Politics and philosophy are categorically different: addressing ends, the former seeks to create, preserve, and generally adapt as it can; the latter seeks to understand for its own sake, and cannot be reduced.
Rationalists insist ideology or technocracy must guide politics, and cannot expect to reach their predefined goals. To the Rationalist, there’s no value in mere existence – nothing should be unscrutinized. Reform is wastage – it’s better to start over – and change must be induced. The customary and traditional is wrongly seen as changeless. Drawing on Bacon and Descartes (Pascal having avoided Cartesian certainty with his doctrine of probability), they see technical knowledge as the only kind of practical, genuine knowledge. Oakeshott sees early history of the US as Rationalist: pioneers were given to self-confident experimentation upon abstract ideals at the expense of tradition; but he overlooks their predominance from the 1900s.
There is no science of society. Social custom and arrangements must be seen as precursors to politics, since there indicate how societies go about their business. It’s necessary to define and understand political knowledge and education in order to improve the caliber of politics. A community’s politics is no less individual than its language and must be pursued more lore or less equal proficiency. Rationalism has misapplied philosophical writings to politics. Resolution of a given matter lies in actual arrangements, not in the greater or less application of a theory or system. The successes of government lie in orderly, peaceable routines, not in manifesting religion or theory or philosophy – all searches for truth or perfection.
Politics is a proper subject of history not because of history’s intrinsic concern with past events but as it reveals detail of concrete application – how affairs were handled. Equally it’s important to understand what was said about past events for understanding of contemporary process. Political machinery is not so much apparatus fit in advance for a purpose but the manners of behavior which fail without context from which they came. Contra Mill, who held representative government proper to any society which reached a certain level of civilization, arrangements reveal agreed approaches to unknown results – not best practices. Political philosophy is not accretive, does not increase the likelihood of success, but is redolent of history, ability to espy good or bad precedents.
The historian is scientific in looking at matters not as they affect but as they are in themselves. Freeing oneself from influence of the past (i.e., ‘relevance’) is harder still – the not understanding the world in our present interests. Events are not ‘necessary and sufficient’ but only intelligible; there aren’t ‘origins’ which implies Whiggish, but only trends and causes.
Civilisation is a conversation of manifold activities: science, art, politics, etc. The way to learn a given endeavor (e.g., history) is not to study ‘historical method’ but particular aspects (e.g., civil war) to which method is a way to understand.
The characteristic of a profession or trade is knowledge of how to decide questions and problems, not a set of propositions. Consequently reason is using knowledge, not ascertaining the validity of propositions. In politics the doctrinaire is the man who falls back on knowledge of other activities while supposing such knowledge is independent of any activity. Concrete activity is knowing how to (morally) act; no action is ex ante rationale; it is rational only as to what has gone before. See also the legal standard for reasonable care, which depends on circumstances.
There are three kinds of education: school, vocational, and university. The study of politics has come to be vocational, using current idiom of explanation but not in the search for knowledge in a philosophic sense. Justice is divided into explanatory ‘texts’ making them prescriptive and thus vocational. Academic study is suitably only when activity is isolated and richly illuminated (e.g., government in France, but not China or Soviet Russia). Politics is very difficult to study because idiom takes over, converting from knowledge of what’s being (been) done to ‘how it’s done’.
Political discourse in modern Europe is distinguished by clannish vocabulary: the beliefs behind such idiom are axioms for constructing polemic, but are unable to prove their premises, instead relying on ‘generally helds’. This condition stems from Plato and Rousseau but is a false process because it does not admit competing claims. More specific to Marx, explanatory ‘laws’ of social change cannot entail political deliberation for arriving at correct decisions, or even proofs of correct and incorrect. It is the great failure of the 20th century. Yet the project continues in social sciences, the study of social and political organizations and governments of various types. No recognition of ideal types can solve distinct matters; granting axiomatic status to opinions is vice. Worse, it discourages the only solution of matching conditions to the first principles of the state.
Contemporary Europe harbors opposing ‘moralities’ of individualism and socialist ‘mass man’, and so there are two understandings of government objectives. Society finds its purpose in continuity and its principle in consensus. One is free because pursuit of current ends does not deprive one of respect for precedent. Collectivism and individualism are true alternates – there can’t be both. Collectivist government cannot tolerate individual opportunity; paradoxically nor can it abide trade unionism. The freedom of England stems from avoiding the overwhelming concentration of power – man is free because he does have to sacrifice the present to an ‘incalculable future’ nor the future to a transitory present.
On Hobbes: Leviathan is the greatest English-language masterpiece in political thought! Every masterpiece draws a new vision of man’s predicament: Hobbes can be compared to Hegel in creating a political system, a civic philosophy that intends to conciliate politics with the material doctrine of the world. For Hobbes, philosophy is the mirror of reason: civic philosophy is civil reason (order). Reason is chiefly concerned with cause and effects; this is to exclude things eternal, final causes, things cause divinity, and so on – things that are not rationally explainable. The purpose is to determine conditional causes of given effects, or conditional effects of given causes. Thus three contrasts run through Hobbes: philosophy vs theology (reason vs faith), philosophy vs science (reason vs empiricism), and philosophy vs experience (reason vs sense). There is standing tension in Hobbes between science and philosophy: things as they appear conflict with the theory of knowledge. Locke and Kant are similar, in contrast with Bacon and Descartes.
Hobbes begins with sensations because we can be certain of them, and then reasons out to determine what must be. He pursues causes of things not their nature. Therefore his view lies in a conception of the nature of philosophic knowledge, not in a doctrine of the world.
The greatest liberty of civil subjects derives from silences of the law. No distinction can be held between revealed law and natural law. Hobbes commences not with natural law or right but land and obligation, law being the product of reason. He stems from the tradition of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas but decisively breaks in that the sovereign (or sovereign body) is not subject to laws but prioritizes reason of state. For Plato and Aristotle civic association falls short of the best life of contemplation; for Hobbes the best is not common will but release of wills into desire. His opposition to Aristotle is somewhat overstated but nonetheless the latter believe in teleology (ends) while Hobbes though human behavior random. The greatness of Hobbes lies in constructing a political theory reflecting the changes of the 15th and 16th-century theologians, who consider that will, imagination, and passion replaced divine reason.
Bentham exemplifies the philosophe, who is concerned with ignorance but does not admit perplexity (i.e., the unknown); ironically, he is credulous. Either one agrees or is foolish (science or superstition). Generally Bentham is critical of 18th-century rationalism for not extending reason but instead promoting dogma.