Essays on Church, State, and Politics (Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics)
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Contents:
A Christian Case for Religious Liberty
Hayward in Schultz ed. An important issue that connects the conservatism of Hume, Burke, Sidgwick is what people have reason to expect over time. Suppose one holds that justice requires X , but that people have long been doing Y , which is incompatible with X , and have entered into life-plans that assume that X is how things are.
If one tries to make society more just by preventing people doing Y , that in itself is an unjust action. But in our actual imperfect world. Every reform of an imperfect practice or institution is likely to be unfair to someone …To change the rules in the middle of the game, even when those rules were not altogether fair, will disappoint the honest expectations of those whose prior commitments and life plans were made in genuine reliance on the…old rules. The propriety of changing the rules in a given case depends upon inter alia the degree of unfairness of the old rules and the extent and degree of the reliance placed upon them…we must weigh quite legitimate incompatible claims against each other in circumstances such that whichever judgment is reached it will be unfair to someone or other Feinberg Michael Oakeshott —90 was the last major exponent of the Idealist tradition, which enjoyed a period of eminence in Anglophone philosophy in the later 19 th and early 20 th century.
He has been regarded as a liberal Franco , while others claim him for the afore-mentioned maverick right Anderson 7. But Oakeshott is generally regarded as the most important modern conservative.
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Oakeshott He contrasted a state that has an economy, with a state effectively reduced to an economy, and bemoaned the domination of politics by the pursuit of economic growth as opposed to the good life. For Oakeshott, human knowledge is not the mother of practice, but only its stepchild…an exfoliation from [practices] that we have inherited…When we theorise our practices, we are discerning coherences within them, not imposing form without any set of abstract principles. Gray , Other Internet Resources. In his book of essays Rationalism in Politics , Oakeshott is concerned with how the rationalist conception of knowledge has operated to the detriment of practice.
This conception of knowledge holds that all genuine knowledge can be expressed entirely in propositional terms, in a theoretical system, or a set of rules or maxims. Oakeshott holds that in the modern world, the resulting instrumental rationality has penetrated inappropriate areas such as law, education and the arts—his thought thus interestingly parallels that of Critical Theorists such as Adorno, and also Heidegger.
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Means-end thinking concerning the state is particularly inappropriate, as we have no choice but to belong to it, Oakeshott maintains. Politics is not the science of setting up a permanently impregnable society, it is the art of knowing where to go next in the exploration of an already existing traditional kind of society.
Ideologists make everything political, but politics is only a part of human life, he holds. For Oakeshott, civil associations, are fundamental to modern, free democracies, and opposed to the modern interventionist state. Enterprise associations, in contrast, are defined by a common purpose; society is not one of them.
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Politics, for Oakeshott, belongs to the mode of practice, along with religion and morality; the two other modes are science and history. We again see that conservatism, although a practical standpoint that appeals to experience, does not rest on philosophical empiricism.
Poem Sampler. A prominent example of a monarch who took the Enlightenment project seriously was Joseph II of Austria , who ruled from to and implemented a wide array of radical reforms, such as the complete abolition of serfdom , the imposition of equal taxation policies between the aristocracy and the peasantry , the institution of religious toleration , including equal civil rights for Jews and the suppression of Catholic religious authority throughout his empire, creating a more secular nation. The Law of Nations by Emerich de Vattel. It was said to be Egypt's most popular and influential political party for a period in the s and 30s. If the God of abolitionists was a benevolent deity, he was also a God of justice who would punish unrepentant sinners.
Oakeshott is a Burkean particularist sceptic, for whom politics concerns people developing ways of living together in light of their history and traditions, not driven by universal extrinsic goals such as equality or elimination of poverty:. 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.
The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel… When the mechanic has to mend a watch, he lets the wheels run out, but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions. Aesthetic Education , Letter 3. However, Gamble adds, that disposition gains substance from its connection with national ways of life and traditions:. For Oakeshott, the past conceived in this way is intensely liberating because it is a repository of a wealth of practical knowledge, which is needed to live the good life.
Gamble For him, conversation is the model of education. In a position reminiscent of J.
Unlike many non-Millian liberals, however, Oakeshott does not base his requirement of limited government in an abstract theory of human nature, and abstract rights. Other notable 20 th century conservative thinkers include historian Maurice Cowling and philosopher Anthony Quinton.
