Michael Oakeshott
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 122nd anniversary of the birth of Michael Oakeshott (11 December 1901–19 December 1990), who was born in London on this date in 1901.
Oakeshott was a prolific philosopher, with much of his work output being on political philosophy, but also with a substantial amount written on history and philosophy of history. Since I find it difficult to get a handle on Oakeshott’s conception of history (I haven’t read Oakeshott in other contexts, so I come to his work with shocking naïveté), I will begin with a summary from Preston King:
“…the salient features of Oakeshott’s philosophy of history are as follows. There is first and foremost the notion of history being entirely committed to the past (even if this is a commitment in and of — and implicitly to — some present activity). There is conjoined with this some notion of such commitment being ethically neutral (even if it is never clearly explained how the notion of complete commitment to a present pursuit can entirely escape some moral colour or evaluative overtone). There is, too, the suggestion that any understanding of the past can only be achieved through the pursuit of the unique, not the typical; that we must place our emphasis upon differences, not similarities.”
King calls Oakeshott an “historical particularist,” which I take to mean, at least in part, that Oakeshott falls on the ideographic side of the ideographic/nomothetic distinction, and this is implied in the above by the emphasis on the uniqueness of history. But King himself doesn’t mention this distinction, nor does he mention any of those prominent in the tradition — in the quoted paper there is no mention of Dilthey, Windelband, or Rickert — and King seems to mean something more than ideographic when he attributes particularism to Oakeshott. In the paragraph following the above King writes of Oakeshott:
“…he ‘paradoxically’ insists upon a commitment to the past rather than the present, assumes that comparison between ‘different’ periods is vicious or impossible, seeks to exclude generalisation from past to present and vice versa, assumes that avoiding contemporary issues is much the same as being objective, and demands (more or less in the manner of traditional empiricists) the accumulation of sheer detail as a means of reaching up to the heaven of historical truth. All of this is permeated by the assumption that to understand an historical event is to penetrate its context, to see it as distinct, to regard it as unique.”
There are at least six claims in the above paragraph, which no doubt overlap generously, but each of which can be taken independently as a thesis in the philosophy of history. The idea that distinct periods of history are incommensurable can be compared to Ranke’s claim that any period of history is equidistant from God and therefore must be taken on its own merits; this claim could be considered historicist, but King also attributes to Oakeshott the exclusion of generalization in history, which means that we cannot reason abstractly about history using general concepts, and therefore we cannot make predictions, which is the substance of Popper’s critique of historicism. Of course, we all know that there are countless definitions of historicism (as there are countless definitions of history). King mentions historicism only in the title of Popper’s book, and in comparing Popper and Oakeshott he writes:
“Popper, then, asserts with Oakeshott that history involves ‘the appreciation of the unique.’ But, unlike Oakeshott, he does not repudiate what he calls ‘causal explanation’ in history.”
According to King, then, Oakeshott goes farther than Popper in repudiating causal explanation in history. In Three Essays on History (included in On History, and Other Essays), II Historical Events, section 7, Oakeshott gives his argument against “the claim that the significant relationship between historical events sought in an historical enquiry must be a causal relationship.” Oakeshott identifies two kinds of ways in which historians attempt causal explanation:
“There are two distinct versions of this contention. In the first an historical enquiry is said to be an engagement to explain reported bygone occurrences or situations by understanding them as examples of the operation of universal ‘laws’ or regularities which it is the task of the enquiry to ascertain and formulate… The second version of this claim is more circumspect: it has nothing to say about an ‘historical process’ or about ‘laws’ of historical change or development. It is an undertaking, first, to spell out exactly the logical structure of causal explanation; and secondly, to sustain the thesis that an historical enquiry, as an engagement to establish a past composed of significantly related antecedent and subsequent events, must be an enquiry of this kind.”
We can see, implicit in this distinction between two kinds of causal explanation, an earlier distinction that appears in Three Essays on History, in part I “Present, Future and Past,” where Oakeshott distinguishes between “the notional grand total of all that has ever happened in the lives of human beings,” and, “a certain sort of enquiry into, and a certain sort of understanding of, some such passage of occurrences; the engagement and the conclusions of an historian.” This is the familiar distinction between past actuality and the record of past actuality that we have found in many philosophies of history, but Oakeshott seems to adapted this familiar distinction to causal explanation.
