The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism.

Hartle, Ann

Oakeshott, Michael. Edited by Timothy Fuller. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. xx + 139 pp. Cloth, $25.0--The question which this book addresses is "What shall governments do?" Oakeshott's aim is to understand the practices of and thoughts about government that have dominated the modern European world. Put more precisely, his question is: "What is the character of modern politics that makes its practice run to ambivalence and its vocabulary run to equivocation?" (p. 19) The most fundamental distinction that can help us to sort through this ambivalence and equivocation is that between "the politics of faith" and "the politics of scepticism," two opposed styles of politics whose interaction is the concordia discors of the past five centuries of European politics.

Oakeshott identifies three sources or starting places for inquiry concerning political things: practice, our talk about politics, and considered writing. Practice is primordial and is reflected in speech and writing. The inquiry proceeds on three levels which correspond to these three sources.

With respect to practice, Oakeshott begins by laying out the essence of the politics of faith and skepticism, takes us through the "fortunes" of each, then locates the nemesis of each in its own essence. The politics of faith understands government to be in the service of the perfection of mankind, a perfection to be achieved by human effort alone. Governing involves the control and organization of human activity in pursuit of this ideal of perfection. The politics of skepticism sees governing as detached from the pursuit of perfection. Its first object is the maintenance of order so that a variety of activities can be pursued undirected by government.

Historically, both the politics of faith and of skepticism proceed from the same source, the "enormous enlargement of power that marks the beginning of modernity, the mastery of man over his world. The most significant change that occurs in the passage from medieval to modern life is "the gradual disappearance of the intermediate authorities which had formerly stood between a then weak central government and the subjects, leaving them naked before a power which in its magnitude was becoming comparable to a force of nature" (p. 49). This power came to be spoken of as "sovereignty." At this point, the enlargement of power pulled in the direction of faith while the concomitant narrowing in the specification of government pulled in the direction of skepticism. Oakeshott identifies two versions of the politics of faith, the religious version exemplified by Puritan politics, and the economic version manifested in various forms of "productivist" society such as "mercantilism" and ultimately socialism and communism. The two greatest failures of the politics of skepticism are its alliance with the politics of Natural Rights and its alliance with modern republicanism.

Each of the two opposed styles contains within itself the source of its own destruction. The politics of faith needs immense power to subdue society and direct all activity to a single end. No price is too high to pay for perfection. Hence, there is nothing to prevent the degradation of living men as a spring to this perfection. "In this twilight, doctors will dream of rapid advances that might be made in medicine if they were supplied with expendable human subjects for experiment" (p. 99). The poor who cannot defend themselves will become material for social experiment. The politics of faith has no inherent means of limiting itself. "The politics of Terror. . . sleeps in every version of government as the pursuit of perfection" (p. 94), and where perfection is identified with security, the condition of the subject will be that of a slave. Absolute security is absolute precariousness. The nemesis of the politics of skepticism arises out of the severe self-limitation that belongs to its essence. Here, the danger is political quietism. The disposition of the skeptic is to reduce politics to play.

At the second level of inquiry, Francis Bacon and the philosophes of the eighteenth century represent the politics of faith. Montaigne, who had no illusions about power, is a skeptic. So also are Machiavelli, Spinoza, Pascal, Hobbes, Hume, Burke, and Hegel. In spite of all this philosophical skepticism, in practice, the politics of faith remains ascendant. Oakeshott concludes that "there is no better starting place for a renewed attempt to understand and to modernize the principles of the skeptical tradition in our politics than a study of Pascal and Hume" (p. 129).

At the third level of inquiry, we must begin from the ambiguity that springs from the fact that the politics of faith and of skepticism share a common language. For we do not have a scientific, univocal, political language, but only a living, popular language. The politics of faith regards this ambiguity as worthless. The politics of skepticism, and Oakeshott himself, regard it as good in the sense that it allows a space for the conversation of diverse activities.

What, then, is the point of Oakeshott's inquiry if not to eliminate ambiguity? Here, the subtlety of Oakeshott's thought, his clarity about his own activity, and his Montaignian character come through most forcefully. Although our own circumstances do not permit the remedy of Confucius--"the one thing necessary is the rectification of names"--Oakeshott proposes as his task a more modest version: "To have perceived the ground and the range of the ambiguity is to have deprived it of some of its power to confuse" (p. 130). And although it is clear that, philosophically, Oakeshott is on the side of the skeptics, he advocates a holding back from the extremes in practice. His account is meant to serve as a guide for political reasoning, so that we may enjoy the virtues and avoid the vices of our own political situation. He himself is an exemplar of the "larger sympathy for our political predicament" (p. 19) that he wants this inquiry to foster.

This book was an untitled typescript found among Oakeshott's papers after his death in 1990. Timothy Fuller's introduction is a genuinely philosophical appreciation of Oakeshott's thought. Certainly, we can add the study of Oakeshott to that of Pascal, Hume, and Montaigne as a starting place for the renewal of the skeptical tradition.