from scientific explanations, is that eachact is understood not as a necessary consequence, or as a mere accident, but asan intelligible event.

This analysis of contingency implies an understanding of history as a dis-tinct mode of inquiry. It also provides the basis for a more general philosophyof the human sciences, one that not only recognizes the centrality of meaning


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to the subject matter of these sciences, but that distinguishes between the task ofunderstanding human practices as systems of meaning and that of explainingparticular, substantive performances. It is a conception Oakeshott had begun toarticulate in the 1920s and was still working on half a century later. A conceptionof considerable complexity and subtlety, it calls for detailed attention.


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1. Oakeshott’s historical writings are numerous and scattered, but the main items are hisessays on Hobbes, now collected in Hobbes on Civil Association, and the interpretations of thehistory of European political thought found in the following works: (1) The Politics of Faith andthe Politics of Skepticism, probably written in the early 1950s but published in 1996; (2) Moralityand Politics in Modern Europe, some lectures delivered at Harvard in 1958 and published in 1993;(3) “The History of Political Thought from the Ancient Greeks to the Present Day,” an unpub-lished set of lectures at the London School of Economics from the middle 1960s; and (4) thethird part of On Human Conduct, published in 1975, entitled “On the Character of a ModernEuropean State.” On Oakeshott as a historian of political thought, see L. O’Sullivan, “MichaelOakeshott on European Political History,” History of Political Thought 21 (2000), 132–51.

Historical Understanding

In ordinary usage, the word “history” stands, ambiguously, for past eventsand for a particular way of understanding past events. History as past eventsis what actually happened, the subject of historical inquiry. History as a wayof understanding past events is this inquiry itself, the study or “science” ofhistory. While history as past events is made by those who participated in theevents, history as inquiry is “made” only by the historian (OH 2). As a histo-rian of political thought, Oakeshott has much to say about history in the firstsense, but my concern in this chapter is with what he has to say, as a philoso-pher, about history as a mode of inquiry and understanding.1

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Oakeshott never departed from the view, articulated in his earliest writ-ings, that the philosopher, qua philosopher, can have nothing to say aboutpast events themselves. A philosopher is neither a historian nor a theorist of“the historical process” conceived in either teleological or causal terms, andtherefore the efforts of Vico, Condorcet, Hegel, Marx, Comte, Toynbee, andmany others to tell the story of the world or to discover the laws of its histor-ical development must be regarded as misconceived. This view—that the phi-losophy of history must confine itself to examining the nature and limits ofhistorical knowledge—is one that, by the middle of the twentieth century hadcome to be widely accepted by philosophers under the label “critical” or “ana-lytical” philosophy of history.

Oakeshott’s writings on historical inquiry span a period of more than fiftyyears. The main texts are an important chapter in Experience and Its Modes; a1958 essay, “The Activity of Being an Historian,” later included in Rationalismin Politics; and three related essays (“Present, Future and Past,” “HistoricalEvents,” and “Historical Change”) in On History and Other Essays (1983). Oake-shott also treats historical inquiry at the end of the first part of On HumanConduct and in many reviews of historical books. In what follows, I draw onall these writings to interpret the theory of historical inquiry they jointly pre-sent. The essays in On History deserve particular attention because they arethe most recent and least discussed of Oakeshott’s writings on the subject. Ibegin by discussing his account of the presuppositions of history as a distinctmode of understanding. These presuppositions include the ideas of knowl-edge, fact, and truth as they are defined within this mode; the idea of anauthentically historical past distinguished from other, modally distinct, kindsof past; and the idea, which Oakeshott both expounds and criticizes, that whatis real in history are particular persons, nations, periods, and events (“histor-ical individuals”). With these presuppositions as a basis, I go on to considerOakeshott’s analysis of historical explanation, which holds that change isexplained “historically” by showing it to be the outcome of contingent rela-tionships between events—an analysis that rejects the positivist theory that his-torical explanations, like scientific explanations, aim to account for particularevents as instances of general laws. For Oakeshott, this historical positivism ismistaken not only because it assimilates history to science but because it mis-conceives science as explaining particular events: genuine science is concernedwith abstract relationships, not with particulars. Finally, I return to a theme ofChapter 3 to consider Oakeshott’s view of the place of historical inquiry withinthe human sciences.


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History as a Mode of Inquiry

The effort to define history as a mode of inquiry encounters the same objectionsmade against other efforts to distinguish a mode from the self-understanding ofan actual discipline. Like the practitioners of other disciplines, historians areinclined to doubt the competence of outsiders to determine the aims andscope of their craft. History, they object, is best defined by the practicing his-torian, not the philosopher. We have met this objection before in the contextof science, but because Oakeshott is especially interested in history and hasimmense respect for historical scholarship at its best, he responds to it herewith particular care. Underlying the objection, he thinks, is a failure to distin-guish between the historian’s interest in understanding the past and the philoso-pher’s interest in locating historical inquiry on the map of knowledge. Thelatter is not itself a historical concern, and historians are not especially quali-fied to pursue it. On the contrary, their views on what historical knowledge isand how it relates to other kinds of knowledge are those of scholars speakingbeyond their professional competence.2 Historical questions are best answeredby the historian, but the character of historical knowledge raises philosophicalrather than historical questions. To answer such questions, we must put asidethe practice of historical inquiry to examine the assumptions on which it rests.To define the historical, one must of course know something about the prac-tice of history, but such knowledge by itself is insufficient. The philosopher ofhistory is interested in what the historian takes for granted: the presupposi-tions, the “symptoms of modality” (EM 88), that distinguish historical under-standing from other kinds of understanding.

A more substantial objection to the effort to define history as a mode ofinquiry is that historical inquiry is not one thing but several. “History is whathistorians do,” as historians like to say, and because they do a number of dif-ferent things, historical inquiry cannot be said to rest on a single set of defini-tive assumptions. History is an ever-changing collection of questions asked andmethods used in studying the past, not a distinct mode of thought. But, Oake-shott replies, identifying shared assumptions in the work of historians is com-patible with there being a diversity of approaches to historical scholarship. Toinsist that the past can be studied in different ways is already to acknowledge


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2. The true historian escapes the errors of positivism “not by a reflective knowledge of thephilosophical principles of historical thought, but by means of his intuitive grasp of his ownsubject, and without knowing in detail what he is escaping.” Review of Collingwood, The Ideaof History, English Historical Review 62 (1947), 86.

that history can be defined because it identifies “the past” as the common con-cern of historical studies, and this suggests at least the possibility of specifyingthe character of historical inquiry more precisely (OH 3).

Historians do, however, rightly object to the interference of philosophersin the conduct of historical scholarship, Oakeshott thinks, for if the historianis not as such a philosopher, neither is the philosopher a historian. Even ifphilosophers have something cogent to say about the definition of historicalinquiry, it is not for them to tell historians how to conduct their studies. But,he insists, an effort like his own to define history as a mode of inquiry is notitself prescriptive. The criteria that define historical inquiry as a distinct modeof inquiry are its presuppositions, its working assumptions and foundationalbeliefs, not prescriptions for how to conduct historical research. The reflec-tions of the philosopher on this manner of inquiry aim to distinguish it fromthe practical and other concerns from which it emerged and with which it isstill often confused. A philosophical understanding of historical inquiryabstracts from the practice of historians and therefore neither describes thatpractice nor prescribes how it should be carried on.

Historical Knowledge

According to the ordinary view of history—a view that is reflected in the pos-itivist conception of historical research—historical events exist independentlyof the historian’s knowledge of them. Historical knowledge is not an intellec-tual construct but a record of real events. Events occur, and the historian’stask is simply to discover what has occurred. This commonsense view is easilydemolished, however, for even if we choose to speak of “events” as having“happened” (two problematic ideas that I will examine below), we must rec-ognize that some actual events have not been recorded and that some recordedevents never actually happened, and this, Oakeshott thinks, is enough toundermine the idea of historical knowledge as a mere chronicle of successiveevents. The events that comprise this putative series cannot be identified apartfrom one another, not only because the available information is unreliablebut, more important, because its sources represent a point of view that is dif-ferent from the historian’s. As every historian knows, before a recorded eventcan become part of a historical narrative or explanation it must be judgedaccording to the historian’s ideas. A historian cannot simply accept the beliefsof those about whom he or she is writing: “what is a ‘miracle’ for the writer ofany of the gospels cannot remain a miracle for the historian” (EM 90), for


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example. Nor can one historian uncritically accept the conclusions of others.The information on which a historian relies in constructing an account of thepast is not history until it has been critically reinterpreted.

The ordinary empiricist view of history might, however, be reformulatedto meet this objection. History, it might be said, even if it is more than a mereseries of events, is nevertheless a collection of objective historical facts, not anintellectual construct. What actually happened, whether or not it has beenrecorded, is independent of what historians think: historical events determinewhat historical narratives record. Oakeshott’s response to this argument fol-lows from his view of experience or understanding itself: “history cannot be‘the course of events’ independent of our experience of it, because there isnothing independent of our experience. . . . An event independent of experi-ence, ‘objective’ in the sense of being untouched by thought or judgment,would be an unknowable” (EM 93). Historians do not merely record whatappears as given, but must uncover evidence, decide which evidence is rela-tively solid, and reconcile discrepant pieces of evidence. Historical evidence isnot an unproblematic gift from the past that the historian simply accepts.There are no “authorities” in history—sources of evidence that are beyondquestion. A historical event is always the conclusion of an inquiry into surviv-ing records, where these records are understood as themselves historical per-formances that need to be understood.

To put it differently, the starting place in a historical investigation is neverthe past itself but a provisional view of the past—a view that is itself onlyimperfectly historical. “The historian begins, not with an array of ‘facts,’ butwith an understanding, and with an understanding which ex hypothesi is non-historical because it is an understanding in relation to what were believed atthe time to be the fortunes of the age concerned.” The historian’s task is togenerate a historical understanding “by allowing the categories of historicalthinking to work upon this ‘non-historical’ material.”3 For the historian toconclude anything at all about what happened, historical “facts” must be madeto criticize one another within an understanding shaped by the presupposi-tions and procedures of a historical inquiry. To assert a historical occurrence istherefore always to make an inference that something did in fact happen.

Historical inquiry begins not with a miscellaneous assortment of brute facts,which the historian arranges to construct a coherent narrative or explanation,


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3. Review of Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History, Cambridge Journal 6(1952), 248.

but with an existing body of ideas—as Gadamer says, with inherited meaningsand the judgments (“prejudices”) they bear. Historical facts, like all facts, areconclusions.4 They are “verdicts” based on what has been determined (accord-ing to other judgments) to be the relevant evidence. And like any other judg-ment, a judgment of historical fact can be mistaken. Historical facts are not“what really happened” but “what the evidence obliges us to believe” (EM112). The past as understood by the historian consists of facts that are objec-tive because they have been established by historians in the course of inquiriesthat critically examine a body of evidence according to the canons of historicalresearch. The historical past is constructed on the basis of intersubjectivelygrounded facts. As Droysen observed in the 1860s, we cannot restore pastevents objectively but can only construct a more or less subjective view ofthem on the basis of what we determine to be evidence, and these construc-tions are all we can know of the past. “‘History’ exists not outwardly and as areality, but only as thus mediated, studied out, and known.”5

This is essentially the view defended by certain philosophers of historysince the mid-1970s under the label of “constructionism.” Historical knowl-edge, the constructionist argues, is inferential, not perceptual; it can never beconfirmed by “observation,” as that term is used either in ordinary or in scien-tific discourse. It is therefore unreasonable to expect historical inquiry to sat-isfy criteria of factuality, truth, and reality that make sense when we can engagein direct observation. What contributes to the reality of a historical fact is thatso much supports it and so much else depends on it.6 This cautious historicalconstructionism must be distinguished from the more radical view (“decon-structionism”) of those who argue, rather incautiously, that because the realnature of the past cannot be ascertained, there are no objective constraints onthe way historians choose to imagine the past. Such arguments, by erasing theboundaries between history, poetry, and practice, in effect deny the autonomyof history as a mode of inquiry and understanding. Oakeshott’s construction-ism must also be distinguished from the “social constructivism” that is now


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4. F. H. Bradley emphasizes the inferential character of historical facts in an essay first pub-lished in 1874, The Presuppositions of Critical History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 87–93.For Gadamer’s view of the place of “prejudice” in interpretation, see Truth and Method, 2d rev.[English language] ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: CrossroadPublishing Company, 1989), 269–77.

5. Johann Gustav Droysen, Outline of the Principles of History, trans. E. Benjamin Andrews(Boston: Ginn, 1893), 111–12.

6. Leon J. Goldstein, Historical Knowing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 80.

orthodox in many parts of the humanities and social sciences, which defends amorally engaged and therefore, from Oakeshott’s perspective, modally con-fused, understanding of the human sciences.7

The world understood historically is a constructed world of ideas, but thisworld is one that has been constructed according to the specific ideas, the cat-egories and canons, that define the historical outlook. The historian begins aninvestigation already equipped with certain assumptions: “a system of postu-lates (largely unexamined) which define the limits of his thought,” and anidentified subject matter to be studied, “a specific view of the course of events,a view consonant with his postulates” (EM 97). These assumptions determinewhich materials will be collected for study and how they will be studied. Thisis not to say that what are judged to be historical facts do not also influencethe historian’s assumptions and theories, only that the two are interdepen-dent. Theories, recognized or unrecognized, guide historical research, butthey are also affected by what this research discovers. For what is discoveredcan transform our ideas about the past and even our understanding of histor-ical inquiry itself. In a historical investigation we proceed not by accumulat-ing new information, which we incorporate into an existing framework, butby considering the known past in the light of new discoveries that are them-selves the product of historical thinking. Clearly, this view of historical factsbelongs to the general theory of knowledge that Oakeshott presents in Expe-rience and Its Modes.

Oakeshott’s definition of historical truth likewise follows from that theory.The truth of a proposition is not determined by a criterion that lies outsideexperience—an absolute, permanent, universal, or unquestionable standardagainst which any proposition can be tested. It is determined by how thatproposition fits with others within a given system of ideas. It is this condi-tional coherence—coherence relative to a given system—that allows us tospeak without contradiction of different kinds of truth: scientific, moral, artis-tic, and so forth. It follows that there can be no test of historical truth outsidethe historian’s reconstruction of the past. Words like “discover,” “recover,” andeven “reconstruct” are misleading insofar as they imply a reality independentof experience, and to avoid this implication Oakeshott prefers to say that thehistorian’s task is “to create and construct” (EM 93). As he later emphasizes,the meaning of a historical fact, which makes it the fact it is, can be established


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7. Ian Hacking examines the expression “social construction” and its various uses in TheSocial Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

only in relation to other historical facts. The meaning and therefore the veryidentity of historical facts is determined by their place in the story the histo-rian constructs according to the evidence. “The historian is like the novelistwhose characters (for example) are presented in such detail and with suchcoherence that additional explanation of their actions is superfluous” (EM141). Historical truth is coherence and coherence of a specific kind: coherencewithin a system of historical ideas.

One must be careful not to read too much into the idea of history as acoherent “story.” Historical conclusions are often presented in a narrative, butthe narrative form is not itself a presupposition of historical knowledge. Toargue that narrative is essential to historical understanding is to confuse acommon way of presenting the results of historical research with the episte-mological status of historical knowledge. Narrative is a mode of expression,not of understanding. The same can be said of particular narrative styles orgenres (sometimes called “tropes”).8 The criteria of coherence in a romance ortragedy are criteria of literary, not historical, coherence. A narrative, moreover,is merely one way in which the results of a historical inquiry can be presented.If an inquiry has been conducted according to the canons of historical research,its conclusions are historical knowledge no matter how they are presented.

Oakeshott has been charged with advancing a theory of historical knowl-edge that lacks a criterion of truth, and without such a criterion, one criticprotests, “we are unable to arbitrate between two coherent but incompatiblepieces of historical reconstruction.”9 But this objection misconstrues the ideaof coherence. If two historical reconstructions are incompatible, there mustbe an incoherence in each supposedly coherent reconstruction insofar as itcannot make sense of the facts identified by the other. The idea that we can berescued from this dilemma by postulating an independent standard of histori-cal truth to which our various accounts must correspond merely privileges,without justification, some third reconstruction that is presumed to be beyonddoubt and therefore able to adjudicate between the others. Implicit in thisobjection to a coherence theory of historical truth is the same uncriticalattachment to realism, with its definition of truth as correspondence, that isevident both in science and in ordinary practical experience. Because it studieswhat no longer exists, historical inquiry is without an “object” in the usual


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8. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

9. John Gray, review of On History and Other Essays, Political Theory 12 (1984), 452.

sense of that term. This anomaly in itself should be enough to make us skepti-cal of a historical epistemology drawn from ordinary experience or from anaive and outdated view of science (even if it is a view still common amongscientists). And because philosophy in any case involves the criticism ofreceived ideas, that it reaches conclusions different from the ideas it criticizescannot be proof that these conclusions are erroneous.

The definition of historical truth as coherence within a body of historicalideas cannot be dismissed, then, simply because it has surprising implications.One of these surprising implications, Oakeshott thinks, is that what we call“the past” is an aspect of the present. If historical truth is not correspondencebetween a historian’s ideas and “what really happened” but coherence withina present system of ideas, with the present state of historical knowledge basedon presently available evidence, it follows that the historical past “does not liebehind present evidence” but is itself “the world which present evidence cre-ates in the present” (EM 108). History as a mode of understanding is the his-torian’s experience of a present world conceived as that which has passed by,the present world as “past.” The past is distinguished by being not present,and yet it can exist only in the form of present ideas. “Historical fact and his-torical truth . . . are necessarily present, because all fact and all truth is neces-sarily present, and at the same time they are conceived of in the form of thepast” (EM 118). What the paradoxical quality of historical existence reveals,however, is not the unreality of history but the limits of any simple realistepistemology.

The historical past, the past recovered in a historical inquiry, is thereforealways an inference from present evidence, the product of judgments thatbelong to the historian’s present experience. The historian constructs a historicalpast, using one piece of evidence critically to determine the significance ofanother. But the historical past is not whatever the historian happens to think—it is what the historian is compelled to think by the pattern of the evidence.

The Historical Past

The historian attempts to achieve coherence among ideas that are not merelypresent but present in a particular mode. It follows that the historian’s past isnot the only past that can be constructed. The argument for this conclusion—that the historical past is one among a number of modally distinguishablepasts—is straightforward if one grants the premises on which it rests: that the


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historical past is an aspect of present experience, and that the present is expe-rienced in different ways. For if the present can be understood in a number ofmodally different ways, and if the past is simply the present understood underthe category of the past, then there must be a corresponding number of modallydifferent pasts, each defined by the assumptions of the modal present to whichit corresponds. As Oakeshott puts it, “a mode of past is to be distinguished interms of the modal conditions of the present to which it is related” (OH 9).“There is a past for every way of thinking: there is neither one preeminentpast, nor is there any past at all except for some way of thinking.”10

Only a past constructed according to the postulates of historical under-standing is an authentically “historical” past. Past and present in a scientifictheory have nothing to do with the historical present and past. The pastimplicit in a set of differential equations that defines a thermodynamic or aneconomic system, for example, is not what happened, as a matter of fact, butwhat according to the equations must have been the state of the system at anearlier time. And the past as we understand it in relation to the lived world ofeveryday experience is a practical, not a historical, past. Corresponding to agiven present situation understood in practical terms is a remembered pastthat is also understood practically. This practical past is quite distinct from apast established by historical investigation. Memory is not history, eventhough memories may be among the evidence a historian examines in con-structing a historical past. A historian cannot simply transcribe his or her ownmemories into a historical account of events witnessed, for to do so would beto treat memory as an authority. What the historian remembers is only evi-dence subject to critical examination, not a direct source of historical knowl-edge.11 Memoirs, as everyone knows, make bad history.

We might even speak of a poetic or contemplative past, one composed ofimages like the characters in a historical novel, though strictly speaking therecan be no poetic past because to enter the imagined world of the novel is toignore the “pastness” of these characters by imagining them as immediatelypresent (RP 164). But the practical past is the nonhistorical past that Oake-shott is most concerned to distinguish from the historical past. And with goodreason, for the practical awareness of the past is both older and more com-


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10. Oakeshott, “History and the Social Sciences,” The Institute of Sociology, The Social Sci-ences (London: Le Play House Press, 1936), 73. 72. To indicate that there can be more than onepast, in On History Oakeshott speaks of not of “the past” but simply of “past,” omitting the defi-nite article.

11. Goldstein, Historical Knowing, 147.

pelling than an authentically historical awareness. Because historical scholar-ship typically originates in a study of persons and events that are likely tointerest the historian’s audience, it has trouble distancing itself from presentpractical concerns and maintaining itself as an autonomous mode of inquiry.Furthermore, there are similarities between historical and practical understand-ing that make them all too easy to confuse. Both, for example, are concernedwith human affairs, that is, with intelligent conduct rather than not-intelligentprocesses. This shared concern might seem to imply that the modes of practiceand history are “closer” to one another than either is to science. But it does notfollow that the difference between history and practice is not a modal differ-ence. Historical understanding may emerge, in a historian or in a civilization,from the concerns of practical life, but the understanding it generates neithersupersedes nor remains subordinate to practical understanding.

As we saw in Chapter 2, history and practice are sometimes identified witheach other because historical inquiry is itself an activity or practice. But theconclusions generated in an authentically historical inquiry are historical, notpractical, conclusions. The practical present of the historian’s own activity andthe historical present created by the conclusions of that activity are categori-ally distinct. What distinguishes the historical present, the present of histori-cal knowledge, is that it is composed of objects understood to be survivalsfrom (and therefore evidence of) a historical past, not of objects whose signif-icance is practical. But because “even the most severely ‘historical’ concernwith the past is still liable to be compromised by seeking the answer to ques-tions which are not historical questions and by asides and even judgmentswhich belong to some other mode of understanding” (OH 118), historicalinquiry must struggle continually to free itself from other ways of understand-ing the past, and above all from the practical past.

This practical past includes, besides a remembered past of personal memo-ries, a public past of religious and national origins—a “living past,” peopledby founders, patriots, and martyrs, of the kind that is taught to children, notthe dead (that is, finished) past that is the subject of critical historiography.The practical past is a source of models or ideals, of practical wisdom, or ofreligious or legal authority. An authentic historical past must be distinguishedfrom these and other practical pasts, which are pasts we regard as significantbecause they preceded our own present and because we think they are rele-vant to our concerns. It is especially hard to separate the historical study ofreligion from practical concerns. Where religious conclusions are made thepremise of what purports to be a historical inquiry, for example, the past is


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interpreted in a context that already determines its significance, as when SaintAugustine is treated as a figure in “Christian history.”12 The more distance wehave from religious, political, or other practical concerns that may be broughtto the study of history, the easier it is to see the pasts that are constructedunder the influence of these concerns as practical constructions, and to do thisis to be on the road to critical, and therefore genuine, history.

The historical past, in short, is distinguished from various practical pastsby the absence of any connection with present practical concerns. But the his-torical past cannot be divorced from present evidence. This evidence is all thehistorian has from which to construct a historical past. Historical knowledgeis present knowledge concerned exclusively with a past inferred, according toan appropriate procedure, from present evidence.

The present that concerns the historian, qua historian, is composed ofobjects, which may be artifacts, recorded statements, and other performances,that are understood to be survivals from the past, and for this reason and onlythis reason objects of historical attention. The raw material of historical inquiryis not the past, which no longer exists, but things in the present that we havegrounds for treating as evidence of a vanished past. In Droysen’s words, “thedata for historical investigation are not past things, for these have disap-peared, but things which are still present here and now, whether recollectionsof what was done, or remnants of things that have existed and of events thathave occurred.”13 Some of these survivals, like a parish register or a canceledcheck, may be the remains of earlier practical transactions, but others may bemathematical theorems, philosophical ideas, or works of art. However frag-mentary or damaged they may be, however detached from the activities ofwhich they were once a part, such survivals are the only materials the histo-rian has to work with in reconstructing the past.

As Oakeshott understands it, then, the sole concern of historical scholar-ship is to construct a past from these present survivals: to recover, assemble,identify, order, and repair them, to discern their connections with one another,and, by recognizing each in relation to its proper context, “to determine itsauthentic character as a bygone practical or philosophical or artistic . . . per-formance” (OH 32). But this recorded past, this past of surviving objects, is


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12. Review of J. Burleigh, The City of God, Cambridge Journal 4 (1950), 568.13. Outline, 11. “The present in historical understanding is composed of objects recognized,

not merely to have survived, but solely and expressly as survivals, vestiges, remains, fragments ofa conserved past” (OH 28).

not itself the historical past. The historical past has not survived, and can onlybe inferred in a critical investigation in which authenticated survivals are usedas circumstantial evidence of past events. It is this inferred past, and only thisinferred past, that is authentically historical.

Historical Reality

In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott links the concept of “reality” to thatof self-completeness or individuality. What is real is what has boundaries andan identity: a “thing” that has been distinguished from its environment, anidentity that persists through change, an “individual.” And what is individual,and therefore real, is something that each mode of experience defines in itsown characteristic way.

What, then, is real in history? Historical reality, Oakeshott initially sug-gests, lies in the individuals used in a given historical inquiry: in the persons,institutions, situations, or events it seeks to understand. These identifiedindividuals are always somewhat arbitrary, however, for they are constructedobjects and the distinctions that separate them are not absolute. The Bolshevikrevolution, for example, can be defined as an event or a series of events, as aninstitution or a set of related institutions, or as the actions of particular per-sons, as changes in ideas, and no doubt in other ways. To put it differently,the expression “the Bolshevik revolution” means different things in differentcontexts, and none of these contexts is the unconditionally correct context forusing the expression.

