## 1. Life and Works


 
Michael Oakeshott's father, Joseph Oakeshott, was a member
of the Fabian Society, a socialist but not radical organization (its
symbol was the tortoise), many of whose members participated in
establishing the British Labor Party. The Society's leaders,
Beatrice and Sidney Webb, were among the founders of the London School
of Economics. The younger Oakeshott studied history at Gonville and
Caius College, Cambridge, in the early 1920s and became a life fellow
in 1925. After serving in the British Army between 1940 and 1945, he
returned to Cambridge, then taught briefly at Nuffield College,
Oxford, before becoming Professor of Political Science at the LSE in
1951. At some point during his years at the LSE he launched an annual
course of lectures in the history of political thought. Focused
initially on canonical authors and texts, after the fashion of the
lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1958 (Oakeshott 1993b), the course
gradually became a more comprehensive examination of the political
experience and thought of four peoples: the ancient Greeks, the
Romans, medieval Christians, and modern Europeans (Oakeshott 2006). He
also led a seminar in the history of political thought for
postgraduate students and, as an emeritus professor, was active in it
until 1980, contributing papers on the historical study of political
thought and the philosophy of history. Brief accounts of
Oakeshott's life can be found in two memorial collections
(Norman 1993; Marsh 2001) and a biographical essay (Grant 2012). The
notebooks Oakeshott kept for much of his life (Oakeshott 2014) offer
additional insights, as do his unpublished letters.




Although Oakeshott criticized the postwar Labor government's
belief in planning, in his youth he thought of himself as a
socialist. But it was a romantic socialism concerned with spiritual
transformation, not economic redistribution (L. O'Sullivan
2014). And though he later repudiated Fabianism, Marxism, and other
left-wing ideologies, the late Oakeshott still sympathized with the
anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, sharing the latter's vision
of a liberal order combining community and equality with individuality
and independence. His reputation as a conservative thinker was
substantially shaped by his trenchant essays on the limits of reason
in political life, collected as *Rationalism in Politics and Other
Essays* (first edition 1962, cited hereafter as *RP*). On
the basis of these essays he has been compared to a host of
conservative figures from Burke to Wittgenstein. Others argue that he
is better characterized as a liberal. As a theorist of the rule of
law, he invites comparison with Friedrich Hayek and Carl Schmitt. But
efforts to label Oakeshott as either conservative or liberal founder
not only on the ambiguities of those terms but on the partisanship
they imply: Oakeshott was emphatically not politically engaged. As he
provocatively informed those attending the twentieth-anniversary
celebration of the *National Review* in 1975, the Right's
differences with the Left were a petty squabble over how the spoils of
the state as a corporate enterprise were to be distributed
(*RP* 459). To grasp the philosophical significance of
Oakeshott's thought one must move beyond the vocabulary of
twentieth-century political dispute.




In his first book, *Experience and Its Modes* (1933, cited as
*EM*), Oakeshott barely mentions politics. But this does not
mean that he was not interested in political philosophy when he wrote
it. The book grew out of his Cambridge lectures from the late 1920s,
"The Philosophical Approach to Politics", now included in
*Early Political Writings* (Oakeshott 2010). In these lectures
he distinguishes different ways of thinking about politics, but in the
book these different ways of thinking are detached from the subject of
politics and presented as general modes of experience. By the time he
wrote *Experience and Its Modes*, Oakeshott had come to believe
that political philosophy was necessarily defective--that it was
limited by its commitment to a pre-philosophically demarcated sphere
of experience and therefore not genuine philosophy. The book is a
highly individual performance in the style of British philosophical
Idealism, written at a time when that approach to philosophy was
rapidly going out of fashion. In it, Oakeshott credits the influence
of Hegel, Bradley, and Bosanquet, but it was evident that he had
absorbed their views "into an insistent literary personality
which moved freely and suggestively in many types of literature"
(Cowling 2003: 256). When Oakeshott took up politics again in the late
1930's, it was in relation to the controversies of the day. At
the urging of the Cambridge political scientist Ernest Barker, and
partly motivated by the hope it would gain him a professorship, he
compiled an anthology of texts expounding the "doctrines"
of contemporary Europe: Representative Democracy, Catholicism,
Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism (Oakeshott 1939). His first
postwar publication was an edition of Hobbes's
*Leviathan*, with an influential introduction later published
together with other essays on Hobbes in *Hobbes on Civil
Association* (Oakeshott 1975b). In 1947 he founded the
*Cambridge Journal*, a short-lived but critically esteemed
vehicle treating politics and culture as topics for civilized
conversation rather than ideological polemics or academic
research. Several of the essays reprinted in *Rationalism in
Politics* first appeared there.




Oakeshott's magnum opus, *On Human Conduct* (1975a, cited
as *OHC*) appeared late in his career. It was greeted in some
quarters with incomprehension and in others with hostility, but mostly
with silence. Even those who judged the book important found its style
forbidding, and its impact has been muted. Also difficult are the
three late essays on the philosophy of history included in *On
History and Other Essays* (1983, cited as *OH*). His essays
on the idea of liberal education and its practical implications,
collected in *The Voice of Liberal Learning* (1989, cited as
*VLL*), are more accessible and continue to receive attention
(Williams 2007; Backhurst and Fairfield 2016). After Oakeshott's
death other writings appeared, first in a series of volumes published
by Yale University Press (Oakeshott 1993a, 1993b, and 1996) and then
in a series from Imprint Academic (Oakeshott 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008,
2010, and 2014). There has also been a steady stream of secondary
works, including two companion volumes (Franco and Marsh 2012;
Podoksik 2012). Comparison with philosophical
contemporaries--Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Schmitt, Strauss,
Hayek, Gadamer, Arendt, Foucault, MacIntyre--offers another angle
from which to view his place in twentieth-century thought (Dyzenhaus
and Poole 2015; Plotica 2015; N. O'Sullivan 2017). This
literature, together with the attention his less accessible writings
are starting to receive, suggests that Oakeshott occupies an
increasingly secure place in the history of philosophy and political
thought.


