Oakeshott Said Being Conservative Is a Temperament Before It Is a Program

Here is a sentence guaranteed to produce a headache at any think tank: a conservative is not someone with a plan. Everyone in the room has a plan. There are position papers, task forces and a six-point agenda printed on very nice paper. And into this a rumpled professor from the London School of Economics wanders and says that the real conservative is the man who would rather sit in his own chair than study the blueprints for a better one.

The professor was Michael Oakeshott, and he has more to teach American conservatives than most of the authors on our shelves, precisely because he disagrees with us about so much. He gives us the temperament. We have to supply the creed. Let me explain what he said, why it is right as far as it goes, and where an American has to part company with him.

The professor

Michael Oakeshott was born in 1901 and died in 1990. He studied at Cambridge, taught there and at Oxford, and in 1951 was appointed to the chair of political science at the London School of Economics, succeeding Harold Laski, a leading socialist intellectual. It was a deliciously odd succession, and Oakeshott held the post until 1969. His inaugural lecture, "Political Education," set the tone for everything that followed.

He was an unusual figure on the right: a philosopher in the British idealist tradition, not a party man, not a politician, not much of a joiner. He wrote about history, religion, education, poetry and the conversation of mankind as well as about politics. The essays that made him famous among conservatives were collected in 1962 in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. The title essay appeared in 1947, and "On Being Conservative," written in 1956, was added to the volume. Those two essays are the heart of this post.

Define the terms

The argument depends on two words that Oakeshott used carefully.

• Rationalism, in his sense, is the belief that all knowledge worth having can be stated as explicit rules and principles, and that politics should therefore be run by applying a correct technique, as an engineer applies a formula. The rationalist trusts the blueprint over the practice.
• Practical knowledge is the kind learned by doing and by apprenticeship, which cannot be fully written down: how to run a household, a school or a government. You acquire it by living among people who have it.

Oakeshott's best-known illustration is a cookbook. A person who has never cooked, he says, cannot make a good meal by following a recipe; the recipe presupposes a skill it does not itself contain. The book is an abstract of practice and not a substitute for it. The rationalist mistakes the abstract for the real thing.

The critique of the technical manual

In "Rationalism in Politics" Oakeshott goes after a style of thought he found in his age, from the planners of the 1940s to the ideologues of the left and, he insisted, also on the right. The rationalist is impatient with tradition, treats inherited arrangements as irrational until proven otherwise, and believes that a mind armed with the right theory can rebuild a society from scratch.

He had two objections.

1. The theory is a thin summary of the practice. A political tradition is an accumulated way of doing things, with its reasons embedded in habits and institutions, not a list of propositions. Take the practice apart to examine the theory and you lose what made it work.
2. The rationalist cannot account for his own confidence. Where did the knowledge for the grand plan come from? If it came from the existing society, then it was drawn from the tradition he proposes to demolish. If it came from nowhere, why believe it?

The point is not that planning is wicked. It is that politics is not an exercise in engineering, and treating it as one yields results the engineer did not foresee, as the history of every ambitious five-year plan shows. For a case where that failure was complete, see Mises Showed in 1920 That Socialism Cannot Calculate a Single Price.

The sentence everyone quotes

In "On Being Conservative," Oakeshott gives his definition of the disposition, and it is worth reading in full. To be conservative, he writes, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, and present laughter to utopian bliss.

Read it slowly, because the last clause deserves a pause. Present laughter to utopian bliss. It is a joke, and the joke is a serious argument. A dinner among friends, which is available tonight, is worth more than a perfect society which is promised and which has not yet shown up. People who give up the first for the second tend to lose both.

Notice what the definition says and does not say. It does not say change is bad. It says that the conservative is disposed to be slow and wary of it, to ask what is lost, to prefer improvements that grow from existing practice, and to keep a proper suspicion of a proposal that begins "let us start again." Oakeshott puts the point in a second striking passage, taken from "Political Education": in politics, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea, with no harbour for shelter and no floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The task is to keep afloat on an even keel, using the resources of a traditional manner of behaving. A conservative is a sailor, not a navigator with a map of a coast that does not exist.

Why a temperament and not a program

Here is the argument, in numbered premises.

1. A program is a set of propositions about what should be done. It can be written down, enacted and checked off.
2. A temperament is a disposition, a settled way of responding to the world. It shows itself in what a person values, what he notices and what he distrusts.
3. Conservatism, at its core, is the second kind of thing. Two conservatives may be on opposite sides of a policy question, tax rates or a trade deal, because the disposition does not dictate every answer. What it does is shape the questions: what do we already have, who relies on it, and what will we lose?
4. Therefore a movement defined only by its program is brittle. When programs change, a movement with nothing under them loses its way. The disposition is the thing that lasts.

This explains why a good conservative is often an unpopular dinner guest at a political rally. The room wants a promise. The temperament says: let me see what that does to the existing arrangements first.

