Oakeshott's Porcupines: Oakeshott on Civility
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Oakeshott’s Porcupines: Oakeshott on Civility Peter Johnson Department of Philosophy, University of Southampton, Avenue Campus, Southampton SO17 1BF, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
In this paper, I examine Oakeshott’s account of civility by drawing on the porcupine metaphor that Oakeshott borrows from Schopenhauer. I explain why Oakeshott thinks that civility is best understood as a moral practice, one which has a special significance for politics. I outline the conceptual differences between civility understood as a small virtue and as an attribute of the civil condition. Three major difficulties in Oakeshott’s treatment are raised. The first concerns his view that ‘civil’ is an adverbial qualifier; the second concerns the relation between civility in its moral and its political senses, and the third is about the relation between civility and justice. While recognizing what is distinctive about Oakeshott’s account, I indicate reservations about his discussion through a series of comparisons with Schopenhauer, and I conclude that, on their own terms, neither philosopher is able to solve the problem the porcupines set for them. Contemporary Political Theory (2007) 6, 312–329. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300274 Keywords: civility; Oakeshott; Schopenhauer; law; justice; political philosophy
Civility can be described as cutting across the boundaries between ethics and political philosophy. We can think of it as a virtue that requires that others be treated with consideration and respect and also as a procedural good that excludes arbitrariness and unjustified partiality. These two senses of civility have often caught the attention of philosophers. It has been understood as ‘virtue manifesting itself in small things’ (Kant, 1930, 198), and as the key concept of the state as modern liberalism understands it. In this paper, my aim is to examine these two senses of civility in the context of Michael Oakeshott’s political philosophy. Oakeshott’s main concern is with civility understood as specifying the conditions that individuals subscribe to in a civil association, but it is not the only sense of civility that can be drawn from his argument, nor, I shall claim, is it the only sense of civility that his argument needs. To support this view, I will draw on the work done by the porcupine metaphor that Oakeshott borrows from Schopenhauer, and which he deliberately broadens. Oakeshott values Schopenhauer’s metaphor as a succinct way of expressing his theory of civil association. I shall claim, first, that Oakeshott’s porcupine individuals need an understanding of manners as
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much as Schopenhauer’s, and, second, that the account of manners that we can reconstruct Oakeshott as offering is, while ingenious, not ingenious enough (good general discussions of the aspects of Oakeshott that concern me can be found in Gerencser (2000), Boucher (2001) and Nardin (2001)). Oakeshott’s porcupines (Oakeshott, 1991, 460) are not, of course, originally Oakeshott’s but Schopenhauer’s, and their first app
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