## 2. Modes of Experience




Philosophers have used the word "mode" to refer to an
attribute that a thing can possess or the form a substance can
take. For Oakeshott, this thing or substance is experience, by which
he means both the activity of experiencing and what is experienced,
understood as inseparable and therefore as a unity. Looked at from
either side, experience involves thinking and therefore ideas. He has
in mind the kind of mutually correlated subject-object relationship
that Hegel examines in the *Phenomenology* (which Oakeshott
read in his 20s), according to which what is experienced--the
object--is itself thought. Where a body of ideas has achieved a
substantial degree of integrity and differentiation, a mode of thought
can be said to have emerged. Sometimes, a mode is understood to be an
aspect of something larger or more real than itself (Descartes 1641:
27-28, 31). In *Experience and Its Modes* there are
traces of the view, also discernible in Spinoza and Hegel, that this
"larger thing" is everything that exists, the sum total of
experience identified as God or the Absolute. Oakeshott does not use
the word "mode" in later writings in a way that postulates
a universal or ultimate reality. But neither is a mode of thought just
any kind of thinking. It is an "autonomous" kind of
thinking, one that is "specifiable in terms of exact
conditions" and "logically incapable of denying or
confirming the conclusions of any other mode" (*OH* 2). A
mode constitutes a distinct and self-consistent "whole of
interlocking meanings" (*VLL* 38), a world of ideas
resting on its own criteria of truth, factuality, and reality. A
puzzle, then, is how the modes can talk to one another, and the
solution is that as modes they don't. There is a difference between
the modes as ideal types and their instantiation in actual thoughts
and actions, and therefore between philosophically differentiating
them and investigating them historically or sociologically. 


 

Thinking that is involved in acting is one such mode, which Oakeshott
calls "practice". Another is "history", by
which he means neither "the notional grand total of all that has
ever happened" nor some part of it, whose makers are the
participants in the occurrences that constitute it, but rather a
distinct kind of inquiry into and understanding of events. Because
events are not given but must be inferred from what the historian
treats as evidence, history is made by the historian (*OH*
1-2). It is, moreover, an inquiry that aims to account for past
events as intelligible outcomes of antecedent events. In contrast to
history, understood in this way, "science" as a mode is
defined by its search for regularities that can account for the
occurrence of repeatable events and for ways to express these
regularities as relationships between quantities. This way of
distinguishing between history and science locates Oakeshott in the
tradition of German Neo-Kantian of the previous generation, Windelband
and Rickert especially, in which the *Naturwissenschaften* and
*Geisteswissenschaften* were treated as distinct
epistemological forms. History and science are both inherently
explanatory, but the kinds of explanations they provide are
different. Genuine history is also distinguished from ideas about the
past that are shaped by current practical concerns (the
"practical past"). The same holds for science: as a mode
of inquiry, science is different from the practical application of
scientific knowledge. From this perspective, we might see engineering
as a practical discipline rather than a scientific one. 




Modes, then, are distinct and provisionally coherent kinds of
knowledge. In *Experience and Its Modes*, Oakeshott aims to
identify the presuppositions in terms of which a mode can be made
coherent and distinguished from other modes. Modal distinctions are
categorial. A categorial distinction is one of kind rather than
degree. Philosophers have disagreed about whether the identified kinds
are natural (ontological) or conceptual (epistemological): the former
are categories of being (Aristotle), the latter categories of
understanding (Kant). Philosophers have also disagreed about whether a
categorial scheme must be exhaustive and fixed or, alternatively, can
be open and mutable. The modes that Oakeshott identifies in
*Experience and Its Modes*--history, science, and
practice, to which he later added "poetry" (aesthetic
experience)--can from one angle be seen as epistemological
categories, not ontological ones. But from another angle the
distinction between being and knowing does not make sense
(Hegel). There can be no absolute difference between what a thing is
and how it is conceived in a particular context because there are no
"things in themselves" in the Kantian sense that are
independent of thought. And though the modes are mutually exclusive,
Oakeshott does not think that they form a closed set. The modes he
identifies are intellectual constructions that have appeared in the
course of human experience. This suggests that they could change or
even disappear, and that new modes might emerge. But here we must
distinguish between a mode and its instantiation. History was a
possible form of thinking before anyone started to think historically
and would remain a possibility even if human beings were to cease
thinking historically. 




A number of other conclusions follow from this understanding of
modality. First, a mode of experience implies a distinct and
autonomous kind of understanding. It implies a universe of discourse
with its own arguments and ways of assessing and grounding
them. Because propositions in one mode of discourse have no standing
in another, truth is coherence, however defined, within a given
mode. To argue across a modal boundary is to commit the fallacy of
*ignoratio elenchi* (irrelevance). If there is any relationship
between the modes it is conversational, not argumentative: cross-modal
encounters yield differences, not supra-modal conclusions. Oakeshott
sometimes makes this point by speaking of modes as
"voices" in an inter-modal conversation (*RP*
488-491, 497). In conversation the rules of relevance are
relaxed: a conversation is not an argument. Second, because what
counts as rational in discourse depends on the mode of discourse
itself, there is no extra-modal definition of reason or
rationality. The illusion that there is arises from privileging what
counts as reasonable within a given mode and denigrating what is
considered reasonable in other modes. This illusion of superiority
generates the narrowness, and at times hubris, characteristic of each
mode connoted by the labels "historicism",
"scientism", "pragmatism", and
"aestheticism". A conversational as opposed to
argumentative juxtaposition of modal voices is respectful of
differences and for that reason inherently civilized, which means that
to insist on the primacy of any single mode is not only boorish but
barbaric. And because the modes are independent of one another, and
none is more expressive of an imagined mode-independent reality than
any other, there can be no hierarchy of modes.




In making these points, Oakeshott differs from philosophical Idealists
in Germany, Italy, and England who were proposing similar categorial
schemes around the same time. These include Benedetto Croce, who
distinguishes the theoretical modes of art, history, and philosophy
from the practical modes of economics and ethics, and R.G.
Collingwood, who in *Speculum Mentis*, an early work, begins
with Hegel's triad of art, religion, and philosophy, identifying
philosophy broadly defined with "knowledge" and
distinguishing three kinds of knowledge--science, history, and
philosophy narrowly defined--to generate a fivefold hierarchy of
modes. In Collingwood's scheme, art is at the bottom, followed
by religion, the former concerned to imagine or "suppose"
and the latter to "assert", and then by the three kinds of
genuine knowledge, which are distinguished from art and religion in
being critical. Philosophy proper is the most critical of all because
it aims to transcend the other forms (Collingwood 1924; Connelly
2015). Oakeshott, partly in response to Collingwood, folds art and
religion into practice, denies that modes can be ordered
hierarchically, and defines philosophy as the activity of
interrogating presuppositions, including its own, and therefore not
itself a mode. But despite characterizing philosophy as supramodal, he
severs the tie between philosophy and unqualified
knowledge--"the Absolute"--that one finds in
Idealist metaphysics from Hegel to Collingwood. The distinction
between modal thinking and philosophy that Oakeshott asserts in
*Experience and Its Modes* reappears in *On Human
Conduct* as a distinction between "conditional" and
"unconditional" theorizing, the former resting on
assumptions that the latter questions. 