Probably the leading living thinker is Roger Scruton, who bases conservatism on three concepts: authority, allegiance and tradition Scruton He rejects post-Hobbesian contractualism, which presupposes. It is only somewhat Hegelian, because for Burkean conservatives, history lacks the moral or spiritual direction that Hegel discerned; there is no moral or spiritual progress, and people think collectively toward a common goal only during a crisis such as war.
As we saw, established power that originates in revolution poses a problem for conservatism. Non-relativistic conservatives 1. Relativistic conservatives, in contrast, might accept these systems. On his view, tradition is inescapable, and societies rather rigid. True conservatism is a decidedly English doctrine with little appeal…in other countries [because] only English and hence British institutions have ever been decent enough to allow a decent [person] to be conservative.
Graham —9. As conservatives such as Burke supported the Revolution, so they should support the non-violent uprisings of MacIntyre, We saw that Burke regarded tradition and individual reason as contradictory principles, but may have endorsed a notion of collective reason Beveridge and Turnbull Conservatives would reply that Burke does stress the importance of incremental change, while Oakeshott, like MacIntyre, has an interrogative attitude to tradition.
Moreover, the communitarian opposition to liberal values is limited, and does not extend to advocacy of religious intolerance and homogeneity or patriarchal authority see Taylor ; Waldron —though neither does the anti-liberalism of Burkean conservatives. A further consideration is that traditional methods may not always yield the most practical responses Scott Millian liberalism is less subject to the conservative charge of rationalism. As Gamble puts it,. Oakeshott rejects the universal claims of liberalism, because he is only interested in claims that are grounded in English political experience.
Bentham and—on some views—Burke seem to conceive only of legal rights; but if one can make sense of moral obligation, one can make sense of abstract rights.
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Some writers on the left find value in conservatism. Minogue holds that. As Kant wrote,. But as they are ought to read as we have made them by unjust coercion, by treacherous designs which the government is in a good position to carry out. Kant Neiman —9. Men make their own history, but [not] under circumstances chosen by themselves…The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Marx While Lenin aimed to impose a socialist blueprint through a vanguard party of specialists, for his Marxist critics Luxemburg and Kollontai, revolutionary tasks are unknowable in advance:. Given the uncertainty of the endeavour, a plurality of experiments and initiatives will best reveal which lines of attack are fruitful…[and produce] a creative, conscious…and empowered working class. Scott —9. Lord Hugh Cecil postulates within modern conservatism what he calls innate conservatism: a psychological characteristic found in all people to some degree Cecil For C.
D Broad, it has two sides:. The more worthy side [rational scepticism] [says] that social problems are so very complex that there is always a strong probability that some factor has been overlooked in any scheme of change…The less respectable side [mental inertia] is the dislike of novelty as such.
Rational scepticism, as a motive for rejecting a scheme that offers to remove admitted evils, involves two applications of probability. The first is…that social affairs are so complex that it is very improbable that all the effects of a given social change have been foreseen. But…we must have some ground for judging further that the unforeseen effects are more likely to be bad than good…this judgment cannot rest on the known nature of the effects of this particular measure [but only] on some general proposition, such as: It is more probable that the unforeseen effects of any social change will be bad than that they will be good.
Broad Broad is alluding to the fact that every philosophical standpoint must confront the problem of how to treat its own defining claims, by its own lights. Conservatism seems unduly pessimistic about the possibility of individual, explicit knowledge of society, therefore. There are some things about society that we can come to know—and government economic policy, for instance, seems justifiably dedicated to finding them out. Conservatives must concede that radical change is sometimes acceptable; some major changes, for instance votes for women, are good.
These must be prepared for—as they were in Britain in , compared with, say, —and preparing for change makes it less radical. What conservatives will insist is it that revolutionary change is unacceptable.
William Wordsworth
Especially since the advent of green politics, there have been conservatives advocates for ecological conservation. A less noticed parallel is that between the opposition of cultural conservation and modernism, and that of conservatism and revolutionary Jacobinism Cohen , Other Internet Resources.
Conservatives would criticise both developments. Leading modernist poet T. Eliot — was also an important conservative thinker, and so occupies an ambivalent position. In contrast, the classical repertoire of Western art music is open and flexible, operating—when circumstances are propitious—as a living presence in contemporary culture.
On a less exalted aesthetic level, the tuxedo is a living sartorial classic in this sense.