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2019 | Buch

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Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss

The Politics of Renaissance and Enlightenment

verfasst von: David McIlwain

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : Recovering Political Philosophy

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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This book compares the thought of Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss, bringing Oakeshott’s desire for a renaissance of poetic individuality into dialogue with Strauss’s recovery of the universality of philosophical enlightenment. Starting from the conventional understanding of these thinkers as important voices of twentieth-century conservatism, McIlwain traces their deeper and more radical commitments to the highpoints of human achievement and their shared concerns with the fate of traditional inheritances in modernity, the role and meaning of history, the intention and meaning of political philosophy, and the problem of politics and religion. The book culminates in an articulation of the positions of Oakeshott and Strauss as part of the quarrel of poetry and philosophy, revealing the ongoing implications of their thinking in terms of the profound spiritual and political questions raised by modern thinkers such as Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger and leading back to foundational figures of Western civilization including St. Augustine and Socrates.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Introduction

Abstract

Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss are often discussed together in terms of their political conservatism. While recognizing the basis of this approach, McIlwain argues that Oakeshott and Strauss are better understood as committed to a politics of renaissance and enlightenment, respectively. For Oakeshott renaissance signified the triumph of the individual through the freedom of creativity and imagination. Oakeshott’s worldview had its origins in the “Judaic” tradition of free and contingent creation ex nihilo. For Strauss enlightenment meant the investigation of the universal problems in perpetuating the philosophical way of life amid the competing claims and demands of religion and politics. Strauss’s “Greek” worldview was oriented toward a permanent cosmos as fundamental to rationalism. In developing these opposing poles each envisioned the revitalization of Western civilization.

David McIlwain

Chapter 2. Political Moderation and Practical Conservatism

Abstract

McIlwain examines the conventional identification of Leo Strauss and Michael Oakeshott as conservatives and demonstrates the superficiality of characterizations of them as political reactionaries. This involves a critique of Perry Anderson’s grouping of Strauss and Oakeshott with Carl Schmitt as katechon or “restrainers” of the “end times,” which Anderson argues Schmitt interpreted as democratic or proletarian sovereignty. McIlwain reveals instead that Oakeshott and Strauss were aware of the tension between the radicalness of theory and the moderation that is appropriate in practical life. Understanding this relationship in terms of the achievements of “German” theory and “British” practice, Oakeshott and Strauss attempted to avoid the political extremes of fascism and Nazism while remaining aware of the necessity of addressing the very real shortcomings of liberal modernity.

David McIlwain

Chapter 3. Liberal Education and Classical Republicanism

Abstract

McIlwain compares the ideas of Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss on liberal education, a topic which was of great importance to both thinkers. In examining their reasons for insisting on the elevated role of the university, McIlwain defends Oakeshott and Strauss from charges of social elitism and highlights the relevance of liberal education in underpinning political moderation. This involves the comparison of Oakeshott’s “conversation of mankind” and Strauss’s dialogue of the great minds. Oakeshott and Strauss’s emphasis on the intrinsic value of liberal education is also interpreted alongside their commitment to classical republicanism. The chapter also considers the effects of training and mobilization on Oakeshott’s pessimism about the universities and reflects on the figures of Heidegger and Churchill in elucidating Strauss’s hopes for the liberally educated.

David McIlwain

Chapter 4. Historical Interpretation and Philosophical Intention

Abstract

The problem of history was central to the thinking of Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. In this chapter McIlwain investigates the positions of both thinkers on the questions of historicism and authorial intention in the history and tradition of political thought. Tracing these concerns to their early intellectual interests in the fate of their religious inheritances amid the heightened historical consciousness of modernity, McIlwain reveals how Oakeshott and Strauss came to contrasting understandings of the historical and practical character of political thought while seeking to preserve the “eternal” aspect of philosophy from the thoroughgoing historicism of modern thinkers such as Collingwood and Heidegger. The chapter concludes in examining Strauss’s hermeneutic principle of esotericism and Oakeshott’s endorsement of a similar principle in interpreting the philosophy of Hobbes.