The idea of a hierarchy of modes is not particular to Idealism. Where
there are different understandings, someone interested in reconciling
them might argue that they represent different levels of
understanding, some more inclusive and in that sense higher than
others. In contrast to unifying philosophies, including philosophical
Idealism, Oakeshott's position is pluralist and
anti-hierarchical. In this respect he has more in common with Wilhelm
Dilthey, who struggled with the issue of relativity in metaphysics and
how to distinguish the human from the natural sciences, than with the
British Idealists--Bradley, Bosanquet, and McTaggart among
others--with whom he is often associated (Boucher 2012). For
Oakeshott, all knowledge is conditional. Theorizing is "an
engagement of arrivals and departures" in which "the
notion of an unconditional or definitive understanding may hover in
the background, but ... has no part in the adventure"
(*OHC* 2-3). In attempting to construct a coherent view
of the world the philosopher "puts out to sea"
(*OHC* 40) and is perpetually *en voyage*: there are no
"final solutions" in philosophy any more than in practical
affairs. 


## 3. Rationality and Rationalism




What Oakeshott calls "Rationalism" is the belief, in his
view illusory, that there are "correct" answers to
practical questions. It is the belief that an action or policy is
rational only when it rests on knowledge whose truth can be
demonstrated. Its error is thinking that correct decisions can be made
simply by applying rules or calculating consequences. In an early
essay, Oakeshott distinguishes between "technical" and
"traditional" knowledge. Technical knowledge is knowledge,
whether of facts or rules, that is easily learned and applied, even by
those who are without experience. Traditional knowledge, in contrast,
is "knowing how" rather than "knowing that"
(Ryle 1949). It is acquired by engaging in an activity and involves
judgment in handling facts or rules (*RP*
12-17). Knowledge often involves an element of rule-following
but using rules skillfully or prudently means going beyond the
instructions they provide. Even a simple rule, like "no vehicles
in the park" (Hart 1958), implies an element of judgment. This
holds for collective as well as individual decisions and for political
as well as private ones. But if technical knowledge has limits, so
does traditional knowledge. We cannot conclude that experience and
judgment are infallible: clearly, they are not. 




Political deliberation occurs when a public decision needs to be made
and a proposed course of action defended. But deciding which course of
action to pursue involves more than simply applying rules or
calculating costs and benefits. It requires interpretation and
judgment. We must decide which rule to use and then interpret what it
means in a given situation. If, alternatively, we choose an action
based on its likely consequences, we must judge the expected value of
those consequences, and this involves making value judgments as well
as estimating probabilities. Whether we are applying rules or
calculating outcomes, we must work with what we presume to be facts,
though these are always uncertain in various ways. For these reasons,
there is never a demonstrably correct course of action. Political
arguments cannot be proved or disproved; they can only be shown to be
more or less convincing than other such arguments. Political
discourse, then, is a discourse of contingencies and conjectures, not
of certainties or context-independent truths. It is persuasive and
rhetorical, not a matter of demonstration or proof (*RP*
70-95).




These are familiar points, made by Oakeshott with particular
clarity. What he adds to other philosophical discussions of practical
reasoning, such as Aristotle's treatment of *techne* and
*phronesis* (*Nichomachean Ethics* 1142a) or
Kant's remarks on judgment as the middle term between rules and
applications (Kant 1793: 8:275), are reflections on how practical, and
in particular political, discourse can cause disasters when these
points are overlooked. His conclusions rest on a dissection of
ideological politics, which, Oakeshott thought, reflects a
characteristically modern disposition to substitute rules--which
can be moral, historical, scientific, or divine--for judgment in
practical reasoning. The rules that are thought to govern practice are
not independent of practical activity but abstracted from it. They are
"abridgments" of customs, habits, traditions, and skills
(*RP* 121). To borrow language from Michael Walzer, they are
interpretations rather than discoveries or inventions (Walzer
1987). And what they interpret are ways of doing things: 



> 
> 
> the pedigree of every political ideology shows it to be the creature,
> not of premeditation in advance of political activity, but of
> meditation upon a manner of politics. (*RP* 51) 
> 
> 
> 


 
Rationalists, unaware of the local origins of the universal
principles that they imagine they have identified, reject knowledge
gained through experience in favor of something they call reason or
science. Whether deductive or computational, this abstract reason is
thought to guarantee greater certainty than experience and judgment
can provide. The fallacy of Rationalism, in other words, is that the
knowledge that it identifies as rational is itself really a product of
experience and judgment. It consists of rules, methods, or techniques
abstracted from practice--tools that, far from being substitutes
for experience and judgment, cannot be effectively used in their
absence.



In his essays on Rationalism, Oakeshott discusses many examples of
ideological politics. He dissects the rhetorical strategies of Locke,
Bentham, and Marx and takes contemporaries to task for thinking that
political conclusions can be extracted from religious or scientific
principles or from what are believed to be the lessons of
history. Marxism, for example, claims that laws of historical change
can be discerned scientifically and practical guidance derived from
them. But the claim should be understood as a rhetorical one that can
persuade only those who already believe it (Oakeshott 2008:
168-177). In his *Lectures in the History of Political
Thought* (Oakeshott 2006: 469-482) and *On Human
Conduct* (*OHC* 263-316), he discusses the arguments
of Francis Bacon, the German Cameralists, and others who impute some
collective purpose to the state as an enterprise for promoting some
particular substantive goal. This goal might be religious, economic,
imperial, or therapeutic. Bacon, for example, argues that the purpose
of government is to exploit nature, which implies mobilizing labor for
the sake of collective welfare--an implication explored and
developed by later thinkers, often but not only those identified as
socialist. The "collective" and "welfare"
elements of this understanding of the modern state, like the more
general theme of exploiting nature for human ends, have become
ubiquitous. Oakeshott examines seventeenth-century Puritanism,
eighteenth-century enlightened despotism, and twentieth-century
fascism and communism, all of which see the state as a corporate
enterprise of some kind, as instances of what he calls
"telocracy" (or "teleocracy"). In each case,
the collective goal is tied to an ideology that professes to offer
guidance for how to achieve the goal. 


