History and opinion
In a previous post I provided an excerpt from Martyn Thompson’s book on Oakeshott’s philosophy of history on his concept of the pastness of history and the activity of the historian. Here I cover a section exploring Quentin’s Skinner’s dismissal of Oakeshott and how Oakeshott’s philosophy of history clarifies a confusion in Skinner’s approach to history.
First, Skinner’s measure of Oakeshott from a 2002 interview, coloured, alas, by a certain liberal sneering:
Michael Oakeshott’s philosophical work was of no influence at all…but if you want to know how he appeared to students of my generation in the 1960s, you would find a very good guide in Brian Barry’s book, Political Argument,…Oakeshott seemed a figure of the past, and we rejected his anti-rationalism and his political conservatism outright…But nothing prepared my generation for his apotheosis under Thatcherism, nor the high esteem in which his philosophy continues to be widely held.’
Yet Oakeshott in his philosophy of history provides a way of dealing with the tension between history and providing judgments on contemporary politics that increasingly characterises Skinner’s work.
As Thompson relates, Skinner commenting on his practical turn in Liberty before Liberalism on so-called ‘republican liberty’ said:
I want my work to be as historical as I can possibly make it, but I also want it to have some political point…I admit that I am walking a tightrope. As with all tightropes, moreover, it is possible to fall off on one side or the other. It seems to me that most historians fall off on the side of worrying too little about the point of what they are doing. I am more in danger of falling off in the direction of sacrificing historicity. If the choice is between historical impurity and moral pointlessness, then I suppose that in the end I am on the side of the impure…Perhaps I lack the true historian’s sensibility, but I have always wanted the study of the past to be of some use to us here and now, and this desire increasingly guides my practice.
For Oakeshott the image of the tightrope is entirely mistaken because he makes a categorical distinction between the historical past and the practical past. Thompson notes:
To suppose that there might be a tightrope over these fields along which an intrepid historian-cum-moralist might walk is to suppose that these obviously very different activities are sufficiently similar to one another that they can be pursued simultaneously…Skinner, Oakeshott would have concluded, has committed himself to writing hybrid works, works that are part history and part moral and political instruction. But he has done so without properly acknowledging that these are two disparate and incommensurable activities…the problem to be avoided in writing hybrid works is intellectual confusion, not logical contradiction.
Oakeshott’s making the distinction between historical and practical pasts was not to commend the former and condemn the latter. He intended it as an explanatory distinction. If this is the case why should we think this distinction matters? It matters because supposedly objective history is being used to push opinions that are anything but. There is nothing wrong with pushing one’s opinions of course - it’s both unavoidable and enjoyable even if many are utterly tedious. But we should see this for what it is.