The Skeptic's Oakeshott
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The Skeptic’s Oakeshott Steven Gerencser Macmillan, Basingstoke 2000, viii + 214pp. ISBN: 0 333 91386 8. Contemporary Political Theory (2003) 2, 389–391. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300087
There are two central strands of arguments in this book. The first claim is that Oakeshott’s early idealism was modified and to some extent abandoned in his later works; the second is that the sceptical strain in his thought (which earlier existed in awkward juxtaposition with the constructive elements of absolute idealism) became more dominant not only in his conception of philosophy but also in his understanding of politics and civil association. In particular, as a consequence of scholarly interaction with the work of Hobbes (in which he found in part what he was already predisposed to find) Oakeshott emerged in the 1940s as a sceptic in relation to politics and philosophy. Accordingly (and Gerencser shows this convincingly), Oakeshott’s reading of Hobbes is somewhat contentious in certain points of detail, and most contentious, it would seem, at precisely those points where Oakeshott wanted Hobbes to be a proto-proponent of his own later claims concerning civil association and authority. The chapters on Oakeshott’s reading of Hobbes are the strongest and most convincing in the book. The weakest chapters, to my mind, are those devoted to the presence and absence of idealism in Oakeshott’s philosophy. This is not only because I remain to be fully convinced that Oakeshott jettisoned his earlier idealist position, but also because Gerencser’s characterization of both idealism and of the philosophical background in the 1920s and 1930s leaves something to be desired. We have then, a book of two parts, each part containing a distinctive line of argument, but leaving open the question of the relation between the two parts. In other words, even if the first claim was true, does it have any necessary bearing on the second? I suggest that here we have an excellent book on Hobbes, Oakeshott, politics, civil association, authority and democracy concealed inside a book that overstretches its resources by attempting to fight a battle on two fronts. Experience and its Modes is clearly a work of idealism, published at a time when idealism was losing its grip as a dominant academic force. Its year of publication, 1933, although it also saw the appearance of Collingwood’s An Essay on Philosophical Method, also saw the founding of the journal Analysis. In my view, Gerencser is right to pay attention to Experience and its Modes; my objection is that he overstates the philosophical differences between this work and Oakeshott’s later philosophical position, and also that he to some extent mischaracterizes the nature of the idealism of the time, and hence also
Book Reviews
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Oakeshott’s idealism. He appears to be over-reliant on Anthony Quinton’s British Academy lecture an Absolute Idealism, while ignoring work by authors such as Joachim and Collingwood. The omission of Joachim is significant because he was not only the author of The Nature of Tr
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