I’ll try to answer some of the questions offered thus far about what a politics of skepticism might look like by addressing where it comes from. There are two sources of modern political skepticism. One is religious and the other epistemological. As Oakeshott notes, ‘the politics of skepticism…may be said to have its roots either in the radical belief that human perfection is an illusion [the religious version], or in the less radical belief that we know too little about the conditions of human perfection for it to be wise to concentrate our energies in a single direction by associating it with the activity of governing [the epistemological version].’
The religious kind of skepticism in its Christian form points backward to St. Augustine and Martin Luther, while counting Herbert Butterfield and Reinhold Niebuhr among its many contemporary proponents. There is a general claim made by these political skeptics that the inherent weaknesses of human nature limit the possibilities of human achievement. For these folks, it is precisely their religious commitments which make them skeptical about the promises of political action (pace both contemporary American religious conservatives and liberals).
The epistemological version of political skepticism is stated in its most theoretically coherent form in the works of writers like Montaigne, Hobbes, Hume, Oakeshott, Gadamer, and the later Wittgenstein. These writers share the notion that practical understanding is inherently conditioned by the circumstances and character of practical activity, and that these general conditions exclude the possibility of the kind of highly abstract and rationalized politics which has come to characterize modern political discourse.
Both groups can be called political skeptics because they are skeptical of the most characteristic form of modern political discourse, namely ideological politics. Ideologies, or ‘armed doctrines’ as Burke called them, include almost all of the various idioms in which politics is now discussed. For example, any version of political skepticism looks dubiously on the kind of emancipatory politics which emerged out of the left Kantian and/or left Hegelian conception of radical critique which is most obviously associated with Marx and neo- or post-Marxism in all its forms (difference feminism, critical race theory, colonialism, etc). However, skeptics are also doubtful of the liberalism of Lockean natural rights tradition and the utilitarianism of the recent Anglo-American legal tradition, viewing them both as abstractions which misunderstand the fundamental characteristics of community and ethical value.
In fact, any attempt to permanently ‘solve’ the inherent incoherence of practical life and reduce politics to the mere application of a set of a priori rules or the universal application of a previously created blueprint would be anathema to political skeptics. Elie Kedourie notes that the skeptical disposition is ‘hostile to…policies or movements…that…are the outcome of ideologies which misapprehend the character of society and which prescribe aims impossible to fulfill.’
Thus, political skepticism does not offer a particular program, but instead involves a series of reactions against attempts to create and institute ideological political programs. Oakeshott’s comment on Hayek is appropriate here. He suggests that a plan against all planning may be better than the alternative, but it is still speaks in the same idiom as the planners. Nonetheless, now that I have provided a very brief historical conspectus, I’ll try to offer the outlines of a possible skeptical political disposition tomorrow.
EPISTEME: December 2023
2 days ago
2 comments:
I'm sympathetic both with the argument you put forward and with skepticism. Nevertheless, as you present it, skepticism is still vulnerable to the criticism skeptics have faced since antiquity, namely that it cannot survive application to itself. It is, hence, incoherent. With hindsight I suppose that's really also the underlying gist of my earlier comments on previous posts. Let me flesh this out a bit.
In fact, any attempt to permanently ‘solve’ the inherent incoherence of practical life and reduce politics to the mere application of a set of a priori rules or the universal application of a previously created blueprint would be anathema to political skeptics. Elie Kedourie notes that the skeptical disposition is ‘hostile to…policies or movements…that…are the outcome of ideologies which misapprehend the character of society and which prescribe aims impossible to fulfill.’
Well, of course one would want to be hostile to ideas based on a misapprehension of society. Surely that's not unique to skeptics! In addition, your statement assumes that skeptics do understand the true character of society. But their understanding is by necessity also an abstraction, and thus something skeptics should reject! How is this not a contradiction?
Thus, political skepticism does not offer a particular program, but instead involves a series of reactions against attempts to create and institute ideological political programs. Oakeshott’s comment on Hayek is appropriate here. He suggests that a plan against all planning may be better than the alternative, but it is still speaks in the same idiom as the planners.
But how is Oakeshott different? Instead of a plan against planners he has an attitude against planners? But surely such an attitude has to be put into action before it can have effect? So Oakeshott would have to do the same as Hayek, devising a plan given the circumstances, unless he's saying that Hayek advocates the same plan against planning for all circumstances. But Hayek doesn't, as that would contradict his own reasons for being skeptical about planning.
I’ll try to answer some of these questions soon, but, for now, I will merely suggest that political/practical skepticism doesn’t necessarily involve a commitment to philosophical skepticism. Hegel, for example, was most definitely not a philosophical skeptic, but was quite dubious about the possibility of applying philosophical conclusions to practical life because the fundamental presupposition of practice is that the world is changeable.
Hume, on the other hand, was both a philosophical and practical skeptic, but he certainly realized that there was a certain paradoxical character to making skeptical philosophical claims. In fact, he wrote at one point that skepticism as a philosophical argument only really made sense in an age in which people had a great faith in the power of reason because such skepticism relies upon rational arguments to undermine rationalism.
On the last point, I think that Oakeshott’s potshot at Hayek is actually unfair to Hayek, and what he is in fact saying is that Hayek is advocating the same plan for all circumstances and this Procrustean rationalism is what Oakeshott rejects.
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