A Skeptical Conservative

For consider what a state that did so confine itself would look like: consider, that is, Oakeshott's account of the civil association. Its government would be small and, by our standards, inactive, for it would have few policies. It would have scant resources of its own, and hence little to distribute, and so the political contest for spoils would lose most of its point. Its economic policies would not extend much beyond sound money and antitrust policing. Its main task would be enforcing general rules of social and economic behavior by adjudicating conflicts as they arose; Oakeshott insisted adjudication did not mean conciliation, which was altogether too activist a role. He said, "Government in this style is, we have seen, primarily a judicial activity", and indeed it seems less like a government than a High Court of Equity. It would preside over a society that was a congeries of private enterprise associations, from whose conflict, mysteriously, all violence, ruthlessness and skulduggery had disappeared, thereby relieving the government of the duties of coercion and punishment.

Oakeshott was quite open about how inadequate all this would seem to earnest policymakers. They would see it as excessively skeptical, he conceded, as underestimating human possibilities, as frivolous, ironical, even playful. None of which bothered him, for at least such a style of politics was not self-defeating, as the politics of passionate rationalism inevitably and disastrously was. This did not convince even political thinkers who were quite near Oakeshott in temper. Hayek, for example, was waging a campaign against social "constructivism" that was parallel to Oakeshott's assault on rationalism in politics, but Hayek reasonably insisted that at the center there had to be a government armed with effective coercive power, which was necessary to the functioning of the market system--but which was also dangerous to personal liberty, and therefore had to be limited and in some way supervised. Keynes, too, had foreseen the objections to Oakeshott's brand of indolent conservatism, saying, "It leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard; it is not even safe, or calculated to preserve from spoilers that degree of civilization which we have already attained ... [we] must have an attitude, a philosophy, a direction,, [3]--in short, some sort of rational enterprise.

More fundamentally, it seems, there is the question whether, in the real world of politics from which Oakeshott was so remote, a state can even exist that is not in certain important respects a rational enterprise, notably in the matters of defense and foreign policy. His friend and editor, Timothy Fuller, says, after describing the modest adjudicator state, that Oakeshott

thought that the main obstacle to enjoying such a government was the unavoidable and continuous preparation for war that imposed on all modern governments the undertaking to organize society in terms of uniformity of goals, reinforced by infatuation with technology, and the belief that human beings could not be entrusted to take care of themselves unless directed by an extrinsic goal or purpose, an ideology.