THE POLITICS OF FAITH AND THE POLITICS OF SKEPTICISM.

THE POLITICS OF FAITH AND THE POLITICS OF SKEPTICISM.

Joseph Landau

By Michael Oakeshott. Yale Univ. Press. 128 pp. $25

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In this volume, released six years after his death, the distinguished British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) crystallizes what for him are the two "poles" of modern political thought. "The politics of faith" begins in Francis Bacon’s assertion that human beings can achieve perfection, and that government can be the primary agent of human betterment. Such a regime places all human activity under the surveillance of its notion of the good.

"The politics of skepticism," by contrast, originating in Thomas Hobbes and Niccolò Machiavelli, rejects any attempt to order human experience according to a single standard. In this view, government should strive not to be the expression or fulfillment of the common good but rather to serve as the instrument for assuring basic order, rights, and liberties. Beyond this, the regime should abstain from involvement "with the souls of men."

Oakeshott seeks neither to inform our practical decisions about public policy nor to plead for one form of government over the other. Rather, he would redirect the contemporary discussion of politics away from an ambiguous lexicon (of which the present uses of "liberal" and "conservative" are but the most egregious examples) and toward a new vernacular. His principle of moderation, or "appropriateness," eschews the "nemesis" of pure faith on the one hand, pure skepticism on the other. Where the middle ground lies at the moment, he does not say. Nor does he need to. By clarifying "the ‘charges’ of the poles of our political activity, each exerting a pull which makes itself felt over the whole range of government," he has written a guide to the future of political thought.

 

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