Another way to understand the rather tenuous character of historical indi-viduals is to see that they are constructed identities that are defined by howthey resemble as well as by how they differ from other identities. We typicallyidentify new things by noticing that they are like and unlike familiar things. Itis sometimes said that history is concerned with particulars, but this is mis-leading because there are no absolutely particular things: every individualthing, in being identified as a thing of this or that kind, also possesses a degreeof generality. All knowledge, and therefore historical knowledge, involvesgeneralization. Historical identities are constructed by noticing the general inthe particular, as when we recognize Zaire to have been a “state” and Mobututo have been its last “president.” All identities, all individuals, are “unities ofparticularity and genericity” (OHC 102). To say that history concerns itselfonly with particulars—in contrast, say, to science, which generalizes aboutclasses of particulars—is to make historical understanding impossible, for


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what is absolutely particular cannot even be identified and therefore cannotbe understood.

Historical generality is not the same as scientific generality, however. Asshould be clear from the discussion of historical knowledge in Chapter 3 (andas we shall see more clearly when we examine Oakeshott’s theory of historicalexplanation), historical generalizations are not general laws with particularinstances. They are collective or enumerative judgments, like “few Americansin 1945 owned television sets”—limited and provisional generalizations that ahistorian constructs somewhat arbitrarily for a particular purpose. Such gener-alizations have a certain interpretive utility in making sense of the materialbeing organized into a historical account, but their place in a genuine historicalexplanation is secondary. Even the kind of generalization required to identifyhistorical individuals takes the historian only so far. As we shall see, Oakeshottcame to think that what distinguishes history proper from other ways ofexplaining human conduct is that the identities it studies are not related to oneanother in generalizations of any kind but in a narrative of contingently relatedevents.

History, as a distinguishable kind of knowledge, might be said to havebegun to separate itself from practical experience in becoming skeptical of thenames given, by the members of a community, to the persons and events theybelieved to compose its past. The individual things that are identified as sig-nificant and real in the practical past of a community, when subjected to criticalscrutiny, are gradually transformed into historical individuals. The problem forhistorical inquiry is that this skepticism regarding received names is potentiallyunlimited, for whatever is identified by criticizing something formerly takenfor granted can itself be dissolved by criticism. A historical investigation, likeany other inquiry, requires at least a temporary suspension of skepticism. Oncea situation, event, or other identity has been chosen for use in a historicalinvestigation, it acquires a relatively fixed character that defines its individual-ity. It becomes an identity to be used, not questioned. This does not meanthat historical individuals are unalterable, only that each investigation mustbegin by identifying the individuals whose history it investigates. Whatcounts as a historical situation or event, or even a person, is “designated” bythe ideas the historian brings to the investigation, not discovered in a pastthat is independent of those ideas. As Oakeshott puts it in Experience and ItsModes, “History itself does not and cannot provide us with the historical indi-vidual, for wherever history exists it has been constructed upon a postulatedconception of individuality” (EM 120).


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The point must be qualified, however, because even though a historicalinquiry must designate its identities, it never absolutely fixes those identi-ties—a point Oakeshott emphasizes in later writings. To be useful in a histori-cal investigation, an identity must be reasonably consistent and stable, but itis never beyond question. It is a working assumption, not an unalterable pos-tulate. Precisely because they are designated, historical individuals are nomore than interpretive tools. And because they are tools, historians can anddo question their adequacy. In recognizing that historians can be tentativeabout the concepts they employ, Oakeshott softens the distinction betweenmodal and philosophical thinking he drew so sharply in Experience and ItsModes. But he still holds that such questioning, if pressed far enough, candestroy a historical inquiry by turning it into something else. If, for example,instead of using the idea of the Enlightenment we persist in questioning it,we are no longer studying a designated thing, the Enlightenment, but its des-ignation, “the idea of the Enlightenment.” When we problematize instead ofsimply using an identity, we transform our original inquiry into a differentinquiry, one less historical and more philosophical. The success of any histori-cal investigation therefore depends on maintaining a balance between usingand interrogating the identities in terms of which it is conducted.

The problem of determining this balance, and therefore of demarcatingthe line between history and philosophy, is one that engaged Oakeshott’sattention for many years. His earliest writings on history, while recognizingthe fluidity of historical identities, stress the need to presuppose their stabilityin order to proceed with a historical investigation. Oakeshott’s last writings,in contrast, while not denying the historian’s need for identities, emphasizethis fluidity.

To clarify the differences between Oakeshott’s earlier and later conceptionof historical identities, it is helpful to compare his discussions of the historicalindividual in several essays on religion from the late 1920s and in Experienceand Its Modes with his discussion of historical change in On History.14 Theproblem he explores in each of these writings is that, in history as in otherareas of experience, the “things” we identify for use or study are continuallychanging. Does something that has changed over time in certain ways, or thathas moved to a different place, remain the “same thing”? In the course of its


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14. The essays are “The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity,” ModernChurchman 19 (1929–30), 313–27, reprinted in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, and a reviewof G. G. Atkins, The Making of the Christian Mind, Journal of Theological Studies 31 (1930),203–8.

long existence, the Roman Empire changed its boundaries, its inhabitants, itscitizens, its capital, its religion, and its laws—and yet we speak of it as an indi-vidual thing, one that had a beginning and an end and that can be distinguishedfrom its environment. A historical individual, Oakeshott suggests in Experi-ence and Its Modes, is defined not by time and place, or even by what are pre-sumed to be its essential features, but by continuity and discontinuity. Romeexists—is a real historical individual—because we think there was some dis-continuity at its beginning and (because it is finished) at its end, as well assignificant continuity through all the changes “it” experienced in between.

Oakeshott’s philosophical interest in the idea of historical identity growsout of a religious and then historical interest in the identity of Christianity. Ina characteristic shift from the practical or the historical to the philosophical,he moves from a concern with the identity of Christian religion to a concernwith the concept of identity itself.

One answer to the question “What is Christianity?,” Oakeshott suggests in“The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity” (1928), is thatauthentic Christianity is original Christianity: if what is today identified asChristian differs from the original, it is not Christian. But the theory of iden-tity implied by this definition is a mere tautology, for even a small changecauses an identified thing to become something other than itself and destroysthe identity (RPML 64). In the case of Christianity, the theory prompts us tolook for an original faith, but such a faith can never be discovered. Christian-ity cannot be the religion of Jesus, for example, because it involves beliefsabout Jesus and about his death. Moreover, the teachings of Jesus and of hisdisciples changed in the course of time. Which of these teachings, and whichinterpretations of them, should we identify as the original and therefore essen-tial faith? This theory of Christianity is faulty because the theory of identity onwhich it rests is faulty.

A second answer is that the identity of Christianity lies in an unchangingcore of belief that has persisted through centuries of change. But the theory ofidentity implied here, the theory of “identity as substance,” turns Christianityinto an abstraction that captures only a small part of Christian experience. Wesuppose that this unchanging, and therefore “invulnerable,” substance ofChristian faith can be discovered “by whittling away the differences and soexposing the thing,” but what remains when all the differences have been dis-carded is not a faith but “an invulnerable nothing” (RPML 66). “We mustgive up speaking of ‘the essence of Christianity’ if that means merely ‘the most


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important part of Christianity.’”15 The substance of Christianity is to be foundnot in the essence but in the whole of Christian experience.

Rejecting these flawed originalist and essentialist theories of identity, Oake-shott argues that the identity of Christianity lies in whatever “qualitative same-ness” can be discovered in the historical record. This “qualitative sameness” maysound suspiciously like an essence, but it is not. In contrast to an essential sub-stance, which is defined independently of the historical record, the samenessdiscerned by someone who takes the whole history of Christianity into accountis based on that record. According to this view, any belief or practice is properlyidentified as Christian if it fits into the overall pattern of the Christian tradition.A belief or practice can therefore be identified as Christian even if it differsfrom what was once called “Christian.” But there must be not an unchangingcore of belief but an overall pattern, a continuing but also changing identityinto which new beliefs and practices have been incorporated. Without such anidentity there can be no change: “Christianity is neither a bottle filled once andfor all time, nor one into which anything may be poured so long as the label isretained.”16 The principle of identity that emerges in this discussion, though it isnot clearly articulated in this essay, is the principle of continuity.

Oakeshott continues this line of argument in Experience and Its Modes,suggesting that what is true of institutions like the Roman Empire or theChristian faith is also true of historical events and persons. Events have nofixed duration but are defined by continuity within designated limits: Luther’snailing his ninety-five theses on the door is an event, but so is the Reforma-tion. What makes an event is an apparent discontinuity between what is des-ignated as the event and what is thought to have preceded it. And whatmaintains its individuality is continuity within this designated identity. Per-sons, too, are identified by an original discontinuity (birth) and by continuity(a self, centered in a body, which persists until death). Yet even historical per-sons, in some inquiries, can merge with an office or some other aspect of theirenvironments: it is often difficult, for example, to distinguish the private andpublic personae of rulers. Every historical individual is an identity chosenaccording to the purposes of the inquiry in which it figures.


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15. Review of Atkins, 207–8.16. Review of Atkins, 207. Oakeshott is persuaded that the problem of Christian origins

played an important role in the emergence of a distinctively historical mode of thinking. See hisreviews of R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, English Historical Review 62 (1947), 85, andW. H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History, Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1952), 277.

The idea of the historical individual, which is merely a kind of continuity,therefore implies the idea of change. And like the idea of the individual, the ideaof change combines alteration or difference with sameness or identity. We rec-ognize differences as change if we can attribute them to an underlying elementin the situation that persists unaltered. We can say that “Paul has changed” if wenotice that he has lost weight or become nervous and irascible, because wenotice a difference in what we take to be a stable substrate, an unchanging iden-tity, “Paul,” that we distinguish from its changeable properties.

But, Oakeshott argues in On History, this familiar conception of change,on which philosophers of history as well as historians have relied, is unhistor-ical. It comes from ordinary practical experience, where we typically assumethe existence of unchanging identities. And the reason this idea of change isunhistorical is that nothing in history can be assumed, in advance, to beunchanging. The historian may regard some things in the historical past asrelatively stable, but this is a conclusion, not a postulate, of historical inquiry.Unlike our ordinary practical idea of change, which rests on identifying differ-ences in the attributes of an unchanging entity, the idea of historical changedoes not postulate unchanging entities. There is no authentic history of “theArabs” or “international law” that is not a history of changes undergone bywhat is itself a changing subject; no history of an idea, practice, or person inwhich the identity studied is not itself a changing identity. The further wepress a historical investigation, the more it becomes clear that there are in his-tory no enduring ideas, practices, or persons, but only ever more minutelyanalyzed events—noticed changes in changing identities.

The “identity” in historical change (the element in the situation that changes)is, in short, even less stable than a tentative and mutable “historical individ-ual.” In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott makes the designation of histori-cal individuals a presupposition of historical inquiry. Although such identitiesare designated rather than discovered, and are therefore no more than inter-pretive tools, and although no historical individual can be assumed to beimmutable, the historian must presume a degree of continuity or else there isno identifiable thing whose story can be told. But in On History, the historicalindividual is dissolved into relations between events. In a historical inquiry, asOakeshott now sees it, institutions and even persons are understood not aschanging identities but as sequences of events, and events are themselves ana-lyzed into smaller, constituent events. A historical inquiry may spring from aninterest in a particular person or institution, but as the historian works onreceived material that has been organized in terms of such categories, it


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becomes clear that there are no authentic historical individuals apart from theevents the historian must try to make intelligible.

Authentic historical identities, Oakeshott in the end maintains, are the con-tingently related events that are collected to compose a historical narrative.The only real historical individuals in an authentic (modally pure) historicalunderstanding are the events, the “differences,” the historian has identified.Furthermore, events are understood to be the contingent outcomes of ante-cedent events and the contingent antecedents of subsequent events.17 “Wherean historical past is understood to be composed of historical events (that is,differences) assembled in answer to an historical question there is no room foran identity which is not itself a difference” (OH 101). In a historical inquiry,what unites a collection of events into an identified change is “its character asa passage of differences which touch and modify one another and converge tocompose a subsequent difference” (OH 114). The entities of history, in thisdifficult theory, have become as elusive as the particles of the nuclear physi-cist. A historical identity, properly understood, is nothing other than its owncircumstantial coherence understood as a contiguity of discernible differences.This historian is not concerned with the accumulated changes experienced bya persisting thing but with a continuous chain of happenings that is itself thechanging thing to be understood. The kind of change exemplified in Sir JohnCutler’s silk stockings, darned with wool until no thread of silk remained (theexample is Bradley’s), is therefore not (as is sometimes supposed) an illustra-tion of historical change, because the example postulates an unchanging, andtherefore unhistorical, substrate that goes from being silk to being wool.18

Historical inquiry, Oakeshott insists, is the study of changes produced in andby identified events that are themselves changing identities.

To grasp the implications of this new, and in its own careful way deconstruc-tive, conception of historical understanding, we must consider Oakeshott’s the-ory of historical explanation. In articulating this theory, Oakeshott buildsupon his analysis of historical identities to distinguish a distinctly historical


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17. In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott incautiously suggests that the meaning of histor-ical events is affected by their subsequents: in the world understood historically “the terms of a‘series’ . . . lose their isolation and come to depend upon the criticism and guarantee of other,perhaps subsequent, terms” (EM 91). It is possible that his effort to analyze the logic of historicalinquiry is derailed here by a concern to show that history is defective in relation to philosophy, asLuke O’Sullivan suggests in “Oakeshott on History,” dissertation (Australian National Univer-sity, 1996), chap. 2.

18. Cf. David Boucher, “The Creation of the Past: British Idealism and Michael Oakeshott’sPhilosophy of History,” History and Theory 23 (1984), 210, 211–12.

way of explaining change from other modes of explanation that, though oftenimported into historical writing, are intrinsically alien to it. Once we haveunderstood this theory, we will be in a position to consider the further impli-cations, for historical inquiry in particular and for the human sciences in gen-eral, of Oakeshott’s suggestion that the identities relied upon in explaininghistorical change are themselves changing identities.

Historical Explanation

Historical inquiry, we have seen, begins in (though it may soon pass beyond) astudy of historical individuals: identified persons, institutions, situations, andevents that are themselves subject to change. It is an inquiry that seeks to explainchange, for to ask why events have happened, or how institutions have alteredover time, is to invite an explanation of historical change (EM 125; OH 98).

Oakeshott’s theory of historical explanation is, as one would expect, relatedto a wish to defend the modal autonomy of historical inquiry, and in this casethe immediate enemy is positivist, evolutionist, and Marxist historiography.Oakeshott pursues this aim by distinguishing authentic historical explana-tions from quasi-scientific explanations that rest on general laws and causalconditions, on the one hand, and from explanations that ascribe to history anoverall end or direction, on the other. Such explanations are distorted by sci-entific or practical concepts and concerns, and sometimes by both. Whateverform the argument takes, the effort to look beneath the surface of events todiscover causal or teleological laws that are not themselves events has no placein a historical inquiry, for such laws cannot be inferred from surviving evi-dence of connected events (OH 59). They are obstacles to historical inquiryimposed upon it by unhistorical scientists and prophets or by unwary histori-ans. Causal or teleological explanations, Oakeshott insists, even if coherent intheir own terms, cannot be the kind of explanations sought in historicalinquiry understood as the inferential construction of a past composed ofrelated historical occurrences: explanations based on identifying contingentrelationships between antecedent and subsequent events.

According to this view of historical explanation, to explain a historical eventis to fit it into a pattern that the historian must construct and make intelligibleon the basis of the available evidence. But this intelligibility is gained “alwaysby means of greater and more complete detail” (EM 143), not by appealing tocausal or teleological laws. In the historical mode nothing is natural or inevi-


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table: there is no plot or plan in history, no mechanism, no Providence, nodialectic, no dénouements, no mainstream, no “meta-narrative.” A historicalevent is not an inevitable outcome, a necessary consequence of antecedentconditions or the “culmination” of a series of events, because in historical under-standing events have no necessary causes, inherent potentialities, or permanentmeanings. The only outcome of historical events is other events, themselvesunknown and unforeseeable, whose “character”—hermeneutic individuality—is simply the circumstantial convergence of what went before.

Practically speaking, events may be seen as progressive or regressive, but asobjects of historical investigation they are neither, because history is con-cerned solely with reconstructing past events from present evidence. Andalthough all such reconstructions are revisions of previous understandingsand are themselves subject to revision, no properly historical revision candepend on what came afterward: John F. Kennedy may provide evidence onwhich to base a historical understanding of Bill Clinton, but not vice versa.Whatever significance may be read back into the past from subsequent hap-penings is not historical significance. The danger in defining historical inquiryas the construction of narratives is that in a narrative one may interpret thepast with the benefit of hindsight, and although this may be illuminating it isnot history. An account of the past in which events, as one narrativist philoso-pher puts it, “are continually being re-described, and their significance re-evaluated” in relation to subsequent events, is not a historical account, for itallows the meaning of historical facts to depend on concepts and judgmentsthat are not themselves historical.19

Historical Events and Contingent Relations

One cannot understand Oakeshott’s theory of historical explanation unlessone recalls that the proper task of the historian is not to explain events that areassumed to have happened but to identify events that can be shown to havehappened. Furthermore, the issue in historical explanation is to explain thecharacter and not the mere occurrence of events. A historical event is not anatomic, isolated, permanent thing but (as we have seen) an “identity” or “his-torical individual” constructed by the historian. During the middle decades ofthe twentieth century, analytic philosophers of history were so entirely preoc-


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19. Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1965), 11.

cupied with the problem of historical explanation that they neglected theprior question, one that faces every historian: “How does one come to knowwhat happened in the historical past?”20 History books—books “about” his-tory—implicitly invite their readers to take a realist view of the historical pastfor granted, for in a historical narrative the past is there to be recounted andexplained, not an unknown that has to be established. But the author of sucha narrative, the historian, cannot take this view. The historian’s task is toshow, given the rules of historiography and the evidence identified accordingto those rules, what it is reasonable to believe about the past. The philosopherof history cannot avoid the epistemological difficulties that face the historianby simply assuming that these difficulties have been overcome.

A genuine historical explanation, Oakeshott maintains, concerns eventsthat are understood to be the outcome of earlier events, not of underlyingprocesses. An explanation of the latter sort is not a historical but a scientific,or more probably a pseudo-scientific, explanation. Historical explanation isconcerned with relationships among individual events, that is, events under-stood to be related not as types of events but with respect to their individualfeatures in a past composed of human thoughts and actions. And this meansthat it must concern the circumstantial character or meaning of these events.The historian’s task is to establish, from present evidence, a past composed ofevents understood in relation to antecedent events in such a way that theevents to be explained are made intelligible. The explanation, in other words,must be one in which what are taken to be the relevant antecedents are thosethat not merely account for the occurrence of an event but illuminate its mean-ing. In a historical explanation, the antecedent events that explain another,subsequent event are those that affected “the coming into being of a subse-quent and which converge to constitute its historical character” (OH 98). Ahistorical explanation is really just a collection of antecedent events selectedby a historian for “what they contribute to the understanding of the historicalcharacter of a subsequent event” (OH 111–12). To explain an event historicallyis therefore to comprehend its character as an individual event by distinguish-ing, among its innumerable antecedents, other events that can make thatcharacter clear because their meaning or significance is related to its own. It is“to detect the significant in the merely antecedent and thus to transform thesubsequent into some kind of a consequent” (OH 72).


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20. Leon J. Goldstein, The What and the Why of History: Philosophical Essays (Leiden: E. J.Brill, 1996), xii.

An authentically historical relationship between events is, in short, internaland intrinsic, never merely external and fortuitous. It is, to recall the discus-sion at the end of Chapter 3, a relationship of “contingency.”21 As Oakeshottanalyzes it, the concept of contingency is more precise than the concepts of“configuration” and “colligation” that others have proposed to capture thedistinctive character of historical explanation, and it more adequately differ-entiates authentically historical explanations from explanations that are onlyspuriously historical. A historical explanation may be “configurational” in thesense that it explains an event by showing how it fits into a pattern of occur-rences. And historians may generate explanations by “colligating” events, con-necting them to compose a coherent account. Both concepts fail, however, toexclude the attempt to make sense of events by interpreting them in the lightof subsequent events, which is unhistorical because it reads a present under-standing back into the past.22

In a contingent relationship, an event is seen as a consequence of its ante-cedents. But the kind of consequence envisioned must be carefully specified.For Oakeshott, a contingent relationship is one in which the event to beexplained is understood to be “the difference made” by the confluence of theseantecedent events. Why, for example, did the United States send a militaryforce to overthrow the Marxist government of Grenada in 1983? According toone explanation, the decision was the consequence of several antecedent situa-tions and events: a long-standing wish to be rid of that government; the exis-tence of an invasion plan designed to achieve this end; the emergence of anopposition; a climate of increasing insecurity together with the presence ofAmerican citizens on the island; and a growing fear, following a terroristattack on Americans in Lebanon, that something similar might happen inGrenada. These elements combine to make intelligible the United States gov-ernment’s decision to invade in a particular manner and at a particular moment.And the ambitions, fears, and dispositions that belong to the situation in whichthe decision was reached can themselves be analyzed into historical events andexplained as outcomes of events. In constructing a historical explanation, the


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21. It is the relationship between historical events that is “contingent,” not the events them-selves (OH 94). Oakeshott does not use the term “contingency” in Experience and Its Modes, butthe idea is there in what he calls the “unity or continuity of history” (EM 141).

22. On the idea of “configuration,” see L. O. Mink, Historical Understanding, ed. BrianFay, E. O. Golob, and R. T. Vann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 51–54; on “colliga-tion,” W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 3d ed. (London: Hutchinsonand Co., 1967), 24–25, 59–63.

historian establishes contingent relationships between the event to be explainedand the antecedents, themselves events or sequences of events, that accountfor its character. So accounted for, a historical event can be seen as “itself aconvergence of significantly related historical events” (OH 92).

A contingent relationship is both immediate and circumstantial. It is imme-diate in being a relationship of proximity or contiguity. Contingently relatedevents, Oakeshott suggests, are connected with one another by a filling in ofever smaller details. When a historical account is finished, one event “touches”another in such a way that there is neither need nor room for further mediat-ing events or relations. And it is circumstantial in the sense that events in ahistorical explanation are related simply because, according to the evidence,they happen to be contiguous: the relationship is a matter of evidence and notof causal necessity or probability. Historical events are not joined by “the glueof normality or the cement of general causes” (OH 94) but only by an eviden-tial contiguity in which particular antecedent events fit together to generate asubsequent event.

The idea of contingency, analyzed in this way, casts additional light onOakeshott’s version of the claim that historical conclusions are inferential.Because its identity as an event is the object of historical inquiry, an explainedevent is always the outcome of an investigation in which a historian seeks tounderstand its relation to other events that have converged to make it whatit is. This point is of the utmost importance and therefore bears repeating.Despite the illusion of reality that is created by a historical narrative, a histori-cal explanation does not seek to account for a given, univocal, already under-stood event—an “actual” event. Its aim is to specify the character—the indi-vidual circumstantial meaning—of a provisionally identified event, and thiscan be done only by understanding the meaning of that event in relation to itsantecedents. To explain an event historically, in other words, is to understandit as an intelligible outcome of these antecedents and not merely to accountfor its occurrence. One cannot assume that one already understands an eventone hopes to explain, for its character as a historical event cannot be under-stood before one has looked into it. To explain an event historically is to makemore intelligible something that has been provisionally identified but thatneeds to be further defined and understood.

In a historical inquiry, then, we do not simply examine an understood his-torical event to discern what its antecedents must have been, for in coming tounderstand those antecedents our understanding of the event is inevitablyaltered. In explaining an event, we come to understand it differently, which is


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to say that the very thing we want to explain changes as we succeed in explain-ing it. It is in this sense that it is proper to say that in framing a historicalexplanation the historian not only infers but “constructs” the event to beexplained. Where historians know almost nothing about what happened, wecan see a single historian constructing events for the first time; where much isknown, we should say that events have been constructed by the communityof historians. In both cases, the past is always the outcome of intellectuallabor.23

For Oakeshott, to speak of explaining historical events and explaining his-torical change is to speak of the same thing. It follows that if the former mustbe understood in terms of contingency, so must the latter. “Change in his-tory,” he writes in Experience and Its Modes, “carries with it its own explana-tion; the course of events is one, so far integrated, so far filled in and complete,that no external cause or reason is looked for or required in order to accountfor any particular event” (EM 141). But the aim of historical explanation is toaccount only for historical change. “There is no such thing as change per se,and . . . every distinct notion of change has its counterpart in a different modeof understanding the past” (OH 116). Because historical thinking is recur-rently distracted by other conceptions of change, it is important to distin-guish historical change from change as it is understood in ordinary life, inreligion, or in science. Authentic history is impossible where an inquiry imposeson the interpretation of events a notion of change that, because it belongs toanother mode, is extrinsic to those events understood as historical events. Ahistorical narrative may be a “story” of change constructed by a historian, butit is not a fiction constructed by a novelist or tragedian. The hand of provi-dence or the revolution of rising expectations are explanations of change thatmay make religious or scientific sense, but they have no place in an authenti-cally historical explanation.

Such a view of historical explanation implies two grounds on which theidea of historical change can be distinguished from other, modally different,kinds of change. First, the past as it is constructed historically is composed ofhistorical events and nothing but historical events. What at one level is under-stood as a community, a situation, or a policy resolves itself, if the analysis ispushed far enough, into a pattern of connected events. In an authentic histor-ical investigation, a historical identity—the thing that is studied and that


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23. Goldstein, Historical Knowing, 58. Goldstein’s book provides many illuminating exam-ples of historical construction.

undergoes changes—is itself seen as an event or a sequence of events, a “com-position of differences” whose elements are selected because they make a dif-ference in the way the event to be explained is understood. This identity,which is the true object of historical knowledge, is not something outside anunderstood collection of events, an unchanging element in the situation. It isno more than the “inherent continuity” of this collection of events, whosepattern is not the presupposition but the conclusion of a historical inquiry.And, second, in a historical inquiry, every historical event—that is, everyevent that is part of a historical change to be explained—is recognized as sig-nificant because it helped to shape a subsequent event whose historical char-acter the historian is trying to ascertain.

