A Companion to Michael Oakeshott

Chapter 10: Oakeshott and Hobbes

10 oakeshott and hobbes Noel Malcolm i Even those who know only a little about Michael Oakeshott know that he had a strong and abiding interest in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. His edition of Leviathan (1946) became the standard edition for several generations of students, and his substantial introduction to that volume, which was reissued in a revised version in 1975, remains one of the classic texts of modern Hobbes interpretation. Oakeshott’s special interest in Hobbes had developed more than a decade before the appearance of that edition; his first publication devoted to Hobbes was a long essay in the literary-critical magazine Scrutiny in 1935, in which he surveyed a range of recent publications on Hobbes’s political thought and emphasized that the old caricature of Hobbes as a philosopher of “despotism” was now completely untenable.1 In 1937 Oakeshott returned to this subject with a review of another book, a study of Hobbes’s political philosophy by Leo Strauss; here he agreed with Strauss that Hobbes’s political thought was not grounded on a crudely “naturalistic” kind of science, while disagreeing with Strauss’s attempt to derive it from a set of purely moral assumptions. After the introduction to Leviathan, Oakeshott wrote another lengthy exploration of Hobbes’s moral theory (with an “appendix” on his theory of the formation of the state), an essay entitled “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes,” published in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962). With the exception of the Scrutiny article, these items were gathered (together with a short essay, originally a radio talk, entitled “Leviathan: A Myth,” which Oakeshott described as “a conversation piece, a flight of fancy”) in a volume published under the title Hobbes on Civil Association in 1975. And from the same period (1974) dates also a substantial book review, of a monograph on Hobbes by Thomas Spragens, which was 218 political philosophy later reprinted under the title “Logos and Telos” in the expanded edition of Rationalism in Politics; here Oakeshott once again challenged the idea that Hobbes’s philosophy was simply modeled on natural science, emphasizing that it explored, rather, a world of human intentions and human meanings. In every one of these texts it is evident that Oakeshott wrote about Hobbes not merely as a historian of ideas, but as a philosopher who found, in Hobbes’s central arguments, something valid and philosophically important.2 But herein lies a problem. Those who know only a little about Michael Oakeshott also know that he was deeply opposed to “rationalism” in political theory and practice; yet most of the attitudes and beliefs which he identified as rationalist are also to be found in Hobbes. And this is not a matter of some minor or secondary features of Hobbes’s thinking that happen to overlap , coincidentally, with rationalist positions; rather, the whole portrait of the rationalist in the opening pages of Oakeshott’s essay “Rationalism in Politics” reads like a list of central features of Hobbes’s approach to political theory. The rationalist, Oakeshott writes, “stands . . . for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of ‘reason’” (RP, 5–6). Compare Oakeshott’s own characterization of Hobbes: “For Hobbes, to think philosophically is to reason; philosophy is reasoning. To this all else is subordinate ”; “the inspiration of his philosophy is the intention to be guided by reason and to reject all other guides.”3 The rationalist, we are told, is “sceptical ,” “optimistic,” and “something also of an individualist” (RP, 6). Again, both Hobbes’s skepticism and his individualism are emphasized in Oakeshott ’s introduction to Leviathan; as for optimism, we have only to turn to the dedicatory epistle of Hobbes’s De cive, where he wrote that if philosophy were applied to human actions with the same degree of certainty as that achieved by geometers in their study of geometrical figures, “ambition and greed, whose power is founded on the false opinions of the common people about right and injury, would be disarmed, and the human race would enjoy such secure peace that . . . it seems unlikely that there would ever be a reason for fighting.”4 According to Oakeshott, the rationalist has “no sense of the cumulation of experience”; to the rationalist, “nothing is of value merely because it exists (and certainly not because it has existed for many generations)” (RP, 6, 8). This chimes with Hobbes’s polemical attacks on the alleged authority of custom, such as his comment in Leviathan...