Oakeshott and the historian's mistake
A section from Thompson’s recent book on Oakeshott’s philosophy of history and the the misunderstanding of both postmodernists and certain realist accounts of the historical (in distinction to the practical) past. This misunderstanding arising from a confusion of different forms of enquiry or ‘modes of experience’: history and philosophy:
As Oakeshott noted long ago, “the past for history is ‘what really happened’; and until the historian has reached back to and elucidated that, he considers himself to have performed his task incompletely.” There will be failures, of course, but these “do not invalidate this view of the general purpose [of history] — the discovery and elucidation of a fixed and finished past, for its own sake and in all its dissimilarity from the present.” Nonetheless, from the standpoint of philosophical criticism, he argued, “this view of the historical past cannot…be maintained unmodified…it is what the historian is accustomed to believe, and it is difficult to see how he could go on did he not believe his task to be the resurrection of what had once been alive. This is, and must remain, what the past is for history. But the view suffers from a fatal [philosophical] defect: it implies that history is not experience. And consequently it must be set on one side as a misconceived view of the character of the past of or in history”
Oakeshott’s meaning should now be clear. His is not an argument about the impossibility of historical knowledge, as some postmodernists have claimed. It is rather reflecting the different concerns of historical and philosophical enquiry. For historians engaged in what Huizinga called “the humble spadework of critical research,” historical occurrences are what really happened in the historical past. But from the perspective of the critical philosophy of history, both historical occurrences and the historical pasts they compose are constructions created by historians according to what they currently believe all available evidence obliges them to conclude are the best answers to the historical questions they ask. Since, philosophically speaking, there is nothing to be known that is outside present experience, the historical past is not the past as it once was but is no more. Its logical status is what current historians find themselves obliged to believe about the past that no longer exists. Historians are not wrong to pursue the aim of understanding the past in its own past terms. They are only wrong to believe that this amounts to resuscitating a past as the living experience it supposedly once was. The error here is not that historical research is incapable of identifying and explaining past occurrences and past ideas in their own past terms for present audiences. It is rather that this is an inadequately thought-out conception of the logical status of the historical past. Much more follows from this in terms of a philosophically comprehensive and coherent conception of historical facts, historical truth, historical reality, historical change and historical explanation. But my concern…has been with the core concept of the historical past. The fact that the working assumptions of historians about the nature of the historical past cannot be sustained unmodified when subjected to philosophical criticism does not mean that historians over the past decades have not substantially advanced historical understanding in detail and in depth in all of the various branches of historical enquiry. Of course, they have done so, as any working historian knows and as anyone interested in the results of historical research can attest.1
Martyn P. Thompson, Michael Oakeshott and the Cambridge School on the History of Political Thought, pp. 57-58