All the elements of Oakeshott’s constructionist account of historical expla-nation are now in place. In an authentically historical inquiry, the historianconstructs a past by making inferences from past objects that have survivedinto the present and are treated as evidence. And this past can be understoodeither as “a past of historical events” or as “historical change,” that is, either asan assemblage of events contingently related to one another as antecedentsand subsequents or, which is the same thing, what Oakeshott, in the forbid-ding style of On History, calls “an assembled passage of antecedent differenceswhich, in virtue of its continuity, constitutes a passage of historical change”(OH 115). A historical explanation, by showing how historical events fittogether to shape the character of other events, makes intelligible the differ-ences that constitute a historical change.

Historical Causation

I have explicated Oakeshott’s hermeneutical view of historical explanationwith such care not only because it is both extremely subtle and crucial to hisconception of the human sciences generally, but also because it is not the viewof historical explanation that most historians or philosophers of history hold.The model of explanation most often articulated is one that relies on causality,as it is understood either in ordinary or in scientific discourse. In this alterna-tive model, to explain an event historically is to identify its causes or causalconditions.

In Oakeshott’s judgment, most causal explanations fail as historical explana-tions because they attempt to explain historical events in nonhistorical terms.Historians who propose causal explanations of historical events or philosopherswho defend them dismiss the historian’s primary concern, which is to infer an


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unknown past from present evidence and to explain that past by making itsoccurrences intelligible as the outcome of other occurrences. By replacing thisdistinctively historical concern with an enterprise of seeking causal explana-tions, their arguments risk crossing the boundaries that separate history frompractice or science. The result is modal irrelevance and confusion.

Talk of causation does not, however, invariably signal a nonhistorical atti-tude, for there are different kinds of causal explanation. Different conceptionsof causation figure in what purport to be historical explanations, and theseconceptions need to be distinguished from one another.

The word “cause” is sometimes used loosely, and quite unhistorically, tocall attention to the antecedents of an event believed to be abnormal or espe-cially significant (as when the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is identi-fied as the cause of the First World War) or to assign responsibility for anevent that is regarded as the outcome of an intentional act (as when Hitler’sdecision to invade Poland is identified as the cause of the Second World War).Or it may stand for the pseudo-scientific invocation of climate or national char-acter treated (in the manner of Ibn Khaldun or Montesquieu) as an underlyingfactor that explains historical change. In some cases the causes invoked—Godor human nature—are so comprehensive as to explain little or nothing. Suchexplanations may have little appeal to professional historians, but they arecommonplaces of popular history.

Underlying many conceptions of the causes of historical change is a distinc-tion between essential and incidental events, the former understood to haveproduced, the latter merely to have accompanied, a given historical change. Anessential event (the intervention of God or decision of a “great man”) is some-times supposed to have altered the ordinary or “natural” course of events, inthe same way that the application of force to a moving object will alter itsspeed or direction. Weber’s theory that capitalism emerged as a consequenceof the impact on economic life of an extraneous event, the protestant revolu-tion, invokes the idea of an intervention that alters what would otherwise bethe normal course of events. But this distinction between the essential and theincidental has no place in an authentic historical explanation, Oakeshottargues. It is, on the contrary, an “incursion of science into the world of his-tory” (EM 129).

A similar objection can be made against the view that historical change isthe result not of identifiable causes but of accident. Because it is the histo-rian’s job to find coherence in the past, nothing in history can be regarded asaccidental. For accident—mere chance or “fortune”—explains nothing, and a


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past composed of accidents is as unhistorical as a past of necessary conse-quences. Any account of such a past would be incoherent and scarcely intelli-gible—at best, mere chronicle, at worst not even that. Neither Gorbachev’sdecision to liberalize the Soviet regime nor the murder of President Kennedywere accidents that altered the course events; they were themselves events andtherefore part of the course of events. An intervention never changes thecourse of events because it is the course of events and therefore not an “inter-vention” (RP 169). History is concerned with what the evidence compels usto conclude did happen, and not with what must have happened or with whatmight have happened. Unlike the participant or the eyewitness, who may seeluck or fate in a flood, a victory, or the outcome of an election, the historianlooks only for, and seeks only to explain, what actually took place (that is,what the evidence forces him to conclude took place). Historical inquiry isconcerned neither with necessity nor with accident, but only with “the actualcourse of events which the evidence establishes” (EM 140).

In addition to these informal, essentially practical ideas about historicalcausation, one can identify a number of more systematically elaborated con-ceptions. According to one influential version of the causal model, a pastevent is explained by showing it to be the outcome of an economic, evolu-tionary, or other social process governed by laws of historical change. Marxisthistory provides the most prominent, though not the only, example of thismodel. But as most philosophers of history now recognize, explanations ofthis sort are self-contradictory because the laws on which they rely must begeneralizations that summarize observed regularities, and such generaliza-tions (assuming they could be formulated) would be scientific laws, not lawsof history. That is, they could not refer to individual historical events whileremaining scientific laws, because scientific laws are abstract statements ofgeneral relations, not descriptions of actual sequences of particular events.General laws belong to science, sequences of events to history, and betweenthem lies an unbridgeable modal gap.

There is a further reason why an understanding of historical events cannotbe based on the natural scientific laws governing an evolutionary or other bio-logical process. An evolutionary process is one governed by a law of organicdevelopment that accounts for a sequence of biological events. But in history,the idea of biological evolution is no more than a metaphor, one that has beenapplied indiscriminately to languages, poetic genres, scientific disciplines, civi-lizations, and other cultural entities. None of these corresponds to an organicspecies except on the loosest of analogies, and none is actually understood in


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relation to any “laws” of evolutionary change. Though Oakeshott has in mindthe social Darwinist and other pseudo-evolutionary social theories of the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of what he has to say in Expe-rience and Its Modes about this sort of thinking applies with equal force to themore sophisticated sociobiological theories of the present.

Another version of causality in history rests on teleological rather than scien-tific laws. But a cause of change in an authentic historical inquiry cannot be tele-ological any more than it can be physical or biological. In teleological change ofthe kind postulated in the Judaic, Christian, Enlightenment, and Marxist storiesof mankind’s origin and destiny, each significant event represents a stage in analready known process of development, and the underlying identity thatchanges is a potential to be realized as this process unfolds. But the events inan account of authentic historical change do not culminate in a conditionwhose potential and therefore character is already known. “‘No oak treeswithout acorns’ may be a formally true proposition, but that this acorn did infact produce this oak tree, there and then, is not a teleological necessity; it is acircumstantial occurrence” (OH 104–5). Because history is what happened,not what must have happened, there is no room in an authentic historicalexplanation for teleological causes.

Because there are, in the world understood historically, no previously pos-tulated underlying causes or fixed potentialities, and therefore no necessarycausal or teleological laws, the object of historical scholarship must be definedby criteria intrinsic to the events the historian is seeking to understand, unlessthe historian is content to regard historical change as a series of unrelatedaccidents. What makes a body of events intelligible as an episode of historicalchange is neither a presupposed extrinsic order (which would be unhistorical)nor mere chance (which would be unintelligible) but whatever order can beseen to emerge from the events themselves, as they are identified by the evi-dence relevant to the questions that the historian is trying to answer in a giveninquiry, and as they are related contingently to one another on the basis ofthat evidence. No explanation that discovers the causes of historical changeoutside history itself can qualify as a historical explanation, for it contradictsthe postulated character of historical inquiry as an effort to recover a past, asOakeshott puts it, “composed of passages of related events, inferred from pre-sent objects recognized as survivals from the past, and assembled as them-selves answers to historical questions” (OH 46).

The most sophisticated version of the causal model of historical explana-tion is one in which the occurrence of an individual event is shown to be a


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necessary consequence of the conjunction of general laws and factual condi-tions. More precisely, an explanation of this kind (sometimes called a “deduc-tive-nomological explanation”) seeks to derive a statement describing theoccurrence of an event from two other kinds of statements. One is a state-ment of law-like relationships that are based on empirical regularities and canbe empirically falsified, but which are assumed for the purposes of historicalexplanation to be valid. The other is a statement of the antecedent conditionsthat, in conjunction with those laws, constitute the causes of the event to beexplained. This positivist model of historical explanation, which preoccupiedphilosophers of history for several decades following the publication in 1942of Carl Hempel’s landmark article, “The Function of General Laws in His-tory,” takes its departure from the commonsense view of history shared byhistorians and laymen.24 Instead of considering questions about the episte-mology of history raised long ago by Croce, Collingwood, and other philoso-phers who were familiar with historical scholarship, philosophers of history inEnglish-speaking countries focused on the issue of explanation, itself narrowlydefined, in isolation from such scholarship. Such a focus, which assumes thatissues of historical fact are unproblematic, begs the central philosophicalquestion raised by history as the study of that which no longer exists: How ishistorical knowledge possible?

Oakeshott’s objection to this version of the causal model, in other words, isthat it ignores the main thing a historical explanation is supposed to do, whichis to identify significant relationships between events that are not yet fully iden-tified and understood. A deductive-nomological explanation assumes that theexistence and meaning of a historical event have already been established, andit aims to explain the occurrence of this event. But what needs to be explainedin a historical inquiry is not the occurrence of already-understood events; it isthe occurrence of events whose character is not yet known. The boundaries ofthese events, their identities as historical individuals, have to be established. Todeduce one understood event (a consequent) from another (an antecedent) bymeans of general laws cannot form part of an inquiry that seeks to understanda past that is not yet understood.

For Oakeshott, this dismissal of the historian’s main concern—to under-stand a not-yet-understood past—is inherent in the idea of causal explanation.


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24. Journal of Philosophy 39 (1942), 35–48. The landmark rejoinder, William Dray, Laws andExplanation in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), does not question Hempel’spremise that historical inquiry aims at explanation.

We look for causes only where we are trying to explain already known andunderstood effects. But a historical inquiry must account not merely for theoccurrence of an event but for the kind of event it is—for its individual char-acter or meaning in relation to other events. And this meaning cannot beunderstood until we inquire into it. In other words, to explain an event asthe outcome of general laws requires that we understand the event to beexplained, and this requires interpretation. The positivist model of explana-tion assumes as already known what in fact it is the purpose of historicalscholarship to discover.

In a causal explanation we are not concerned with the individual characterof an event. We are concerned with types of events, for only recurrent events,accumulated into types, can be regularly preceded and caused by other recur-rent events. An individual event cannot be “regularly” accompanied by any-thing because regularity implies repetition. Monet used an uncharacteristicallygarish palette in the works he painted shortly before his cataract surgery, andno doubt there is information about the effects of cataracts on color vision thatcan help us to understand this incident. But not every painter afflicted withcataracts chooses garish colors. Causal explanations cannot explain individualevents in all their circumstantial complexity, but only “the occurrence of hap-penings abstracted and identified in terms of their kinds” (OH 81–82). Andsuch explanations, while perhaps a proper concern of science, have nothing todo with historical inquiry. History, as members of the nineteenth-centuryGerman historical school and its contemporary philosophical interpreters hadargued against an earlier generation of positivists, is concerned not withabstract and general relations among classes of occurrences, but with “events inrespect of their individuality, not merely in place and time, but of character”(OH 88).

To explain a historical event is to display it as the consequent of other,antecedent, events that can illuminate its significance. It is to identify a rela-tionship (a relationship of contingency) in which an event to be understood isrelated to those antecedent events that make it intelligible. It is true that anexplanation of this kind is sometimes described as one that seeks to identifythe causes of an event. But, Oakeshott suggests, to use the word “cause” inthis way is to exclude “all that properly (or even distantly) belongs to thenotion of causality” (OH 85). For to do so is not to identify necessary, suffi-cient, or exclusive relationships between events, nor to is it to explain an eventas the joint outcome of antecedent conditions and general laws. If the word“cause” has any meaning in historical explanation, it is simply as a way of


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expressing the historian’s proper concern, which is to establish connectionsbetween events by distinguishing the antecedents that are significant for under-standing a historical event from those that are not.

History and the Human Sciences

In historical understanding, human conduct is composed of individual occur-rences, each seen as the contingent outcome of other occurrences involvingagents whose actions are responses to their understood situations. To under-stand such occurrences historically is to be concerned “with the transactionsthese actions . . . circumstantially converged to compose and with the rever-berations they contingently set going” (OHC 107). Historical understanding,then, is a particular way of understanding human conduct. How is it relatedto other ways in which human conduct may be understood?

As in the case of practical understanding, it is helpful to contrast Oake-shott’s views with Collingwood’s. The two had an enduring interest both inhistory and in the philosophy of history and they admired each other’s achieve-ments. Each embraced a version of the view that, as Collingwood puts it, “thescience of human affairs [is] history.”25 But they often disagreed. In particular,Oakeshott explicitly repudiates the two claims about historical understandingfor which Collingwood is most famous.

The first of these claims is that historical inquiry aims to recover pastthoughts and feelings and that it proceeds by reenacting the past. Collingwoodis often taken, for this reason, to be a constructionist, but to reenact past expe-rience is not to reconstruct an objective historical past. For Oakeshott, the aimof historical inquiry is to construct a past of contingently related events, andthese events may not have been understood by those participating in them.What people once thought and felt is part of the past, but their thoughts andfeelings cannot be all of it. Furthermore, because different people think andfeel different things, past persons, factions, classes, faiths, or peoples cannot besaid to have understood themselves in only one way. Though recoveredthoughts and feelings may figure in a historical explanation, they are not them-selves such an explanation. “An historical account of the past at least purportsto present something which was never in the mind of anybody at the time; thehistorian at least appears to have a way of thinking about the past which would


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25. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 115.

have been impossible for anyone who lived in that past.”26 An event inferredin a historical inquiry is not an action—an “assignable performance” (OHC64)—but a result or outcome (the word “event” has its origin in the Latineventus, the past participle of evenire, “to come out” or “happen”). Because it isnot an action, an event cannot be explained in terms of intentions; it mayinvolve intentions, but it also includes unintended consequences.27 For allthese reasons, the historical past as it is constructed by the historian must bedistinguished from a past reexperienced in the historian’s imagination.

Second, and more important for our discussion here, is Collingwood’sassertion of what might be called the primacy of history: the view that allknowledge rests on past experience. One of Collingwood’s arguments for thisconclusion belongs to the theory of knowledge he develops in SpeculumMentis (1924), according to which different forms of understanding buildupon and transcend one another, philosophy being the highest and mostcomprehensive stage in a sequence of forms. Philosophy works not with thematerial of immediate experience but with that material as it has been pro-gressively transformed by art, religion, science, and finally history. One mightwonder how philosophy can be the highest science if it is a commentary on oroutgrowth of historical knowledge, and in some lectures on the philosophyof history he wrote two years after the publication of Speculum Mentis,Collingwood in fact casts doubt on this conclusion, arguing that because his-tory is the immediate source of philosophy and therefore closest to it in spirit,“all philosophy is the philosophy of history.”28 By making historical under-standing the mediator between philosophy (viewed, in the Platonic or Ideal-ist manner, as the most critical and comprehensive of all ways of knowing)and the rest of experience, Collingwood privileges historical knowledge, justas realists privilege scientific knowledge, theologians religious knowledge,and pragmatists practical knowledge. “Almost imperceptibly,” Oakeshottwrites, “Collingwood’s philosophy of history turned into a philosophy inwhich all knowledge is assimilated to historical knowledge.”29

Though he does not mention Collingwood in Experience and Its Modes,Oakeshott does consider a number of “historicist” arguments in that work.Leaving aside the view, sometimes called historicist, that historical events are


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26. Review of Walsh, 277.27. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990), 102–3.28. R. G. Collingwood, “Lectures on the Philosophy of History” (1926), in The Idea of His-

tory, rev. ed., ed. Jan Van Der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 425.29. Review of Collingwood, 85.

governed by scientific or teleological laws (a view Oakeshott rejects and that wehave already discussed), historicism may be defined as the view that all knowl-edge either begins with or ends with historical knowledge.30 According to thefirst of these claims, all knowledge is derived from history and is therefore inher-ently historical. If historical experience is the most primordial form of humanexistence, if experience itself is historical, then all other modes of understandingmust be seen as modifications of historical understanding. According to the sec-ond, historical thinking is the highest, most critical, form that understandingcan achieve. It is higher even than philosophy, whose questions and answers thehistorian can show to be rooted in time and place. If this is the case, other kindsof knowledge, when criticized and corrected, reveal themselves to be no morethan inferior forms of historical knowledge. Historicism, in either of these ver-sions, promises privileged access to reality—a promise that, for Oakeshott, is asspurious as any other kind of foundationalism.

The conclusion that historical knowledge is foundational is sometimestaken to rest on the premise that historical individuals are tangible and real—in contrast, for example, to the mathematical abstractions of science. But recallOakeshott’s reason for thinking that this premise is mistaken: that the histori-cal individual is not a given, objective, permanent “thing.” Individuality isalways a matter of degree and of choice. Even historical persons, whose attrib-utes, like everything else in the historical past, must be inferred, are historians’constructions. Because these attributes depend on historical evidence, and thisevidence is not evidence until it has been interpreted within a framework ofsupporting assumptions and conclusions, we cannot say that historical persons,institutions, situations, or events exist except as they are constituted throughinferences made and sustained in historical scholarship. Far from being realgivens, historical individuals are designations that make sense only within asystem of historical ideas, and they certainly cannot be invoked as a groundfor that system.

Historical thought is no more independent of judgment than any other kindof thought. Historical knowledge is not knowledge of a given, autonomous,premodal reality. It is the construction of a reality from problematic evidence


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30. The scientific/teleological meaning of “historicism” gives an unfortunate twist to a wordthat, though ambiguous, formerly connoted a specifically historical mode of understanding. Thenew meaning was popularized by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1957). Its influence among philosophers of history is illustrated in Maurice Mandelbaum’sHistory, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1971).

according to the categories and canons of historical inquiry. Far from rescuingus from transience and uncertainty, historical inquiry selects from the transientmaterial of present experience to construct a continually changing view of thepast. There is, for Oakeshott, an irony in the hope that by knowing history wecan escape the impermanence of the present: far from avoiding change, histori-cal thinking organizes all experience under the category of change.

No “historicist” effort to assert the priority of historical understanding cansurvive close scrutiny. For Oakeshott, history is a mode of understanding; it isneither a source of raw material for other modes nor a kind of understandingthat supersedes, or even employs, their conclusions. History is neither thebeginning nor the end of knowledge; it is merely one kind of knowledgeamong others. Like any other mode of understanding, it is conditional: it restson assumptions that it cannot question without turning itself into a differentkind of inquiry. In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott maintains that as amode of understanding, history must be regarded as defective, because theseassumptions (like the idea of the historical individual) are revealed on exami-nation to be arbitrary—mere tools, not reality itself. In his later writings,however, he is no longer interested in arguing that history, as an inquirybound by modal presuppositions, is inferior to philosophy, which transcendssuch presuppositions. His concern is simply to identify the presuppositions ofhistorical inquiry and to defend its autonomy as a distinctive manner of think-ing. Nothing in this shift of emphasis can be interpreted as awarding histori-cal knowledge ontological priority or as supporting the conclusion thatOakeshott’s approach to the human sciences is “historicist,” as I have beenusing that term.

Though he rejects historicism, Oakeshott nevertheless regards historical in-quiry as central to the human sciences. What exactly is at stake, then, in the claim,which he seems to endorse, that the disciplines that study human conduct—the humanities and the social sciences—are in some sense historical sciences?

The identification of history and the human sciences goes back to the effortsof nineteenth-century German historians to distinguish historical writing frombelles lettres, and to free it from the practical concerns of moral instruction andstatecraft, by turning the study of history into a rigorous empirical discipline.31

History was to be the science of mind, just as physics and chemistry are sci-ences of the material world. But by the end of the century it was becoming


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31. This is the polemical intent behind Ranke’s assertion that historians must aim to under-stand the past “as it really is” (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist). Felix Gilbert, History: Politics or Cul-ture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 45.

clear that just as there are many sciences of nature, so there are many “humansciences”—sciences of mind or culture rather than of nonhuman nature. Thequestion that had to be addressed, then, is whether history is one among thehuman sciences or comprehends them all. Those who identified the disciplinesconcerned with human action and its products as “historical sciences” under-stood them as disciplines concerned with meaning. The historical sciences, inthis context, are interpretive sciences, those that understand human practicesas systems of meaning and human performances as expressions of meaning.

But the word “historical” also implies a concern with particularity or indi-viduality, and the resulting view of the historical sciences as both hermeneuticand individualizing can be a source of confusion unless one is clear whichattribute is intended in a given context. Rickert, for example, uses the expres-sion “historical science” to stand for any science, whether or not it deals withhuman beings, that is concerned with individuality rather than with general-ization. Sciences that describe individuals instead of discovering natural lawsare historical sciences, regardless of their subject matter: “Empirical realitybecomes nature when we view it with respect to its universal characteristics; itbecomes history when we view it as particular and individual.” For Rickert,the human sciences are “historical [that is, individualizing] sciences whichdeal with cultural phenomena.”32 In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott standswith Rickert in insisting that history is a point of view, not a subject matter.The character of historical knowledge is defined by its postulates, not by thematerial on which they are brought to bear. Just as the postulates of scienceconstitute the objects of scientific inquiry, so those of history constitute whathistorians seek to understand. It follows that the subject matter of historicalinquiry is not limited to human conduct: “there is nothing in the human todistinguish it absolutely from the non-human past” (EM 102). On this defini-tion of history, the eruption of a volcano on a given occasion is a historical aswell as a natural event.

But despite these implications of his modal theory, Oakeshott is mainlyconcerned with historical inquiry as a way of understanding human conduct,and in later writings he makes this limitation of scope clear. Historical inquiry,so understood, is neither more extensive than the human sciences nor coex-tensive with them; it is one of several ways of understanding human conduct


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32. Heinrich Rickert, Science and History: A Critique of Positivist Epistemology, trans. GeorgeReisman (Princeton: Van Nostrand and Co., 1962), 57, 16; The Limits of Concept Formation inNatural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986).

and therefore one among the human sciences. Not all ways of understandingconduct explain it in terms of contingency. But the other human sciences,insofar as they explain individual performances, still depend on historical expla-nation. The explanations of human conduct offered by scholars in the humansciences are in effect partial or truncated historical explanations. They fallshort as explanations because even though they offer an interpretation ofhuman conduct, they cannot account for why a particular person respondedin a particular way in a particular situation, or, in general, why individual per-formances, events, and practices, are what they are.

The failure of the human sciences to provide genuine explanations of indi-vidual human performances can be seen most clearly in those disciplines thatremain committed to the idea of a science of human conduct on the model ofthe natural sciences, and which rest on the claim that, even if the conclusionsof this science cannot be reduced to those of biology or physics, one can stillframe generalizations about intelligent action and use such generalizations toexplain particular acts. In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott considers two ver-sions of this claim: the argument that actions can be explained as expressionsof human nature and the argument that they are explained by the agent’ssocial circumstances.

For Oakeshott, the venerable enterprise of understanding human acts asexpressions of human nature has only limited explanatory utility. Whether werely on the idea of human nature in general or on a more precisely defined setof dispositions believed to be characteristic of a class of persons, the effort toconceive an agent as composed of certain “characteristic” dispositions cannottell us much about any particular act he or she may perform (OHC 95). Womenare not invariably nurturing, nor are liars invariably untruthful. Such generalcharacteristics, in other words, cannot illuminate differences between differentexpressions of the trait in question. That politicians are characteristically dis-loyal and dishonest, even if true, tells us little about why Alcibiades or RichardNixon broke this promise or told that lie. Neither “human nature” in generalnor any set of dispositional qualities ascribed to a particular class of humanbeings can provide an adequate explanation of particular acts. Such conceptscan be used to formulate generalizations, but if we want to explain individualperformances, these generalizations cannot take us very far.

The same point can be made about the efforts of sociologists, political sci-entists, market researchers, and many others to explain particular acts in rela-tion to an agent’s “social circumstances”—that he or she is college-educated,unemployed, or an immigrant, for example. Such characterizations are often


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used in ordinary life, and they provide the organizing categories for many sta-tistical analyses. But ordinary practical explanations based on common sensemust not be confused with a quantitative, explanatory science of society. More-over, statistical studies, which are often taken by those who engage in them toconstitute such a science, are barred, even when they succeed in reaching theiraim, from explaining any particular human choice. A science that relies oninformation about social circumstances must find its explanations not in theintelligent choices and self-understanding of agents performing actions but incausal relationships between not-intelligent identities: income levels, suiciderates, and other variables that are abstracted from conduct (Durkheim’s “socialfacts”). And even when it is successful, this enterprise has nothing to do withunderstanding or predicting the thoughts and actions of individual personson specific occasions.

Implicit in both strategies for salvaging the idea of a natural science ofhuman conduct that can explain individual performances is the unwarrantedassumption that an explanation that draws upon statistical generalizations is ascientific explanation. But generalizations about how people in general, peo-ple of a certain sort, or people in certain social circumstances customarilybehave are not scientific generalizations about a time-independent class ofphenomena; they are more or less well-disguised descriptions of customs spe-cific to a particular historical situation. To explain an event in terms of thecustoms it is said to exemplify is to invoke, not laws of the sort uncovered byscience, but descriptive generalizations about the practices of a particular timeand place. The same can be said of the efforts of social scientists to predictparticular events, such as the outcome of an election, for such efforts typicallyrely not on causal laws but on statistical models that extrapolate data patternsof limited generality. It should be added that statistical social science is not theonly enterprise that seeks to represent intelligent human conduct as the unin-tended outcome of human dispositions or social circumstances, for this is alsothe program of structuralism and poststructuralism in the hands of Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, and others whose arguments, thoughdiverse and often incompatible, reduce human actions to the systems (“struc-tures,” “discourses”) that produce them.

When the pretense of scientific generalization is dropped, we are left withhistorically-specific generalizations, and with a way of speaking about con-duct that is concerned not with particular actions but with historical situa-tions or practices. Historians, for example, often make use of the kind ofhistorical individual that Oakeshott calls a “situational identity” (OHC 57).