 
These explorations of ideological politics took Oakeshott in two
directions. One, discussed in Section 4 below, was to distinguish
alternative understandings of the modern European state, each of which
could appear as either an analytical concept or an ideology. The other
was to affirm the independence of explanatory theorizing from
practical engagement by questioning the commonly affirmed "unity
of theory and practice"--an argument, discernible in
Heidegger and Gadamer, American pragmatism, and Frankfurt School
critical theory, for the practical character of all knowledge (Neill
2013). Heidegger treats practical experience not as one mode of
understanding among others but as the primordial experience from which
nothing human can free itself. For pragmatists from Peirce to Rorty,
ideas arise from our relationship to nature, which is how it affects
us and our projects. For critical theorists, all theorizing is
determined by the practical concerns that motivate it and is therefore
implicitly if not explicitly prescriptive. Even philosophy is
practical, at least when it deals with ethics and politics, for those
who offer practical guidance under the labels of normative or applied
ethics. Moral philosophy, they argue, aims primarily to judge and
guide conduct and only secondarily and instrumentally to understand
it. A similar point is made about political philosophy.




Oakeshott worked hard to rebut the argument that political philosophy
is inherently and unavoidably practical. Not only is it possible to
distinguish political philosophy from its object, political activity,
but its claim to being philosophical demands that the distinction be
recognized. In Oakeshott's view, moral philosophy properly
so-called is theorizing about morality (metaethics). It is concerned
to understand and explain, not to prescribe. Prescriptive or normative
ethics, he argued early on, is "pseudo-philosophy"
(*EM* 331-346) because it mixes theorizing with
moralising. Just as a theory of jokes is not itself a joke
(*OHC* 10), a theory of morality is not itself a morality. The
object of theorizing is a "going-on" to be reflected upon
("theorized") by an observer (a "theorist")
whose reflections may generate conclusions ("theorems"),
however provisional (Oakeshott 2004: 391; *OHC* 3). Theorizing
is distinguished from what Oakeshott calls "doing" in that
the product of theorizing is an understanding, a theorem or
proposition, not, as in the case of doing, an action. In doing,
whatever reflection takes place involves deliberating about what to
do. The theorizing that distinguishes genuine historical and
scientific inquiry from pseudo-history or pseudo-science is not
action-oriented and prescriptive but explanatory. What distinguishes
philosophical from historical or scientific inquiry is that philosophy
is more critical in examining the presuppositions of inquiry: where
scientists or historians want to get on with their work, the
philosopher is concerned to problematize that work and to examine the
experience of thinking itself. Political philosophy, then, is properly
philosophical when it examines the presuppositions of political
activity. 




An objection to distinguishing theory and practice in this way is that
it treats as categorial a distinction better understood as one of
degree. Political theory is messy. It involves describing and judging,
explaining and prescribing, and it is not always clear where one
begins and the other ends. They are certainly joined in
Oakeshott's writings despite his arguments for keeping them
separate (Haddock 2005). But the objection affirms rather than denies
the distinction. This is not to say that it cannot be challenged, but
to push the discussion further we must rethink the terms involved, for
example by defining practical reasoning as reasoning that results in
changes in *belief* as well as action (Wallace
2020). Alternatively, we might treat the theory-practice distinction
as contextual: a philosopher's theoretical argument can appear
practical when read historically as a move in some debate (Nardin
2015: 318-319). 




For Oakeshott, philosophy is distinctive because it questions rather
than uses other kinds of knowledge. Theorizing politics is therefore
not the same as engaging in politics, and to the extent that
theorizing is itself political it loses its distinctive character. The
irony of critical theory is that there must be things of which it is
uncritical in order to do what it purports to do: one cannot question
and act at the same time. The contribution of political philosophy,
for Oakeshott, is not to generate ideologies or recommend policies but
to understand political activity in terms of its assumptions. The
knowledge it generates, moreover,

is always provisional. Because scientific or historical knowledge is also provisional, this might seem to blur the distinction between philosophy and other kinds of inquiry. But philosophy is distinguished by its relentlessness in questioning presuppositions: it is an inquiry 



> 
> 
> in which questions are asked not in order to be answered but so that
> they may themselves be interrogated with respect to their conditions.
> (*OHC* 11) 
> 
> 
> 


 
To embrace this activity is to escape the prison of one's
current understanding. For the philosopher, it means leaving politics
and even political philosophy behind to pursue other concerns. This is
not intended as a description of what political philosophers do (they
do many things) nor a prescription for how they should proceed; it is
the product of Oakeshott's reflections on his own experience in
moving from engaging political arguments to uncovering their
presuppositions.


## 4. Civil Association




For the study of politics to be genuinely philosophical, Oakeshott
thought, it must exchange the vocabulary of political activity for one
that explains politics in other terms--different terms from those
to be explained. But this can lead to misunderstanding because the
vocabularies are not interchangeable. The need to escape the shackles
of an inherited political vocabulary explains why, in *On Human
Conduct* especially, Oakeshott modifies that vocabulary to
distinguish the kind of association he calls "civil" from
association to promote a substantive purpose, "enterprise"
association. If we apply the idea of enterprise association to the
state, we necessarily generate a conception of it as a corporate
undertaking. Civil association, in contrast, implies a state whose
laws leave citizens free to pursue their own self-chosen purposes: a
state premised on the independence of those associated and therefore
committed to resisting the domination that occurs in private life when
some impose their preferences on others and in public affairs when the
state itself is organized to impose a collective purpose on
everyone. For this to work there must be limits to the pursuit of
individual purposes, and in civil association these are understood as
limits that enjoin respect for the freedom of all. Oakeshott's
Latinate terminology--*civitas* for state, *cives*
for citizens, *lex* for law, *jus* for the rightness of
law, and *respublica* for the common good--springs from
his wish to direct the reader away from the conventional connotations
of the English words by using words less closely identified with the
concerns of enterprise association that pervade modern politics and
therefore modern political discourse. *Civitas* is a mode of
association in which *cives* are related to one another as
fellow subjects of common laws and in which the laws based are
noninstrumental.




