I recently had the opportunity to read "On Being Conservative", in which Michael Oakeshott lays out his ideas on the proper role of government. Oakeshott was a relatively obscure political theorist, who remains almost unknown outside of academic circles. Nevertheless, he is often cited as the most important British political philosopher of at least the past hundred years or so. Reading him gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling that you get when you see your own beliefs expressed with so much more eloquence and power than you could hope to emulate. I've done the next best thing, and written a précis of Oakeshott's essay. It gets to the heart of a lot what I believe about politics.

A theory of government begins with a particular view of society. Michael Oakeshott’s view of society is pluralist. He sees society in the liberal West as teeming and dynamic; a multiplicity of thought and action, with humans all pulling in their own direction, frequently in opposition to each other, and occasionally coming into conflict.

The question is, how does one respond to this multifarious chaos? Oakeshott believes that there are two broadly consistent responses. First, there are people who dislike it. They deplore the inefficiency and wastefulness of the status quo, and dream of world in which all that human energy could be marshalled to achieve some higher or nobler purpose. Oakeshott doesn't have a name for these people, but you could call them the "dreamers" of politics. As Oakeshott admits, their dreams often have little in common: this group includes communists, socialists, fascists, communitarians, certain religious fundamentalists, certain environmentalists, and plenty of others. What unites these disparate camps is their common belief in ideology itself, and a shared view that sees government as a tool with which to impose their ideology on others.

The second response to the chaotic pluralism of modern society is essentially conservative: to embrace the status quo, faults and all. Some might wonder how this differs from libertarianism. It comes down to the reasoning Oakeshoot uses to justify his position. Libertarians typically argue for the existence of natural inalieble rights (which is an attractive concept, but difficult to prove with absolute certainty outside the realm of theology), and assert that freedom itself is intrinsically good. Oakeshott does not deny any of this, but he adds at an eminently Burkean argument to his arsenal: he defends the liberal status quo precisely on the grounds that it is the status quo. People have chosen to live this way, he says. Furthermore, they appear to enjoy living this way. From this alone, we can conclude that the status quo is good and deserves to be protected. As for those dreamers and ideologues who would remake society according to abstract principles, why should their ideals be given more weight than the competing ideals of anyone else? If they would argue that their own ideals are so uniquely superior as to warrant universal imposition, they have an almost impossibly heavy burden of proof lying upon on them.

The conservative disposition lends itself to a very different idea about the proper role of government. The purpose of government is not to impose a certain lifestyle on the populace. It has only one legitimate reason for existence: to rule. Oakeshott means this quite literally. We need a government to ameliorate the tensions that naturally arise in a free and multifarious society, and arbitrate between us when we come into conflict with each other. In the process, government sets up a chain of rules and precedents which eventually become codified into law. Laws are necessary to ensure that members of the populace are treated in a fair and uniform way, and because the only alternative to laws is a state that acts capriciously and arbitrarily. Thus, the function of government is to make, implement and interpret the law. Beyond that, we require very little. We certainly don’t need a government which exists only to impose one person’s grand ideal onto everyone else.

Russell Kirk famously argued that conservatism should not be seen as just another political ideology, alongside liberalism, socialism, and so on. Conservatism, he said, can be more properly understood as the negation of ideology. Oakeshott would certainly agree. Unlike ideologues of various stripes, he does not start out with a grand vision of a better world, and then attempt to devise some mechanism through which this vision could be overlaid on reality. His focus is on the here and now; he praises the virtues of what we do have, rather than what we could. This is not the sort of disposition that will appeal to passionate and zealous devotees of politics. But more thoughtful conservatives will find much to appreciate in Oakeshott’s contemplations.