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March 29, 2007
In this review of Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Backin the New York Review of Books. Jonathan Raban shows that Sullivan is acutely aware that the different strands of the Republican Party---eg., the worldviews of the Christian fundamentalist, the project-driven neoconservative theorist, and the small-government free-marketeer----are dramatically incompatible on both religious and philosophical grounds. So, despite Fox Television, the strands are more defined by their differences than by what they hold in common.
Raban links Sullivan back to Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott, for all his emphasis on tradition stands for a conservatism that is different from a conservative traditionalism. Raban gives a brief account of Oakeshott:
Central to Oakeshott's thought was his conviction that reality consists in the unending swarm and confluence of intractable particulars and contingencies. So historians, reading the past backward from the present, impose on it illicit patterns dictated by their contemporary concerns, while politicians project on the future equally vain patterns in the form of grand schemes for the improvement of humankind. Oakeshott's great abomination was what he called Rationalism (always with a capital R and with the emphasis on the ism), the dominant force, as he saw it, in Western politics since the Enlightenment, and the source of every collectivist attempt to build utopia by reasoning on the basis of "felt needs."
The framers of the American Constitution, Marx, Engels, and Hitler were all Rationalists, and Oakeshott's catch-all list of dangerous Rationalist projects included the "so-called Re-Union of the Chris-tian churches," "the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire," "the World State (of H.G. Wells or anyone else)," the Beveridge Report (blueprint for Britain's postwar welfare state), the 1944 Education Act, and "the revival of Gaelic as the official language of Eire." it would also include the neoconservatives of the Project for the New American Century? "
So why did Sullivan, whose roots are in Oakeshott, sign up to that project, and become a cheerleader for this Rationalist project and the imperialist conquest of Iraq, whilst shrilling about nihilists and traitors and the decadent left being a fifth column? By rejecting Oakeshott---the soul of conservatism for Sullivan.
There is a similarity between Oakeshott and Friedrich Hayek who labelled the welfare policies of Western European governments ‘the road to serfdom’. Oakeshott’s main concern was not to argue about the best way to achieve economic efficiency or even free constitutional government. His critique was part of the general critique of the entire style of modern politics and moral life, labelling it as ‘rationalist’.
However, in his Rationalism in Politics, Michael Oakeshott refers to Hayek by name, describing Hayek's rejection of ideologies as an ideology itself. While being admittedly better than other ideologies, its philosophical origins deny it admission into the conservative camp. 'A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite,' observes Oakeshott, 'but it belongs to the same style of politics.'
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