Michael Oakeshott’s Cold War Liberalism

Increasingly recognized as a twentieth-century thinker of the first rank, Michael Oakeshott nevertheless still resists easy categorization. And this is so despite the fact that he has long been recognized as a notable figure in several related intellectual disciplines including the history of ideas, the philosophy of history, and—especially—political philosophy. Indeed, until recently, Oakeshott has often been labelled as a thinker sui generis, difficult to classify and to come to terms with, and even sometimes dismissed as an uncompromising eccentric. Why is this?

Michael Oakeshott might seem at first glance to have little to say about totalitarianism and therefore to be an unlikely contributor to either the theory or the practice of Cold War liberalism. The word does not feature in any significant sense in his very extensive writings. If he noted the term totalitarian at all he would have mentally classed it with all those other words like nation-state and popular sovereignty that litter modern political discourse and in his view are best avoided by serious students of politics. Such ideas are derived from rationalist political doctrines and therefore belong to ideological politics. An ideology is an “abstract principle or set of related abstract principles which has been independently premeditated.”¹ Oakeshott believed that ideologies confuse more than they elucidate because they are based on a very superficial view of what politics is about, and prevent clear thinking about its nature.

When people in East Asia talk about Cold War liberalism, they are more likely to think of Berlin, Popper, Aron, and, in particular, Hayek than of Michael Oakeshott. In the Chinese-speaking world, for example, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was translated in the mid-1950s and his Constitution of Liberty has been available in Chinese since the early 1970s. In contrast, Oakeshott’s most famous essays, collected in 1962 as Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, were translated into Chinese and made available in China only in 2004 by Zhang Rulun, who discusses Oakeshott’s reception in China in Chapter 9 of this volume.¹

Michael Oakeshott was hardly a typical Cold War liberal.¹ Unlike Raymond Aron, for instance, he did not pen polemics against intellectuals who had fallen for the illusions of communism; unlike Isaiah Berlin or Karl Popper, he did not trace the pathologies of Communist political beliefs back to “precursors” in the history of ideas; and, unlike almost everyone else plausibly described as a Cold War liberal, he offered no sketch, let alone a comprehensive theory, of totalitarianism. He gave a talk on Radio Free Europe once and said everything a Cold War liberal would have said about the fallacies of believing in “historical laws”; he also insisted in an unpublished piece on the topic of conversation that he would never want to be a communist.² But that was it, on the face of it. No grand intellectual-cum-moral battles against “fellow travelers”; no participation in ventures like the Congress for Cultural Freedom; and certainly no attempt to play counselor to any Cold War foreign policy establishment.

Is Michael Oakeshott relevant in East Asia? Some scholars find rich potential for a cross-cultural dialogue between the East Asian philosophical tradition, especially Confucianism and Daoism, and Oakeshott’s “poetic thinking.”¹ Given Oakeshott’s interest in East Asian practical wisdom found in the teachings of Confucius and Zhuangzi, among others, this certainly is one way in which Oakeshott can be relevant in East Asia. But what about Oakeshott’s political theory, for which he is best known, despite some recent arguments against characterizing him as a “political” philosopher simpliciter?² Given that Oakeshott’s political theory has long been neglected even by Anglo-American political theorists, it is hardly surprising that it is less popular, if not completely unknown, in East Asian academia. Even those who have been exposed to Oakeshott’s self-contained, postulates-constituted political theory, most fully articulated in his major work, On Human Conduct, are often puzzled over what to make of it, not only because of its unorthodox style but, more importantly, because of its self-conscious defiance of efforts to categorize it as either conservative or liberal,³ which are the terms casually employed to describe East Asian—especially South Korean and Japanese—domestic politics.