Abstract
There is an overlap between the activity of the politician and that of the scholar, both of them being engaged in a certain form of tradition-based activity. Oakeshott’s description of the figure of the scholar is in fact a counterpoint to that of the rationalist. Beyond a professional knowledge, the scholar is characterized by a certain civilized way of life. Relying on his early essays on the university, the argument presents the political background of Oakeshott’s stress on practical knowledge and develops a comparison to show how practical knowledge operates in science, religion, art and cookery, stressing the conservative components and aesthetic qualities of these practices.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning, ed. and intr. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001, originally published by Yale University, 1989).
- 2.
See Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Simon Gunn, and Rachel Bell, Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl (London: Phoenix, 2003).
- 3.
For an explication of bildung’s relevance for conservatism, see the present author’s paper: Ferenc Hörcher, “Culture, Self-Formation and Community-Building: The Bildungsideal from the Perspective of the Intellectual History of Civil Sociability,” Ethos: Kwartalnik Instytutu Jana Pawla II, KUL 28, no.109 (2015), 64–83.
- 4.
Bruce Truscot, and Edgar Allison Peers, Red Brick University (London: Faber & Faber, 1943)
- 5.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Universities,” in Oakeshott, Liberal Learning, 118–158, 120, 138.
- 6.
Sir John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (1852, 1858), available online at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/
- 7.
Sir Walter Moberly, The Crisis in the Universities (London: SCM Press, 1949).
- 8.
Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” in: Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), 5–42., 6–7.
- 9.
Ibid., 9.
- 10.
Michael Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe, with five additional prefaces by F.A. Ogg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942).
- 11.
As we shall see, Oakeshott presents his ideal of the scientist in opposition to the “rationalist” scientist.
- 12.
Ibid., 13, n4. and n5. Oakeshott explicitly refers to Polányi’s work: Science, Faith and Society (1946). One can see the relationship of Oakeshott’s emphasis on practical knowledge and Polányi’s notion of tacit knowledge, as presented in Michael Polányi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
- 13.
Ibid., 13.
- 14.
See for example his “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” in Rationalism in Politics, 488–541. For the present author’s account of Oakeshott’s views on the voice of poetry see Ferenc Hörcher, “‘A brief enchantment’: Oakeshott’s account of the role of conversation and poetry in human life,” in The Meanings of Michael Oakeshott’s Conservatism, ed. Corey Abel (Exeter: Imprint-academic.com, 2010), 238–254.
- 15.
Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 13.
- 16.
Ibid., 15.
- 17.
Michael Oakeshott, “Learning and Teaching,” in Oakeshott, Liberal Learning, 35–61, 60.
- 18.
Of course, Geist has a metaphysical meaning in German classical idealism, famously represented in the work of Hegel. The notion of spirit does not give back the full range of the meanings of Geist in ordinary English.
- 19.
Ibid., 51.
- 20.
Michael Oakeshot, “The Idea of a University,” in Oakeshott, Liberal Learning, 105–117, 116.
- 21.
Oakeshott, “The Idea of a University,” 114.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Oakeshott, “The Universities,” 158.
- 25.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, copyright © Jonathan Bennett, 2017, available at: https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/burke1790part1.pdf, 34.
- 26.
For another defence of cultural conservatism, see Roger Scruton, The Politics of Culture and Other Essays (Manchester, Carcanet, 1981).
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Hörcher, F. (2022). The Art of the Scholar: Oakeshott’s Conservative Account of Liberal Learning. In: Kos, E.S. (eds) Oakeshott’s Skepticism, Politics, and Aesthetics. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83055-7_6
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