A Skeptical Conservative

Thus, political rationalism was not some malady to be eradicated but an element in a complex European tradition, one force in a parallelogram of forces, one pole toward which policymaking might veer (like Left or Right). Ideology, too, after being deplored in comparison with the intimations of a live tradition, is restored to favor because, as a summary of a tradition, it can be of service to conservatism as well as to political rationalism. Moreover, since so much political rationalism is impractical and unworkable, what we are criticizing in it often is not the actual implementation of bad policies but erroneous belief misdescriptions of society. When asked if that was worth getting so cross about, Oakeshott said trying to do what was impossible was "a corrupting enterprise."

That Oakeshott overlooked, or at least underestimated, the role of rationalism in the state was perhaps due to his reliance, which he often stressed, on English history. There is much in that country's story that can be represented as the working out of traditions, feeling the way by touch toward a balance of political forces, even doing great things in a fit of absent-mindedness. No such account could be given of the history of, say, Spain. As Ortega y Gasset said in Invertebrate Spain, that nation-state was "the great enterprise" of Castile during the centuries-long campaign against the Moors: "The vision of a united Spain was . . . an abstract ideal which could be realized, a plan which could fire men's minds." Generalizing from that case, he echoed Hintze: "The great nations have been made not from within but from without. A successful international policy, a policy of high enterprise, is the only thing that creates a fruitful internal policy--which is always, in the last analysis, a rather shallow affai r."

But the massive counter-example that Oakeshott runs into, like Hayek and all the other critics of constructivism and rationalism, is the American Constitution, which, as every schoolchild is taught, was deduced more geometrico from natural law theory and cognate rationalist abstractions. When Walter Lippmann raised this objection, Oakeshott replied tartly that this was a typically shortsighted American view; there had been no Founding Fathers, only a series of limited decisions. Hayek had no better answer to the objection that the Constitution was "a product of rationalist constructivist liberalism." He said it was the "product of accident rather than design" and simply extended ancient English traditions. One must leave these assertions to the historians, but they have a prima facie air of desperate ad hoccery.

The Uses of Social Science

IN GENERAL, theorists like Oakeshott and Hayek are often arbitrary in drawing the line between rationalist political constructions and those institutions that have grown to no one's design over long periods of time. The distinction is not as clear-cut as it sounds. Because the Constitution is a good thing, it cannot be allowed to be an instance of rationalism in politics; but because the welfare state is (or has become) a bad thing, it is travestied as a political design deduced from the rationalist construction "social justice." It is not seen to have grown imperceptibly out of an old tradition, but must have been created by a political party, perhaps at the time of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, or in Britain's Beveridge Report of the 1940s, or, in the German case, in backroom deals between Bismarck and Lassalle. In reality, the welfare state is a stage in the evolution from the poor relief of Elizabethan times, and from religious charity via private benevolence, to social insurance. It is a classic examp le of the unplanned, dispersed, incremental growth of an institution, and one that was only brought under central government responsibility after the Second World War. Of course, that does not protect it from any criticism one may care to offer, except from the charge that it is culpable "constructivism" or "rationalism in politics."