Michael Oakeshott on being conservative
It's a way of feeling, not a doctrine
After a distinguished academic career at Cambridge and Oxford, Michael Oakeshott became the professor of political science at the London School of Economics in 1951, at the age of fifty, succeeding one of England’s leading leftist thinkers. He opposed extremist politics, including Marxism, and favored liberal democracy as the least bad system, because “the imposition of a universal plan of life on a society is at once stupid and immoral.” He explains conservatism in the essay “On Being Conservative,” published in 1956, and collected in Rationalism in Politics.
Oakeshott calls conservatism a “disposition,” whose “general characteristics”
centre upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.
Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone.
What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity: not, Verweile doch, du bist so schön [“Stay, because you are so beautiful,” a line from Faust], but, Stay with me because I am attached to you.
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one’s own fortune, to live at the level of one’s own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one’s circumstances.
With some people this is itself a choice; in others it is a disposition which appears, frequently or less frequently, in their preferences and aversions, and is not itself chosen or specifically cultivated.
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