A Companion to Michael Oakeshott

Chapter 4: Michael Oakeshott’s Philosophy of History

4 michael oakeshott’s philosophy of history Geoffrey Thomas “Determinatio negatio est,” says Spinoza: to specify the nature of anything is also illuminatingly to say what it is not.1 This remark, whatever its general force, applies exactly to Michael Oakeshott’s philosophy of history. Oakeshott is a polemicist, a prince of skeptics, throughout his writings on the nature of history. To be sure, his position can be characterized positively: he is a constructionist . He holds that the historical past is an inferential construction from present experience. So, clearly enough, here’s the first negative: Oakeshott rejects any idea of the reality of the past. The past does not exist; if it did, the historian would not need to construct it inferentially or in any other way. It would just be there, open to investigation. The nonreality of the past is a major negative theme. Another of Oakeshott ’s principal themes, that of the autonomy of history, also carries heavy negative implications. Oakeshott has a strong sense of the autonomy of history . Historical inquiry has its own internal impetus. It defines its own problems , poses its own questions, and has sole authority in regard to its methods. Its practitioners also decide who is a good or competent historian. Oakeshott’s insistence on autonomy is not accompanied by very much if anything of a methodology of history as a specific craft of inquiry. But it does carry some punchy negatives. One of these is a rejection of scientific categories from historical explanation. More precisely, Oakeshott will have nothing to do with causal explanation in history. The notion of cause is a mistaken intrusion— an outside interference—from the scientific realm. Nor is science the only source of irrelevant categories. The realm of practice sends its saboteurs into historical inquiry, and the price of history is eternal vigilance against them. Practice obtrudes its unwelcome attentions in three ways: one, by seeking to use history as a repository of practical wisdom, as a guide through analogies and parallels to the current world; two, by moral judgment on historical 96 the conversation of mankind phenomena; and three, by false teleology, projecting ends, goals, processes as inherent in the course of historical events. It is hardly too much to say that Oakeshott’s positive theory of history is a coda to the rehearsal of these errors: the errors of assuming the reality of the past, applying the category of causation to historical inquiry, and allowing the intrusion of practical considerations into the work of the historian. In his own terms Oakeshott is concerned with the “philosophy of history” in the sense of an inquiry “about the nature of historical truth and the validity of historical knowledge” (WIH, 203). He is not occupied with the methodology of historical research (e.g., how to decide whether there are too many or two few word dividers on a putative Ugarit tablet) or with speculative delineations of great historical patterns such as we find in Saint Augustine’s The City of God, in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, or in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.2 texts and continuity “What did he say?” “Did it change?” “Where were his views expressed?” I take these natural questions in order. What Oakeshott said about history—his canonical philosophical view about the nature of historical inquiry—can be summed up in four theses: (1) the past does not exist, only the present; (2) only experience exists; (3) the historical past is an inferential construction from experience; (4) historical inquiry is autonomous, not a part of or ancillary to either science or practice. These theses are a framework; the framework will be filled in later. But is there simply “a” framework, a fixed set of theses? Or did these theses emerge from earlier, less clearly defined or more tentative ideas, and did Oakeshott ever significantly qualify them? Thus we raise the developmental issue. Since Oakeshott’s writings on history extend from the 1920s to the 1980s, the developmental issue presses quite sharply. So, simply put: how much continuity is there between the 1920s writings published in What Is History?, Experience and Its Modes, “The Activity of Being an Historian,” the reflections relevant to historical inquiry in On Human Conduct, and the three essays included in On History? Opinion is divided. My own view is that the four theses did not spring full-fledged from Oakeshott’s mind sometime in the 1920s. But if we exclude the...