Michael Oakeshott Quotes on Politics
Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics (1962) and the late On Human Conduct (1975) gave mid-twentieth-century British conservative political philosophy its most rigorous critique of the rationalist political project. The central polemic is directed at the rationalist political style — the conviction that political institutions are best understood as the deliberate productions of abstract reason rather than the slow inheritance of practical traditions — and the corresponding constructive program develops the distinction between the civil association (a non-instrumental relationship of citizens under common practices and procedures) and the enterprise association (an instrumental relationship organized around shared purposes) as the principal categorial frame for understanding modern political life. The framework, drawing on Hegel and the British idealist tradition Oakeshott studied under at Cambridge, shaped subsequent Anglo-American conservative thought through Roger Scruton, Pierre Manent, and the broader twentieth-century engagement with the philosophical foundations of liberalism.
Quotes
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“To be conservative 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.”
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“In political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination.”
Rationalism in Politics -
Attributed to Michael Oakeshott:
“Political education is learning how to participate in an arrangement.”
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Attributed to Michael Oakeshott:
“A tradition of behaviour is a tricky thing to get to know.”
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“By one road or another, by conviction, by its supposed inevitability, by its alleged success, or even quite unreflectively, almost all politics today have become Rationalist or near-Rationalist.”
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“Rationalist politics, I have said, are the politics of the felt need, the felt need not qualified by a genuine, concrete knowledge of the permanent interests and direction of movement of a society, but interpreted by 'reason' and satisfied according to the technique of an ideology: they are the politics of the book.”
Wikiquote -
“Rationalism in politics, as I have interpreted it, involves an identifiable error, a misconception with regard to the nature of human knowledge, which amounts to a corruption of the mind. And consequently it is without the power to correct its own short-comings; it has no homeopathic quality; you cannot escape its errors by becoming more sincerely or more profoundly rationalistic.”
Wikiquote