In Three Essays on History II, section 8, Oakeshott observes that “causal” has been used very loosely in history, meaning that his criticism of causal explanation does not necessarily apply to every historical claim of causal explanation, and then he goes on to identify comparison, correlation, and analogy as what is actually going on in history, rather than causal explanation. At the end of section II Oakeshott gives something of a summary to this argument, though it must be read in full to be appreciated:
“An historical event, then, has no necessary or essential character. It is a conflation of accessories which, here, have no exclusive characters but are the difference they made in a convergence of differences which compose a circumstantial historical identity. Such identities may differ in magnitude and in complexity, but they are alike in being the conclusions of enquiries and themselves answers to historical questions about the past which admit of no other kind of answer. An historical enquiry is not an explanatory exercise, nor is it a concern to solve a problem; it is an engagement to infer, to understand discursively and to imagine the character of an historical event. It begins in a present-past of survivals, and at each stage it is necessarily sustained only in terms of a reading of the circumstantial evidence it invokes. To seek the authentic utterance of a survival from the past, to anatomize a situation which has not survived, and to understand the character of an historical event which could not have survived, each are enquiries concerned to understand what has been somehow identified but the character of which is not yet understood. An historian is never in a position to look back from an already understood historical situation or event and to conclude what must have been its components or significant antecedents. And the conclusion of an historical enquiry cannot be confirmed or falsified by comparing it with the conclusions of any other kind of enquiry, and it cannot be tested against independent criteria of credibility — those of a current common sense or of a reading of so-called ‘human nature.’ As nothing here is necessary, so also nothing is impossible. Historical writings differ greatly in the perceptiveness they exhibit in the consideration of the circumstantial evidence they employ, in the quality of the imagination they display in the construction of an historical event, and in the idiosyncratic deviations of their authors from this engagement, but somewhere in every genuine historical enquiry there is an undertaking of this sort, and this is what constitutes it an historical enquiry.”
This is refreshingly distinct from the usual run of ideographic formulations of history, and it implies a refreshingly distinct formulation of the philosophy of history, as the discipline that would philosophically examine this distinctive conception of history. The above comes from late in Oakeshott’s life, but we can see in his earlier writings that he was working toward a distinctive conception of history, and therefore a distinctive conception of philosophy of history. Oakeshott’s posthumously published “Philosophy of History” (from around 1928) is mostly a discussion of Spengler and Schlegel, though the conception of history on which this converges bears some similarity to Huizinga’s definition of history, though now transposed from history to philosophy of history. Huizinga wrote that history is “an intellectual form for understanding the world” while Oakeshott here writes that for the philosopher of history, history, “is one among a number of attitudes which the mind is capable of adopting towards the objective world,” which is precisely what one would expect from a philosopher who has written a book titled Experience and its Modes. Here is from the 1928 essay:
“The world of the historian is a world of half-true, half-understood facts and happenings out of which he must make up some kind of rational whole. In ordinary language his object is fact. The historian, as such, does not think about history, he is not self-conscious, his object is always something other than his own historical thinking, for, were this not so, he would be simultaneously engaged with two totally different objects of interest. The philosopher, on the other hand, has a different object: and, in so far as he comes into contact with the historian, his object may be said to be history itself. History for him is one among a number of attitudes which the mind is capable of adopting towards the objective world; and the philosophy of history, we may suppose, consists in reflexion about the way in which the historian approaches his object, in some sort of consideration of the relation of the historian to the fact. If this be so we have gained at least one important point: we have found (have we not?) a study which, while it has something to do with history, is not itself history and should not be confused with history. This is where the other kinds of philosophy of history went wrong. Instead of making history itself the object of study, it tried to study the same object as history — the happenings of our world — and so, where it did not lapse into nonsense, became finally indistinguishable from history itself.”
In other areas of his thought, Oakeshott can be relative conventional. For example, in another “Philosophy of History” essay, from twenty years later (1948), prepared for a broadcast talk, distinguishes three intellectual exercises that have all gone by “philosophy of history,” which are 1) “the study of the course of past events in an attempt to detect some general principle or principles which would make the whole thing hang together,” 2) “a study of… the problems and methods of historical research, with what may be called methodology,” and 3) an inquiry into “the nature and presuppositions of this enquiry called ‘history’. And the aim of the study is to reach some conclusions about the nature of historical truth and the validity of historical knowledge.” We will recognize this tripartite distinction as a distinction among speculative philosophy of history, historiography, and analytical philosophy of history. We usually encounter a distinction only between speculative and analytical philosophy of history, but there is a more philosophical form of historiography that could also count as a form of philosophy of history.
It is worth noting that Oakeshott can take familiar and conventional ideas and transform them into something unexpected, as we saw above in his use of the distinction between past actuality and the record of past actuality. Thus Oakeshott could similarly make creative use — or someone working from Oakeshott’s philosophical template could make creative use — of this familiar distinction between speculative and analytical philosophy of history.
Further Resources
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King, P. (1981). Michael Oakeshott and historical particularism. Politics, 16(1), 85–102. doi:10.1080/00323268108401789
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00323268108401789
