Vol. 14 No. 18 · 24 September 1992
pages 7-11 | 9248 words
The Intransigent Right at the End of the Century
Perry Anderson
- Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays by Michael Oakeshott, edited by Timothy Fuller
Liberty Press, 556 pp, $24.00, October 1991, ISBN 0 86597 094 7
A few months alter the fall of Margaret Thatcher, the most original thinker of post-war Conservatism died. Perhaps partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the philosopher’s papers, without so much as mentioning his political ideas. Perhaps another element in the muted reaction was the remoteness of Oakeshott’s intellectual origins from the contemporary landscape. Anglo-Scottish Idealism of the early years of this century, its other lights long since extinguished, has become one of the least recollected episodes of the native past. Oakeshott was always held difficult to place. Although he was an exemplary patriot of British institutions, a superficial glance might lead one to think he was latterly more regarded in the United States. His last book, The Voice of Liberal Learning, was edited from Colorado. The first posthumous collection, an enlarged version of Rationalism in Politics, now appears from Indianopolis. The only extended survey of his work is a monograph from Chicago. But his profile, on either side of the Atlantic, continues to be elusive.
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 20 · 22 October 1992
From William Lamont
‘The impeccably liberal Ernest Barker’ (Perry Anderson: LRB, 24 September)? Would ‘peccably’ be better? In 1937 he made a favourable comparison between Hitler and Cromwell in a swastika-draped hall in Hamburg: see his Oliver Cromwell and the English People (Cambridge, 1937).
William Lamont
University of Sussex
Vol. 14 No. 21 · 5 November 1992
From Perry Anderson
William Lamont points to Ernest Barker’s Oliver Cromwell and the English People as a peccant moment of his liberalism (Letters, 22 October). Touché. Still, if Lamont’s own work on William Prynne and Richard Baxter teaches us to distinguish between different kinds of 17th-century Puritan, not to smooth out their paradoxes, and to set each in the collective context of the time, the lesson is valid for 20th-century liberals too. Barker’s 1936 lecture to the Sthamer Society in Hamburg, coloured – as he explains – by memories of friendship with the Weimar Ambassador to London after whom it was named, contains a culpable mixture of diplomatic and ingenuous elements. But although he did compare Cromwell and Hitler as national leaders, in an epilogue written after his return to England, the comparison was not simply favourable, since Barker stressed the difference between religious and racial conceptions of the nation, contrasting the Protector’s tolerance of Jews with the Führer’s anti-semitism, and the antagonism between the principles of freedom of conscience and of political uniformity. If any English ruler was ‘the precedent and example of the totalitarian leader’, it was Hentry VIII rather than Cromwell – whose portrait Barker draws with creditable balance. Significantly, he took issue with Carl Schmitt in doing so. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt had cited Crowell’s virulent speech against Spain in September 1656 as a supreme expression of the demarcation of friend from foe that constitutes the essence of political life. Barker replied that Cromwell’s declaration of enmity was conceived neither in strictly political nor exclusively national terms. ‘It is a speech in terms of “the religious”, and it is couched in the interest of a common European Protestantism’ – a martial but confessional internationalism, whose limits no Puritan could transcend.
Perry Anderson
London N5
