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Michael Oakeshott's critique of modernity: Science, ideology, and reason
Abstract
Modernism, for Michael Oakeshott, is an intellectual movement that considers itself definitive of moral and political reasons for action. It is, in short, the “cult of man.” The scientific approach to things political leads to that specifically modern institution, ideology, or a series of logically coherent propositions, dogmatically held, that claim to exhaust the subject matter of political and social life. In fact, Oakeshott claims that ideology is the primary mark of particularly contemporary social life. Ideology, however, is merely a brief, incomplete, and misleading abbreviation and summary of a certain experience with modern life. For Oakeshott, it cannot be this; it is indeed merely what a cookbook is to the art of cooking. Politics is a complex maze of moral, economic, communitarian, and social difficulties that cannot be summarized in a pamphlet. Its nuances are too detailed for a brief blueprint to completely exhaust. At best, ideology is a useful tool to analyze the institutions and practices of an existing society, but cannot serve as a map for social reconstruction. In its place, Oakeshott posits a classically idealist vision of social epistemology, but one that is consciously traditionalist in character. In his (1933) Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott maps out an alternative to ideology, which the remainder of his career was dedicated to expanding and reexamining. There is no understanding of life as a whole. Reality can be viewed only in parts, and these parts are constructed through socially conditioned ideas called “modes.” The world can be viewed under four specific modes: the scientific, historical, aesthetic, and practical. Each of these has developed an idiom of its own, and each contains criteria for truth solely internal to itself. These criteria, or the idea itself, is historical in character in that it is a developing tradition of a specific practice. The overarching argument, then, is that in arguing for an eccentric idea of modal epistemology, Oakeshott attempts to ground conservative and traditionalist theory in skeptical and idealist philosophy.
Subject Area
Political science|Philosophy
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Matthew R, "Michael Oakeshott's critique of modernity: Science, ideology, and reason" (1999). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9929208.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9929208