An obvious objection to this view is that a state needs instrumental
as well as noninstrumental laws; no state can function without issuing
orders and framing policies to secure compliance, raise revenue,
defend itself against enemies, and so forth. Oakeshott would not
disagree. Any actual state is a mixture of formal and substantive
elements, procedures and policies, civil and enterprise
association. But defining civil association does not mean identifying
the features of an actual state; it means identifying the
"postulates" of civil association as a mode of
association. These are attributes of a state that determine its civil
character and distinguish it from states in which that character is
recessive or even suppressed, as in a despotism. *Cives* are
united in their recognition of the authority of *lex* and of
the obligations it prescribes. The law identified as *lex*
constrains citizens in the same way that Hobbes said hedges constrain
travelers: keeping them on the roads without prescribing their
destinations (*Leviathan*, ch. 30). To say that the laws in a
*civitas* are authoritative is to say that their recognition as
law is independent of whether *cives* approve of the
obligations they prescribe. Similarly, to consider the desirability of
a law in civil association is to engage in an activity narrowly
focused on the question of whether that law is an appropriate
expression of *respublica*, conceived not as a substantive
good, interest, or purpose but as rules, procedures, and offices
governing the conduct of the associates (*OHC* 147-149):
this is the *res publica*, the "public concern",
which is the proper subject for political deliberation in civil
association. In an actual state, however, the public concern includes
substantive goods that follow from or are needed to sustain the rule
of law, for it is the rule of law that defines the civil
condition. These goods, as Kant and others have observed, might
include policing, roads, schools, hospitals, and social security
(Ripstein 2009: chs. 8 and 9). Civil laws do not violate the premises
of civil association when they redress "public bads" such
as poverty, epidemic disease, or air pollution (de Jongh
2022). There is, in short, ample room for welfare concerns
within the civil condition, once the idea of civil association is
brought down to earth. 




Oakeshott considers the implications of a "civil"
understanding of the modern state in many writings, but most
systematically in his essays "On the Civil Condition"
(*OHC* Part II) and "The Rule of Law" (*OH*
119-164). Underlying the theory of civil association that he
develops in these works is a distinction between two modes of human
relationship, one moral and the other prudential. Laws in the mode of
civil association, which is an idea abstracted from what might be
going on in an actual state, are noninstrumental rules enabling the
coexistence of independent wills, not instruments to advance a
collective purpose. Such laws are "moral", in the sense
that they prescribe authoritative constraints on how individuals may
go about satisfying their wants, not prudential devices for achieving
substantive satisfactions. In contrast to persons transacting or
cooperating to satisfy wants, those who are related morally (in this
sense of the term) are related on the basis of rules as rules:
noninstrumental standards of conduct whose authority is distinguished
from their utility. One might question Oakeshott's use of the
word "moral" without disputing his suggestion that there
is a distinction between the propriety of an act as judged by its
relationship to a rule and its consequential desirability. A moral
rule binds people regardless of their purposes; it binds enemies as
well as friends. As a moral relationship, then, civil association
unites people not as subjects compelled to pursue a collective goal
but as individuals pursuing goals of their own, subject to the
constraints of laws that are not the instruments of some larger
purpose.



*Lex* is what Oakeshott calls an "ideal character",
an abstraction that is not to be confused with the actual law of any
existing state. To theorize civil association is not to describe the
contingent features of a particular state but to identify the
presuppositions of the state as a mode of association. Having
identified the modes of civil and enterprise association, Oakeshott is
able to distinguish a legal order organized to advance a substantive
purpose, one shaped by laws instrumental to that end, from one in
which the laws are noninstrumental constraints on the choices of
subjects pursuing their own purposes. Once we have grasped the
distinction, we can see why he identifies the rule of law with civil
association: differentiating the rule of law from other kinds of legal
rule is necessary to distinguish between laws premised on the
independence of citizens and laws designed to conscript them for
purposes not their own and thereby to dominate them. For Oakeshott,
the rule of law is a concept, not a description of any existing legal
order, much less (as it is for a less philosophical thinker like
Friedrich Hayek) a guiding ideal or ideology. In what has been called
"the ambiguity thesis" (Friedman 1989), Oakeshott holds
that any actual state--any existing legal order--is mixture
of noninstrumental rules regulating interactions among citizens and
rules instrumental to achieving substantive purposes: an ambiguous
combination of civil and enterprise association.




There will, then, be enterprise elements even in states in which the
civil character predominates. An actual state must have, in addition
to rules of association, some way to recognize, alter, and apply those
rules. Civil association, in other words, requires legislative and
judicial institutions and an apparatus of "ruling"
(policing, licensing, conscripting, and the like). Such institutions
are needed to anchor the idea of civility in the real world. The
government of an actual state will occupy buildings, keep records, and
collect taxes. And as a necessary part of governing it will sometimes
pursue substantive policies, attempt to produce particular outcomes,
issue specific orders or commands, and concern itself not only with
classes of persons but with named individuals. These powers can be,
and often are, misused, but they must be available if the rule of law
is to be more than "a logician's dream" (*OH*
149). But there is a difference between the conceptual presuppositions
of civil association and the conditions for realizing it in the
circumstances of a particular state. In civil association the
*persona* of the legislator, judge, or administrator is defined
by the obligations of *lex*. A legislator is not an advocate
for policies. A judge is not an arbitrator between interests, nor is
an administrator the implementer of a collective project. What is to
be legislated, adjudicated, and implemented is noninstrumental law,
*lex*, not policies to advance the substantive purposes of a
state conceived as a corporate enterprise. In any actual state these
roles--legislator and policymaker, judge and arbitrator, ruler
and manager--may not be sharply distinguished. But in the mode of
civil association, they are distinct. 




There is also a difference between the authority of a law and its
desirability: a legal order that its subjects disapprove of might have
difficulty sustaining itself. The difference is conceptual as well as
practical. Oakeshott joins legal positivists in distinguishing the
validity of a law as law (which he calls its
"authenticity") from its desirability or justice (its
"rightness"). But as his vocabulary signals, there are
subtle distinctions that he finds important. In a civil association, a
law is authentic if it is the outcome of an authoritative procedure
for enacting or otherwise recognizing it as part of the legal
order. This leaves open questions about its utility, moral legitimacy,
conformity to some standard of fair distribution, or other qualities
that might bear on its desirability. For Oakeshott, the rightness of a
law (or as he puts it, the *jus* of *lex*) is not a
matter of its consequences. He does not agree with John Rawls, Ronald
Dworkin, or other liberal egalitarians that the rightness of a law
(which they call justice) depends on whether it fairly distributes
benefits and burdens (*OH* 156). Nor does he agree that it
depends on criteria that Lon Fuller (1969) calls the "inner
morality" of law, which requires among other things that laws be
public, general, and not retroactive. These are qualities not of
justice but of legality, Oakeshott argues. A law that is secret,
tailored to benefit or injure particular individuals, or designed to
punish acts performed before its enactment is a disguised command, not
a genuine legal rule (*OHC* 128). He also disagrees with those
who think that a law's rightness depends on its conformity with
a higher law, whether divine or natural, with principles of human
rights, or with any other universal and categorical standard
(*OHC* 174; *OH* 142). 




