The Nature of Political Theory

146 The Nature of Political Theory

the concerns of their Idealist predecessors. Equally, both clearly rearticulated (in their
own terms) the Idealist view of experience, in Collingwood’s case viewing the ‘totality’
of experience as a linked hierarchy of forms, and, in Oakeshott’s, as coordinatemodes,
orarrests, with philosophy constituting the concrete totality of experience as a whole.
Thus, despite their subtle differences from previous Idealism, both Collingwood and
Oakeshott played a significant role in keeping the spirit of Idealism alive, not only in
social and political philosophy, but also in aesthetics, metaphysics, and the philosophy
of history and the social sciences.
The use made of Oakeshott here is simply to indicate that there is a longer standing
tradition of sophisticated conventionalism, which predates the debates of the 1980s
and 1990s, and which, nonetheless, encompasses many of the central arguments of
these latter debates. The only problem in considering Oakeshott—whose last con-
tributions wereOn Human Conduct(1975) andOn History(1983)—is that he took
little, if no time, to debate the arguments within political theory, which were develop-
ing in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, one has to surmise how he would have responded
to the likes of Rawls, Habermas, or Skinner. On the other hand, anyone familiar
with the deep currents of thought in the first decades of the twentieth century period
will recognize many underlying themes and preoccupations in his thought, which
stayed with him until his last writings in the 1980s. Thus, for example, his continu-
ing preoccupation with the modern European state in, for example, the last essay
ofOn Human Conduct, represents, once again, a form of Idealist orientated philo-
sophicalStaatslehre. There are indeed some very subtle parallels here with Bernard
Bosanquet’sThe Philosophical Theory of the State(1899). In order to grasp Oakeshott’s
contribution to conventionalism it is necessary to discuss briefly his Idealist philo-
sophical method, which goes back to his first workExperience and its Modes(1933).
These methods are largely assumed, if modified, within his 1963 bookRationalism in
Politics, and returned to again, in a slightly different format, in the first essay of his
On Human Conduct.
Oakeshott’s conventionalism can be seen in the premises of his philosophical
approach. The central point is that the human agent has no nature. She is what,
in conduct, she becomes. Human intelligence creates its own world, but with the
ideational material to hand. This ideational material is embodied, for the most part,
in what Oakeshott originally called modes (and later conversations and idioms).
Oakeshott describes the philosophical impulse as coming to understand, in other
terms, what one already understands. The important point here is, though, that we
are born into a pre-established intelligible world. This pre-established world of mean-
ing relates to our own contingent historical civilization. We think with and through
established conventions, which are characteristic of our own community and civiliza-
tion. Philosophy, in this sense, is not a search for new knowledge. To be human is
to encounter ‘what is in some manner understood’ (Oakeshott 1975: 1). All facts in
the world are mediated through the understood conventions. Facts have no finality
in confirming or disconfirming any theory.Allthat we know is experience. Philo-
sophy, in his first and to a less obvious extent in his last works, is the only form of
thought, which is sensitive to thiswholeof experience. As he puts it, ‘Philosophical