Abstract
Is Michael Oakeshott relevant in East Asia? Some scholars find rich potential for a cross-cultural dialogue between the East Asian philosophical tradition, especially Confucianism and Daoism, and Oakeshott’s “poetic thinking.”1 Given Oakeshott’s interest in East Asian practical wisdom found in the teachings of Confucius and Zhuangzi, among others, this certainly is one way in which Oakeshott can be relevant in East Asia. But what about Oakeshott’s political theory, for which he is best known, despite some recent arguments against characterizing him as a “political” philosopher simpliciter?2 Given that Oakeshott’s political theory has long been neglected even by Anglo-American political theorists, it is hardly surprising that it is less popular, if not completely unknown, in East Asian academia. Even those who have been exposed to Oakeshott’s self-contained, postulates-constituted political theory, most fully articulated in his major work, On Human Conduct, are often puzzled over what to make of it, not only because of its unorthodox style but, more importantly, because of its self-conscious defiance of efforts to categorize it as either conservative or liberal,3 which are the terms casually employed to describe East Asian—especially South Korean and Japanese—domestic politics.
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Notes
See for instance Chor-yung Cheung’s essays in The Poetic Character of Human Activity: Collected Essays on the Thought of Michael Oakeshott, ed. Wendell J. Coats Jr. and Chor-yung Cheung (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012).
Most notably, Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001).
See Nardin’s essay in this volume. That said, many scholars still subscribe to the received wisdom that understands Oakeshott as a conservative. See, for instance, Andrew Gamble, “Oakeshott’s Ideological Politics: Conservative or Liberal?” in The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott, ed. Efraim Podoksik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012);
Robert Devigne, “Oakeshott as Conservative,” in A Companion to Michael Oakeshott, ed. Paul Franco and Leslie Marsh (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012);
and Edmund Neill, Michael Oakeshott (New York: Continuum, 2010).
For a work that understands Oakeshott mainly as a liberal thinker, see Paul Franco, “Oakeshott, Berlin, and Liberalism,” Political Theory, vol. 31, no. 3 (2003), 484–507.
Jiang Qing, Zhengzhi Rujia: Dangdai Rujia de zhuanxiang, tezhi yu fazhan [Political Confucianism: Contemporary Confucianism’s Challenge, Special Quality, and Development] (Beijing: San lian shu dian, 2003).
A substantive part of Jiang’s book is available in English in Jiang Qing, A Confucian Constitutional Order, ed. Daniel Bell and Ruiping Fan and trans. Edmund Ryden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
Also see Jiang Qing, “From Mind Confucianism to Political Confucianism,” in The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contemporary China, ed. Ruiping Fan (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011).
Cf. Leigh Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say? A Methods-Centered Approach to Cross-Cultural Engagement,” American Political Science Review, vol. 101, no. 4 (2007), 741–55.
Stephen C. Angle, Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 12.
For proposals for institutional Confucianism other than Jiang Qing’s, see Daniel A. Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006);
Tongdong Bai, “A Mencian Version of Limited Democracy,” Res Publica, vol. 14, no. 1 (2008), 19–34;
Kang Xiaoguang, Renzheng: Zhongguo zhengzhi fazhan de disantiao daolu [Humane Government: A Third Road for the Development of Chinese Politics] (Singapore: Global Publishing, 2005);
Ruiping Fan, Reconstructionist Confucianism (New York: Springer, 2010).
For instance, see essays by Chen Ming, He Baogang, Ni Peimin in Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and Perspectives, ed. Fred Dallmayr and Zhao Tingyang (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012).
Paul Franco, The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990);
Efraim Podoksik, “Oakeshott’s Theory of Freedom as Recognized Contingency,” European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 2, no. 1 (2003), 57–77.
Michael Oakeshott, “John Locke,” Cambridge Review, vol. 54 (1932–33), 72–73, at 73.
C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
See, for instance, John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969);
Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 30–31, 53.
“The root of so-called ‘democratic’ theory is not rationalist optimism about the perfectibility of human society, but skepticism about the possibility of such perfection and the determination not to allow human life to be perverted by the tyranny of a person or fixed by the tyranny of an idea.” Michael Oakeshott, Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 109.
Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 231.
Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 94. It is important to note that for Oakeshott merely to defend or to attack “democracy” is a meaningless activity as it can be connected with either manner of the politics of faith or the politics of skepticism. His real concern is how to prevent popular institutions from selling themselves entirely to the politics of faith in contemporary circumstances where the vitality of the politics of skepticism has been significantly reduced (131–32).
Oakeshott, Rationalism, 44. It is worth noting that in On Human Conduct, the notion of “politics” undergoes a radical conceptual transformation in terms of an important postulate of civil association. See Glenn Worthington, “Oakeshott’s Claims of Politics,” Political Studies, vol. 45 (1997), 727–38.
On the chastisement of democratic faith by the politics of skepticism, see Patrick J. Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)
For my critique of the advocates of Confucian meritocratic elitism, which focuses on Daniel Bell, Tongdong Bai, and Joseph Chan, see Sungmoon Kim, “To Become a Confucian Democratic Citizen: Against Meritocratic Elitism,” British Journal of Political Science, vol. 43 (2013), 579–99.
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Kim, S. (2015). Oakeshott and Confucian Constitutionalism. In: Nardin, T. (eds) Michael Oakeshott’s Cold War Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137507020_9
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