The kinship with Burke and Hume

Oakeshott was not inventing this out of thin air. He stood in a line that runs through Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) argued that a society's inherited institutions embody a wisdom no single generation can reproduce, and David Hume, who showed that custom, not abstract reason, holds most of social life together. See Burke's Doctrine of Prescription Says Old Institutions Deserve a Hearing and Hume Doubted the Social Contract, and Conservatives Learned From Him. G. K. Chesterton gave the same idea a charming form when he called tradition the democracy of the dead, a vote for those who cannot vote because they are no longer alive. That one is in Chesterton Called Tradition the Democracy of the Dead, and He Was Right.

The lesson across the line is not that the past is always right. It is that the burden of proof sits with the person who proposes to change what works. See Tradition Is Not Nostalgia, and Five Other Myths About Conservatives.

The strongest objection

Here is the case against Oakeshott, put as its defenders would put it. If conservatism is only a temperament, it has no way to say when change is right. Slavery was traditional. Segregation was familiar. A disposition to prefer the familiar would have defended both. The people who ended them were the ones who looked at a settled practice and demanded something better.

It is an excellent objection, and Oakeshott's skepticism has no answer to it on its own.

An American has to supply the answer from somewhere else, and the somewhere else is the Founding. The Declaration of Independence states that "all men are created equal" and are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Those words did not describe the world the Founders lived in. They set a standard against which that world could be judged. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to that standard, not to a novel theory, and what they asked for was that the country live up to its own creed. That is a conservative argument in the best sense: it conserves a principle against a practice that betrayed it.

Here, then, is the difference between the British temperament and the American case. Oakeshott's England had a tradition of customs, common law and inherited institutions. America has that too, but it also has a founding creed, a written statement of the principles on which the country was built. For a conservative in America, "the familiar" includes natural rights, limited government and the equal dignity of persons. When he says "conserve," he means conserve those. The old American question is not whether a practice is old but whether it is consistent with the creed. See Common Sense Is a Philosophy Too, and It Shaped the Founders' Plain Talk and Ordered Liberty Is Not a Contradiction, It Is the Only Kind That Lasts.

What Oakeshott gives us anyway

None of that reduces Oakeshott's value. He is a corrective to three tendencies conservatives fall into.

The tendency to treat politics as a crusade. If every election is the last chance for civilisation, the temperament goes out of the window. Oakeshott's advice is to keep your sense of humour and your sense of proportion. A movement that cannot laugh is on its way to becoming the thing it opposes.

The tendency to adopt a theory and apply it by force. Some on the right have their own blueprints, and the same objection applies: a blueprint is thin beside the practice. Friedrich Hayek, who also warned against the rationalist's hubris, took care to say why he was not a conservative in the temperamental sense; see Hayek Wrote Why I Am Not a Conservative, and He Had a Point Worth Facing. And the case that no mind can design an order as complex as a language or a market appears in Nobody Designed the English Language, and Hayek Called That Spontaneous Order.

The tendency to think reform and conservation are enemies. Oakeshott allowed for change, but of a particular kind: innovation that is small, gradual and responsive to a particular need, rather than a grand scheme. The nineteenth-century reforms of Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli are often held up as examples: Peel and Disraeli Show How Conservatives Reform Without Wrecking.

A fair criticism of the criticism

One more point in fairness to the man. Some American conservatives find Oakeshott disappointing because he seems to offer no direction, only a mood. They want a program, and they are entitled to one. The best answer is that he was offering something else on purpose: a way of holding whatever program you adopt. Someone who believes in lower taxes, strong families and limited government will do better if he also has Oakeshott's wariness about what happens when a good idea is applied everywhere at once.

The tension between the temperament and the creed is, in fact, the source of conservatism's strength. The creed tells us what to defend. The temperament tells us how to defend it without wrecking the thing we are defending. Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions describes the two kinds of mind, the one that trusts the designers and the one that trusts accumulated experience; Sowell's Two Visions Explain Why Smart People Talk Past Each Other takes up that division.

The case in brief

1. Oakeshott held that conservatism is first of all a disposition: to prefer the familiar, the tried, the actual and the limited to the unknown, the untried, the possible and the unbounded.
2. His critique of rationalism holds that politics cannot be run from a technical manual, because practical knowledge lives in habits and institutions that a blueprint summarises badly.
3. His line about preferring present laughter to utopian bliss is a serious argument for proportion and against crusades.
4. An American conservative needs more than a temperament: the Founding creed supplies the standard by which inherited practices, such as slavery and segregation, are judged and found wanting.
5. The temperament and the creed belong together: one says what to defend and the other says how to defend it without wrecking it.

What you can do: read Oakeshott's "On Being Conservative" in his collected essays, and then read the Declaration of Independence's second paragraph, and write down one thing from each that you would conserve.