Oakeshott is less clear about what justice or rightness in civil
association is than what it is not. He suggests that the most
important consideration in assessing a law's rightness is whether the
obligations it prescribes are appropriately imposed, in part because
law is inherently coercive (*OHC* 160; *OH* 143). That
an action is harmful, wrong, or otherwise undesirable is not
necessarily a decisive reason to forbid it legally. Whether a state
should constrain someone's choices on such grounds depends on
what Oakeshott calls the moral-legal self-understanding of a community
(*OH* 160). If the criteria used in judging the justice of laws
are not already embedded in the way a community deliberates legal
changes, what is called justice becomes an arbitrary standard that can
undermine the rule of law. The defect here arises when we judge a
community's laws according to abstract criteria unrelated to the
self-understandings of its members. Here again, Oakeshott's view
resembles that of Michael Walzer, who argues that appropriate and
effective "social criticism" comes from those who are
experienced in the ways of the community they criticize: they are
"connected critics" who base their criticism on the
community's own standards. They stand "a little to the
side, but not outside" the communities whose practices they
criticize (Walzer 1987: 61). The desirability of a law, then, must be
judged in relation to the practices of the community. These are not
univocal, however, and so the judgments are a matter for continuing
debate. Judging well requires a disciplined focus on the obligations a
state can properly prescribe. A law might be found wanting, for
example, if enforcing it were to require intrusive surveillance. The
character of deliberation in a state bearing the character of a civil
association is defined by its style more than by its conclusions in
particular cases (*OH* 161).


 
Oakeshott's idea of civil association responds to a
fundamental question in political philosophy: how can the nonvoluntary
character of law be reconciled with individual freedom? And his
answer, which self-consciously restates conclusions reached by
Rousseau, Kant, and J.S. Mill, among others, is that law respects
individual freedom only when it is understood as limited to regulating
the activities of citizens pursuing purposes of their own. A legal
order of this kind must ensure adequate compliance with its laws, but
coercion for that end should be distinguished from coercion designed
to advance substantive policies unrelated to maintaining the civil
order. The state as a framework of laws for the coexistence of free
individuals becomes a tyranny when law is used to impose the purposes
of some on others who do not share them. The legal subject in an
enterprise state is not an independent citizen but someone to be led,
managed, mobilized, or provided for: a subordinate assigned a role in
a purposive project. The dependent role-players in an enterprise state
and the independent individuals in a civil one are equally
"free", in one sense of that word, because both have
"agency", the capacity to choose even when their choices
are constrained. But only in civil association do those associated
enjoy "individual freedom", which for Oakeshott means
freedom from being legally subjected to the purposes of others.




This is a version of the republican idea of freedom as independence or
nondomination (Skinner 1998; Pettit 1997), though for Oakeshott as for
Kant independence is defined in moral rather than material terms and
stripped of certain other elements of republican political thought,
such as that the people must make its own laws. Individual freedom,
which is distinct from the freedom inherent in agency, is not
compromised by law in civil association. One reason for this is that
in civil association, as a *mode* of association, laws are
general rules, not particular commands. The more nearly a state
resembles an enterprise association in practice, the less it can
accommodate activities "eccentric or indifferent to its
purpose" (*OHC* 316). Participating in a purposive
enterprise can express individuality only if participation is freely
chosen. The subjects of an enterprise state are not independent,
because the purposes they are compelled to serve have been chosen for
them. And although some may contingently escape servitude, whether
they are permitted to go (or for that matter to stay) is a management
decision (*OHC* 317). Because individual freedom in enterprise
association is the freedom to dissociate as well as to associate, it
can exist only if the association itself is voluntary, and this cannot
be assumed if the association is a state.




Oakeshott builds his account of civil association in *On Human
Conduct* on an exploration of its presuppositions. These include
the ideas of agency, agents, actions, transactions to satisfy wants,
instrumental and noninstrumental practices, and the conduct of agents
related in terms of such transactions and practices. And he explores
ideas about the modern state in European thought and practice, a topic
he also discusses in other writings (Oakeshott 1993b, 1996, 2006,
2008). He traces the distinction between civil and enterprise
association to the medieval ideas of *societas* and
*universitas*, terms he borrows (and redefines) for his
purpose. *Societas* designates a relationship of agents in a
practice (such as a common language), agents 



> 
> 
> joined not in seeking a common substantive satisfaction, but in virtue
> of their understanding and acknowledgement of the conditions of the
> practice concerned and of the relationships it entails. (*OHC*
> 88) 
> 
> 
> 




A *universitas*, in contrast, is a corporate undertaking (such
as a partnership or school) established to advance a particular
end. *Societas* is not identical with civil association,
however; it stands for a larger class of relationships based on the
noninstrumental considerations that define them. The civil condition
emerges only when these considerations harden into rules
("laws") and are supplemented with other rules for
recognizing, altering, and enforcing them. Oakeshott examines
reflections on the modern state, so conceived, found in Machiavelli,
Madison, Constant, and Montesquieu, among others, and more
philosophically (that is, in terms of its presuppositions rather than
incidental features) in Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and
Hegel. He also examines the ideas of thinkers who saw the state as a
purposive enterprise. These include Francis Bacon, for whom the state
was a productive estate, Joseph de Maistre, who saw it as "a
religious corporation in the Catholic idiom" (*OHC* 281),
and various theorists of enlightened despotism, socialism, national
self-determination, and economic development. But Oakeshott's
discussion of these thinkers and their arguments is only loosely
historical, inviting the charge that he is using them for his own
purposes and in a way that does not meet his own standard of genuine
historical inquiry.


