Michael Oakeshott and Augustinianism After Hobbes and Hegel

McIlwain, David

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-13381-8_9

David McIlwain⁴

Part of the book series: Recovering Political Philosophy ((REPOPH))

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Abstract

This chapter elucidates the subtle relationship between Michael Oakeshott’s skeptical political theory of a neutral civil authority and his rich conception of poetic individuality, offering a detailed investigation of how Oakeshott moved between mythology and political theory in combining the thought of Hobbes and Augustine. McIlwain argues that Oakeshott used these two thinkers to separate the human will from the fatalism implied by a completely rational account of experience and then to “eternalize” Hegel at the historical stage of the pax Romana. Oakeshott’s adherence to a modern philosophical monism is thus revealed to be elevated by an earthly and poetic Augustinianism that avoids both “Gnostic” historical necessity and supernatural dualism. Oakeshott’s theory is then described in terms of the almost “religious” intensity of self-completion.

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Notes

1.
Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 85 n.
2.
Cited in Dominic Manganiello, T. S. Eliot and Dante (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 134.
3.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 175.
4.
Michael Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” in Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 77.
5.
Michael Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, Selected Writings, Volume II, ed. Terry Nardin and Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006), 334.
6.
Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 81.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 158.
9.
Oakeshott, Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, 81.
10.
Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: Corrected and Expanded Edition, Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 192.
11.
Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 150.
12.
Ibid., 153.
13.
Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (University Park: State University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 209.
14.
Richard Friedman, “Michael Oakeshott and the Elusive Identity of the Rule of Law,” in The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott, ed. Corey Abel and Timothy Fuller (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), 176.
15.
Oakeshott, On History, 159.
16.
John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 27–29.
17.
Michael Oakeshott, “Talking Politics,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays: new and expanded edition, ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), 450.
18.
Ibid., 449.
19.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 88.
20.
Ibid., 87.
21.
Michael Oakeshott, “On Misunderstanding Human Conduct: A Reply to My Critics,” Political Theory 4, no. 3 (August 1976): 362.
22.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 241.
23.
Ibid., 70. See Elizabeth Campbell Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 118.
24.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 242 n. 1.
25.
Michael Oakeshott, “Education: The Engagement and Its Frustration,” in The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 99.
26.
Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 23.
27.
The distinction is George Santayana’s. Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 23.
28.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 84.
29.
Nardin, Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, 66.
30.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” in Rationalism in Politics, 489.
31.
Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 2.
32.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Tower of Babel,” in Rationalism in Politics, 479.
33.
Nardin, Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, 156.
34.
Ian Tregenza, “Skepticism and Tradition: the Religious Imagination of Michael Oakeshott,” in The Meaning of Michael Oakeshott’s Conservatism, ed. Corey Abel (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010), 13.
35.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity,” in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 67.
36.
Michael Oakeshott, Notebooks, 1922–86, Selected Writings, Volume VI, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2014), 426.
37.
Michael Oakeshott, “Religion and the World,” in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, 31, 34.
38.
Patrick Riley, “Michael Oakeshott, Philosopher of Individuality,” The Review of Politics 54, no. 4 (1992): 664.
39.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 324.
40.
Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 292.
41.
Michael Oakeshott, “Learning and Teaching,” in The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 56.
42.
Steven B. Smith, “Practical life and the critique of Rationalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott, ed. Efraim Podoksik (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 149.
43.
Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 321.
44.
Ibid., 310–311 n.
45.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 27.
46.
Allan Bloom, “Interpretative Essay,” in The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 322.
47.
See Wendell John Coats, Jr. “Michael Oakeshott as Philosopher of ‘the Creative’,” The Place of Michael Oakeshott in Contemporary Western and Non-Western Thought, ed. Noël O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2017).
48.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 30.
49.
Michael Oakeshott, “Leviathan: a Myth,” in Hobbes on Civil Association, 159–160.
50.
Oakeshott, “Voice of Poetry,” 541.
51.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 27–30.
52.
Josiah Lee Auspitz, “Individuality, Civility, and Theory: The Philosophical Imagination of Michael Oakeshott,” Political Theory 4, no. 3 (August 1976): 288.
53.
Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 6.
54.
See David Boucher, “Michael Oakeshott in the context of British Idealism,” in Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott, 268.
55.
Stuart Isaacs, The Politics and Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3.
56.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 240.
57.
Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” 18–19.
58.
Jan-Werner Müller, “Re-imagining Leviathan: Schmitt and Oakeshott on Hobbes and the problem of political order,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13, nos. 2–3 (2010): 326.
59.
Wendell John Coats, Jr., Oakeshott and His Contemporaries: Montaigne, St. Augustine, Hegel, Et al (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2000), 44–45.
60.
Paul Franco, The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 6, 159.
61.
Ibid., 209.
62.
Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” 7–8.
63.
Michael Oakeshott, “Dr. Leo Strauss on Hobbes,” in Hobbes on Civil Association, 157–158.
64.
Franco, Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, 87, 206–210.
65.
Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” 67.
66.
Franco, Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, 192.
67.
Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 160.
68.
Ibid., 157.
69.
Ibid., 160.
70.
Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” 66.
71.
Ludwig Siep, “The Struggle for Recognition: Hegel’s Dispute with Hobbes in the Jena Writings,” in Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts and Commentary, ed. John O’Neill (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 284.
72.
Judith Shklar, “Purposes and Procedures,” Times Literary Supplement, 12 September 1975: 1018.
73.
Oakeshott, “On Misunderstanding Human Conduct,” 366.
74.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 454.
75.
Nardin, Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, 190.
76.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 73 n. 1, 85.
77.
Oakeshott, “Tower of Babel,” 487.
78.
Coats, Oakeshott and His Contemporaries, 32, 35.
79.
Oakeshott, “Leviathan: a Myth,” 161.
80.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 324.
81.
Glenn Worthington, “Michael Oakeshott and the City of God,” Political Theory 28, no. 3 (June 2000): 377.
82.
Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative,” in Rationalism in Politics, 410.
83.
Corey Abel, “Oakeshott’s Wise Defense: Christianity as a Civilization,” in The Meaning of Michael Oakeshott’s Conservatism, 25.
84.
Ibid., 27 ff.
85.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 85 n.
86.
Coats, Oakeshott and His Contemporaries, 30.
87.
Robert Grant, review of Notebooks 1922–86, by Michael Oakeshott, History of Political Thought 36, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 799.
88.
See William Blattner, “Authenticity and Resoluteness,” The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. Mark A. Wrathall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 331 n. 21.
89.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 83.
90.
Worthington, “Michael Oakeshott and the City of God,” 391–392.
91.
Ibid., 394.
92.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 81.
93.
Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 44.
94.
Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 112.
95.
Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 228.
96.
Harold Bloom, Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 24. Cf. Oakeshott, “Religion and the World,” 33.

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Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, Australia
David McIlwain

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McIlwain, D. (2019). Michael Oakeshott and Augustinianism After Hobbes and Hegel. In: Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13381-8_9

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13381-8_9
Published: 15 March 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-13380-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-13381-8
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