David McIlwain

Chapter 5. The Philosophical Intention and Legacy of Hobbes

Abstract

Michael Oakeshott’s engagement with Leo Strauss on Hobbes is known to be an important part of Oakeshott’s development as a thinker, but the extent to which the Hobbes chapter of Strauss’s Natural Right and History forms a response to Oakeshott’s “Introduction to Leviathan” is less well known. McIlwain argues that when taken with Oakeshott’s rejoinder in “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes” this constitutes the rudiments of a dialogue. Participating in the scholarly return to Hobbes in the 1930s, both thinkers approached Hobbes’s thought on moral grounds. The chapter examines and compares the divergent interpretations in which Strauss detected the origins of modern technological mindset in Hobbes while Oakeshott presented Hobbes as securing the non-substantive civil autonomy for a Renaissance individuality.

David McIlwain

Chapter 6. Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève on Tyranny and Theory

Abstract

The debate between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève in On Tyranny is most often approached in terms of the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns—Strauss having sought a philosophical opponent capable of making a consistent and intransigent case for modern thought against which his revival of Socratic political philosophy might appear in the greatest clarity. However, McIlwain argues that the debate can also be understood in terms of Strauss and Kojève’s shared interest in Heidegger’s interpretation of the “Call of Conscience” and its connection with the state of nature as the starting point for the moral and political thought of Hobbes and Hegel. This approach better reveals the stark differences between Strauss and Kojève on the relationship of the philosopher to political history.

David McIlwain

Chapter 7. Michael Oakeshott and Alexandre Kojève on Play and Practice

Abstract

Leo Strauss’s discussion of the role of death in the political philosophy of Hobbes informed Michael Oakeshott’s understanding of what he called “life from the standpoint of death.” Strauss had explained to friends that his work on Hobbes had been conceived with an emphasis on the “deep connection” between Hobbes and Hegel, an aspect of his study which was sharpened by discussions with Alexandre Kojève. This implies the indirect influence of Kojève on Oakeshott and McIlwain uses this context to construct a unique comparison of Kojève and Oakeshott, clarifying the premodern and religious elements in Oakeshott’s description of a poetic self in setting this against Kojève’s universal and homogeneous state. The comparison is developed in terms of Kojève’s Japanese “snob” and Oakeshott’s mode of poetry.

David McIlwain

Chapter 8. Leo Strauss and Socratism After Nietzsche and Heidegger

Abstract

This chapter examines the little heralded but profound philosophical insights that Leo Strauss achieved in the wake of Heidegger’s vision of the arrival of a global technological society as the result of the failure of Nietzsche’s call for a new Western nobility. Separating Nietzsche and Heidegger from their polemical elevation of courage against Hobbesian fear of death, Strauss emphasized their commitment to the higher nobility of philosophy. McIlwain reveals how Strauss developed his own contributions to philosophy in contemplating Nietzsche and Heidegger’s insights into the problem of thinking and the origin and ultimate ground of Western rationalism. This would involve a renewed confrontation with the poetic conception of the gods and a reencounter with the Bible understood trans-culturally as “the East within us, Western men.”

David McIlwain

Chapter 9. Michael Oakeshott and Augustinianism After Hobbes and Hegel

Abstract

This chapter elucidates the subtle relationship between Michael Oakeshott’s skeptical political theory of a neutral civil authority and his rich conception of poetic individuality, offering a detailed investigation of how Oakeshott moved between mythology and political theory in combining the thought of Hobbes and Augustine. McIlwain argues that Oakeshott used these two thinkers to separate the human will from the fatalism implied by a completely rational account of experience and then to “eternalize” Hegel at the historical stage of the pax Romana. Oakeshott’s adherence to a modern philosophical monism is thus revealed to be elevated by an earthly and poetic Augustinianism that avoids both “Gnostic” historical necessity and supernatural dualism. Oakeshott’s theory is then described in terms of the almost “religious” intensity of self-completion.

David McIlwain

Chapter 10. Conclusion

Abstract

McIlwain concludes his comparison between the thought of Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss by examining the two thinkers in terms of the quarrel of poetry and philosophy, drawing out the connections between the themes of religious and national inheritances, history, and the problem of theory and practice. The nub of contention comes to center on the question of the passions and whether they are guided and elevated by reason as eros (as Strauss argued) or require the autonomy of will and artifice to reach their full virtuosity (Oakeshott’s position). This leads to a final confrontation with “the problem of Socrates” involving an engagement with the tragic worldview of Nietzsche and its relation to the comedy of Aristophanes and the character of Don Quixote.

David McIlwain

Backmatter

Titel: Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss
verfasst von: David McIlwain
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-13381-8
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-13380-1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13381-8