Michael Oakeshott
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Michael Joseph Oakeshott (11 December 1901–19 December 1990), who was born on this date in 1901.
Oakeshott is primarily remembered as a political philosopher, but in his final book On History (1983) he took up questions in the philosophy of history, and there are essays on the philosophy of history in the posthumously published volume What is History? and Other Essays. It should be noted that even Oakeshott’s first book, Experience and Its Modes (1933), he touched on the philosophy of history.
A couple of passages from Oakeshott’s posthumously published notes give an interesting glimpse of the man at work. Of Plato he said:
“Books II–VII of the Republic may be regarded as a philosophy of history. But it is in no sense an ‘historical’ account. And for this reason all account of the reaction from without, which plays so great a part in actual societies, is omitted.”
And of Hegel:
“Hegel’s philosophy of history is great history, but often poor philosophy. Hegel had that purely historical-literary interest in his work as well as the philosophical, & sometimes it gets the upper hand.”
Both of these passages represent views somewhat out of the mainstream of philosophy, and so highlight Oakeshott’s independence of mind. I know of no other philosopher who thought that Hegel’s philosophy of history was better history than it was philosophy.
Oakeshott held (as did Windelband, Rickert, Berlin, and many others) that history cannot be treated as the natural sciences, but rather has its own method, and that historical knowledge constitutes a distinctive form of knowledge. In Oakeshott’s terminology, history is a distinct mode of experience. Part III of Experience and Its Modes is concerned with historical experience. Here is a paragraph that gives some of the flavor of Oakeshott’s approach:
“…the view of history I have in mind may different considerably from the historian’s view of history, or (which is the same thing) history’s view of its own character. The view which the historian, as such, must take of history is an historical view; and if (and in so far as) the history of a thing falls short of its definition, his view of the character of history must fail to be satisfactory in experience. It history be not the concrete totality of experience, of which all forms of experience are mere modifications, wherever the historian is found considering the character of history, the fact that he is an historian, so far from giving special authority to his speculations, will render them suspect. It should not be assumed, then, that all views of the character of history must be confined to the historian’s view of its character. And it should not be supposed that any view of the character of history which different from history’s own view of its character, must therefore be false or inadequate.” (p. 88)
We find in this passage the idea of viewing history from outside, which is also found in the above quote about Plato. The possibility of an ahistorical account of history seems to fly in the face of Oakeshott’s denial of the possibility of scientific history that seeks laws of historical development, as one would naturally connect an ahistorical account of history with an account in terms of principles, but perhaps someone better versed in Oakeshott’s philosophy of history can point the way here.
In his essay “The Philosophy of History” (there are two essays by Oakeshott with this title, one from 1928 and one from 1948; what follows below is from the 1928 essay), Oakeshott gives a sketch of his reading of Spengler (in the 20s it was almost obligatory for philosophers of history to make some mention of Spengler), and then comments as follows:
“In this view of things there seem to me to be three entirely false assumptions. First, there is no single fact of history the nature and meaning of which is or can be finally settled. And in consequence the material to build our general laws is wanting. This can appear enigmatic or false to no historian, for he at least is aware of the immense difficulties which must be overcome before an historical question can be settled. But I refer here not to practical difficulties, but to a theoretical impossibility. History rests upon an inference from our own experience. When we are presented, as it were from the outside, with an historical ‘fact’, the question we ask is, Did it happen this way? (For to know that it happened without knowing in detail what ‘it’ is and how it happened, we should agree were barren knowledge.) And the final answer is possible only in terms of a coherent whole of history. From our theoretical standpoint then, no fact in history can be known in its full significance, exactly as it happened, unless all facts are known with a corresponding degree of fullness, and this is an obvious impossibility. The future influences the past; for it must not be forgotten that what we call ‘the past’ has no fixed and absolute existence but is simply our view of the past, a view seen in the light of a varying and growing experience. History requires distance; it is in the weak hands of ignorance rather than in the sensitive hands of knowledge that events cease to be malleable. To make such generalizations as Spengler’s is to make bricks without clay — no mean accomplishment. Secondly, these laws are not in point of fact abstract and universal (like those of physics) because they are concerned with transitory, essentially non-recurrent events. Laws that might be deduced about the growth and decay of Gothic architecture are concerned not with something which is general and permanent, but with something which is both individual and past. And thirdly, this philosophy of history ignores the most fundamental characteristic of facts as viewed historically — their individuality. For history, events are not instances of a law, they are unique facts, happening at a particular time and in a particular place; and it is their uniqueness, the fact that these events never happened before and can never happen again, which is significant. That ‘the French revolution produced Napoleon,’ is a unique historical fact. That ‘anarchy is followed by despotism,’ is a statement in general terms of the significance which this fact may contain. That ‘anarchy must invariably be followed by despotism,’ is a general law which no knowledge of history could ever warrant us to construct.”
Here again we find the motif of viewing history from the outside, “…we are presented, as it were from the outside, with an historical ‘fact’…” side-by-side with a critique of Spengler’s attempt to find laws in history.
Twenty years later, in his 1948 essay “The Philosophy of History,” the discussion of Spengler is entirely abandoned, and Oakeshott makes a tripartite distinction of the kinds of intellectual activity that have been called “philosophy of history,” rather than the usual distinction between speculative or critical (in Mandelbaum’s language, material or formal) philosophy of history. Oakeshott distinguishes, 1) discovering a principle, a pattern, or a plan in history (which we would usually call speculative; it seems to me like it would be worthwhile to distinguish among principles, patterns, and plans, but Oakeshott does not, as indeed most philosophers of history do not), 2) the critical study of historical methodology, which we would customarily call historiography, and 3) “…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.” This latter kind of inquiry largely overlaps with, but does not perfectly coincide, with what is usually called critical philosophy of history. It would be an interesting exercise (perhaps a good exercise to be assigned) to precisely distinguish what Oakeshott is getting at here from what is commonly understood by critical philosophy of history (or, as Mandelbaum would have it, formal philosophy of history).
Oakeshott makes this sensible observation in the 1948 paper:
“…it is no part of the function of this philosophy of history to give directions to the historian about how he shall think and write, the relation between the two is reciprocal. The philosopher, in this enquiry, uses the work of historians as at least part of his material; and the historian, in his own enquiry, may, perhaps, benefit from the philosophical criticism of some of his more general ideas — ideas such as cause and effect, growth and decay, development, change, progress, success and failure.”
I suspect that few philosophers of history would disagree with this.
Further Resources:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oakeshott
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/oakeshott/
https://archive.org/details/onhistoryotheres0000oake
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