## 5. History and the Human Sciences




By distinguishing between thinking to understand and thinking to act,
Oakeshott aims to protect historical, scientific, and philosophical
inquiry from the imperialism of practical concerns. This aim is
evident in his treatment of historical inquiry, especially in his
concern to distinguish the idea of a distinctively historical past
from what he calls "the practical past". Genuine
historical inquiry is concerned to establish what happened, not to
elicit knowledge that speaks to present concerns. It is indifferent to
"the lessons of history" (*EM* 316) or "the
living past" (*OH* 19). His point is not that past
experience cannot guide, but that the past that is supposed to guide
is not a "historical" past. Nor is it the business of
historical inquiry to generate stories about the direction of
history. Books about the progress of the human mind (Condorcet) or the
end of history (Fukuyama) written from the standpoint of the
author's own time do not observe the modal conditions of
historical thought but are instead works of what Herbert Butterfield
(1931) called "Whig history"--history designed to
ratify, if not glorify, the present. A similar point can be made about
stories of decline. By detaching historical knowledge from present
concerns, Oakeshott articulates a theory of history as a distinct mode
of inquiry and understanding. 




Implicit in these claims for the autonomy of historical inquiry is a
distinction between naturalistic and hermeneutic ways of understanding
human affairs. Oakeshott uses the word "conduct" to
identify human choice and action, contrasting it with behavior
explained as the outcome of natural processes. Unlike natural
phenomena, human conduct involves ideas. And unlike the natural
sciences, the "human sciences"
(*Geisteswissenchaften*, the sciences of mind as a body of
ideas) require interpreting ideas, especially those that shape
intentional and self-conscious action. The human sciences are, in
fact, doubly interpretive because they interpret human conduct, which
is itself an activity that involves making and acting on
interpretations. And when they go beyond generalizing about human
conduct to explaining particular acts, the explanations they provide
are "historical" explanations. 




In making these points Oakeshott draws on late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century German thinking about the study of history,
especially the anti-positivism of Windelband, Rickert, and
Dilthey. Their arguments rest on a distinction between the realms of
human freedom and natural necessity articulated by Vico, Kant, and
Hegel, among others. Understanding human conduct in terms of thought
and action can nevertheless be scientific--that is,
systematic--in its own manner. Such an inquiry might focus on
what Hegel called "objective spirit", shared ideas
expressed in languages, moral traditions, and other practices that
require interpretation. But it might also focus on individual
performances: particular acts, ideas, judgments, arguments, and other
products of thinking. In either case, the disciplines of the
humanities and humanistic social sciences are concerned with the
content of thinking--ideas--not the natural processes that
make thinking possible (*VLL* 23-24). This claim is at
odds with how the social sciences are widely understood and especially
with much in the disciplines of psychology and cognitive science. 


 
If separating the social sciences from the humanities is a
mistake, Oakeshott thinks, another is to imagine that the word
"social" designates a subject for
investigation. Sociology, he argues, is not a discipline with its own
subject matter; it is what remains when disciplines such as economics
and psychology have claimed certain aspects of human activity as their
own. The study of a residual category cannot be a genuine discipline,
nor is there any general science of society that grounds the
conclusions of economics, psychology, and the other social
sciences. What are loosely called social relationships are actually
relationships in terms of specific practices--habits, customs,
rules, and roles--that prescribe considerations of utility or
propriety in acting. They are not, as Oakeshott thought sociologists
were inclined to assume, 



> 
> 
> components of an unspecified, unconditional interdependence or
> "social" relationship, something called a
> "society" or "Society". (*VLL* 24)
> 
> 
> 


 
This is not a point about nomenclature but a claim that a proper
discipline has boundaries that enable a coherent inquiry. For
Oakeshott, the category that defines coherent inquiry into human
conduct is not "social" but
"intelligent". Intelligence, here, is not the quality of
being bright or stupid but of having agency, the capacity to think and
choose. An excavated object is either a manifestation of intelligence
(an inscribed tablet) or not (a rock). In making this distinction, he
is not suggesting that the experienced world is made up of two kinds
of things but rather that we experience the world differently
according to the categories of understanding that we bring to it. For
an understanding to be coherent, it must distinguish between the
intelligent and the not-intelligent because these categories are
mutually exclusive. Propositions about the biochemistry of thinking
cannot explain the cognitive content of a person's thoughts. No
inquiry can generate a self-consistent body of knowledge if its
objects are categorially ambiguous. These claims restate
Oakeshott's point that cross-modal arguments are necessarily
incoherent. Much of social science is undermined by efforts to
understand intelligent conduct as the product of not-intelligent
physiological, psychological, or social processes seen as natural,
that is, operating independently of understanding. Such efforts cannot
generate genuine knowledge because they involve a categorial
error. Coherent explanation is impossible when 



> 
> 
> rules are misidentified as regularities, intelligent winks as
> physiological blinks, conduct as "behavior" and contingent
> relationships as causal or systematic connections. (*VLL*
> 26)
> 
> 
> 


 
Thoughts and actions can be explained, but only historically, not
scientifically. Oakeshott is here deliberately breaking with the view
that explanations are always "causal" explanations that
invoke scientific laws. Historical explanations presuppose a
distinctively historical conception of causation. An argument, choice,
or judgment made by a particular agent at a particular moment is an
individual performance, an event. Scientific psychology can generalize
about how people are likely to act but it cannot explain particular
choices, which may fail to illustrate the generalizations. And the
reason for this limitation is not only the categorial impossibility of
explaining meanings in terms of statistical patterns or natural
processes but also the gap between observed generalizations and
particular acts. The generalizations about human nature or social
conditions found, confirmed, and relied upon by social scientists,
though often illuminating, cannot explain the occurrence of particular
acts, which viewed as intelligent human conduct are always
performances in relation to some practice. The social sciences aim to
find causal relationships between variables such as age or income, and
to offer explanations in terms of these relationships rather than
intelligent choice. Such explanations are possible, but what they
explain is variance in the data, not particular performances. 


 
Explaining particular acts, Oakeshott argues, is
"historical" explanation, which as he understands it is
categorially distinct from scientific explanation. An observed pattern
in the data, a statistical generalization, identifies a type of
action. A performance, in contrast, is the choice of an actual agent
at a particular moment. Science as a generalizing mode of inquiry aims
to explain types of events, not particular occurrences. The humanities
and humanistic social sciences, in contrast, are concerned with
particular acts or other individual objects. The individuality of an
act is explained historically by relating it to antecedent events that
led to its occurrence as an act with its particular
characteristics. An individual act is one in a series of acts, each of
which has meaning in relation to acts that preceded it. It is these
antecedent acts, or some of them, that illuminate its unique
character. Only explanations of this kind are properly historical,
Oakeshott argues. 


 
This account of historical explanation departs sharply from a
positivist theory like the covering law model (Hempel 1942; Nagel
1961) because it holds that a historical explanation aims to explain
not just the occurrence of an event but its cognitive significance,
which Oakeshott calls its "character". Unlike scientific
explanations, which postulate repeatable events, historical
explanations postulate events that are individual and
unique. Positivist theories of historical explanation get things
backward by assuming that the event to be explained is already
understood as an instance of a type of event, but the historian cannot
make this assumption. Historical inquiry is not an exercise in
explaining an event whose character is known in advance of the effort
to explain it. This character has yet to be established, and it can be
established only by showing how antecedent events led to it rather
than some other event. The relationship between an antecedent and a
subsequent event is a "contingent" one in which the
meaning of the subsequent is illuminated by the antecedent.


 
Oakeshott's conclusion that history is central to the human
sciences results from reflection on the limitations of the natural and
social sciences in explaining individual performances. Scholars in the
humanities and humanistic social sciences typically interpret such
performances in relation to historical practices such as religious
ceremonies, musical genres, culinary traditions, or legal procedures,
each of which may be understood as a "language" of human
performance. But the understanding thereby gained is incomplete,
Oakeshott argues, because what it reveals is not the individuality of
a performance but rather its "conventionality" (OHC
99-100), the type of conduct it illustrates. As explanation,
this kind of interpretation help to understand contexts, situations,
and types of action (practices), but it cannot explain the occurrence
of particular acts (performances): why a particular person did such
and such a thing on this or that occasion.




Given Oakeshott's view of the importance of history among the human
sciences, the sustained attention that he devoted to it is not
surprising. History is the first mode he considers in *Experience
and its Modes* and he returns to the topic often in later
writings. History as a mode of thought is not a record of past events
but a distinct way of identifying and explaining them. The task of the
philosophy of history, as Oakeshott sees it, is to clarify what
distinguishes historical from other kinds of inquiry. Historical
investigation cannot simply record historical events because what is
identified as an event depends on evidence, and what counts as
evidence must itself be established. The point, fundamental to the
modern discipline of critical history, was made in 1852 by Gustav
Droysen, who argued that 



> 
> 
> the data for historical investigation are not past things, for these
> have disappeared, but things which are still present here and now,
> whether recollections of what was done, or remnants of things that
> have existed and of events that have occurred. (Droysen 1893: 11) 
> 
> 
> 




The historian begins not with the past itself but with survivals from
the past that need to be authenticated and interpreted before they can
be used as evidence. A historical fact is not simply given. It is a
conclusion: not "what really happened" but "what the
evidence obliges us to believe" (*EM* 112). We identify
as historical facts the conclusions that our investigations best
support. The task of historical inquiry is to establish historical
knowledge, according to the canons of the historian's craft,
from evidence that is always scattered, unreliable, and open to
interpretation.




Historical knowledge, as Oakeshott sees it, can therefore be said to
be constructed. The ideas ("identities") that the
historian uses to organize an inquiry--the Renaissance, India,
the Dreyfus affair--are designated, not discovered. And they are
changing, not immutable, identities that dissolve under scrutiny into
collections of events, which are themselves identities. They are not
givens but organizing ideas that are themselves open to
reconsideration. Historical explanation means illuminating the
circumstantial meaning of an event in relation to its antecedents,
which in a genuinely historical inquiry are always events and never
scientific laws or processes. In a historical explanation, an event to
be explained is made intelligible as the outcome of what the evidence
suggests are the relevant antecedents. In this theory, which Oakeshott
develops in the second of three late essays on historical inquiry
(*OH* 45-96), a particular historical past appears as a
collection of contingently related events, often presented as a
story. But not necessarily: he disagrees with the view, which was
gaining adherents at the time he was writing, that what distinguishes
historical from other kinds of explanations is that they take the form
of a narrative (Ankersmit 1983; Danto 2007). Historians do frequently
construct narratives, but a narrative is not the only way to present
historical knowledge. 


 
If historical knowledge is a construction, it follows that what we
identify as the past is actually present because it is what the
evidence supports now. Historical facts are present because all facts
are present, that is, exist as conclusions within a present body of
knowledge. A historical past is constructed according to what present
evidence--an object, such as an axe, diary, painting, or coin,
that has survived and is treated as evidence--compels the
historian to believe. Nor is this historical past the only possible
kind of past: if there is a historical past then there must be other,
non-historical, pasts constructed in modes other than the historical
(OH 9). Of these, Oakeshott is particularly concerned with what he
calls the practical past because of the difficulty of distinguishing
it from a past resulting from historical inquiry: 



> 
>  
> even the most severely "historical" concern with the
> past is still liable to be compromised by seeking the answer to
> questions which are not historical questions and by asides and even
> judgments which belong to some other mode of understanding. (OH
> 118)
> 
> 
> 




A scientific past, such as what happened during the first three
minutes of the existence of our universe, must also be distinguished
from the historical past. Cosmologists might learn something about
this past by running their equations backward, but historians have no
equations to run. 


 
What is distinctive about Oakeshott's conception of
historical inquiry can be brought out by comparing it with
R.G. Collingwood's claim that the historian's proper task
is to reenact the past (Collingwood 1993 [1946]: 282-302). That
claim makes historical truth subjective by requiring that the
historian reconstruct past events as they were experienced by those
who participated in them. But this privileges the understandings of
the participants, who may not have understood or even known what was
happening. Their ideas are important in constructing a past but are
not everything we need to know to understand it. To argue otherwise is
to argue that the historian is barred from having any ideas about a
given past that "would have been impossible for anyone who lived
in that past" (Oakeshott 2008: 49). Oakeshott also rejects
Collingwood's claim that "all philosophy is the philosophy
of history" (Collingwood 1993 [1926]: 425) because it makes
philosophy, and by implication all knowledge, subservient to
historical knowledge (Oakeshott 2007: 199). Collingwood's
argument for the primacy of history (historicism) is as reductionist
as arguments for the primacy of science (scientism) or practice
(pragmatism). The argument that one kind of understanding is the
foundation of other kinds assumes the truth of what it sets out to
prove. Historical inquiry constructs knowledge from what it concludes
to be evidence. It does not provide knowledge of a given, pre-modal
reality. If historical pasts are intellectual constructions, there is
no access to these pasts except through historical inquiry.