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Situational identities are broad interpretive concepts like “the civilization ofRenaissance Italy,” “the French Revolution,” or “Jeffersonian democracy,”each of which is a pattern of related occurrences identified by a historian in aneffort to answer a historical question. But reconstructing a historical situationis only part of what is involved in formulating a historical explanation, for theidentified situation is static: the situational identity gives us a historical pastconceived as permanent, a past that cannot properly accommodate an accountof change. To account for historical change we need an inquiry that aims not onlyat reconstructing a past situation but at explaining any occurrence, whether asimple performance or a complex situation, as itself a historical event or sequenceof events—that is, to reveal it as an intelligible outcome of what went before.And because what went before are events, to explain an event historically isnot to reveal its place in an unchanging situation, but to locate it in time andin relation to other events and to change. Like a generalization concerninghuman nature or social circumstances, then, a situational identity is an inter-pretive tool that falls short of explaining particular, contingent happenings.And the same may be said of efforts to account for human actions as expres-sions of unchanging structures or discourses.

Many ways of explaining conduct seek to make sense of individual perfor-mances as expressions of, or reactions to, literary genres, architectural styles,moral ideals, and other practices composing conventional human under-standings and arrangements. Much of what goes on in anthropology, literarycriticism, cultural history, constitutional law, and other humanistic disciplinesis concerned with the interpretation of actions as subscribing or not subscrib-ing to such practices, understood as patterns or (as Oakeshott sometimes says)“languages” or “idioms” of human performance. The human sciences are con-cerned, each in its own way, with theorizing human conduct in relation topractices.

A practice provides a “map” on which to locate individual performances.But the understanding provided by assigning performances a location onsuch a map is not a complete understanding: it reveals only their character asperformances of a certain kind. When, in other words, we interpret a perfor-mance as reflecting a given practice, we reveal “the character of an action . . .in terms of its ‘conventionality’” (OHC 99–100). Such an approach requireslearning and skill and is obviously important in the human sciences. But theunderstanding of human conduct it provides is limited.

The explanation of performances as expressions of practices that may be usedto illuminate them remains, then, an exercise in open-ended interpretation. It is


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incomplete and indeterminate for several reasons. First, every performancedraws upon and is shaped by an indefinite number of practices, and is there-fore open to being interpreted in an indefinite number of ways and to beingdescribed as an indefinite number of actions. Second, because practices arethemselves historical occurrences, their intelligibility is also contextual. Thatis, although a practice provides a context for understanding individual perfor-mances, it requires its own context in order to be understood. A practice canitself be viewed as an event to be explained as the contingent outcome ofantecedent events. The historian may, for example, want to understand how apractice came to be what it is and may explain it by composing a narrativethat connects contingently related actions or other events. What is said aboutexplaining performances therefore applies, by extension, to explaining prac-tices (OHC 92n, 100n). Third, practices are not independent of the individualperformances they are used to interpret, for practices are themselves createdand continually modified by performances. Fourth, practices are displayedonly in performances: a practice is the trace, the residue, of its performances.Practices are not “stable compositions of easily recognized characteristics.”They are nothing more than “footprints left behind by agents responding totheir emergent situations, footprints which are only somewhat less evanescentthan the transactions in which they emerged” (OHC 100). Like other histori-cal identities, the practices that are used to illuminate performances are notimmutable; properly understood, they are themselves changing identities interms of which to understand change. And, finally, the conventionality of aperformance is only one aspect of its character, and no performance can beexplained or otherwise understood merely in terms of its having or not hav-ing a conventional character. No action can be understood only as it exempli-fies or fails to exemplify a practice. For all these reasons, there are no conclusiveinterpretations.

Interpretive theorizing in the human sciences involves “an engagement ofhistorical understanding of a certain limited sort” (OHC 24), because it isalways the interpretation of an individual expression of human intelligence.But interpretation is not historical in a narrower sense of the term—it is nothistory “properly so-called” (PFPS 19)—because it cannot explain particularperformances: individual acts, distinguishable from other acts that exhibit agiven practice. To interpret an act in relation to a practice cannot explain whyan agent has chosen to view a situation or to respond to it in a particular man-ner. Practices can provide a context for interpreting a performance, but theyare only one aspect of a larger context. They cannot provide more than a par-

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tial and tentative understanding of the occurrence and meaning of a perfor-mance as an individual event because performances are related not only topractices but to other performances. What is needed to fill in the free space ofinterpretation that remains after an action’s conventionality or lack thereofhas been explored is an account of its relationship to other actions, that is, anaccount that places it in a narrative of contingently related events: a historicalexplanation proper.


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1. Oakeshott’s essay on Hobbes was written in 1960. The quoted passage is at RP 195–96and HCA 76. The passage from Vico is as Oakeshott gives it at the head of the second essay inOn Human Conduct (OHC 108).

2. Oakeshott’s first extended consideration of civil association (or “civil society,” as he thencalled it) is the introduction to his edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946). For

Understanding the Civil Condition

In the night of thick darkness enveloping ancient timesthere shines the eternal never-failing truth beyond alldoubt: that the civil condition is certainly a human inven-tion and that its principles are therefore those of humanintelligences.

—Vico, The New Science, § 331

The moral life appears only when human behavior isfree from natural necessity; that is, when there are alter-natives in human conduct. . . . Moral conduct is art, notnature: it is the exercise of an acquired skill.

—“The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes”1

Many of the ideas we have been considering are brought together in Oake-shott’s efforts to answer one of the fundamental questions of political theoriz-ing: How can human beings be related within an order that constrains theirconduct while respecting their individuality? His answer is to imagine a modeof human relationship that is moral, in being premised on mutual recogni-tion, but also legal, in that the considerations imposed on those related arecompulsory. Reviving the vocabulary of an earlier time, Oakeshott identifiesthis mode as a relationship of “civility” (“civil association”).2 But, as one might

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expect, these terms (and related expressions like “the rule of law”) acquire par-ticular meanings in the context of his investigation. Because even he found thesemeanings hard to disengage from other, less philosophical meanings, under-standing Oakeshott’s theory of civil association requires careful attention.

Moralities and legal systems are human practices that can be described andexplained historically as the contingent outcome of antecedent events. Andbecause these practices are used in conduct, they both exhibit and invite practi-cal understanding. But morality and law can also be understood philosophically,as distinguishable kinds of human activity, by uncovering their presuppositions.Philosophical inquiry yields conclusions that are neither historical nor practi-cal: conclusions that neither explain the occurrence of individual events noroffer precepts to guide individual acts, but which illuminate human practicesby distinguishing modes of conduct as well as modes of inquiry. It is true thatin discussions of morality and law, as elsewhere, ideas that belong to differentmodes of inquiry are often hard to disentangle. But we can, in principle, dis-tinguish the philosophical task of elucidating the presuppositions of moralityand law from the practical activity of making moral and legal judgments orfrom the historian’s concern to explain those judgments.

Oakeshott is in some moods a moralist, a judge of mores and of conduct.But in writing about morality, he is concerned as a theorist to pursue an inquirythat excludes making moral judgments. Philosophers are always trying tochange the world, he implies, but their proper task is to understand it. Myaim in this chapter is to consider the view of morality and law that Oakeshottdevelops from his conception of practices as the outcome of and context forintelligent conduct. This will involve identifying what morality and law, asmodes of human relationship, have in common as well as what distinguishesthem from each other. Insofar as it is concerned with conceptual definition,Oakeshott’s analysis is philosophical, not descriptive. Morality, understood asa distinguishable manner in which human beings may be related to one another,presupposes agents engaged in the prudential pursuit of satisfactions withinan order of authoritative and nonprudential (noninstrumental) considera-tions. And law, understood as a kind of moral association, comes into beingwhere these considerations take the form of express obligations and where


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Oakeshott, as for Hobbes, the concern of “civil philosophy” is not to justify but to define andexplain civil association. And for both, civil association is a work of art springing not from nat-ural human sociability but from the convergent choices of separate wills. The most substantial ofOakeshott’s writings on Hobbes are reprinted, with some significant alterations, in Hobbes onCivil Association.

there are procedures for authoritatively interpreting legal obligations andsecuring compliance with them. Though Oakeshott has much to say about thehistory of the ideas of morality and law, my concern here is with his philosoph-ical effort to define these ideas, not his investigations of the contexts in whichthey emerged and in relation to which they might be understood historically.

Morality and Moral Conduct

Oakeshott has little to say about morality in Experience and Its Modes; thatwork is concerned with the logic of the practical world in general, not withdistinguishing particular kinds of judgment or conduct within it. Nor does hetreat morality except in passing in other early works. But beginning with “TheTower of Babel” (1948) and continuing in several essays on Hobbes, in a seriesof lectures on modern political thought delivered at Harvard University in 1956,in “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (1959), and eventuallyin On Human Conduct and in a neglected but important essay on “The Rule ofLaw,” Oakeshott develops an increasingly subtle analysis of morality as a distin-guishable mode of human conduct.3

Two main approaches to theorizing morality can be discerned in thesewritings. One distinguishes alternative idioms of European moral experience.Oakeshott initially contrasts moralities of habit or custom with those that reston self-consciously articulated ideals or rules. Later, he makes a threefold dis-tinction between communal, individualist, and collectivist moralities. Judgingthe first of these (perhaps prematurely) to be a relic in the modern world, heidentifies the tension between individualist and collectivist moralities as anessential context of modern politics. Because it is largely historical anddescriptive, I do not consider Oakeshott’s treatment of this theme except as itrelates to his discussion of the idea of civil association.

The second approach, which becomes prominent in that discussion, involvesa narrower concern with philosophical definition. This explicit concern todefine morality as a mode of human relationship makes its first appearance in“The Voice of Poetry.” In this essay, Oakeshott distinguishes aesthetic experi-ence from other modes of experience, and especially from the mode of practical


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3. “The Tower of Babel,” reprinted in Rationalism in Politics, should not be confused witha subsequent essay with the same title published in 1983 in On History. References to “The Voiceof Poetry in the History of Mankind” are to the essay as it appears in the 1991 edition of Ratio-nalism in Politics. “The Rule of Law” can be found in On History, 119–64.

experience (in which he had previously located it), but in doing so he alsoexplores the ideas of morality and prudence, thereby anticipating the distinctionbetween instrumental and noninstrumental modes of association that is centralto his later efforts to theorize morality, law, and government. The idea of civilassociation, for example, is the idea of individuals coexisting within a frame-work of noninstrumental laws.

In “The Voice of Poetry,” Oakeshott develops the idea of a prudential modeof practical activity from an essentially Hobbesian conception of prudence asends-means reasoning. The world of practical activity, he suggests, is a worldcomposed largely of “images” of pleasure and pain—images that, practicallyspeaking, have real consequences for obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain.4

And the skills required to obtain pleasure and avoid pain are prudential skills.In practical activity, understood prudentially, “every image is the reflection ofa desiring self engaged in constructing its world and in continuing to recon-struct it in such a manner as to afford it pleasure” (RP 499). Practical imagesare conceptions of things to be either used or avoided. The world of practice,viewed solely in prudential terms, is a world of desire and will, inhabited by aHobbesian “desiring self.”

As we experience it, this world is real: we seek pleasures and avoid painsthat we regard as real, not illusory. The criterion of reality in practical activityis therefore pragmatic: an image is real if it has consequences for the satisfac-tion of our wants and especially “if by regarding it as ‘fact’ (pleasurable orpainful) the desiring self is preserved for further activity” (RP 499). What wehave so far, then, is a model of stark simplicity that reveals a crucial aspect ofpractical existence. But it is not the only aspect, and so we need a more com-plicated model.

The world of desire and aversion is a world of many selves, but in thisworld only one of these is recognized as an authentic self. For the desiring selfpursues pleasure and avoids pain in a world of other selves whom it regards inthe same way that it regards things that are not selves: that is, instrumentally.It “admits the ‘fact’ of other selves, but refuses to recognize them as selves,refuses to recognize their subjectivity” (RP 499–500). This self inhabits aworld of images related exclusively to its own desires, and this is (in Hobbes’svivid metaphor) a solitary world where human life is unavoidably a war of allagainst all.


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4. The key term in “The Voice of Poetry” is “imagination,” in contrast to “experience” (as inExperience and Its Modes) and “understanding” (in On Human Conduct).

To experience pleasure and avoid pain, one needs only the prudential skillsof being able to recognize practically-relevant “fact” and to escape illusion.Such skills are needed most in dealing with other selves, who are there to bemastered and used, if possible, and otherwise avoided or destroyed. In thisHobbesian world, other people are repelled, enslaved, or turned into allies.These relations of coercion or exchange may be temporary or they may be rel-atively permanent, but they create no obligations and confer no rights. Eventhe making of alliances, which seems to require the recognition of otherselves, is no more than “a disingenuous recognition of subjectivity: the bel-lum omnium contra omnes carried on by other means” (RP 501).

The world of desire and aversion, so analyzed, achieves a certain degree ofcoherence. Though incomplete, it has a logic and the economic worldview itsupports must be faulted not for what it sees but for what it fails to see. Forthere is more to life than satisfying wants, competing for resources, and prac-ticing the arts of prudence and war. Practical activity also has a “moral” dimen-sion, and when this is taken into account we find ourselves in a world thatincludes images not only of desire and aversion but also of approval and dis-approval. Approval and disapproval differ from desire and aversion in thatthey imply standards of judgment: we may be averse to something and yetapprove it, just as we can desire what we disapprove. And when this is recog-nized, conduct is seen as a complex activity of achieving both what is desiredand what is approved, an activity that involves moral as well as prudentialconsiderations. The skill required in moral conduct “is not that of knowinghow to get what we want with the least expenditure of energy, but knowinghow to behave as we ought to behave: the skill, not of desiring, but of approv-ing and of doing what is approved” (HCA 76; RP 296).

But, adding further complexity to our model, moral conduct involves morethan simply paying attention to standards of approval, for morality implies arelationship between selves or agents that is categorially different from theirrelationship to things. In the world understood morally, one recognizes otherpersons not only to control them, but unconditionally, as “ends” in them-selves and not only as “means” to one’s own ends. It is this recognition thatdefines the moral point of view. Morality, in this now Kantian and Hegelianas well as Hobbesian model, is possible only in a relationship between mutu-ally recognizing subjects, for although an action can “go wrong” when it failsto achieve its imagined object, it can only “be wrong” in relation to “mutuallyrecognized . . . conditions or practices” (OHC 259). Implicit here is the proposi-tion that recognizing a practice as the basis of a relationship means recognizing


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the selfhood of those related. In the moral point of view, persons are under-stood to be members of a community of persons, and “approval and disap-proval are activities which belong to them as members of this community” (RP502). Morality, in other words, inheres in the communal standards accordingto which judgments of approval and disapproval are made. Moral conduct isconduct that responds appropriately to these standards: it is conduct thatinvolves “knowing how to behave in relation to selves ingenuously recog-nized as such” (RP 502). What is essential in moral conduct is the ability totreat other people as ends and not as mere instruments for the satisfaction ofone’s own desires.

In On Human Conduct, and then in “The Rule of Law,” Oakeshott furtherrefines the distinction between prudence and morality as modes of humanrelationship. The first exists to satisfy wants, but the second is premised on anacknowledged practice or set of rules within which people seek to satisfy theirwants. Because the distinction between these two modes is basic to Oake-shott’s analysis of the idea of law, and because critics have denied its cogency,it deserves detailed examination.

In the prudential mode, human beings are related insofar as they impedeor assist one another in their efforts to satisfy substantive wants. Prudentialrelationships and the instrumental practices they generate are evident in theactivities people engage in, individually or collectively, in pursuing their goals—activities whose rationale lies in the purposes that motivate their participants.It is important to see that the wants that motivate agents need not be theirown wants: there is no reason why an agent cannot define the situation as onein which the wants of others should be satisfied, and therefore no reason whyan agent cannot be prudent on behalf of others. Prudence, in other words, isnot limited to the management of one’s own interests (OHC 52–53).

Purposive activity may involve rules for successfully achieving goals, butthese rules have no independent significance. Such rules are maxims for exer-cising power, not moral precepts. They are a guide to “the prudential disposi-tion of the available resources” (OH 124): “mutually understood instrumentsto promote the transactions they govern” (OHC 113). Where people cooper-ate in pursuing a shared purpose, rules are instrumental to that pursuit andare desirable only insofar as they are useful. They are the product of associa-tion, not its basis, and do not alter the mode of the relationship, which remainspurposive.

Let us call this kind of relationship “relationship in terms of wants”—anawkward but precise expression Oakeshott sometimes uses. As a mode of


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relationship, it is shaped by the purposes those involved have chosen to pur-sue, by bargaining or cooperating, in an effort to satisfy their wants. “Transac-tions” of exchange between agents independently pursuing their own purposescan be distinguished from cooperative “enterprises” in which agents pursueshared purposes, so Oakeshott distinguishes “transactional association” (OHC112), on the one hand, from the kind of association he calls “enterprise” (OHC114, 118, 313, 315; OH 133), “purposive” (RP 453; OHC 313), or “corporate”(OHC 264), on the other. Both kinds of association, however, are relation-ships premised on the pursuit of interests: a transaction is no less purposivethan cooperative activity and cooperation can be seen as a series of transac-tions. The distinction between a transaction and a cooperative enterprise is adistinction within the more inclusive “relationship in terms of wants.”

A moral relationship cannot be a relationship of this kind, however. Moralconduct presupposes mutual recognition between independent agents, eachpursuing his or her self-chosen ends. These agents, in seeking to satisfy theirseparate or collective wants, are related in various purposive transactions andenterprises and therefore concerned with a multiplicity of procedures, skills,and other practices that are instrumental to achieving their ends. But they arealso constrained by practices that are not instrumental to the achievement ofthese ends: “moral” practices. In contrast to a prudential relationship, whichexists to procure individual or joint satisfactions, a moral relationship is definedand ordered by noninstrumental standards of conduct: “conditional propri-eties” expressly or tacitly recognized in all other relationships (OHC 88).

These “proprieties” are authoritative considerations that agents must ac-knowledge, even if doing so interferes with efforts to achieve their individualand collective goals; they not only state criteria for judging right and wrong inconduct, but prescribe obligations (OH 132). It is, for example, proper thatpromises should be kept even when inconvenient, improper that a personshould be “punished” for an offense of which he or she is known to be inno-cent. The reasons for adhering to an instrumental practice derive from its pur-poses or from the expected consequences of adhering to it, but the reasons foradhering to a moral practice are internal to the practice itself. The grounds onwhich behaving morally are justified are determined by a moral, not an extra-moral, standard or criterion. In a moral practice, the standard is antecedent tothe act, not tied to its consequences. One does not act morally for the sake ofbenefits to oneself or even to others. Moral practices are concerned with theintrinsic propriety of actions, not the desirability of outcomes. As Oakeshottputs it, a morality is “a practice without any extrinsic purpose; it is concerned


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with good and bad conduct, and not with performances in respect of their out-comes” (OHC 62). It may help in understanding the argument Oakeshott isadvancing here to put aside the semantic question of how the word “moral”should be used, and to consider whether one can, as he asserts, distinguish thedesirability of an act in relation to its consequences from its propriety in rela-tion to a noninstrumental precept or principle. This distinction is often deniedby those who defend a utilitarian or some other consequentialist theory ofmorality. But it is denied irrationally, for their own position—that an act isright or wrong because of its expected consequences, not its relationship to amoral practice—in fact presupposes the distinction.

Persons who are related in a “moral” (noninstrumental) practice may sharethe same beliefs, enjoy a happy convergence of interests, or find themselvesjoined in pursuing a shared goal. But recognizing the authority of moral con-straints does not presuppose such agreement. And because morality does notpresuppose purposive agreement, it can exist even among enemies. Indeed, amoral relationship may be all there is between those with incompatible aims.Nations at war with one another are morally required to observe, and some-times do observe, rules limiting the conduct of war—not only because observ-ing these rules can be shown in certain or in all circumstances to have objectivelydesirable consequences (this might or might not be true) but for reasons of“honor,” “humanity,” “civility,” or “respect for human rights,” all of which, in thetradition of the rules of war, express the ethos of the tradition itself. Theobjection that to acknowledge moral rules as obligatory requires at least someagreement on ends, because people would otherwise have no motive to acceptcommon constraints on their conduct, confuses the contingent circumstancesfor the existence of a practice with its defining characteristics.5

For Oakeshott, steering a narrow course between the Scylla of KantianMoralität and the Charybdis of Hegelian Sittlichkeit, a moral practice is a“language”: each morality is a noninstrumental practice, but each has its ownvocabulary and syntax, can be used to conclude different things, is learnedonly in being used, and can be employed with varying degrees of skill. Amorality is a “vernacular language of intercourse” and moral conduct is “akind of literacy” (OH 133). And those who use a moral practice, like the speak-ers of a language, implicitly acknowledge the authority of its conventions. Itis, moreover, because they are using their own acquired moral standards that


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5. For a version of this objection, see Richard E. Flathman, The Practice of PoliticalAuthority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

they exist as agents. For just as one must have a language in order to speak, soone needs a “language of conduct” through which to express oneself in action.We use various prudential languages in the transactions and enterprises inwhich we are involved, but we cannot avoid expressing ourselves, also, in anoninstrumental “language of moral converse.” It is primarily in relation toour own moral practices that, as agents, we understand our situations, chooseactions, and, in choosing, disclose our identities (to ourselves and others). Inacting we explore the varied characters, styles, and relationships that are madepossible by the moral practice we have learned to use. As Oakeshott puts it inan essay on Hobbes, “what we ought to do is unavoidably connected withwhat in fact we are,” and “the idioms of moral conduct which our civilizationhas displayed are distinguished, in the first place, not in respect of their doc-trines about how we ought to behave, but in respect of their interpretations ofwhat in fact we are” (HCA 76; RP 296). Michael Walzer makes a similar pointwhen he suggests that our morality “is authoritative for us because it is only invirtue of its existence that we exist as the moral beings we are” and that “ourcategories, relationships, commitments, and aspirations are all shaped by,expressed in terms of, the existing morality.”6 Who I am depends not only onwhat I believe but on the beliefs embedded in the practices of the variouscommunities to which I belong and in terms of which I define my identity. Amoral practice is, for this reason, an inescapable condition of agency itself:“the ars artium of conduct; the practice of all practices; the practice of agencywithout further specification” (OHC 60).

Though it can be understood, on the analogy of language, to provide agrammar of moral conduct—rules by which acts may be judged morally “cor-rect” or “incorrect” (VLL 53)—a moral practice is not identical with suchrules. Moral rules are merely abridgments of moral conduct, “passages ofstringency in a moral practice” (OHC 67). But there is always more to a moralpractice than can be stated, and much is lost when its nuances are replaced bycodified formulas. The familiar words of moral discourse (justice, right, duty,responsibility, and the like) are abstractions, “faded metaphors” whose mean-ing alters with the contexts in which they are deployed. There are, moreover,many moral practices, many “vernaculars” of moral converse, each “a historicachievement of human beings” (OHC 63). Every morality, like every spoken


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6. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1987), 21. Alan Donagan considers Oakeshott’s views on the character of morality in rela-tion to those of Kant and Hegel in The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1977), 9–17.

language, has its individual qualities, its peculiar resources and liabilities, foreach is a continually renewed product of the actions of those who use it. Likea person or institution, a moral practice is an individual, always changing andyet continuously itself. It has a character but is not immutable: “it is its vicissi-tudes” (OHC 64).

This account of morality displays a number of characteristically Oakeshot-tian features. It is theoretical rather than practical: it seeks to explain, not toprescribe. It is philosophical rather than historical, for though the conceptionof morality it identifies is a generalization from moral experience, that con-ception is defined by specifying the formal characteristics that distinguish amoral practice from other practices, not by describing the substantive con-tent, the particular prescriptions, of individual moralities. When Oakeshottdefines morality as a practice composed of noninstrumental considerations,he is offering neither a moral judgment nor a descriptive generalization but atool for distinguishing alternative modes of human conduct. What he pro-vides is a philosophical definition, one that necessarily diverges from ordinaryconceptions of morality because it is the result of a dialectical procedure inwhich an idea is examined in relation to what it presupposes, purged ofambiguity, and progressively redefined. To object, as critics sometimes do, thatOakeshott’s definition of morality does not correspond to “what we ordinarilythink of as moral” is to take ordinary ideas not as the starting place for philo-sophical definition but to make them the criterion of a satisfactory definition.

Furthermore, in noticing the plurality of moral practices and rejecting effortsto reduce this plurality to a single set of substantive principles, Oakeshott offersan account of morality that is antifoundational and therefore, in that sense ofthe term, relativist. In this respect, he stands closer to Hegel than to Kant—or, to offer a more a contemporary comparison, closer to Walzer than toDonagan.7 This relativism is a consequence of Oakeshott’s view of philoso-phy, not merely of his definition of morality. A philosophical theory, he writesin a 1938 article, is not a “solid basis upon which things like science and theconduct of practical life ultimately rest; science and practical life, as such, haveno philosophical foundations” (CPJ 345). Nor can the existing plurality ofmoral languages “be resolved by being understood as so many contingent andregrettable divergencies from a fancied perfect and universal language of moralintercourse” (OHC 80). The aim of philosophy is to understand this plurality,not to eradicate it by demonstrating that one moral language is superior to allothers. The demand for moral uniformity is more often practical than theoret-


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7. Donagan, The Theory of Morality, and Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism.

ical, a demand for moral certainty where none is possible. It is, for Oakeshott,an essentially religious demand, and although an individual agent can seekabsolutely reliable guidance in faith, this is not an option that is available tothe theorist. There are, however, limits to Oakeshott’s relativism, for if amorality is, by definition, a noninstrumental practice premised on mutualrecognition, the diversity of moral practices is confined within boundariesthat correspond to a broadly Kantian, nonconsequentialist understanding ofmorality as presupposing “respect for persons.” But this is a theoretical under-standing of morality, not itself a moral argument.

