Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life.

Some writers we read because we want to know what to think. Unsure of ourselves, faced with confusing issues, we try on other people's arguments until we find one that fits, and then we say we have formed an opinion. Other writers, however, we read not in order to know what to think, but to learn how to think, and from reading them we gain what we call wisdom. These authors are always more difficult. They offer up their lessons much more slowly, and only to those who marry patience with discipline. Michael Oakeshott, the English philosopher who died in 1990, was such an author, and for this reason I hope that the publication of these two books helps find for him the wide readership he deserves.

Each of these books reflects Oakeshott's lifelong distrust of that way of thinking which trades in the easy certainty of abstract generalizations and to which he gave the name rationalism. The chief failings of rationalism, thought Oakeshott, are its unwarranted confidence in the power of abstract mental reflection to shape our world and our relations with others, and its corresponding neglect of the fact that our world is understood by us, and has distinctive value to us, only because we exist within traditions (things like religious faith and cultural habits, mores and manners) whose teachings cannot be captured in the kind of formulas that rationalism insists upon as the mark of true knowledge. For Oakeshott, then, rationalism is both misguided, because it regards as knowledge only that which can be written down in a book, and dangerous, because it leads to attempts to reconstruct social relations according solely to abstract principles and thus puts at risk those traditions which give sense to our lives and which cannot be explicitly formulated.

Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, which comprises eight lectures given at Harvard in 1958, presents Oakeshott attempting to think about politics without falling into the rationalist trap. His central point is that in order to understand the movement of modern political thought, we need to see that it did not simply spring de novo from the heads of philosophers, but that it constituted a response to the historical facts of the breakdown of tightly structured communities and the increased personal liberty experienced by many subjects at the birth of the modem age. This increased freedom, argues Oakeshott, occasioned two distinct moralities, and two corresponding political theories: the morality of individuality, with its politics of individualism; and the morality of the anti-individual, with its politics of collectivitsm. Individualism, represented by figures like Locke, Kant, and Bentham, embodies the hopes of those eager to explore new opportunities for autonomous self-realization. Collectivism, advocated by thinkers like Calvin and Marx, speaks to the fears of those unwilling or unable to define their own identities in a world where the authority of communal ties is rapidly disintegrating.

Oakeshott believes that contemporary political thought still presents us with these two options, and in general he is probably right. I have less confidence, though, in his decision to group as collectivists those new liberals concerned with a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, and here I think his own classificatory scheme shows clear signs of strain. Having described collectivism as the belief that the state should "impose a comprehensive pattern of activity" upon all citizens, it is rather odd that he should then describe these liberals as collectivists, for it seems quite clear that a state committed to securing a basic degree of human welfare is not imposing any activity at all, but is rather trying to ensure the preconditions necessary for any activities individuals might undertake. The welfare state is best defended on the grounds that it tries to extend the politics of individualism in the fairest way possible, and Oakeshott entirely overlooks this line of argument.

Overall, however, these lectures offer an excellent entirely for those unfamiliar with Oakeshott's political philosophy. Though a wonderful writer (whose sentences, like Greek architecture, are at once beautiful and austere), Oakeshott is not an easy one, and these lectures are more accessible than much of his writing. For those willing to plunge into the full majesty of Oakeshott's literary style, however, the ten essays (some never before published) in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life offer a good place to start. Many familiar Oakeshott themes receive concise treatment here: the impotence of rationalism, the indivisibility between individual and society, and the notion that philosophy can play no role in helping us evaluate ends and is therefore of limited application in practical life. As the last of these has been a frequent target of those critical of Oakeshott, let me briefly offer a partial defense of Oakeshott's position here, a defense built around his treatment of religion.

Along with philosophy, religion may be said to offer a way of understanding and giving order to human experience. But while philosophy concerns itself with the truth of ideas, religion considers ideas with an eye to their usefulness in giving to life a sense of richness and meaning. The importance of religion in this regard Oakeshott describes in several poignant passages, and these are perhaps the most unexpected treasures in this book. When he suggests, for example, that the religious person "has the courage to know what belongs to his life, and, with it, steps outside the tedious round of imitation by which the world covers up its ignorance of what it is alive for," we feel that he is struggling bravely to answer the question, how should we live? And while his precise recommendations are, as they should be in this context, sketchy and nonspecific, it is clear that the answer is to be found not in any philosophical system but in some kind of religious attitude toward the world.

Oakeshott, then, has not severed philosophy from its role in practical life; instead, he has tried to show that philosophy is not by itself a fully adequate response to human experience. This is an idea by which some of us (not just philosophers) might be made uneasy, for it implies that our lives are not ultimately to be explained in terms of reason alone. But this conclusion should come as no surprise, for if Oakeshott has made anything clear, it is that our lives have greater depths than can be mined by philosophical inquiry alone. In this, he shares the wisdom of that Danish Prince who reminded his friend that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy.