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Oakeshott's answerAlexander Lyon Macfie aa Sevenoaks, Kent, UKPublished online: 27 Oct 2010.

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Oakeshott’s answer

Alexander Lyon Macfie*

Sevenoaks, Kent, UK

In this paper I consider the question of whether Michael Oakeshott’sexplanation of history as a mode of understanding provides an adequatedefence of the subject against the ‘postmodern’ attack mounted by KeithJenkins, the noted British philosopher of history. On the whole Iconclude that it does not, though it does go quite far in that direction. Inthe process I discover a considerable amount of agreement between thetwo philosophers, in particular with regard to the constructed nature ofhistory, but not enough to enable them to arrive at similar conclusions.

Keywords: mode; postulate; past; experience; fact; event

Does Michael Oakeshott’s account of history, as a mode of understanding,provide an effective defence of the subject against the attacks mounted on it inrecent years (1990–2010) by Keith Jenkins, the noted British ‘postmodern’philosopher of history? Probably not. But the possibility is worth investigat-ing further, not least because in his various works on the subject Jenkinsstands out as a leading British critic of conventional (academic) history, whileOakeshott, part of an earlier generation of thinkers on the subject, offers whatone commentator referred to at the time as possibly the ‘most penetratinganalysis of historical thought’ ever written (Boucher 1984, 193).

In this article, I will draw mainly, in my account of Oakeshott’s view ofhistory, on his two major works on the subject, Experience and its modes(1933) and On history and other essays (1983) – works which, with regard tohistory at least, it is generally agreed, display a remarkable consistency(Auspitz 1984, 42; Johnson 1993, 407; Podoksik 2002, 718; Franco 2004,133). In or about 1955, Oakeshott also wrote a short piece, ‘The activity ofbeing a historian’, later published in Rationalism in Politics (1962), but inthis work Oakeshott added little to his earlier analysis. For my account ofJenkins’ thought on the subject I will draw mainly on Why history? Ethicsand postmodernity (1999) and on the introduction to a recent collection of

*Email: alexandermacfie@btbroadband.com

Rethinking HistoryVol. 14, No. 4, December 2010, 521–530

ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online

� 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2010.515807

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his articles, At the limits of history (2009), though I might equally well havedrawn on his groundbreaking Rethinking history (1991), on On ‘What ishistory?’ From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (1995), and on Refiguringhistory (2003), all significant works.

It has to be admitted that, despite the remarkable consistency of hiswork, some small change did occur in Oakeshott’s thinking about historybetween the writing of Experience and its modes and On history. In Onhistory, Oakeshott no longer identifies philosophical experience as ‘experi-ence without presupposition, reservation, arrest or modification’ (Oakeshott1933, 2) and history as a defective mode of experience. Rather, experience,now of a world of objects, can only be approached by way of modality, thatis to say by way of an ‘autonomous manner of understanding, specifiable interms of exact conditions . . . logically incapable of denying or confirmingthe conclusions of any other mode of understanding’ (Oakeshott 1983, 2; seeO’Sullivan, 2003, 221–2; Franco 2004, 125–9, 133–43).

Oakeshott, it may be noted, lectured on history and politics at Cambridgein the 1920s and 1930s, before becoming, following service in the armed forcesin World War II and a brief spell at Oxford, Professor of Political Science atthe London School of Economics (1951–68). During his life time (1901–90),he was known mainly as a political thinker, but he is now known almost asmuch as a philosopher of history (see O’Sullivan 2003; Franco 2004; Boucher1984). As for Jenkins, he has, throughout his career, as a Reader in, laterProfessor of, History at University College, Chichester, become known as apowerful exponent of the mainly continental critique of history, mounted inthe second half of the twentieth century by such notable luminaries as JeanFrancois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard,HaydenWhite and Frank Ankersmit. Where Oakeshott was generally knownas a political conservative, though of a distinctly independent kind, Jenkinsidentifies himself as a polemical, leftward-leaning, cutting edge radical, intentnot so much on understanding the world as on changing it. Interestingly, bothhave occasionally been described as sceptical nihilists, threatening the verysurvival of civilisation or at least the sort of civilisation their critics claim to bedefending (Crick 1963, 65; Jenkins 2009, 10).

What Oakeshott argues, broadly speaking, in his various works on thephilosophy of history, is that the world of experience, normally understoodas a totality, can also be understood, independently, by way of (at least)three, later four, modes of understanding, the practical, the scientific and thehistorical: in 1959, in The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind,Oakeshott added a fourth mode, the poetic. The practical mode of under-standing is present experience viewed under the category of use or benefit(friendly or hostile, advantageous or disadvantageous). The scientific mode isexperience, viewed under the category of quantity (objective and as far aspossible independent of the self). The historical mode is experience viewedunder the category of the past (a certain way of reading the present). And the

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poetic mode is experience viewed under the category of the aesthetic (thecontemplation of images). Each mode of understanding has a language of itsown, an ‘autonomous universe of discourse’ that interprets the world in acertain way (Oakeshott 1983, 20). Each abstract world of ideas, thus createdis, as such and as a world, wholly and absolutely independent of any other;and each, in so far as it is coherent, is true for itself (Oakeshott 1933, 75).

In order to understand the character of history, the philosopher, inOakeshott’s view, must first discover the system of postulates that underliesit – the differentia of the historical mode. In Oakeshott’s opinion the fivemost important of these are: the idea of past, of fact, of truth, of reality andof explanation. The past, as a postulate of history, is not the rememberedpast. Nor is it the practical (useful) past, the fancied (imagined) past, or thewhole past. It is the past conceived ‘for its own sake’ as a dead past, inferredfrom the evidence of a past that has survived into the present; and it is to befound only in a history book (Oakeshott 1983, 33). The ‘historical past’, inother words, is a constructed past, made up of ‘what the evidence obliges usto believe’ (Oakeshott 1933, 111–12). It ‘can neither be found nor dug up,nor retrieved, nor recollected, but only inferred’ (Oakeshott 1983, 33). Toattempt to construct a history that some how corresponds to ‘what was’,‘what really happened’, would be to pursue a phantom.

Historical fact, Oakeshott declares, in Experience and its modes, is aconclusion, a result, an inference and a judgement. As such it belongs, likeeverything else, to the world of present experience. Like the historical past, itis ‘what the evidence obliges us to believe’ (Oakeshott 1933, 111–12). Truth iscoherence in a world of present ideas. As such it is never a matter of thecorrespondence of a present world of ideas with a past course of events, orthe correspondence of present facts with ‘what was’. The truth of each factdepends upon the truth of the world of facts to which it belongs, and the truthof the world of facts lies in the coherence of the facts which compose it. Eachseparate fact remains a hypothesis until the whole worlds of facts isestablished (Oakeshott 1933, 113). Historical reality is present experience ofthe world, comprehended under the category of the past. For conveniencethis ‘real’ world is divided up into ‘historical individuals’, namely events,things, situations and persons, all governed by the ideas of change, continuityand discontinuity. Explanation is similarly derived from experience. Inexperience there is always explanation. Historical explanation is an attemptto give a rational account of the world in terms of two of the principalcategories of historical experience, change and identity. Such categories asthese are not the product of some kind of inductive study of the course ofevents but the presuppositions of such a study. For without such presup-positions there would be no historical world, no course of events from whichto gather the principles of historical knowledge (Oakeshott 1933, 125).

It is the business of the philosopher, Oakeshott declares, in Experienceand its modes, to understand, as far as possible, the nature of experience.

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‘Experience’ stands for the concrete whole, which analysis divides into‘experiencing’ and ‘what is experienced’. Similarly, experience is sometimesdivided into thought, consciousness, sensation, perception, volition, intuitionand feeling. But such divisions, though occasionally useful, are in error, forexperience as such admits of no final or absolute division. As for the world ofvalue, that too is a mode of experience, an abstract world of ideas, anincomplete assertion of reality; while valuation is thinking, the attempt tomake coherent a world of ideas (Oakeshott 1933, 274); though for Oakeshottmost of the time valuation is concerned with the practical mode ofunderstanding. As we have seen, in On history, Oakeshott somewhatmodifies his position on philosophical experience, and also on history as adefective mode of experience. Nevertheless he continued throughout to basehis philosophical project on an understanding of present experience.

For Oakeshott, then, a historically understood past is the conclusion ofan enquiry of a certain sort, specified only in terms of the procedure of thatenquiry. It is an enquiry in which authenticated survivals from the past aredissolved into their component features in order to be used for what they areworth as circumstantial evidence from which a past that has not survivedmay be inferred, a past composed of passages of related historical events,assembled as themselves answers to the questions about the past formulatedby the historian (Oakeshott 1983, 33). As such history (the historicallyunderstood past) contains no lessons, justifies no meaning and sends nomessages. Such interpretations of experience belong purely to the practicalmode of understanding, which should not be confused with the historical(Oakeshott 1933, 102–11, 137, 157–8).

What Jenkins argues, broadly speaking, in Why history and At the limitsof history, is that ‘nothing is given to a gaze, but rather is constituted ‘‘inmeaning’’ by it’ (the mind does not observe an independent and externalworld, but rather constructs the essential features of that world) (Jenkins1999, 1). As a result it is impossible to say anything truthful or objectiveabout the ‘real’ world, past or present. The world as it actually is or wassimply cannot be described or represented. Any attempt to do so willinevitably be both polemical and partisan. What this means, with regard tohistory (the past) is that there is nothing definitive for us to get out of it,except that which we have put into it. It consists of nothing independent of usthat we have to be loyal to, nothing we have to feel guilty about, no facts wehave to find, no truths we have to respect, no problems we have to solve, noproject we have to complete. The past, in other words, does not exist‘historically’ outside the historian’s textual, constructive appropriations, sothat, being made by them, it has no independence to resist their interpretativewill, not least at the level of meaning. However irreducible, stubborn, painful,comic or tragic the past may have been, it only reaches us through fictionaldevices which invest it with a range of highly selective and hierarchicalreadings which are ‘always subservient to various powers and interests’

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(Jenkins 1999, 3). Consequently, the past as history always has been andalways will be necessarily configured, troped, emplotted, read, mythologisedand ideologised in ways to suit ourselves. There is, as Hayden White has putit, ‘an inexpungeable relativity for every representation of historicalphenomena’, such that one must simply face the fact that ‘when it comesto apprehending the historical record, there are no grounds in the historicalrecord itself for preferring one way of constructing its meaning, over another’(Jenkins 1999, 3). History, in short, particularly lower case (conventional,academic) history, is problematic, both in terms of the various claims madeon it, metaphysical, ontological, epistemological and methodological, and interms of its putative, normative utility. It is a ‘ramshackle phenomenon’,unworthy of preservation, ‘just one more foundationless, positionedexpression of interests, in a world of foundationless, positioned interests’(Jenkins 1999, 4, 8). Far from struggling to keep it alive, we ‘postmodernists’should recognise its moribund condition and let it go.

Jenkins, it may be noted, is well aware of the fact that, if every reading ofthe ‘real’ world is ultimately the effect of a ‘constitutive/performativereading’, then there is no more justification for a ‘postmodern’ reading thanfor a modernist one. There are, in other words, no unproblematic answers toquestions concerning the metaphysical foundation of things, the ontologyand epistemology of which cannot be known. Faced with this absence oftruth, we human beings, qua human beings, just have to make choices (theaporetic ‘madness of the decision’), to find answers to impossible questionsthat we as a species just happen to be able to formulate. This, Jenkinsadmits, is a trite response. But it may be the only one we are capable ofmaking (Jenkins 1999, 5).

This short analysis of the nature of history, as he sees it, Jenkinssomewhat expands in his introduction to At the limits of history, his latestwork on the subject. There he explains that the past (all that has happened‘before’), which certainly did once exist, depends for its current (ontological)existence on its representers (say, historians) and their representations: norepresentation, that is to say, no past. And even were the historian toattempt to represent the ‘real’ past, as it actually was, he could not do so, ashe would not be able to determine, from the infinity of events andoccurrences, what to put in and what to leave out; where to begin and whereto end; how to structure the historical meaning of the traces that remain,while at the same time taking into account all the things that happened forwhich no traces remain; how to determine, from the multiplicity of ‘causes’,each with an inherent possibility of infinite regression, the causal factors thatsupposedly explain events; and what actually constitutes a ‘historical event’in the first place. All such questions, Jenkins concludes, are ultimatelyunanswerable, even when exposed to historical theory, the usually unspokenjustification of historical method. History, in other words, far from being asecure form of knowledge, of an epistemic kind, should be seen rather as a

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sort of ‘figural realism’, in the realm of the aesthetic, a branch of rhetoric, a‘faculty for the furnishing of arguments’ (Jenkins 2009, 5). Moreover, sincesuch arguments can never be true or false, but only valid or invalid, nohistory, based on such argumentation, can ever be, as an historical account,of a truthful kind. All it can be is a thing inferred, a mere conjecture andproposal, inviting refutation, always logically open, never in and for itself,but always persuasive (political and ideological), always in other words for‘someone’ (Jenkins 2009, 5).

Both Oakeshott and Jenkins, incidentally, see history as a culturalphenomenon, not a natural one. Oakeshott sees it as a ‘direction ofattention’, an activity and a practice that has somehow emerged ‘withoutpremonition’ from the ‘indiscriminate gropings of human intelligence’ overthe last two hundred years or so (Oakeshott 1962, 137; 1983, 6). Jenkinslikewise sees it as just one of the many ‘imaginaries’ we have fabricated tohelp us to make some sense of the apparent senselessness of existence, againparticularly in the last two hundred years. After all, as he remarks in Whyhistory, ‘nothing knowable is of a natural kind’ (Jenkins 1999, 14).

The differences between the Oakeshott analysis of history and theJenkins version are not surprising, particularly in view of the fact that theyapproach the subject from different standpoints (Oakeshott conservative,Jenkins radical), anchor their thinking in different philosophical traditions(Oakeshott idealist, Jenkins postmodernist, poststructuralist and post-Marxist), and belong to different generations, differently educated. WhereOakeshott, for instance, locates experience as the ultimate foundation of alltruth, fact, explanation and historical reality, Jenkins denies the existence ofall foundation, of experience or anything else. Where Oakeshott sees it as thebusiness of the philosopher to investigate experience, and the modes(practical, scientific, historical and poetic) by which it can be understood,Jenkins sees it as the business of the philosopher to ‘deconstruct’ theestablished structures of thought of a culture and reveal their inadequaciesand contradictions. Where Oakeshott, in his analysis, distinguishes betweena historical mode of understanding and a practical one, Jenkins makes nosuch distinction. For Jenkins, that is to say (using Oakeshott’s vocabulary),all history is practical history, always ‘for someone’. Where Oakeshottconcludes that truth consists of coherence in a world of present ideas,Jenkins concludes that it is an epistemic impossibility, an expression not ofcoherence but of power. Finally, where Oakeshott, as a pragmaticphilosopher, accepts the existence of history both as an activity and as amode of understanding, albeit (in Experience and its modes at least) adefective one (an ‘arrest’ or modification of experience), Jenkins, as a radicalthinker, sets out to destroy it.

What is surprising is the similarity of the two views. Both, for instance,agree: with the standard idealist argument that, broadly speaking, it is themind which makes the world, at least as we experience it. As Oakeshott puts

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it, ‘the conditions of understanding specify what is to be understood’(Oakeshott 1983, 5); or as Jenkins puts it, ‘nothing is given to a gaze butrather is constituted ‘‘in meaning’’ by it’ (Jenkins 1999, 1). That,consequently it is impossible to know anything definitive about the ‘real’world (the world as it actually is, the ‘thing in itself’, whatever that mightbe). That similarly it is impossible to know anything definitive about thepast. The past, as it actually was, simply cannot be represented or for thatmatter reconstructed. Such history as is written, must inevitably, therefore,be a construction, inferred, adequately or inadequately, from the remains ofthe past that happen to survive. As such it belongs to the world of present,not past, experience; and is embodied in language, which Oakeshott refersto as ‘an autonomous universe of discourse’ and Jenkins as ‘discourse, textand narrative’ (Oakeshott 1983, 20; Jenkins 2009, 2). That the only placehistory is to be found is ‘in a history book’ (Oakeshott 1983, 33; Jenkins1999, 3). That the categories of historical explanation, commonly used bythe historian, should not be accepted as somehow descriptive of the ‘real’world, past or present. For Oakeshott, they are the postulates of a historicalmode of understanding, prefiguring the world of the historian. For Jenkinsthey are mere ‘meaning-making expressions’, totally detached from thetraces of the past that are supposed to support them (Oakeshott 1933, 97–98; Jenkins 2009, 6). Change and identity, in particular, should not beaccepted as the product of some kind of inductive process. Nor shouldcausation be accepted as an explanation of historical change: bothOakeshott and Jenkins agree that any attempt to explain historical eventsin terms of causation may be undermined by the argument of ‘infiniteregress’ (Oakeshott 1933, 125, 127). And, finally, that history (inOakeshott’s case the historical past) contains no lessons, justifies nomeaning and sends no messages. Such meaning as is apparently discoveredin history (again in Oakeshott’s case the historical past) by the historian isinvariably constructed or imagined by him, not discovered or found. AsOakeshott puts it, in ‘The activity of being a historian’, for the historian ‘thepast is dead and irreproachable, the past is feminine. He loves it as amistress of whom he never tires and whom he never expects to talk sense’(Oakeshott 1962, 166). And as Jenkins puts it, in At the limits of history, ‘theidea that the historical past has meanings – purposes, significance,teleologies – in it, meanings that can be found rather than manufactured’,appears ridiculous (Jenkins 2009, 1).

The many similarities between the Oakeshott analysis of history andthe Jenkins version do not mean that the two resemble one another intheir conclusions. As we have seen, Oakeshott’s analysis of the world ofexperience and of the postulates of the historical mode of understandingenables him to conclude that history, as a distinguishable mode ofenquiry, concerned with a specific ‘historical past’ and a ‘historicallyunderstood past’, is viable as a coherent way of understanding the world.

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Jenkins concludes, from his ‘postmodern’ analysis of the subject, thathistory should be seen merely as a ‘discursive representation’ producedoverwhelmingly by the historian. Thus deprived of a transcendentalsignifier, history, Jenkins believes, should now be seen as what it is, avehicle not of knowledge but of rhetoric, irretrievably problematic(Jenkins 2009, 1–2, 5).

How far, it can reasonably be asked, does the Oakeshott analysis ofhistory answer the charges brought against it by Jenkins? In my opinion, forwhat it is worth, quite far; though not far enough, perhaps, to resolve theissue definitively. Central to Jenkins’ attack on history is the contention that,pretending to describe the ‘real’ past, the historian fails completely, as notonly is the past, as such, indescribable, on account of its absence andabundance, but also because it is categorically (ontologically) different fromhistory, in that while the past consists of events, happenings, occurrences,etc., history consists of discourse, text and narrative (Jenkins 2009, 1–2).Oakeshott’s answer would, I suppose, be that the historian, thinkingcoherently, in a philosophical manner, does not attempt to describe the ‘real’past. What he does is to construct, from the authenticated remains of theactual past, a historically understood past, containing historical events andoccurrences, appropriately inferred. Far from being categorically (ontolo-gically) different from its subject matter, history, as a mode of under-standing, is an aspect of the experience it attempts to understand, albeit (inExperience and its modes at least) a defective one. Questions concerning theinfinity of events, the inadequacy of traces and the supposed structures ofhistorical meaning are in this context irrelevant.