Oakeshott’s view of the noninstrumental and plural character of morality iscrucial to his analysis of law. But Oakeshott also takes his exploration of moral-ity in another direction, in a discussion of what he calls the “self-enactment”of agents (OHC 70). His concern here is with acts understood in relation totheir motives, the sentiments in which they are performed. Moral conduct isnot only a matter of responding to considerations of propriety in choosingactions. It also means having an acceptable motive for choosing and, in choos-ing, representing oneself as one would like to be. In conduct we not only dis-close our desires in the actions we choose; we also enact or “live” a characterby cultivating certain motives or virtues. Our self-disclosure in our choice ofactions and our self-enactment in our choice of motives, though often con-fused—by those, for example, who think that to be concerned with the pro-priety of an action rather than its consequences is to be concerned with one’sintegrity—are distinguishable considerations in every actual language of moralconduct.

The distinction here is not merely between act and motive, between anagent’s choices and the character that determines those choices; it is betweenrelating to others and escaping what Oakeshott, in his early essays on religion,calls “the world.” For actions are not given but contingent. They dependupon an agent’s understanding, which because it is an understanding could bedifferent. An act is a response to an understood situation, a response thatmight not have been chosen. It can be compromised, even defeated, by otheragents, because acts performed in relation to others are dependent on theirresponses and are, for that reason, “infected with contingency” (OHC 73). Incontrast, because it does not seek such a response, what one does in relationto one’s self is independent of what others think or do. It therefore escapes,not all contingency, but at least the contingencies of compromise or failure intransactions with other agents: in examining my motives, I am evaluating myown character, not their responses. Nevertheless, the effort to enact a self,which seems to offer permanence that outlasts one’s actions, is also an illu-


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sion. One cannot, even here, escape the world, for self-enactment is still action,always contradictory and invariably mortal: “the enacted self is itself a fugi-tive” (OHC 84).8

This discussion of sentiments, motives, and character, illuminating thoughit may be, takes us away from the effort to understand morality as a practiceregulating the purposive interactions of agents. In our efforts to coexist withother human beings, the sentiment in which they act is less important to usthan what they do, for not only does the success of our actions depend ontheir responses but morality itself is more often a matter of how people actthan of why they act. As far as motives are concerned, we must for the mostpart “take our fellows as we find them; not ‘judging’ them (as we sometimeshave to judge their self-disclosures), but contemplating them with admira-tion, with reserve, or with indulgence” (OHC 77). The choice of the word“contemplation” here may be significant, for it suggests that in reflecting onthe motives of other human beings we are touching a modal boundary, onethat divides the practical and the aesthetic realms. What we cannot rightlycontrol we can only contemplate, and it is a consequence of human freedom(the kind of freedom that is inherent in agency) that we cannot dictate whatothers think. We can, however, choose our own motives: though we have tolive with the character we have, through a lifetime of choices, made for our-selves, we are not forced (though we may in fact choose) to rest in the merecontemplation of this character.

There is certainly more to be said on the theme of character and virtue, butOakeshott’s inquiry into morality and moral conduct is focused on considera-tions governing the relations of agents: considerations that are appropriatelya matter of public concern and can therefore be embodied in a system of laws.Let us therefore turn to what Oakeshott has to say about law and about theconnection between morality and law.

The Rule of Law

One of the central concerns of legal theory is to identify law as a kind of prac-tical activity. This concern generates two subsidiary questions: first, how to


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8. The part of On Human Conduct in which these ideas are floated should be read in thelight of Oakeshott’s 1929 essay, “Religion and the World” (RPML 27–38), discussed in Chapter 2above, whose argument it revises.

distinguish law, as a kind of activity, from the contingent features of particularlegal orders; and, second, how to distinguish law from other kinds of practi-cal activity, like custom and command, which it resembles and to which it isrelated in various ways. The theoretical challenge, in other words, is how todistinguish law, so understood, from various other things to which the word“law” has been applied.

Oakeshott’s answer to these questions is that a legal order is a moral prac-tice that has turned into a system of rules and acquired what such a systemintimates: a mechanism for identifying rules that are valid or “authentic”within that system, for using such rules in particular situations, and for ensur-ing that they can be relied upon. For as soon as there are rules there is inter-pretation, and with interpretation comes disagreement and the need for a wayto settle interpretive disputes. When interpretation remains in the hands ofthose to whom the rules apply, there is little to distinguish a legal system fromother kinds of moral practice. Every morality has its moralists, its specialistsin interpretation, but in most they occupy no office and possess no exclusiveauthority. But when a morality has official interpreters—“legislators” to make,revise, or nullify rules, “judges” to determine what the rules mean in specificsituations, and “rulers” to ensure that the rules are attended to—it has becomea legal system. In communities without these offices, the distinction betweenmorality and law is unimportant. It hardly matters whether we say that suchcommunities are without a legal system or that their legal systems are decen-tralized or “primitive.” As Oakeshott sees it, then, a legal system is a moralpractice adapted to the task of regulating a contentious multiplicity of indi-viduals by being distilled into authoritative and justiciable rules, includingrules for declaring, interpreting, and securing observance of these rules.9

Though it yields a definition, Oakeshott’s theory of law does not aim to sayhow the word “law” is or should be used, or to describe the diversity of humanarrangements to which that word has been applied. A philosopher is not con-cerned to collect everything that may fall under a received name and to searchfor coherence in that miscellaneous body of materials. No philosophically


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9. Oakeshott’s definition of law as an institutionalized system of moral rules resembles anddoubtless owes something to Hart’s definition of law as a union of (“primary”) rules of obliga-tion and (“secondary”) rules for identifying, altering, and applying these obligations. H. L. A.Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). But the distinction betweeninstrumental and noninstrumental rules, which is crucial both to any nonconsequentialist viewof morality and to Oakeshott’s theory of law as institutionalized morality, is absent from Hart’sdiscussion, which rests on utilitarian premises.

consistent theory of law could explain the diversity of things to which theword “law” has been applied. The philosopher’s task is to articulate a coherentconception of law, even though it departs from ordinary ideas.10

Oakeshott’s way of accomplishing this task is to distinguish a form ofhuman relationship, a “relationship of civility” (OHC 108) or “the rule oflaw” (OH 119) in which persons are related to one another on the basis ofauthoritative and noninstrumental rules. His aim is not to say what an expres-sion like “the rule of law” has actually meant in this or that context (as an ide-ological slogan, for example), but “what it must mean” if it is to designate adistinct and coherent idea (OH 119). Still less is his aim to recommend theconcept of law it designates as morally required or otherwise desirable: thephilosopher’s aim is not to advocate the rule of law but to theorize it. Civilassociation or the rule of law is an ideal relationship defined by principlesabstracted from the actual activity of human beings. We can understand thisrelationship by inquiring into its principles. But the activity in which theseprinciples are exhibited precedes the inquiry. The aim of this inquiry is there-fore neither to invent the activity nor to use it but, in reflecting on it, toendow it with a coherent character (OHC 109; OH 121).

Because the point is so often misunderstood, it must be emphasized thatthis abstract relationship is not to be confused with the contingent miscellanyof rules, rulings, commands, orders, and managerial directives that constitutesthe actual laws of any particular state. As used by Oakeshott in his later writ-ings, the expressions “rule of law” and “civil association” designate an idealcharacter, a mode of human association.11 And the aim of his inquiry is to under-stand this ideal character “in terms of its postulates” (OHC 109, 111)—that is,to analyze the presuppositions of the civil mode of relationship, not todescribe the features of any actually existing association, past or present. Tounderstand this kind of relationship theoretically, we must avoid confusing itwith the contingent features of particular legal systems.

The distinction here is between a kind of activity and an actual instance ofthat activity. A game, for example, is both an event—a series of actions occur-


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10. Oakeshott explicitly discusses the aims and scope of legal philosophy in “The Concept ofa Philosophical Jurisprudence” (CPJ).

11. Oakeshott refers to “the rule of law” in “The Political Economy of Freedom” (RP390–93, 399–400) and The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (88–89), works datingfrom the late 1940s and early 1950s, but his understanding of the expression is more conven-tional and less carefully theorized in these works than in his 1983 essay “The Rule of Law” (OH119–64).

ring on a given occasion—and a practice, defined by its rules, that exists inde-pendently of the event that is an instance of it (OH 127). Just as we can dis-tinguish baseball as a game constituted by certain rules, from the play ofparticular persons on a particular occasion, so we can distinguish law as a prac-tice from what is actually going on in this or that legal system. As a mode ofrelationship, civil association is not a plenum of actual contingent transac-tions involving concrete individuals (“assignable agents”), but an ideal (con-ceptual) relationship among legal subjects understood as abstract personae.And just as in a game we can separate the abstract personae of the players(pitcher, shortstop) from the actual persons who may adopt those personaeon a given occasion, so in civil association we can separate the persona civica(or its various forms, like voter, juror, etc.) from the individual, named citi-zens of an actual state (OHC 129).

The laws of an actual, individual state are always a mixture of rules instru-mental to achieving various substantive purposes and noninstrumental “rulesof the game” regulating the activities of subjects, no matter what their pur-poses. Every actual state is, therefore, in different proportions, both a substan-tive enterprise and a civil association. In sketching these modal alternatives,Oakeshott is not presenting two portraits of the modern state, one a goodlikeness and the other not. His argument is, rather, that every actual state is anambiguous construction displaying both understandings of its character andpurpose.12 According to one conception, a state is a corporation whose asso-ciates are joined in the pursuit of shared goals (which may be religious, eco-nomic, military, etc.), whose laws are instruments to further this pursuit, andwhose government devises policies for reaching these goals: a purposive orenterprise association. According to the other conception, a state is an associ-ation of citizens joined not in the pursuit of shared goals but solely inacknowledging the authority of a common body of rules: a civil association.In such an association the laws are not commands instrumental to the pursuitof a collective purpose. They are noninstrumental constraints on conduct, anda government is the custodian of the civil condition constituted by these laws.


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12. The claim that states are “ambiguous associations” (OHC 128) is crucial to Oakeshott’sargument, and is one of the places where many interpretations go astray. For a cogent analysis of“the ambiguity thesis,” see Richard Friedman, “Oakeshott on the Authority of Law,” Ratio Juris2 (1989), 27–40. The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, a work evidently completed inthe early 1950s, suggests that Oakeshott was concerned with the ambiguity of modern politicalactivity long before he articulated this concern in terms of the alternative modes of associationthat might be displayed in a state.

In the first, “law” is the rule-book of a managerial enterprise; in the second, itis a framework of authoritative rules of coexistence among individuals engagedin their own, self-chosen transactions and enterprises.

Civility, then, is an imagined condition of association, fully realized in noexisting state but implicit to some degree in all, in which efforts to satisfy sub-stantive wants are constrained by obligations that are not themselves instru-mental to satisfying wants. In the civil mode, those associated (“citizens”) areunited not because they share the same beliefs and values (they may not, andshared beliefs or values are in any case not the basis of this kind of associa-tion), but only in recognizing a common body of rules and the authority of agovernment whose office it is to make and apply these rules. Civil association,as a mode of relationship, is “association in terms of rules” (OHC 127), a rela-tionship that depends on the operation of reliable procedures for ascertainingwhich rules are the authoritative rules of the association and for securing theirobservance. Turned into deliberately chosen and administered laws, thesenoninstrumental obligations constitute a particular kind of moral relation-ship, one in which those related are related on the basis of such laws: the ruleof law.

Oakeshott summarizes the elements of the rule of law, as a mode of rela-tionship, in the following way:

Association, not in terms of doing and the enjoyment of the fruits ofdoing, but of procedural conditions imposed upon doing: laws. Rela-tionship, not in terms of efficacious arrangements for promoting orprocuring wished-for substantive satisfactions (individual or com-munal), but obligations to subscribe to non-instrumental rules: amoral relationship. Rule, not in terms of the alleged worth, “rational-ity” or “justice” of the conditions these rules prescribe, but in respectof the recognition of their authenticity (OH 148).

Taking up each of these elements, I will discuss civil association or the rule oflaw as a mode of relationship based on noninstrumental laws. I will also con-sider Oakeshott’s argument that there is a conceptual connection between therule of law and individual freedom. And I will conclude by examining hisconclusion that institutions for recognizing, altering, and securing observanceof laws, which are needed if this mode of association is to be realized in anactual community, belong to the idea of civil association. Doubts have beenraised about each of these claims, and these, too, need to be considered.


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Relationship in Terms of Rules

The rule of law, Oakeshott says, is “relationship in terms of the recognition ofrules as rules” (OHC 148). But what does it mean to be related “in terms of”rules? What is a rule, and how do rules differ from requests, commands,warnings, and the like? How, precisely, do instrumental and noninstrumentalrules differ? And how can the rule of law be distinguished from other prac-tices that are also “relationship in terms of rules”?

Oakeshott shares with legal positivism the view that law is a practice inwhich human beings use and must therefore interpret rules.13 But he rejects asconfused John Austin’s view that a rule is a kind of command, “the commandof the sovereign.” For Oakeshott, as for H. L. A. Hart, laws are rules, not par-ticular performances. But a command is a performance, not a rule. It is anorder, addressed to particular persons, to perform particular acts, and it can beobeyed or disobeyed only by those to whom it is addressed. It is “an injunc-tion to perform a substantive action and it calls for obedience; that is, the per-formance of the action it specifies.” It is itself a performance, a contingentresponse to a particular situation that “is used up on the occasion” (OH 129).A rule, in contrast, is a practice, not a performance, and in being used is not“used up.” Being general, it exists in advance of the contingent situations towhich it may later be applied, and “remains ‘standing’ for unknown futureoccasions” (OHC 126).

Central to this analysis of law as a system of rules is the argument that rules,unlike commands, do not prescribe particular performances and thereforecannot be obeyed or disobeyed. What Oakeshott means in advancing thiscounterintuitive claim is that rules do not prescribe individual actions. Rulesrequire or forbid types of action, and it is a matter of interpretation whether aparticular act falls under the rule. Rules cannot tell an agent “what choice heshall make” or “what to do or to say,” for their meaning must still be specifiedby the agent in deciding what to do. Rules presuppose the making of choicesand the performance of acts and prescribe considerations (“conditions”) to beacknowledged and taken into account (“subscribed to”) in choosing perfor-mances, but which cannot themselves be performed (OHC 55–56, 58, 126).And that is why it is misleading to speak of “obeying” a rule; strictly speaking,


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13. Oakeshott mentions, as thinkers engaged (sometimes uncertainly) in theorizing the ruleof law, Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Austin, Jellinek, and “many so-called ‘pos-itivist’ modern jurists” (OHC 171n, 251–52; OH 161–62). Although he does not name them, HansKelsen and H. L. A. Hart would figure prominently among the latter.

one responds to a rule by subscribing adequately or inadequately to the con-ditions it prescribes (OH 129). Rules do presuppose judgment about whatcounts as adequate subscription. But because every rule is general, one mustdecide how it relates to a given situation. And because there are many ways oftaking a rule into account, many different performances can be said to fulfillthe obligations it prescribes: a rule can “never relieve us from the necessity ofchoice” (VLL 54).

Oakeshott uses the word “adverbial” to capture this aspect of rule-following.Rules “adverbially qualify” actions, for to act according to the prescriptions of apractice is to act (depending on the practice) morally, lawfully, punctually, tact-fully, and so forth. To say, for example, that a rule forbids rudeness is animprecise way of saying that it forbids behaving rudely: “rudeness” is notitself an action but is a possible aspect of any action. “A criminal law, whichmay be thought to come nearest to forbidding actions, does not forbid killingor lighting a fire, it forbids killing ‘murderously’ or lighting a fire ‘arsonically’;and these adverbs are narrowly specified in terms of the evidence required tosubstantiate or to rebut the considerations alleged” (OHC 58n). When we saythat the law forbids murder, we are referring elliptically to such considera-tions, not to specific, contingent performances. This point, which is muchdisputed in the secondary literature on Oakeshott’s theory of civil association,is an aspect of reasoning well understood within the hermeneutic tradition. Ifinterpretation, like judgment, is an “art” that cannot be completely specifiedin terms of rules, the same must be said for other kinds of conduct, for allconduct involves meaning and requires interpretation.14

There is a problem with the argument that rules do not determine perfor-mances, but it is not, as our ordinary, careless way of speaking invites us toassert, that rules do in fact demand or forbid particular actions. The problemis that even commands, which can be said to prescribe individual performances,must fall short of completely determining an agent’s choice in a given situa-tion. If, because of the interpretive freedom that is inherent in human con-duct, an agent’s situation never completely determines his response, this mustbe true even when that situation includes prescriptions in the form of com-mands. For commands as well as rules can be interpreted or executed in dif-


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14. The “art of judgment,” explored by Kant in his Critique of Judgment, is made central tohermeneutics by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, and Other Writings,trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

ferent ways, and therefore cannot be said to completely specify performances.The distinction between commands and rules, then, is not that the former com-pletely specify action and the latter do not; it is that commands, unlike rules, arethemselves substantive performance. Rules are practices, not performances.

In defining laws as rules and distinguishing rules from commands, we havegone only partway toward articulating a coherent view of the rule of law, how-ever, for the rules on which this mode of association is based are not only gen-eral but noninstrumental. This brings us to the most important (and contested)distinction in Oakeshott’s theory of the rule of law as relationship in terms ofrules, the distinction between instrumental and noninstrumental rules.

An instrumental rule is a statement of advice. Advice can come not only inthe form of a suggestion that a particular agent do a certain thing (in which itresembles a command), but also in the form of general hypothetical rules ormaxims. Maxims of this sort are instrumental because they state how toachieve a desired result: bread dough should be left to rise slowly in a coolplace; honesty is the best policy; “men must be either caressed or extinguished”(Machiavelli). When we call such prudential maxims rules, it is clear that weare speaking of instrumental rules. Noninstrumental rules, in contrast, are notprudential and do not convey advice. But how, more precisely, can we distin-guish noninstrumental from instrumental rules?

First, a noninstrumental rule is concerned solely with the propriety of acts,not their usefulness in achieving a particular outcome (OH 128). A noninstru-mental rule is not an admonition or a piece of advice urging a course of actionon consequential grounds. This characteristic of a noninstrumental rule—itsconcern with propriety—can be seen in the rules of public debate, for such rules“do not tell a speaker what to say and are wholly indifferent to any particularconclusion” (RP 454). Noninstrumental rules are concerned with form andprocedure, not substantive content.

Second, a noninstrumental rule is authoritative. That is, the reasons for attend-ing to it derive from its character as an authentic rule, not, as with a recipe, warn-ing, or other instrumental rule, from its consequential worth. And the criteria bywhich this authenticity is determined have nothing to do with its efficacy in pro-ducing a desired outcome.

Third, noninstrumental rules create obligations. Rules of this kind are notmerely standards for judging actions; they guide conduct by prescribing consid-erations to be taken into account in choosing actions. A noninstrumental ruledoes more than distinguish between right and wrong; it is “an authoritative


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prescription of conditions to be subscribed to in acting and its counterpart isan obligation to subscribe to these conditions” (OH 130). An obligation, inturn, is not a feeling or a habit, but an understanding, for to be obligated by arule is nothing more than to recognize it as a rule, that is, to acknowledge it asauthoritative in a given situation. This recognition need not be explicit. It canbe implicit in conduct because to use a rule—to invoke it in making a judg-ment, for example—is already to acknowledge its antecedent authority. But aswe shall see, acknowledging this authority—either expressly or simply by act-ing in a way that shows awareness of the rule as a rule—does not necessarilymean that one approves what the rule prescribes. In the understanding of lawthat Oakeshott explores, the grounds on which a rule is recognized as author-itative and the grounds on which one might approve or condemn it as desir-able or undesirable, just or unjust, are not confused with one another.

Taken together, these characteristics of a noninstrumental rule, in contrastto those of a command or prudential maxim, help to specify the ideal charac-ter that Oakeshott calls “relationship in terms of rules.” In this mode of rela-tionship one can distinguish between intelligent subscription to a rule andmere conformity; between recognizing a rule and liking it; and between beingobligated by a rule, which means having a duty under it, and being compelledto obey it, which is independent of duty. Relationship in terms of rules pre-supposes agents engaged in pursuing their own self-chosen purposes andimposes duties that these agents are expected to observe in the course of thispursuit—obligations that remain in effect even when they are ignored. Theseobligations are derived from rules whose authority rests not on their efficacyin advancing the goals of those whose conduct they govern, but on indepen-dent procedures for ascertaining their validity and for interpreting them inparticular situations. The mode of association here is formal: association notvoluntarily chosen for the sake of satisfying wants, but association on thebasis of authoritative “conditions to be observed in seeking the satisfaction ofwants” (OHC 313).

The distinction between “practice” and “rule,” where both are noninstru-mental, is one of emphasis and degree. But the distinction between relation-ship defined by respect for noninstrumental conditions, of any sort, andpurposive or enterprise association is a distinction between kinds of associa-tion. It is, Oakeshott suggests, extending the concept of modality from under-standing to conduct, a modal distinction. To object, as some of Oakeshott’scritics do, that the noninstrumentality of a rule is a matter of degree, not kind,is to confuse the mode of relationship in terms of rules with the contingent


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features of actual rules.15 Actual states may reflect, to different degrees, aspectsof civil and purposive association, but the difference is one of kind, notdegree. Other critics attempt to dissolve the distinction between considera-tions of propriety and considerations of consequences, between form andsubstance, and therefore between noninstrumental and instrumental rules,but their objections rest on nothing more substantial than doubts aboutwhether these distinctions can be sustained.16

We are now in a position to see why relationship in terms of rules, andtherefore the rule of law as a relationship of this kind, is relationship on thebasis of noninstrumental rules. It is because to be joined in observing instru-mental rules is really to be related on the basis of the wants that conformity tosuch rules is thought to secure. Where the rules are instrumental, associationin terms of rules reduces to association in terms of wants, that is, to associa-tion for pursuing the satisfaction of those wants. An association whose rulesare instrumental is a purposive, not a moral, association. It is not surprising,then, that many of those who contest the distinction between the modes ofcivil and enterprise association are utilitarians or other kinds of consequential-ists for whom all relationships are ultimately relationships in terms of wants.17

What distinguishes law as a kind of moral relationship, then, from law as arelationship to achieve certain ends is that it rests neither on commands noron rules that are instrumental to the satisfaction of particular wants, but onnoninstrumental rules that presuppose and are confined to regulating interac-tions between agents seeking to realize their own purposes. Such rules are,Oakeshott sometimes says, “indifferent” to those purposes, in the sense thatthey constrain human beings from using one another as means to an endwithout imposing ends on them. To be constrained in this way, that is, by


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15. See, for example, John Gray, “Oakeshott on Law, Liberty, and Civil Association,” in Lib-eralisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1989), 210.

16. Examples include John Liddington, “Oakeshott: Freedom in a Modern EuropeanState,” in Z. Pelczynski and J. Gray, eds., Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy (London:Athlone Press, 1984), and David Mapel, “Purpose and Politics: Can There Be a Non-Instrumen-tal Civil Association?” Political Science Reviewer 21 (1992), 63–80. In Mapel’s view, Oakeshottdoes not adequately defend his identification of the moral and the noninstrumental. Mapel sug-gests that moral judgments are purposive and therefore instrumental because all rules have pur-poses, but this claim rests on an unanalyzed and equivocal conception of “purpose.” Respect forpersons, for example, is for Kant a postulate of morality, not “the purpose of morality” (73).

17. This consequentialism is clearest in Liddington, “Oakeshott,” but it can be discerned inthe arguments of other critics who assume that there is no significant distinction between what,since Aristotle, have been called external and internal goods, and therefore between extrinsic andintrinsic purposes, prudence and propriety, instrumental and noninstrumental rules, etc.

noninstrumental rules, is not to be used a means to the achievement of any-one’s purposes, including the purposes of those who enact and administer thelaws. This claim should not be confused with the argument, sometimes mis-takenly attributed to Oakeshott, that those who make the laws have no pur-poses of their own, or that laws are neutral in the sense that they do not affectdifferent people in different ways. Oakeshott’s argument is only that, in thecivil mode, it does not belong to the office of government to rule by declaringauthoritative purposes and prescribing the performances by which they are tobe realized, and therefore that laws that are purposive in this sense represent akind of legal order that must be distinguished from the kind of order properlydesignated by the expression “the rule of law.” In contrast to managerial rule,government in a state understood to be a civil association does not set goalsfor its subjects and set them to work to achieve those goals.18 Only a legalorder composed of noninstrumental rules can be a “relationship in terms ofrules,” rather than a relationship in terms of the wants of rulers who use thepersons over whom they rule as a means to satisfy these wants.

There is, however, a problem with conceiving morality as “relationship interms of rules.” It arises, as we have seen, from the fact that relationship interms of rules calls for a reliable means of ascertaining what the rules are.Rules require interpretation: they are complicated and ambiguous, and theyimply exceptions. And more than one rule pertains to any situation in whichan agent might find himself. Interpretation therefore, for these reasons as wellas others we have already considered, cannot yield univocal results: the skill inusing rules is “deliberative, not demonstrative” (OHC 68). And a key prob-lem in deliberating is how to decide which rules and interpretations areauthoritative in a given situation: how, in other words, to determine whatOakeshott calls the “authenticity” of a rule and to distinguish this authenticityfrom its alleged “rightness.” In a moral practice reduced to rules, both authen-ticity and rightness are “prime and contentious considerations” (OH 135).

Authenticity and Rightness

Rules cannot be the basis of association unless there is some way of settlinginterpretive disputes. If no such way is available—if there exists no procedurefor resolving disagreements over the correct meaning of a rule, no umpire to


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18. Richard Friedman, “What Is a Non-Instrumental Law?” Political Science Reviewer 21(1992), 97.

say what a contested rule means in a given situation—interpretations maydiverge so greatly as to undermine the premise of relationship in terms ofrules. This premise is that there is agreement about the meaning of the rules,and that these meanings are authoritative. The rules, as interpreted, must begenerally recognized as valid. But in a moral practice, there is usually no rec-ognized method for choosing between interpretations. And where a practicemakes no provision for resolving interpretive disputes, “every man must dohis own casuistry for himself or accept the conclusions of some self-appointedmoralist” (OH 135). To make things worse, moral practices seldom provide aclear way of separating the issue of whether a rule is authoritative from theissue of whether it is desirable or just.

What is required to settle disputes over the proper interpretation of moralrules is that interpretation should itself be governed by rules. There must bean agreed procedure to decide which interpretations are “correct,” that is, aprocedure according to which disagreements over the authority of a rule canbe settled even where there is unresolved disagreement over whether the ruleis moral, expedient, or otherwise desirable. A legal system, by specifying pro-cedures for ascertaining the “authenticity” (legal validity) of rules, makes itpossible for the meaning of rules of conduct to be determined apart fromdetermining the “rightness” (the justice, fairness, reasonableness, desirability,etc.) of the obligations they prescribe. “Rightness,” here, includes all the con-siderations that bear on the approval or disapproval of a rule apart from itsvalidity within a given system of rules. But it is usually important to distin-guish considerations bearing on the consequential desirability of a rule fromthose that are related to its moral propriety: in other words, between the instru-mental and noninstrumental considerations in terms of which the “rightness”of a rule might be evaluated. Because the word “justice” can stand for bothmoral propriety and consequential desirability, using it without further speci-fication generates confusion in contexts in which distinguishing instrumentaland noninstrumental considerations is important.

Restating one of the basic insights of a long tradition of political and legaltheorizing, Oakeshott suggests that civil association can be understood as anattempt to remedy the inability of morality to resolve disputes about the mean-ing of its rules by providing a rule-governed procedure for determining thesemeanings. The civil condition is an imagined order of things that emergeswhen moral rules are combined with procedures designed to generate author-itative conclusions about the meanings of rules in cases of dispute—to declare,in other words, which rules and interpretations are to count as authentic law.


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In this conception of human association, the question of whether the laws arejust is separated from the question of what the laws are.

There are moral theories that purport to provide objective criteria for choos-ing between interpretations, criteria on the basis of which both the authorityand the rightness of alleged rules can be determined. In a theological ethic,for example, a moral rule may be thought to derive its authority from God:the rule prescribes an authentic obligation because God has willed it. But thejustice of this rule also derives from God, because God, who is by definitionperfectly good, could not will anything that was not just. The divine origin ofa rule makes it authoritative while guaranteeing its justice. A similar tendencyto merge criteria of authenticity and rightness can be discerned in theories ofnatural law, in which reason takes the place of God. Where they spring fromthe same source, the authority of a rule and its justice are distinguished onlywith difficulty. In most systems of religious or natural law, to recognize thevalidity of a moral rule is also to recognize its justice and to approve of what itprescribes.

In law, as it is understood within the civil mode, the authenticity (legalvalidity or justification) of a rule and its rightness (justice or nonlegal justifi-cation) are more easily distinguished. A valid legal rule is one that has beendeclared according to recognized procedures: for example, a statute dulyenacted, an interpretation upheld in the courts, a treaty properly ratified.Though the issue of justice may remain contentious, it can be separated fromthat of legal validity. This does not mean that the issue cannot be confused:some theories of positive law insist that the only standard of justice in a legalsystem is the law itself. It is precisely this confusion that has led legal theo-rists, Oakeshott among them, to distinguish the idea of the rule of law withinthe broader category of positive law. The rule of law is a mode of associationin which the authority of the rules (lex) and the rightness or justice (jus) ofthese rules “are both recognized but are not confused” (OH 136). It is a moderesting solely on general recognition of the authority of the laws, not onshared opinions regarding whether or not the laws are morally right or other-wise desirable. But although the rule of law distinguishes legality from justice,it does not prevent those associated in terms of law from considering the jus-tice of their laws. It simply keeps this activity separate from the activity ofinterpreting the laws.

What, then, is the criterion of justice? As usual, Oakeshott approaches thequestion by excluding various possibilities. Where the rule of law is the modeof association, the justice of a law does not depend on the manner of its cre-


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ation: procedural violations result in invalid laws, not necessarily unjust laws.A just law, strictly speaking, is not one created according to a proper proce-dure but one proper (on grounds not yet specified) to have been created (OH141). Nor does the justice of a law depend on criteria sometimes identified as“the inner morality of law,” but which are in fact inherent in the idea of lawitself—criteria such as that a law cannot be secret or retrospective, or that itcannot arbitrarily exempt certain persons from the obligations it prescribes.19

These are not criteria of “just” law but merely of “law” (as it is understoodwithin the mode of civil association) because they belong to the idea of rela-tionship in terms of rules. They are therefore part of the idea of law itself,where law is understood to consist not of purposive injunctions but of nonin-strumental rules (OHC 128).

It is, however, equally a mistake to identify justice in civil association withuniversal, absolute, and demonstrable criteria outside the law itself, whetherthese criteria take the form of a higher law, divine or natural, or of a deliber-ately enacted basic law or constitution that is thought to embody this higherlaw. Justice in the civil mode is not a matter of human rights, fundamental val-ues, the common good, “the basic requirements of practical reasonableness,”20

or any other set of unconditional values, standards, rights, or liberties (OH142). All such criteria are irrelevant to rule of law. Nor is civil justice related tothe consequences of a law. That a law efficiently provides or even fairly distrib-utes substantive benefits is a consideration of expediency, not of justice. Theonly concern of the rule of law with respect to these or other possible outcomesis to “prescribe obligatory conditions to be observed in seeking them” (OH141). A theory of the state that understands it to be an association ruled by jus-tice, like that of John Rawls, is incompatible with the idea of civil associationbecause it identifies justice as, in part, “a consideration of ‘fairness’ in the distrib-ution of scarce resources, and . . . as what rational competitors, in certain idealcircumstances, must agree is an equitable distribution.” It regards laws as instru-mental rules to be taken as “guides to the achievement of a substantive state ofaffairs” (OH 156n) and evaluated according to their consequences.

For Oakeshott, a criterion of justice compatible with the rule of law is onethat, while not identical with the laws of civil association, is nevertheless inti-mated by those laws. It implies, not an abstract, external standard for determining


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19. Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969),39 and passim.

20. The reference (“practical reasonableness”) is to John Finnis, Natural Law and NaturalRights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

the justice of particular laws, but “a form of moral discourse, not concernedgenerally with right and wrong in human conduct, but focused narrowlyupon the kind of conditional obligations a law may impose” (OH 143).Where the rule of law is the mode of association, he concludes, the primeconsideration in judging the justice of a law is that “the prescriptions of thelaw should not conflict with a prevailing educated moral sensibility capable ofdistinguishing between the conditions of ‘virtue,’ the conditions of moralassociation (‘good conduct’), and those which are of a kind that they shouldbe imposed by law (‘justice’)” (OH 160). Justice in civil association combinesfidelity to the formal character of law and to the “moral-legal acceptability” ofthe obligations imposed by law, where this acceptability in turn reflects “themoral-legal self-understanding of the associates” (OH 160).

These somewhat cryptic remarks suggest several things about the kind ofdeliberation that is proper in debating the rightness of a law. First, they sug-gest that such deliberation must on the whole exclude a concern with motivesand character (“virtue”) as beyond the scope of law. In civil association thelaws are concerned with what human beings do, not with what they are. Theyare concerned with human actions and with their impact on other humanbeings, and it is these that are regulated, not the beliefs, values, wants, desires,and dispositions that motivate action.

Second, even moral standards that are concerned with good conduct arenot necessarily to be secured by means of law. Even though the laws of a stateunderstood in civil terms are noninstrumental, like other moral rules, there isno necessary connection between these laws and any particular body of moralprinciples. That an act is morally wrong is not, in itself, a ground for prohibit-ing it legally, nor does it follow from the fact that something is a positivemoral duty (like the duty of parents to educate their children) that it must belegally required. This does not mean that what is desirable in a law is unre-lated to moral concerns, but only that it cannot be derived from the latter:“no civil rule can be deduced from the Golden Rule or from the Kantian cate-gorical imperative” (OHC 174). The prescriptions of civil association are notconclusions derived from any foundational set of natural conditions, proposi-tions about human needs, moral truths, or principles of justice. So it is notnecessarily a problem if there is tension between what is civilly and morallydesirable, between law and morality.

In civil association, then, determining the justice of the laws excludes argu-ments based on unchanging and unconditional moral criteria of the sortsometimes offered by philosophers. There are writers on law who argue that


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the appeal to moral considerations is unavoidable in interpreting laws, andothers who translate this conclusion into a normative argument about howjudges ought to decide cases or, more broadly, how citizens should respondto the conflicting claims of morality and law. But such arguments fail to takethe issue of authenticity seriously. It is pointless to prescribe that ordinary cit-izens or public officials should conduct themselves according to law andaccording to canons of justice established independently of law unless therespective jurisdictions of these alternative forms of practical guidance areclearly defined. Various kinds of “ethical” and “critical” jurisprudence typi-cally blur these jurisdictions. In Oakeshott’s view, ideas like natural law, fun-damental values, basic rights, and “justice as fairness” are detrimental to therule of law: “more often than not they are the occasion of profitless dispute,and when invoked as the conditions of the obligation to observe the condi-tions prescribed by lex they positively pervert the association: they are therecipe for anarchy” (OH 160).

The rule of law is a mode of association grounded on recognition of theauthority of laws, not on their alleged worth, rationality, or justice. Withoutthis recognition there may be justice, according to some definitions of justice,but not law. Law can answer the need for agreed principles only if it is authen-tic law—law, that is, whose authority as law is established apart from its moralpropriety or consequential desirability.21 This does not mean that a legal systemcan entirely ignore the issue of rightness, as some versions of legal positivismsuggest. Positivists are so skeptical of claims about “justice” that they some-times insist that justice can have no meaning apart from law. Such thinkersconfuse justice with authority by making law itself the sole criterion of justice.The idea of the rule of law, then, occupies the middle ground between thealternatives of a moral order in which human law is secondary and a legal orderin which moral justice is secondary—that is, between the extremes of naturallaw and legal positivism.

Whether or not the laws in an actual community conceived as a civil associ-ation should enforce some particular set of moral considerations depends to asignificant degree, Oakeshott suggests, on the traditions—on the “moral-legal self-understanding”—prevailing among its inhabitants. Where the stan-dards used to evaluate a law are not closely related to those already embodied


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21. “Laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is themystic foundation of their authority; they have no other. . . . Whoever obeys them because theyare just, does not obey them for just the reason he should.” Montaigne, “Of Experience,” Essays,bk. 3, chap. 13.

in legal discourse, “justice” becomes an abstract and arbitrary standard that isat best irrelevant to, and at worst subversive of, the rule of law. The Americansenator in Anthony Trollope’s 1877 novel with that title attacks primogeniture,Parliamentary representation, fox hunting, and other English institutions,invoking abstract principles of right that are, in fact, merely generalizationsof American experience. The novel suggests that these institutions, thoughhardly beyond criticism, are more appropriately judged according to princi-ples drawn from English experience—principles already immanent in localpractice.22 The reasonableness and therefore the relevant justice of a law can-not be determined apart from a community’s other laws and moral practices,and especially from its tradition of discourse regarding the nature and limitsof legally imposed obligations—limits illustrated (in England) by John StuartMill’s harm principle and related understandings of the proper scope of legalpaternalism (OHC 179).

Deliberation regarding the circumstantial propriety or desirability of civillaws, Oakeshott argues, requires “a disciplined imagination” that can forgoutopian thinking to focus on the requirements of civil association, that is, on“the conditions which should be required to be acknowledged and subscribedto” as law (OHC 164). Civility is a practice, and every actual civil practice is acontinually changing body of ideas (“person,” “equality,” “property,” “con-tract,” “public order,” and so forth) that provides material for deliberation andintellectual tools to be used in deliberating. These tools are no more than“aids to reflection,” not indisputable criteria for choosing what, in the “cir-cumstantial flux” of civil life, should receive attention (OHC 178). A law maybe deemed undesirable, for example, if it cannot be enforced without relyingon a degree of policing that is incompatible with reasonable norms of civilconduct. But underlying such specific considerations is the general considera-tion that any law, existing or proposed, must make sense as part of the systemof laws to which it belongs. And although proposals to alter a system of lawscannot be deduced from moral principles, “a rule of civil association is desir-able in respect of the accuracy with which it reflects, or does not affront, themoral imagination of the associates when it is directed to what they havelearned to distinguish as a relationship not of moral perfection but of civility.. . . There are, in this matter, no absolute standards; this moral imagination,concerned with civil obligations, is all there is” (RP 455). We cannot, Oakeshott


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22. Jane Nardin, “The Social Critic in Trollope’s Novels,” Studies in English Literature,1500–1900 30 (1990), 679–96.

insists, prescribe the content of this “moral imagination.” We can, however,identify its premise: that civil association, as a realizable mode of human rela-tionship, is an association of persons within an order of moral rules con-structed in such a way as to reconcile the coercion needed to actualize theserules with the individual freedom that is the postulate of this mode.

Individuality and Freedom

Politics in a modern state is concerned with the laws of an association that is,whether understood in civil or corporate terms, a compulsory association.The rule of law may be premised on individual freedom, but it is neverthelessa mode of association that is realized through obligatory and enforceablelaws. And because few habitable parts of the earth are not part of some state,citizens cannot escape the jurisdiction of one state and its laws without fallingunder that of another. The result is an unavoidable tension between citizen-ship and freedom. To understand this tension, and perhaps to resolve it, hasbeen a concern of political theorizing since the appearance of the modernstate, and it is central to Oakeshott’s reflections on the civil condition.

To understand the problem of freedom in the modern state we must shiftour attention from the association to its members. For Oakeshott, the modalcharacter of a state and its government implies a corresponding character inthose governed. Just as an actual state is an ambiguous construction—an equiv-ocal mixture of civil and enterprise association—so is a citizen a mixture oftwo distinct personae. Each is an “ideal character,” a possible mode of humanagency, not a description of actual persons. Though each persona is highlydeveloped in some persons and barely detectable in others, every actual sub-ject in a modern state can be understood as an equivocal combination of thesealternative conceptions of the citizen.

The persona corresponding to the mode of civil association is that of thecitizen as a distinct individual. Speaking philosophically, rather than histori-cally, we may say that civility and individuality are conceptually related. Civilassociation presupposes citizens who regard themselves as separate persons,each pursuing his or her own self-chosen purposes.23 In civil association, those


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23. It may also be the case that, in an actual community, such a mode of association is mostlikely to flourish where its members regard individuality as intrinsically desirable and see thefreedom inherent in agency as an opportunity to cultivate their own individuality, but this is aproposition about the realization, not the definition, of civil association.

associated, though subjects of a common body of laws, remain diverse intheir self-conceptions, projects, and activities. To be an individual, in thissense of the term, is “to be and to find virtue in being a distinct person” and“to recognize and respond to ‘distinctness’. . . in others” (OHC 250). The per-sona corresponding to a state understood to be a purposive association, incontrast, is that of someone performing an assigned role in an organized enter-prise. In a purposive state, the citizen is either a manager or a subordinate.Those associated are at best partners (joint managers) in promoting policies ofwhich they are the intended beneficiaries; at worst they are resources to beused by the managers of the enterprise.24

Both identified personae—the independent individual and the partner orsubordinate in a purposive enterprise—presuppose freedom because bothinvolve human agency. The idea of agency distinguishes intelligent “conduct”from not-intelligent “behavior.” And agency, so conceived, involves a kind offreedom: “the freedom inherent in agency.”25 This freedom distinguishes intel-ligent choice, no matter how irrational or constrained, from behavior that isthe product of not-intelligent processes. The distinction here is between a con-ception of a human being that postulates free will and one that postulates nat-ural necessity. The identified personae do, however, represent distinct responsesto agency. Each represents a way of dealing with the difficulties of being anagent: a distinct response to “the ordeal of consciousness” (OHC 326).

Because it is a response to agency that values its inherent freedom, the ideaof individuality is sometimes said to be antithetical to that of community. Butthere is, Oakeshott maintains, no contradiction between being an individualand associating with other human beings. Human beings can without com-promising their individuality choose to be partners in an enterprise or mem-


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24. It is, of course, possible to imagine a state managed by some for the benefit of others—abenevolent despotism or enlightened imperial government. Oakeshott explores the historicalcharacter corresponding to the purposive conception of the citizen in La Idea de Gobierno en laEuropa Moderna (Madrid: Ateneo, 1955), in the Harvard lectures (1956), and most fully in “DieMassen in der repräsentativen Demokratie,” in A. Hunold, ed., Masse und Demokratie (Erlen-bach-Zürich und Stuttgart: Rentsch, 1957), 189–214. A version of this essay, in English, appears inthe 1991 edition of Rationalism in Politics and forms the basis for his discussion of the theme inthe third part of On Human Conduct. These writings, which may be taken as Oakeshott’s contri-bution to debates of the 1950s concerning mass society and the authoritarian personality, combinehistorical interpretation, philosophical definition, and moral evaluation in ways that underminethe coherence of each. That Oakeshott himself might accept this criticism is suggested by hisremark that to seek a “general explanation” of the analogous characters of the modern state and itscitizens is “a temptation” to which he has “somewhat improperly” yielded (OHC 323, 326).

25. The freedom inherent in agency is discussed in Chapter 2 above.

bers of a group. To make such a choice is, in fact, a way of expressing individu-ality. Because even careful students of Oakeshott have failed to understand himon this point, it should be emphasized that there is nothing in individuality tobar its expression in communal membership.26 Individuals may be related notonly in transactions and cooperative enterprises but in cultivating a religious,ethnic, or other communal identity. They may seek refuge or self-expressionin sects, “counter-culture” communes, and other communities representing“varying degrees of chosen detachment or retreat from ‘the world’ and its con-cerns” (OHC 265). To be a distinct individual is not to refuse communal ties,but it is to surrender one’s individuality in a community only by an act ofchoice, in which case that choice is itself a symbol of distinctness.

Participation in a purposive enterprise, it follows, can be an expression ofindividuality only when it is freely chosen. For to be an associate in such anenterprise is to endorse the common purpose, to commit oneself to acting inways that are instrumental to achieving this purpose, and to accept “the man-agerial decisions which determine how it shall be contingently pursued” (OHC316). Those joined in a purposive enterprise can be said to enjoy “individualfreedom” only if they have chosen to be associated in the enterprise and if theyare free to reverse that choice. The associates in a compulsory purposive associ-ation retain the freedom inherent in agency because that freedom is the postu-late of all human conduct, no matter what its circumstances. But some at leastcannot enjoy individual freedom because their membership in the association,and therefore their participation in pursuing its purposes, is not optional.Individual freedom in purposive association is therefore “conceptually tied tothe choice to be and remain associated” (VMES 340; OHC 158). It is, Oake-shott concludes, the freedom to dissociate as well as to associate.

The difficulty, then, with the idea of a state as both an association of “indi-viduals” and a purposive association is that a state is a compulsory association.Citizenship is not generally a matter of choice, and though there is no theo-retical obstacle to it, no modern state, no matter how democratic, has ever beenconstituted by the choice of every subject to acknowledge its laws or advance itspurposes. A purposive state is inherently compulsory because it cannot avoidbinding at least some of its citizens to a purpose that they have not chosen, forit is the corporate purpose that constitutes the state as an association and


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26. On Oakeshott’s alleged “animosity to the idea of community,” see Josiah Lee Auspitz,“Individuality, Civility, and Theory: The Philosophical Imagination of Michael Oakeshott,”Political Theory 4 (1976), 286, and Oakeshott’s reply, “On Misunderstanding Human Conduct,”in the same issue, 365–67.

determines the policies of its government. Not only is such a state an associa-tion in terms of “wants,” not “rules,” but the wants of some—those who aremanaging the enterprise, even if they are acting on behalf of the managed—determine the conduct of others. In a purposive state, the citizen has substan-tive actions to perform that arise from the will of these managers. Andbecause a purpose “can be pursued only in the performance of substantiveactions,” the citizens of a purposive state are joined “as co-operators related inthe performance of actions each of which is (or is alleged to be) contributoryto the achievement of the common purpose” (OHC 315). The laws of such astate are instrumental commands, not noninstrumental rules. Because citizen-ship is not freely chosen and cannot easily be given up, and because its lawsare commands, a purposive state is a compulsory enterprise association. Andwhere one is compelled to participate in a purposive enterprise, that partici-pation does not express individual freedom but denies it.

In contrast, the citizens of a state understood to be a civil association retaintheir individual freedom even though it, too, is a compulsory association. Mem-bership in a civil state is compulsory because it is by definition an associationbased on the authority of laws, which presupposes that citizens are obligated,and can therefore be compelled, to subscribe to these laws. But although itslaws are compulsory, citizens in a civil state (a state insofar as it is a civil asso-ciation) remain individually free—that is, they retain their personae as auton-omous, coexisting individuals—because these laws are noninstrumental rulesregulating the activities of citizens pursuing their individual purposes, not sub-stantive commands instrumental to realizing a common purpose. The citizensof such a state are left free to meet their obligations in self-chosen actions(OHC 251, 314–15). What they are not free to do is to impose their purposes,values, and beliefs on other citizens.

Purposive association cannot provide the model for a legal order that isobligatory and yet respects the individual autonomy of everyone it governs,for a compulsory purposive association imposes on some of its members pur-poses that are not their own. A legal order composed of noninstrumental rules,though also compulsory, does not impose such purposes on its subjects; itdoes no more than impose nonpurposive constraints that they are obligatedto take into account while pursuing their own self-chosen purposes. The ruleof law therefore respects individual freedom in a way that a coercive orderof instrumental rules cannot. Only one “end” (to use a word that Oakeshottemploys in the Harvard lectures but not in On Human Conduct) can beascribed to a state that is compatible with individual freedom: “the realization


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under compulsory laws of the right of each man to choose his own ends bysecuring him against the arbitrary encroachments and assaults of others”(MPME 62). The paradox (endlessly explored by theorists of the modernstate) of a system of laws restricting freedom leading to a condition of greaterfreedom is resolved only where the laws are part of a practice of civility.

In a state understood to be a purposive association, not only actions butagents can, in principle, be regarded as instrumental to the pursuit of thecommon purpose. In the absence of the moral constraints that belong to thecivil mode, and which have been theorized, cogently or otherwise, underlabels like justice, human rights, civil liberties, and the like, each subject in acorporate state can be understood as “the property of the association, an itemof its capital resources,” and “whether he remains or whether he is permittedto go must be a management decision” (OHC 317). Indeed, Oakeshott adds,because the state is a compulsory association, “it is not easy to rebut the viewthat the logic of a state thus constituted assigns to the office of its governmentthe authority to exterminate associates whose continued existence is judgedto be irredeemably prejudicial to the pursuit of its purpose” (OHC 317n).This sentence has been taken as a polemical jab at the welfare state and a signof what we might, holding Oakeshott to his own standard of modal purity,call an “unpurged relic” of practical concern.27 The sentence may well revealthe moralist as well as the philosopher, but it states a philosophical claim thatcannot be lightly dismissed because it concerns the idea of the state as a com-pulsory purposive association. The relationship among those who bear thepersona of associates in such an association is, Oakeshott suggests, a pruden-tial, not a moral, one. It is a relationship in which the partners “use” oneanother according to their ability to do so, that is, in proportion to theirpower. But where persons are used, they are not (in Kant’s expression) “endsin themselves.” They are “means” or instruments for promoting a purpose,and, in the absence of nonpurposive, that is, “moral,” constraints, can be usedor discarded as the purpose dictates. Oakeshott’s controversial sentence there-fore does accurately express the logic of compulsory purposive association.

The freedom of a citizen in civil association, then, is more than the free-dom inherent in agency, and it is not diminished by the obligation to subscribeto civil laws. It lies


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27. See, for example, Alan Ryan’s review of On Human Conduct, Listener 93 (1975), 517–18,and David R. Mapel, “Civil Association and the Idea of Contingency,” Political Theory 18 (1990),409 (note 14).

first, in the associates not being related to one another in the pursuitof any substantive purpose they have not chosen for themselves andfrom which they cannot extricate themselves by a choice of their own,and secondly in their actions and utterances being not even officiallynoticed or noticeable (much less subjected to examination or direc-tion) in respect of their substantive character but solely in respect of thecivil conditions to which they are required to subscribe (OHC 314).

Furthermore, this freedom is not increased by participation in the making oradministration of civil laws nor decreased by its absence. In a corporate state,in contrast, the managers have more freedom than the managed.

With this analysis of individual freedom as a postulate of civil association,Oakeshott completes the redefinition of law as a distinctive mode of humanrelationship begun in “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence” in 1938.As Richard Friedman has argued, the problem that Oakeshott has set himselfto solve in investigating freedom in the modern state is a traditional one inlegal theory: to identify the character of law as a specific way of guiding theconduct of human beings, and to distinguish it from other ways of doingthis.28 Following a procedure of progressive differentiation, he identifies law,first, as belonging to the realm of intelligent agency rather than of not-intelli-gent processes; second, as a compulsory rather than a voluntary way of influ-encing human conduct; and, third, as involving a kind of compulsion thatnevertheless respects individuality by regulating the interactions of agents pur-suing their own self-chosen purposes.29 The only way an association can becompulsory and also respect individuality is to regulate human conduct in anonpurposive manner, and the idea of civility or the rule of law is Oakeshott’s(affirmative) answer to the question of whether such a mode of regulation,and by extension a mode of association premised on it, is conceivable.

The Conditions of Civility

If the rule of law is to be realized in an actual state, there must not only belaws as these are understood within the civil mode: known, authoritative, and


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28. This, he suggests, is why Oakeshott continually contrasts law with force, commands,advice, persuasion, and other methods for influencing conduct. Friedman, “What Is a Non-Instrumental Law?” 86.