With regard to Jenkins’ charge that history is always polemical andpartisan, always ‘for someone’, Oakeshott admits that experience, thefoundation of his system, is always ‘someone’s experience’ (Oakeshott 1933,325). But the distinction he makes between the practical mode of under-standing and the historical mode enables him to identify a type of historythat is, hypothetically at least, absolved from the charge of partisanship, onaccount of its supposed abstractness and logical rigour. Moreover, inOakeshott’s view, the fact that the historian’s experience of present remainsmust inevitably be personal does not necessarily mean that there is anythingsubjective or esoteric about such understandings. They may exclude oneanother but they do not deny one another, and they may be recognised bythose who do not share them. Every such object is the perception of asubject but none is ‘subjective’ in the sense of being outside discourse orimpervious to error. ‘Subjectivity’ is not an ontological category (Oakeshott1983, 11).

As for Jenkins’ enquiry concerning the nature of a historical event,Oakeshott’s response, judging by an almost impenetrable chapter in Onhistory, would be that it is a component of an historical past, inferred as ananswer to an historical enquiry from present objects, recognised as survivals

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from the past, which speak only of the past. Such an historical event is,therefore, not a happening or a situation which occurred, or could haveoccurred, and its character cannot be understood in advance of an historicalenquiry. Antecedent historical events and subsequent historical events arerelated, not by chance, a causal nexus, reason, intention and motive, but by(what Oakeshott chooses to call) contingency, that is to say by proximityand ‘touch’, rather like a dry stone wall, the stones of which (the antecedentevents) compose the wall (the subsequent events), held together not by somekind of mortar but by shape. The dry stone wall, thus constructed, has nopremeditated design; it is what its components, on touching, constitute(Oakeshott 1983, II).

Should we accept Oakeshott’s analysis of history, as the product of aworld of present experience, understood by way of a historical mode ofunderstanding, as an adequate answer to Jenkins’ sceptical enquiries?Probably not. There are still too many questions remaining, concerning thenature of experience, the nature of time, the possibility of logical inference,the construction of discourse and narrative, and the supposed distinctionbetween the practical mode of understanding and the historical mode. Justhow stable, for instance, is experience? What is time? Can one actually infera historical discourse or narrative, made up of events and occurrences, fromauthenticated present remains? Can one infer a historical past without alsoinferring (imagining, creating) a historical world first? Is not all historicalunderstanding ultimately practical? How far should we support aphilosophy of history that casts doubt on almost all the history thathistorians actually write? Until such questions as these are satisfactorilyanswered we will, I think, have to delay a final decision. Nevertheless, it isevident to me, at least, that Oakeshott has already taken us quite far downthe road, far enough, indeed, to cause Jenkins some concern.

Notes on contributor

Alexander Lyon Macfie has written widely on the Straits Question, the Eastern Ques-tion, the modern history of the Middle East, and other related subjects. His publi-cations include The Eastern question (Longman, 2nd ed. 1996), The Straits question(Institute of Balkan Studies, 1993), Ataturk (Longman, 1994), The end of the OttomanEmpire (Longman, 1998), Orientalism: A reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2000),Orientalism (Longman, 2002), Eastern influences on Western philosophy: A reader(Edinburgh University Press, 2003) and The philosophy of history (Palgrave, 2006).

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Crick, B. 1963. The world of Michael Oakeshott or the lonely nihilist. Encounter 20,no. 6: 65–74.

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Franco, P. 2004.Michael Oakeshott: An introduction. London: Yale University Press.Jenkins, K. 1991. Rethinking history. London: Routledge.Jenkins, K. 1995. On ‘What is history?’: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White.

London: Routledge.Jenkins, K. 1999. Why history? Ethics and postmodernity. London: Routledge.Jenkins, K. 2003. Refiguring history. London: Routledge.Jenkins, K. 2009. At the limits of history. London: Routledge.Johnson, N. 1993. Michael Joseph Oakeshott, 1901–90. Proceedings of the British

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