29. Friedman, “What Is a Non-Instrumental Law?” 94–96.

noninstrumental rules setting limits to the conduct of agents engaged inactivities of their own choosing. There must also be procedures for declaringthese laws, relating them to contingent situations, applying penalties for inad-equate observance of the obligations they prescribe, and pursuing policiesneeded to maintain the civil order they establish. In discussing civil associa-tion we are therefore led to consider the institutions required to implementsuch procedures. But we must also consider whether these institutions areamong the presuppositions of civil association or merely contingent condi-tions favoring its emergence and persistence—conditions that must be regardedas incidental to the rule of law as a mode of association.

Separating the essential from the incidental is difficult, however, for oncewe begin to ask whether particular institutions are contingently related to theexistence of the rule of law in actual states, we are no longer asking a purelyphilosophical question. We begin to ask historical as well as conceptual ques-tions and may find it hard to say which is which. But if the issues are difficult,the terrain is familiar: we are concerned with institutions for legislation, adju-dication, and administration. We are also concerned with institutional deci-sions regarding the circumstantial desirability of individual laws (“politics”)and, especially, with prudential efforts to preserve a civil order against a vari-ety of internal and external dangers (“policy”).

Association on the basis of common laws assumes that those associatedknow what their legal obligations are (or else these obligations could not bethe basis of their relationship). It also assumes that the laws are generallyobserved (otherwise the civil relationship, having no basis except these laws,would disappear). What must be known, however, is not merely what thelaws are in general, what constitutes authentic law, but what counts as com-pliance with a law in a given situation. And what is required to ensure com-pliance is not only a sanction, but some way of determining what must beestablished before a sanction can be applied: whether or not the law has beenadequately observed or “subscribed to.” There can be no civil association, norule of law, in the absence of “a means of settling uncertainties and disputesabout the adequacy of contingent subscriptions” (OHC 130–31). Civil associa-tion therefore implies an authoritative procedure of adjudication for resolvingsuch disputes and for determining what the laws mean in particular situa-tions, and this, in turn, requires courts and judges.

Because an authentic law is one that has been authoritatively declaredaccording to a recognized procedure, the rule of law postulates legislating aswell as judging. The requirement that citizens must know what their laws are,Oakeshott insists, is “satisfied only where laws have been deliberately enacted . . .


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and may be deliberately altered or repealed” (OH 138)—that is, where thereexists a legislative office of some kind to make, amend, and certify the authen-ticity of the laws. There can be customary law in a state understood as a civilassociation, but its authority rests on its presumed compatibility with statutescurrently in force, and it can always be revised by legislative enactment. Therule of law does not require that the legislative power should reside in a bodyof any particular size or composition, either one that is “representative” of thevarious nationalities, classes, or interests that might be concerned with mak-ing laws, or one whose members are selected “democratically” or in someother desirable manner. These are important concerns, but they are not con-cerns that arise from the rule of law, which is in principle compatible with awide range of constitutional arrangements.

Finally, in addition to institutions for enacting laws and settling disputesabout their meaning in contingent situations, the rule of law requires someway of ensuring that the laws are adequately observed. Civil association can-not be a relationship based on laws unless those related can rely upon a rea-sonable level of respect for legal obligations. It therefore requires a third kindof institution, one distinguishable from either legislative enactment or judi-cial determination, to enforce the law by requiring or forbidding actual per-sons to do or avoid doing particular things in specific contingent situations.This office of “ruling” (as Oakeshott calls it) is itself the exercise of an author-ity conferred by law. In civil association, it is linked to the judicial power andis a way of ensuring that the judgments, injunctions, punishments, and otherorders of a court are carried out. But for a civil order to work properly, it maybe necessary, in addition, to authorize administrative activities that go beyondthe implementation of judicial rulings. These have mostly to do with “polic-ing” (OHC 143): arresting suspects for future accusation in a court or impos-ing martial law in disorders that threaten the rule of law. Nevertheless, in acivil state, administration is concerned with securing adequate subscription tothe laws and not with pursuing policies related to other interests.

Ensuring that citizens do in fact observe the laws is necessary if the rule oflaw is to be realized in the circumstances of an actual community, but thisdoes not mean that effective enforcement is the criterion of law. Althoughsome members of a society may neglect their legal obligations in the absenceof commands and sanctions, civil association is not an association of personsunited by shared expectations about the consequences of obeying or not obey-ing legal rules. Such an association would be one disciplined and held togetherby effectively enforced rules, not an association based on the recognition of


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rules as standards of proper and improper conduct: “rules are not rules invirtue of the sanctions attached to them” (OHC 149). Nor do legal rules ceaseto be rules because particular respondents violate them. Ruling is a power cre-ated by law, not a power to create law.30

Furthermore, although ruling in civil association is not itself a managerialactivity with respect to those ruled, it does require an apparatus of rule (staffedby secretaries, assistants, commissioners, inspectors, tax collectors, coroners,and the like), and rulers have to manage this apparatus. But the office of rul-ing and the activity of managing an office are distinct: “rulers may employclerks but they rule subjects” (OHC 146). Administrators may, in their capac-ity as employers and managers, engage in substantive transactions with the per-sons they employ and manage, but such transactions do not constitute arelationship between ruler and subject. And the relationship of ruler and subject(a civil relationship) cannot be one in which the resources of the latter are usedto advance a purposive enterprise of which the ruler is a manager, for when thathappens, the civil relationship is displaced by a different relationship.

Finally, as actually practiced, legislation, adjudication, and ruling, whosesole rationale in civil association is that they are needed to make the lawsmore reliable, may become self-defeating. Legislators may be distributors ofpork, and administrative officials may be more interested in evading than inexecuting the laws. The rule of law must therefore allow a state to providesafeguards against such abuses. And these safeguards, though they must them-selves be governed by law, cannot be limited to the enactment of still morelaws: particular abuses require particular remedies, and general rules must betranslated into substantive injunctions.

Oakeshott’s concern here is with how civil association as an idea, a possiblemode of association, can be actualized in a living, individual community. Ifthe rule of law is to be “a possible practical engagement,” something morethan “a logician’s dream” (OH 149), it must be realized in the contingent cir-cumstances of actual communities. But where civil association exists, it is (likeany other relationship) vulnerable to harm, and so actual governments mustsometimes pursue substantive purposes, require or forbid specific perfor-mances, and act to produce particular, substantive outcomes if civility is to


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30. The classic contemporary statement of the argument that legal authority and obligationare conceptually independent of enforcement is H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, chap. 2.Oakeshott gives careful attention to the relationship between authority and power in two essaysfrom the mid-1970s, “Talking Politics” (in RP) and “The Vocabulary of a Modern EuropeanState” (VMES).

flourish or even survive. Here we are at the margin that divides a philosophi-cal concern to define civil association as a mode of human relationship byidentifying its presuppositions from a historical concern to describe the fea-tures of particular states or from a practical concern with the circumstancesunder which the rule of law can be strengthened. It is not easy to distinguishthese different inquiries, and Oakeshott himself sometimes seems to run themtogether, thereby lending unwarranted credence to doubts about the cogencyof his theory of the civil condition.

In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott reasons that certain kinds of conse-quence-driven government action, like injunctions designed to ensure thatthe judgments of a court are carried out, are implicit in the operation of thecivil order itself: no actual state can dispense with policing, no matter howclosely it approximates to the rule of law, and civil institutions must be paidfor and protected against corruption. But an actual state must also be pre-pared to deal with other substantive concerns. For civility can be underminednot only through inadequate observance of law by the citizens of a state or thecorruption of its government but also by economic collapse, the dissolutionof civil authority, and other contingencies. Ironically, then, the preservationof civil association can depend upon the pursuit of policies that have noproper place within civil association. The civil condition, Oakeshott suggests,is not necessarily compromised by the temporary imposition of martial law,by policies designed to maintain a stable currency or prevent monopolies, oreven by carefully circumscribed arrangements to provide education, food,medical care, or other support for certain classes of persons—children, the poor,refugees, and so forth. Because great disparities of wealth undermine civil asso-ciation (this is the main thesis of Oakeshott’s 1949 essay, “The PoliticalEconomy of Freedom”), it might (as Hegel argued) be expedient even in astate understood as a civil association to institute “the exercise of a judicious‘lordship’ for the relief of the destitute” (OHC 305n). And these ideas can easilybe extended to include expedients Oakeshott did not consider, such as “affir-mative action” to overcome entrenched patterns of discrimination.31 From the


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31. If civil association unites individuals within a coercive order of rules that respects theirindividuality, then Oakeshott’s view of the situation of women in a state aspiring to be a civilassociation is an advance over his claim, in Rationalism in Politics, that enfranchising women inBritain is called for only because of “an incoherence in the arrangements of the society” (RP 57).Here it is not the coherence of the arrangements of an actual state that are being invoked but thepostulates of civil association as a mode of human relationship.

standpoint of a concern for the integrity of civil association, the chief issueraised by policies that provide substantive benefits is not whether such policiescan be defended at all but the manner in which they are defended.

Because Oakeshott has suggested that there are circumstances in whichcivil rulers may demand particular performances, some of his readers haveconcluded that the idea of civil association collapses into that of enterpriseassociation.32 But Oakeshott denies that the rule of law is compromised bysuch demands: even though they constitute contingent commands ratherthan noninstrumental rules, remedial injunctions are (in civil association)authorized and regulated by law, and are required for its effective operation.A court that assigns damages or an official who issues administrative ordersdoes not violate the rule of law, provided such measures are required to securecompliance with the laws. In such cases (and bearing in mind that Oakeshottis here exploring the logic of civil association, not describing what happens inactual states, in which practices that belong to the civil mode are always com-bined with purposive practices), it is not the laws themselves that demandsubstantive performance; the demand comes from a judge or administratorconcerned with the contingent implementation of the laws.

Oakeshott may seem to contradict himself by saying, in one place, that rulersmay command particular performances where there has been inadequate sub-scription to general rules, and, in another, that a ruler in civil association is “amaster of ceremonies” whose office is “to keep the conversation going, not todetermine what is said” (OHC 202–3). But the latter is a metaphor for the kindof governing that is appropriate to civil association, not a statement about theoffice of ruling, narrowly defined. (Unfortunately, Oakeshott sometimes usesthe term “ruling” not only for administering the laws in a civil state but for gov-erning in general.) Oakeshott is not saying that command and compulsion haveno place in civil association, only that they cannot be the basis of associationbecause the mode of association they imply is one in which agents may be com-pelled to pursue ends they have not chosen for themselves and that the role ofcommands is the secondary one of maintaining the civil character of a statewhen it is threatened by crime, corruption, subversion, or war. If the rule of law


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32. John Gray thinks that Oakeshott’s account of law as a system of noninstrumental rulesseems “to founder on the hard fact of the circumscription of action by legal coercion.” Review ofOn History, Political Theory 12 (1984), 453. A similar objection is advanced by Bhikhu Parekh,Contemporary Political Thinkers (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982), 122.

is to be significantly realized in a given community, some connection withactual human performances has to be made. The challenge, for the civil ruler, isto make this connection in the way that least compromises the rule of law.

By separating the presuppositions of civil association from the contingentfeatures of particular legal systems, Oakeshott’s effort to theorize the civilcondition seeks to avoid the categorial confusion so common in legal andpolitical theorizing. Nevertheless, one can ask whether, in considering theinstitutions needed to secure the rule of law, Oakeshott has not entangledhimself in a confusion of precisely this kind. Procedures for enacting andapplying rules are presupposed by the idea of civil association. But the institu-tions needed to implement these procedures in an actual state—courts, legis-latures, and administrative offices—do not themselves belong to the idea ofcivil association; they are instruments for securing the rule of law in the con-tingent circumstances of a particular community. The rule of law may beunlikely in the absence of governing institutions, but it is not inconceivable.

Let me illustrate the problem by discussing Oakeshott’s assertion thatadjudication is a “necessary condition” for the rule of law (OHC 133; OH144). It is not clear whether the word “necessary” here means that adjudica-tion is conceptually presupposed by the idea of the rule of law itself, or that itis contingently required for the rule of law to emerge or for it to survive inany imaginable or probable set of circumstances. The rule of law presupposes(and is therefore conceptually tied to) some method for authoritatively resolv-ing legal disputes. But an actual court, because it is concerned with how a lawis related to a contingent situation, is already concerned with something out-side the rule of law as a mode of association. And when we add to this the ideaof particular substantive orders, addressed to particular persons to secure com-pliance with the judgments of a court, we are occupied almost entirely withcontingencies: not with the rule of law as a mode of relationship but with thedevices required to make it effective in an actual community. A mode is alwaysan abstraction; it is concerned not with contingencies but with ideas, not withpersons but with personae, not with actual laws but with the idea of obligatorynoninstrumental rules. The idea of adjudication may belong to the rule of lawas a mode of association, but courts and judicial enforcement do not.

For Oakeshott, the rule of law includes “offices” (an equivocal term thatrefers both to legally defined duties and to institutions for performing thoseduties) for altering, interpreting, and administering laws. This equivocationmay explain why he sometimes writes as if there were a conceptual connec-tion between any, “relationship in terms of rules,” and these offices. But there


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are moral practices in which rules are the basis of relationship but in whichsuch offices are lacking or rudimentary. Oakeshott himself acknowledges thatthere is a problem in drawing the boundaries of the idea of civility when, inreplying to critics of On Human Conduct, he writes that he had allowed theconsideration of contingencies to creep into his discussion of civil associationand that he should have made that discussion even more abstract than it is.33

And he barely mentions such contingencies in “The Rule of Law,” publishedeight years after On Human Conduct, where the treatment of enforcement isconfined to a single sentence (OH 148). But to avoid discussing contingenciesis not to avoid categorial confusion if among the “conditions” (OH 137, 144,148) of the rule of law are offices that can demand that citizens perform par-ticular actions. To treat a condition of this kind as one of presuppositions ofcivil association is to cross the modal boundary that separates the idea of therule of law (a relationship of abstract personae on the basis of general rules)from an actual legal order (an actual relationship among particular personssecured through the issuance of substantive commands).34

To avoid this difficulty, we must carefully distinguish the conditions thatare entailed in the idea of civil association, understood as an ideal mode ofrelationship based on respect for noninstrumental laws, and those that arerequired to actualize the idea of the rule of law in the contingent circum-stances of a particular community. Just as moral association can exist in theabsence of a system of laws, as Oakeshott recognizes (OHC 202), so associa-tion in terms of laws can (as in the case of customary or international law)exist without legislators or rulers.

Whether Oakeshott has drawn the line between conceptual postulates andcontingent conditions in the proper place is, therefore, a matter for debate. Butbecause every ideal mode of association is an abstraction from contingencies,


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33. “On Misunderstanding Human Conduct: A Reply to My Critics,” Political Theory 4(1976), 364.

34. If policing, though necessary to realize the civil mode, does not itself belong to thatmode, it is certainly a mistake to say that war, or reason of state generally, must be “counted aspart” of civil association. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990), 83.Oakeshott asserts bluntly that “war is the enemy of civil association” (OHC 273), and his reasonis that where the civil condition is threatened by destruction through civil war or foreign con-quest, the preservation of a civil state becomes a common purpose, rulers the managers of itspursuit, and subjects participants in what has been turned into a compulsory enterprise associa-tion. “So far from its being the case (as Hegel suggested) that the character of an association interms of the rule of law is most fully expressed when it is . . . at war, these are the occasions whenit is least itself ” (OH 164).

and every set of arrangements is itself constituted by ideas, the question of whereto draw that line cannot be definitively answered. The distinction between theconceptual and the contingent, between the universal and the particular,between the formal and the substantive, between an abstract mode of con-duct and an actual, historical practice, and between philosophical and histor-ical inquiry, is in each case relative rather than absolute. This is not to saythat modal distinctions are differences of degree rather than kind, which wouldmean there is no such thing as a categorial difference. But it is to say that modalboundaries can be drawn in different places, and therefore there are no perma-nent and unconditional criteria according to which the lines must be drawn.And this conclusion is consistent with the view, present in Oakeshott’s thoughtfrom the beginning, that all distinctions are distinctions in human understand-ing, not ontological givens that exist independently of understanding.


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1. Readings of Oakeshott in the context of conservative thought include Anthony Quinton,The Politics of Imperfection (London: Faber and Faber, 1978); Maurice Cowling, Religion andPublic Doctrine in Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and RobertDevigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss, and the Response to Postmodernism (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1994). The revisionists include Richard Rorty, “PostmodernistBourgeois Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), 583–89; Wendell John Coats Jr., “MichaelOakeshott as Liberal Theorist,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 18 (1985), 773–87; and PaulFranco, “Michael Oakeshott as a Liberal Theorist,” Political Theory 18 (1990), 411–36.

Conclusion

Because political philosophy is commonly thought to aim at making or ground-ing moral judgments about politics, and so to be a kind of practical reasoning,identifying Oakeshott as a political philosopher risks attributing to him the viewthat philosophy generates practical knowledge. But this view is incompatiblewith the proposition, which he maintains in various ways in all his works, thatphilosophy and practice are categorially distinct and that political discourse israw material for, not the product of, philosophical inquiry. To call him a politicalphilosopher is to suggest that Oakeshott should be read as a moralist, a socialcritic, a “normative theorist,” even an ideologue. And he is, in fact, often read assomeone whose concerns, whether conservative (according to the conventionalview of his work) or liberal (as the revisionists would have it), are essentiallyprescriptive.1 Such readings do not take seriously Oakeshott’s commitment to

the view that theorizing must be distinguished from doing; they implicitly treathim as a moralist who is, if not actually disingenuous, at least naively unawareof the true character of his own activity. Oakeshott does at times write as a moral-ist, but he does not often confuse moralizing with philosophizing.

To call Oakeshott a political philosopher is also to suggest that politics, how-ever it is approached, is the primary subject of his reflections. This suggestionis not mistaken, but it can lead to a mistaken emphasis on the political in hiswork and a corresponding neglect of other concerns. Despite an interest in thehistory of political thought already evident during his years as a Cambridgeundergraduate, Oakeshott was not especially interested in politics as currentaffairs. As he writes in an autobiographical letter, “‘politics’ at the level of opin-ion was [not] a very significant part of [my father’s] life, and it is certainly notwith me.”2 And elsewhere he suggests that with its characteristic confusion,hypocrisy, and self-deception, politics is always “an unpleasing spectacle” (PFPS19). In a 1939 essay, “The Claims of Politics,”3 Oakeshott disputes the convic-tion, typical of the times, that all human activity has political implications, thatpolitics is the most important part of civilized life, and that everyone ought toengage in political activity. Like those who award supreme importance to reli-gion, he suggests, those who assert the importance of politics arbitrarily ele-vate one human concern above all others. But in choosing to question suchclaims, as well as in devoting much of his life to the study of political thought,Oakeshott implicitly acknowledges the actual, if unwarranted, importance ofpolitics among human concerns.

Politics, for Oakeshott, is an activity that springs from and therefore pre-supposes a way of life. Because it seeks to conserve or alter an existing order,its purpose lies in the ideas and practices that constitute this order. Politicalactivity is therefore necessarily a matter of making adjustments in what isalready a going concern. A government is the custodian of an order, not itscreator; like the “governor” of a steam engine, it can do little more than main-tain a system whose motive power is generated elsewhere. This skeptical viewof the possibilities of politics leads directly to Oakeshott’s famous definitionof politics as “the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set ofpeople whom chance or choice have brought together” and, specifically, as


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2. Letter to Robert Grant, quoted by Grant in Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990),12. Grant provides additional biographical details in “Inside the Hedge: Oakeshott’s Early Lifeand Work,” Cambridge Review 112 (1991), 106–9.

3. Scrutiny 8 (1939–40), 146–51.

the activity of amending these arrangements “by exploring and pursuing whatis intimated in them” (RP 44, 56).

As critics of this definition of politics have observed, the arrangements thatconstitute a way of life can intimate many different things, and the definitionitself cannot tell us which of these intimations should be pursued. But this isnot, from Oakeshott’s standpoint, a telling objection, for it cannot be the aimof a philosophical definition to provide practical guidance. There is, in any case,no single and infallible criterion for deciding political questions, the answersto which depend not on science, revelation, or any other kind of proof, but onjudgment. Politics is deliberative, not demonstrative. It is the practical activityof responding to situations that are believed to be public, not private, andtherefore to be the concern of government. Political arguments grow out ofdeliberation in which situations of this kind are interpreted in such a way as todiagnose a problem requiring a practical solution, not as situations to be under-stood and explained independently of action. Such arguments may invoke prin-ciples of various kinds or involve an appeal to the probable consequences of agiven response to a situation and to whether such consequences are likely tobe better or worse than those likely to follow from some other response. Inso-far as it is designed to justify or to persuade, political discourse often makesuse of general ideas and of words expressing these ideas: words like “nature,”“reason,” “equality,” “democracy,” and their corresponding adjectives. Suchwords are combined in languages of political argument: “ideologies” in termsof which choices are debated and which are themselves possible objects of his-torical and philosophical examination.4

Oakeshott’s later writings reflect a growing inclination to doubt that poli-tics is a useful interpretive category and a corresponding tendency to definethat concept ever more narrowly. Although he struggled for years to determinethe character and scope of political activity and political theorizing, Oakeshottseems finally to have concluded that the words “politics” and “political” areused so loosely as to be virtually useless: “already ambiguous in the Aristo-telian vocabulary,” they are now “merely rhetorical expressions, powerless toidentify anything in particular” (VMES 320). “Politics,” he suggests, has beenused not only for certain kinds of human conduct to be understood practicallyor historically but for behavioral processes understood scientifically; not onlyfor deliberating on public concerns but for negotiating private advantages (as

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4. Oakeshott sketches these ideas in “Political Discourse,” an essay published in the 1991edition of Rationalism in Politics.

in “office politics”); not only for debating the policies of governments but fordebating those of voluntary associations; and not only for considering whatshould be legislated, adjudicated, or administered but for the activities of leg-islating, adjudicating, and administering. And he has definite views abouthow each of these ambiguities should be resolved. There is no place for the con-cept of politics, as one that postulates “human conduct” (intelligent thoughtand action), in a purely scientific account of human behavior, nor is it illumi-nating to identify a concern for public things with the pursuit of private inter-ests. Even if we restrict the word “politics” to the activity of governing, it stillcovers a diversity of concerns. Because many of these concerns have acquiredtheir own specific names (like “legislation” and “administration”), Oakeshottargues that “politics” is best reserved for an activity that, though familiar andimportant, does not have a name: the activity of considering the desirability(as opposed to the authority) of a state’s laws. In the end, he narrows itsmeaning even further, defining “politics” as the activity of considering thedesirability of the laws of a state only insofar as it is a civil association.5 Withthis final attenuation, the gap between the philosopher’s concept and ordi-nary usage has grown wide indeed.

In philosophy, the chief reason for delimiting a concept is, as always, todefine a domain of inquiry more coherently. Conceptual revision is needed inthe domain marked out by “politics” and “political” because these words, evenwhen they are linked to the general arrangements of a state, do not identify asingle activity and are not consistently applied. They are most intelligible,Oakeshott thinks, in discourse concerned with the proper “office” or duty of agovernment, which, depending on the mode of association, is either ruling ormanaging. Formally, political discourse is concerned with the desirability of astate’s laws, but the substantive character of that discourse depends on themode of association attributed to a state. The civil and purposive conceptionsof a state therefore generate categorially different conceptions of politics, aswell as of law.

In a state understood as a civil association, politics is concerned with whetherthe current laws are desirable and with proposed changes in the laws. It is notconcerned (as in Harold Lasswell’s famous definition) with “who gets what,when, and how” as a result of government decisions; civil laws, properly under-


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5. One of the few interpreters of Oakeshott to consider his conception of “politics” in thisnarrow sense is Glenn Worthington, “Oakeshott’s Claims of Politics,” Political Studies 45 (1997),727–38.

stood, are not awards of advantage or disadvantage (VMES 414; RP 455). Ofcourse, this view of politics in civil association is a philosophical definition, an“ideal character,” not a report on how the word “politics” is ordinarily used.In a state understood as a civil association, concern with the desirability of thelaws focuses on the obligations that are the terms of association, not on thestate’s purposes. Only when it proceeds in the civil mode, then, is politics“concerned with what itself constitutes the association” (OHC 162). But in astate understood to be a purposive association, politics becomes deliberationon what is desirable with respect to managerial decisions to advance that state’spurposes. It follows that the word “politics” does have an analogical use in con-nection with the affairs of a purposive state because the rules of such a statecan be considered from the standpoint of their desirability. But there is a dif-ference: the rules of a purposive state are instrumental rules, and they aredesirable or not only in relation to what is really important in such a state:achieving its purposes.

The point can be made in another way by noticing that the words “poli-tics” and “policy” mean different things in each mode. In a state understoodas a civil association, “politics” (which concerns the circumstantial desirabilityof the civil rules that constitute the association) can be distinguished from“policy” (which concerns the expediency of managerial decisions guided by acommon purpose). Policy, so understood, is a concern even in a civil state, forno actual state, however closely it approaches the model of civil association,can dispense with a prudential concern to secure its laws or to maintain itselfagainst internal and external enemies. But where a state is seen as a corporateenterprise, “politics” and “policy” can no longer be distinguished because therules whose desirability is being considered are instruments for promoting thecorporate purpose. The rules of an enterprise are desirable if they are expedi-ent: “their desirability or otherwise is merely their propensity to favor or toobstruct the achievement of wished-for satisfactions” (OHC 160). The reasonfor restricting the word “politics” to considering the desirability of the laws ofa state understood as a civil association, then, is that politics emerges here asan independent activity, one that is distinct from a prudential concern withoutcomes. Only when “politics” is defined in this (restrictive) way does itidentify a distinct and internally coherent universe of discourse.

Despite his own doubts that politics—except when defined so narrowly asto lose contact with ordinary usage—is a coherent subject for inquiry, most ofthose who write about Oakeshott are concerned with his ideas about politics,as ordinarily understood, or with what are ordinarily taken to be the political

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implications of his ideas. The publication after his death of works on politicalthought that Oakeshott did not choose to make public while he lived, whileunquestionably a contribution to scholarship, has served to reinforce the pic-ture of a scholar preoccupied with politics as it is ordinarily understood, whenin fact most of his published writings are concerned with other things.6 Oake-shott’s work is misinterpreted by being read as a contribution to one kind ofinquiry, when, in fact, he is engaged in another.

In this book, I have tried to show that Oakeshott’s most significant contri-butions as a thinker are philosophical, not practical, that his interests range farbeyond the boundaries of politics as it is ordinarily understood, and that thevery idea of politics is one he came to disparage as largely incoherent. Givenhis lifelong effort to distinguish different modes of understanding by uncov-ering their presuppositions, Oakeshott is best read as a theorist of knowledge,not a moralist (much less an ideologue), and as a philosopher of human expe-rience generally, not only of politics.

Woven through Oakeshott’s reflections on human experience are the ideasof modality, contingency, and civility. And uniting these ideas, one might say,is the idea of difference. For each is concerned with difference: modality withdifferent kinds of inquiry and understanding; contingency with the individualactions and events that compose the worlds of practical activity and historicalinquiry; and civility with the accommodation of individuality, and thereforeof difference, within a common framework of moral rules.

Modality, the most basic of these ideas, appears in everything Oakeshottwrote. The modes are categorially different from one another: modal distinc-tions are distinctions of kind, not degree. But, as I have emphasized, a modeis not a permanent, unquestionable division of reality. It is an interpretive tool,not an ontological given. Each identifiable mode is the outcome of reflectionon an activity that over time has achieved significant coherence. A mode is anidea that has a history and that is open to revision. And the idea of modalityis itself a tool, one that can be adapted to new tasks. Oakeshott makes modal


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6. Oakeshott wrote four books whose titles include the word “politics”: Rationalism inPolitics and Other Essays (1962 and 1991), Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (1993), Moralityand Politics in Modern Europe: The Harvard Lectures (1993), and The Politics of Faith and thePolitics of Scepticism (1996). Of these, all but the first were published after his death and assignedtitles by their editors. Although the titles are not inappropriate, the fact remains that Oakeshottdid not choose to publish these writings. In his later years, however, he did publish books on“human conduct,” “civil association,” “history,” and “liberal learning.”

distinctions that are appropriate to the problem at hand: he distinguishes,according to context, different modes (orders, idioms, sciences, languages,traditions) of understanding (experience, thought, inquiry, explanation, dis-course) and of conduct (activity, practice, relationship, association). Further-more, the proposition that modal distinctions are ways of making sense ofexperience, not given and permanent features of a world that displays thesefeatures apart from experience, holds not only for the modes (science, history,and practice) Oakeshott considers in Experience and Its Modes but also for thecategories of identity (intelligent and not-intelligent) he employs in On HumanConduct: both involve distinctions in understanding, not in what is under-stood. The mode or category chosen defines the identity to be understood andimposes a character on it, and this character determines the kind of inquirythat is appropriate to understanding it.

Contingency, as a consequential relationship between actions or eventsthat is neither accidental nor necessary, is the organizing principle of humanactivity; it is the inescapable condition of human conduct and the definingpresupposition of historical explanation. In practical activity, agents respondto particular situations, each itself the contingent outcome of previous actions.Exercising the freedom that is inherent in agency itself, different agents choosedifferent responses depending on how they understand those situations. Andin a historical explanation, identified events are joined, not in a necessary rela-tionship of cause and effect or in belonging to a mere sequence of accidents,but in a relationship of meanings in which the individual character of eachevent to be explained is understood in terms of its antecedents. The historianassembles contingently related events to compose, according to the canons ofhistorical scholarship, an intelligible account of what happened. A history isan “assembly of differences.”

Civility, too, is concerned with difference. It is the principle according towhich differences of all kinds can be accommodated within a common moralorder. A civil order is an “assembly” not merely of human beings but of individ-uals. Whereas the citizen in an enterprise state is the performer of an assignedrole, the citizen in a civil state remains an individual even though he or shemay assume the persona of a voter, a representative, or a litigant. The civil con-dition is a mode of association in which relations among human beings areregulated in a manner that, though at times unavoidably coercive, neverthe-less respects individuality, and therefore diversity, by not imposing upon thempurposes that are not their own.

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The idea of unity in diversity that is implicit in these explorations is cap-tured in the characteristically Oakeshottian metaphor of conversation. In aconversation, Oakeshott writes,

the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no“truth” to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusionsought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refuteone another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does notdepend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differwithout disagreeing. Of course, a conversation may have passages ofargument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; butreasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itselfdoes not compose an argument (RP 489).

Irrelevance is a defect in an inquiry but not in conversation. In a conversation,different voices acknowledge, respond to, and animate one another in “anoblique relationship” that “neither requires nor forecasts their being assimi-lated to one another” (RP 490). A conversational relationship preserves theindividuality of the participating voices, and is, for this reason, inherentlyplayful: it is a relationship in which each voice learns “to recognize itself as avoice among voices” (RP 493). Here we have the deconstructionist idea of“play” as well as “difference”—but with a difference. For Oakeshott, siding ineffect with Wittgenstein and Gadamer against Derrida, play is not subjectivebut something that is defined in relation to the rules that constitute a particu-lar game. Conversation itself has rules, which is why the conversationalistwho insists that others must speak his language is a boor. To have a voice ofone’s own is to acknowledge other voices.

A mode of understanding is such a voice. The modes, Oakeshott suggestsin a now-famous phrase, are voices in “the conversation of mankind.”7 Eachidentifiable mode of experience is a distinct way of understanding the worldand a distinct expression of human self-understanding. Human beings canexperience the world scientifically, historically, practically, or aesthetically, andthey can understand themselves as biologically determined organisms, as his-torical individuals each of whom is a contingent outcome of past events, as


232

7. Although the metaphor of conversation is fully developed only in The Voice of Poetry inthe Conversation of Mankind (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959), it appears a decade earlier in“The Universities,” Cambridge Journal 2 (1948–49), 515–42, and “The Idea of a University,” Lis-tener 43 (1950), 424–26. Both articles are reprinted in The Voice of Liberal Learning.

free agents making their own prudential and moral choices, as servants of amaster or a cause, as works of art, and in many other ways. A civilization canbe seen as a particular composition of these understandings and self-under-standings, an inherited culture within which human beings emerge into con-sciousness, acquire the arts of agency, and learn to be human in a particularmanner. The proper relationship between all such modally different under-standings is conversational rather than argumentative or demonstrative.

Because the idea of intermodal conversation is a metaphor, one must becareful not to read too much into it. To begin with, one must avoid confusingit with an exchange between persons, which is what the word “conversation”ordinarily implies, or with an exchange that aims to reach an agreed conclusion.The voices in Oakeshott’s conversation of mankind are modes, not persons, andtheir juxtaposition reveals no agreed truths, only necessary differences. One cansee both misunderstandings in Rorty’s characterization of hermeneutics as away of doing philosophy that sees different discourses as contributions to “aconversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speak-ers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversationlasts.”8 A conversational relationship between actual speakers is one in whichideas are exchanged informally and in which establishing an agreed conclusionis not the point. By extension, a metaphorical conversation between modes isalso not an exchange of arguments that might result in agreement. Persuasion ispossible only within a mode of discourse, where there are common standards ofjudgment and common “reasons” for reaching conclusions. It is irrelevant in anexchange between modes, between universes of discourse that by definition donot presuppose common standards and common reasons. If they did, theywould constitute a single mode.

One is also reading too much into the metaphor if one objects that, onOakeshott’s own premises, a conversation between modes is, strictly speak-ing, impossible. It might seem that to the degree that the modes can commu-nicate with one another at all they cease to be modes. But if, on the contrary,the modes are hermetic discourses, each a monadic world locked within theprison of its own assumptions, what can they possibly have to say to oneanother? How can the modes “engage one another” without some sharedconcerns, and if they have shared concerns does this not challenge the claimthat modal boundaries are impermeable? To the extent that it implies that

Conclusion

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8. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1979), 318.

there can be no exchange whatsoever unless there are shared concerns, assump-tions, ideas, and conclusions, the conversational metaphor is indeed mislead-ing. But no metaphor is exact, and it is therefore pointless to interpret thisone literally. When modes are juxtaposed with another, they do not join inargument, but ideas belonging to different modes can nevertheless illuminateone another even though they are, strictly speaking, irrelevant. If what onemode takes for granted as plain fact another does not even recognize, one ismade aware of unsuspected assumptions or interpretive possibilities and invitedto consider the grounds on which fact and not-fact might be distinguished.Ideas engage one another across modal boundaries not in a joint enterprise thatculminates in agreement but in a juxtaposition of ideas that leads one to a recog-nition of difference. As Oakeshott puts it in On History, different understand-ings “may exclude one another but they do not deny one another, and they maybe recognized by those who do not share them” (OH 11).

A conversational relationship presupposes not only different voices butrecognition of those voices as equally entitled to participate. Just as persons ina moral relationship are equally entitled to be recognized as agents, so themodes in a conversational relationship are equal participants in an intermodalexchange of images. And like a civil relationship among distinct individuals, aconversation among modally distinct voices is one without an extrinsic pur-pose to be pursued. In the metaphoric conversation of mankind, modallydifferent ideas engage one another, not in an enterprise of inquiry or debatedesigned to produce a valid conclusion, but in a civil exchange with no deter-minate outcome. A conversational relationship is, in other words, an essen-tially civilized relationship. But just as civility is compromised when the viewsof some are imposed on others, so conversation is compromised when it losesits civil restraint and its inherent playfulness. Each voice can become preoccu-pied with its own concerns, hearing in other voices only an inferior version ofitself. And a single voice can seek to dictate the terms of conversation. Whenone voice begins to dominate, conversation is at an end. The degeneration ofconversation into monologue, dogmatic assertion, is barbarism.

A civilization encompasses many different ways of interpreting the world,different modes of experience and conduct. Just as modes are historical cre-ations, so is the culture that is shaped by the conversational relationshipamong them. To know one’s culture is, therefore, to acquire some apprecia-tion for the diversity of voices that compose it and, in doing so, to be able tounderstand the world in more than a single way. And because this is an abilitythat must be learned, there is a close connection between conversation and


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learning—a connection Oakeshott explores in his essays on education butthat must remain unexplored in this book.9 To be educated today is to be initi-ated into a cultural inheritance composed of different modes of understandingand self-understanding. It is not only to acquire an understanding of differentways of being human but also to be able to recognize the diversity of under-standings that compose a given civilization. It is also to respect that diversity.

All this can, of course, be read in such a way as to extract a doctrine. But, asI have tried to show, to read Oakeshott in this manner is to misconstrue thespirit of his reflections on the human condition and the different ways inwhich it can be understood. Oakeshott’s greatness as a philosopher lies not inhis conclusions but in an inspired union of unusual abilities: an ability to cre-ate an intellectual world of imaginative grandeur by painstaking attention todetail; an ability to construct a system whose coherence rests not on founda-tional axioms or dogmas but on the harmony of its many and diverse partsand its consequent power to illuminate almost any philosophical question; anability to criticize the prevailing doctrines without embracing the prevailingcriticisms and to sail a steady course through the shifting currents of intellec-tual fashion; and an ability to accomplish all this in language that, at its best,achieves a level of clarity, eloquence, dignity, and force seldom found in philo-sophical writing. Oakeshott’s peers, with respect to these qualities, are not histwentieth-century contemporaries but Plato, Augustine, Montaigne, Hobbes,and a few other acute philosophical observers of the human scene.10 WhatOakeshott says of Hobbes’s Leviathan—that its context, the setting in whichits meaning is revealed, is as broad as the history of philosophy itself (HCA 3)—can be applied to his own masterpiece, On Human Conduct. To read Oake-shott narrowly as a conservative critic of the welfare state or liberal defenderof individualism and pluralism, or even as a political philosopher or historianof political thought, is therefore to misunderstand, and seriously to under-rate, his contribution to philosophy.

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9. Most of Oakeshott’s writings on education, the liberal arts, and the universities are col-lected in The Voice of Liberal Learning; a related essay, “The Study of Politics in a University,”appears in Rationalism in Politics.

10. A study of Oakeshott in relation to this larger context is Wendell John Coats Jr.,Oakeshott and His Contemporaries (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2000). The“contemporaries” are Montaigne, Augustine, Hegel, Hobbes, Constant, Rousseau, and Hume.

Bosanquet, B., 20–21, 41 n. 24Bradley, F. H., 20 n. 5, 30 n. 15, 41 n. 24,

62–63, 105, 146 n. 4Brentano, F., 20, 109–10

Carr, E. H., 94category, 33 n. 18, 34, 42 n. 25, 44, 128–35. See

also modalitycausation, historical, 160, 166–72change, 165

historical, 6, 158–60, 165–66, 168–69, 175, 179practical, 57, 59–60, 158

Christianityhistory of, 63, 64, 144, 151–52, 157 n. 16identity of, 61, 68, 156–57

citizen, 197, 198, 211–12, 214civil association, 3, 196–98, 231

and individuality, 183, 211–12conditions of, 216–24politics in, 228–29

civilization, 3, 233, 234coherence, 21–27, 32–33, 35–36, 39, 50, 59

absolute, 22–23, 24, 35, 40, 45, 60historical, 147–49

action, 55, 57, 59–60, 109, 193. See also conductand agency, 61–62, 70–75, 137–38, 200–201,

212futility of, 59–60, 62, 65, 66–67, 194and intention, 71, 75–76, 173theory of, 74–75

adjudication, 217, 222administration, 218–19, 221–22aesthetic experience, 38, 90, 108, 184–85, 194.

See also art and poetryanthropology, 123–24, 129Arendt, H., 76–77Aristotle, 31, 33, 77, 103, 203 n. 17art, 38, 94, 108, 111 n. 16association, modes of, 33, 189, 202–3, 231. See

also civil association and purposiveassociation

Austin, J., 199authority, 190, 198, 201–2, 206, 209. See also

rules, authenticity vs. rightnessAyer, A. J., 5

barbarism, 234behaviorism, 71–72, 103

I n d e x

practical, 59, 61, 187scientific, 114–15, 119

Collingwood, R. G., 41, 42–43, 49, 79, 108,172–73

community, 188, 212–13comparative method, 124 Comte, A., 103, 106 n. 7conduct, 3, 70–77, 134, 137–38, 231. See also

performances and practicesvs. behavior, 71, 75, 77, 129, 130language of, 191

consciousness, 19–20, 30, 71, 73. See alsointelligence

and the human sciences, 107, 122–23, 136religious, 63, 66

consequentialism, 190, 203 n. 17constructionism, 6–7, 36, 146–47

historical, 3–4, 141, 146–49, 152–54, 165–66contingency, 2–3, 231

historical, 37, 138–40, 159, 160, 162–66practical, 58–60, 62, 66–67, 128, 193–94,

220–24conversation, 4, 14, 232–35critical theory, 81, 98–99

Danto, A. C., 161Davidson, D., 26, 109 n. 11deliberation, 73–74, 204, 210, 227Derrida, J., 29–30, 232Descartes, R., 16dialectic, 7, 22, 27, 31, 45difference, 29–30, 230–35

in anthropology, 124historical, 157, 159, 163, 166, 231political, 212, 231

Dilthey, W., 21, 25, 105–7, 110, 124–25discourse

political, 134, 227, 228, 229universe of, 23, 39, 41–42, 60, 233

Dray, W., 170 n. 24Droysen, J. G., 103–4, 105, 108 n. 10, 146, 152,

163Durkheim, E., 178

economics, 118–20Eddington, A., 111education, 234–35enterprise association. See purposive association

epistemology, 10, 15–16, 27, 34ethics. See moral philosophyevents, historical, 2, 144–145, 157–72, 167–68, 180existentialism, 9–10, 59–60, 74, 81–82experience, 16, 17, 25–26, 70

immediate, 19–21, 82, 83sensory, 16, 19–20, 34, 70

explanation, 3, 56–57, 101, 115, 134, 177–81deductive-nomological, 103, 170historical, 3–4, 139, 142, 160–72teleological, 160, 169

fact, 15, 25–26, 29, 31, 49historical, 145–47, 147–48practical, 57–58, 96, 186–87and theory, 25 n. 10, 31, 114–15, 147

faith, 62–63, 65, 67, 68–69, 193Foucault, M., 98, 178foundationalism, 10, 18, 24, 49

historical, 174practical, 14, 81, 96, 192–93, 208scientific, 5, 111

freedomin agency, 72–74, 194, 200–201, 212individual, 13, 211, 212–13, 214

Friedman, R., 197 n. 12, 216

Gadamer, H.-G., 6–7, 103, 129, 146, 232Geertz, C., 199, 123Geisteswissenschaften, 106–7, 108, 110, 129geistige Welt, 56 n. 1, 108, 136generalization

historical, 154, 160, 168–69, 170–71, 178–79scientific, 104, 112–14, 120, 168–69statistical, 112, 114, 115, 124, 178

Goldstein, L. J., 162, 165Grant, R., 65, 67, 136, 223 n. 34

Habermas, J., 9, 13, 98, 107–8Hart, H. L. A., 195 n. 9, 199Hayek, F., 13Hegel, G. W. F., 5–6, 22, 98 n. 30, 107, 220,

223 n. 34Heidegger, M., 7, 10, 18, 41 n. 24, 81–82, 94Hempel, C., 170hermeneutics

and the human sciences, 105–10, 135–37, 176philosophical, 5–8, 27, 233universal, 8, 101–2, 135–36

Index

238

coherence (continued)

historicism, 173–75history, 2–3, 37, 102–4, 134, 143–76

and the human sciences, 102–4, 137–40,172–81

and practice, 89, 94–95, 134, 150–51, 154,176

Hobbes, T., 68, 183 n. 2, 186–87human conduct. See conducthumanities, 102, 130, 179human nature, 167, 177human sciences, 7–8, 25, 170, 101–10, 117–40,

176–81. See also humanities and socialsciences

Husserl, E., 29, 56

Idealism, 2, 7, 20 n. 5, 22, 44, 111ideas, 2, 6–7, 76, 122, 132. See also meaning

ideal character, 30, 61, 196–97, 211, 229world of, 20–21, 30

identity, 19, 27–32, 231historical, 153–60, 166, 178–79personal, 190–91

ideology, 12, 96, 132, 142, 227idiom of inquiry, 116, 132–34, 135imaginative reconstruction, 107–8, 144–45,

172individuality, 28–29, 104–5, 192, 232

historical, 30 n. 15, 104, 142, 153–60, 170–72,174

and the human sciences, 25, 104–5, 120–22,123, 137–40, 176

political, 183, 211–16, 212–13, 234intelligence

category of, 44, 130–33, 135and the human sciences, 8, 70, 72, 110,

128–30, 135as presupposition of conduct, 3, 71–72,

136–37intentionality, 75–76, 109–10, 135interpretation, 6–7, 17, 20, 27. See also

hermeneuticsin the human sciences, 105, 107–8, 122–23,

124, 135–37, 180–81of rules, 195, 199–200, 204–5

judgment, 20, 58, 91–92, 200, 227, 233adverbial, 200approval and disapproval, 187, 202, 205

justice, 13, 14, 205, 206–10

Kant, I., 34, 91, 103–4, 187–88, 215Kuhn, T., 25 n. 10, 27

law, 184–85, 194–96. See also rule of lawenforcement of, 209–10, 218–19, 220evaluation of, 210–11, 228–29philosophy of, 11, 134, 184–85, 195–96,

216legal validity. See rules, authenticity vs.

rightnesslegislation, 217–18life, philosophy of (Lebensphilosophie), 81, 106,

108life-world, 9–10, 56, 82Locke, J., 96 n. 28

Malinowski, B., 65 n. 8Marx, K., 81, 89, 98, 132, 142, 168meaning

concept of, 5–6, 15, 29–30and conduct, 71, 75, 109, 139–40of historical events, 2, 3, 152, 159–62, 164,

170–72memory, 150metaphysics, 15, 33–34. See also ontologyMill, J. S., 103, 106 n. 7, 210mind, 105–7, 121, 175–76. See also intelligencemodality, 2, 32–44, 117, 224, 230–31. See also

modesand philosophy, 45–46, 51–52

modes, 33, 35, 39–42, 55, 83, 133–35confusion of, 2, 3, 41–42, 118–19, 126, 127as historical, 2, 28, 34, 36, 42, 230relationship between, 33, 40–41, 43, 134,

233–34Montaigne, M. de, 209 n. 21morality, 3, 13, 184, 185–94, 234

and law, 195, 207, 208–9and prudence, 64, 186, 187–88and religion, 61–62, 63–64, 66

moral philosophy, 11, 93, 97–98, 184–85,192–93

motive, 63, 193–94, 208

narrative, 6, 138, 139, 148, 161, 165natural history, 112–13, 121naturalism, 4, 5natural law, 206, 207, 209nature, 8, 12, 37, 103–4, 136

Index

239

Nietzsche, F., 93, 110Nozick, R., 13

objectivity, 25–26, 58, 82, 108, 112, 113–14historical, 145, 146

obligation, 189, 190, 201–2ontology, 8, 33 n. 18, 34, 131, 224, 230–31

being, 33–34substance, 28, 29, 34, 156–57

order of inquiry, 130–35O’Sullivan, N., 92 n. 24

past, 149–50historical, 37, 89, 94–95, 143–44, 145,

149–53practical, 94–95, 150–52scientific, 113, 150

performancesexplaining, 3, 137–39, 179–81prescribing, 199–201, 217–19

phenomenology, 9–10, 16, 19–20, 27, 56,81–82

philosophy, 4–5, 6–7, 14, 18, 45–53 and definition, 18, 31, 49–50, 192, 195–96,

227–28and history, 142, 143–44, 161–62, 173, 217,

220and practice, 11–12, 93, 95–99, 215, 225

Plato, 12, 56, 87Pocock, J. G. A., 12poetry

and contemplation, 38, 57, 67–68, 194as a mode, 36, 38, 103, 150and practice, 59, 67, 83, 90, 94

policy, 217, 220–21, 229political philosophy, 11–14, 93, 96, 98, 127political science, 10–11, 126–28political thought, history of, 12, 78–79, 141 n. 1politics, 17 n. 1, 127, 217, 226–30Popper, K., 13, 174 n. 30positivism, 5, 22, 26

historical, 2, 103, 142, 144–45, 160, 170–71and the human sciences, 8, 101, 107–8, 109,

120legal, 199, 206, 209

postmodernism, 6, 178practice. See also theory and practice

as a mode, 10, 36–37, 56–60, 76, 82primacy of, 9–10, 40, 56 n. 1, 80, 81–83

practices, 75–79, 125, 126, 189–90, 196–97. Seealso rules

and performances, 71, 75, 77–78, 139, 179–81pragmatism, 4, 8–9, 10, 65, 81, 186prediction, 119–20, 128prudence, 36–37, 56, 64, 68, 82, 186–88psychology, 104, 105–7, 120–23purpose, 10, 82, 188–90, 203–4, 214purposive association, 189, 197–98, 203, 212,

213–15politics in, 228–29

Putnam, H., 26

quantification, 112, 113, 114, 122, 128Quine, W. V. O., 26, 113

rational choice, 103, 132Rationalism, 13, 90–93, 97Rawls, J., 13, 207realism

historical, 148–49, 162internal, 26scientific, 5, 13, 27, 110–11, 113 n. 19

reality, 25–26, 43historical, 142, 153, 159, 164, 174–75practical, 57–58, 62–63, 186scientific, 115

relativism, 8, 24, 30, 192religion, 60–69, 92 n. 24, 151–52, 156–57,

193–94, 206philosophy of, 68–69and worldliness, 64–66, 193–94, 213

Rickert, H., 108, 121, 176Rorty, R., 4–5, 7, 18, 47, 135, 233rule of law, 13, 183–84, 194–211, 219, 222–23rules, 78, 91–92, 199–201

authenticity vs. rightness, 204–11vs. commands, 77, 78, 197, 199–201, 214instrumental vs. noninstrumental, 188, 195

n. 9, 201–4 relationship in terms of, 198, 199–204

ruling, 218–19, 221–22Ryle, G., 42 n. 25

Schopenhauer, A., 103science, 37–38, 102–3, 106, 110–18, 129, 134

and history, 101–3and practice, 87–89, 116

scientism, 5, 27, 110

Index

240

Searle, J. R., 111 n. 15self, 62, 186–87, 191

disclosure, 191, 193enactment, 193–94

Sellars, W., 26skepticism, 16, 29, 53, 154 Skinner, Q., 12social sciences, 102, 117–28, 130, 177–78sociology, 124–26, 177–78state, 13, 197–98, 203, 228–29

as compulsory, 211, 213–15, 221Strauss, L., 12structuralism, 178, 179

Taylor, C., 8 n. 8, 108–9, 127technical knowledge, 90–91technology, 87–89, 112teleology, 6, 13, 22, 142, 160, 169theology, 69, 206theorizing, 16–17, 50–53, 80–81, 83–86, 95. See

also philosophy theory and practice, 8–12, 55, 79–99, 101, 108–9tradition, 76, 91Trollope, A., 210

truth, 9, 10, 21–27, 39, 53, 132. See alsocoherence

as correspondence, 23–27, 111 n. 15historical, 147, 148–49religious, 62–63, 68

understanding, 19, 31–32, 231conditional vs. unconditional, 52, 85–86, 95,

105, 107in the human sciences (Verstehen), 105, 107

utilitarianism, 190, 203

value, 57–58, 63, 65, 108–9Vico, G., 103, 136, 142, 183

Waldron, J., 98 n. 30Walzer, M., 12, 191wants, 57–58, 63, 65, 132, 186–89

relationship in terms of, 188–89, 203, 214war, 186–87, 190, 223 n. 34Weber, M., 30 n. 15, 107, 167Winch, P., 103, 109Windelband, W., 104, 121Wittgenstein, L., 18, 26, 48, 83, 109, 232

Index

241

Documents

[Terry Nardin] the Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott(Bookos.org)