The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism  -Part 1

by Elizabeth Campbell Corey

Elizabeth Campbell Corey is Assistant Professor of Politics in the Honors Program at Baylor University. More information is available at her department website. She is the author of Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 2006, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, from which the following excerpts are taken. This appears with permission and will be shown in two parts.

[It is] in The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (Brit. sp.) that we see the full extent of [Michael] Oakeshott's transposed Augustinianism and his religious objections to the Pelagian character of modern politics.The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism implicitly recalls Oakeshott's 1929 essay "Religion and the World," in which he presents a choice between "worldly" and "religious" ways of living. In the book he presents a similar pairing: faith and skepticism. Here, however, the two alternatives are not presented as styles of government that might be explicitly chosen by an individual or a society. Instead, Oake­shott calls them the "poles" of an activity (politics), an activity that may at times swing from one extreme to the other but generally ends up somewhere in between.

 

Faith and skepticism are thus necessarily "ideal" types and alternative visions of what politics might look like. Neither of these is a style of politics, per se, but rather, in Oakeshott's words, they are "logical opposites."¹² In reality, politics partakes of each type, and neither can exist without the other. Faith and skepticism sprang up together over the past five hundred years as a result of specifically modern conditions that Oakeshott describes over the course of the work.

 

It is important to be quite clear at the outset about exactly what faith and skepticism mean to Oakeshott. For at first glance, faith might appear to point toward a less-worldly conception of politics, while skepticism, if taken to an extreme, could potentially undermine all existing political arrangements. But these are not the terms in which Oakeshott describes faith and skepticism. He is quite critical in his assessment of the politics of faith, which he perceives as the "politics of perfection." Faith, in this context, is thus "virtually the opposite of traditional religious faith." In this style of government, man is thought to be capable of achieving Utopia on earth. There are no inherent limitations to human progress, and political activity therefore directs the progress toward perfection. Government becomes huge as it strains to direct the activities of its citi­zens in politics and in all other spheres of life. It is the "chief inspirer and sole director" of the improvement that is supposed to lead to perfection.¹³ Faith means, in short, faith in human capabilities.

 

The politics of skepticism, on the other hand, makes no such claims. It has much in common with Oakeshott's idea of civil association, in which government is an umpire, ensuring that minimal rules are obeyed and that the rule of law is not jeopardized. As its name suggests, skepticism is profoundly dubious about undertakings that pursue mundane perfec­tion. Far from the activist government promoted by the politics of faith, in skeptical politics governing is primarily a judicial activity that leaves human beings free to pursue their own purposes.

 

It is well worth examining these two types in greater detail, because it is here that the religious underpinnings of Oakeshott's thought are most evident. [Observing that] Oakeshott's cri­tique of modern politics is grounded in a religious view does not mean that Oakeshott himself may be counted among the orthodox religious. Nevertheless, his critiques of the politics of faith and of "Rationalism" are so firmly rooted in religious ideas that to overlook these is to miss a vital part of his thought. Oakeshott takes a notably Augustinian position toward what he sees as modern-day [Pelagianism]. Moreover, his view of politics more generally — both of what it can achieve and its rather significant limits — is also directly in line with Augustine's views.

 

 

Modern Pelagianism

Oakeshott explicitly states that a kind of "Pelagianism" lies behind all versions of the politics of faith. In using this term Oakeshott recalls the famous heretic Pelagius, with whom Augustine argued over the doc­trines of free will and original sin in the years following 411. Pelagius be­lieved that moral perfection was possible for man; indeed, it was obligatory.

Against a fatalistic view of original sin, Pelagius spoke to those who wished to reform their lives and "make a change for the better." He be­lieved that man "was responsible for his every action" and that every sin "could only be a deliberate act of contempt for God." He had little pa­tience for the weakness and failings of human beings, which could be remedied, he thought, through a determined exercise of will. He dis­dained what he perceived as the moral weakness in Augustine's Confessions, which seemed to him "merely to popularize the tendency toward a languid piety." ¹⁴

 

Perfectibility, according to Pelagius, was therefore not only possible for human beings, but its pursuit was a duty that "rested with man 'accord­ing to his merits'." Moreover, Pelagius considered himself capable of of­fering individuals "absolute certainty through absolute obedience [to God]." This desire for certainty is the constant companion of the impulse to perfectionism. But for Oakeshott, like Augustine, both perfectionism and the compulsive desire for certainty are hostile to the doctrine of providence and to the idea that the universe is a perfect creation. If Pelagius and his followers "seemed determined . . . to reform the whole Christian church," Oakeshott's Rationalism, likewise, seems determined to reform modern politics in its own image. ¹⁵

 

Augustine differed from Pelagius on virtually all his assumptions and, consequently, also on his conclusions. What seems to have galled him most about Pelagian doctrine was its insistence on moral perfectionism. The idea that human beings, by mere exercise of will, could become perfect even as God is perfect struck Augustine as manifestly false and prideful. Writing against the teachings of Pelagius, he emphasized the degree to which human virtue, such as it is, depends upon God.

 

For we assert that the human will is so far assisted by divine aid in the ac­complishment of justice that, over and above the fact that man is created with the power of voluntary self-determination, over and above the teaching from which he derives precepts as to how he ought to live, he also receives the Holy Spirit, whereby there is engendered (fiat) in his mind the love for and delight in that supreme and immutable good which is God, even now while he still walks by faith and not yet by sight; that, this being given to him as a free offering (munus gratuitum), he may be in­flamed with desire to approach to participation in that true light.

 

Oakeshott, of course, would not write in such explicitly religious terms as these, but against modern-day Pelagians he makes a similar point. Those who (wisely) doubt the desirability of the politics of faith do so because they understand the limitations of their own abilities. This hu­mility springs from recognizing that the world is given to mankind not merely to be exploited, but to be "contemplated" and "enjoyed." What distinguishes skepticism from faith is the skeptic's "sense of mortality, that amicitia rerum mortalium, which detracts from the allure of the gilded fu­ture foreseen in the vision of faith."¹⁶

 

Like Augustine, Oakeshott found the modern impulse to perfection­ism inherently objectionable. A strong warning against perfectionism is, of course, also the moral of Oakeshott's retelling of the Tower of Babel story. It might be said, then, that a religious idea lies at the heart of Oakeshott's critique of a certain kind of politics. This idea is Pelagianism, or, in modern terms, moral and political perfectionism. This is evident in "Rationalism in Politics," where he describes the two general characteristics of Rationalism as the "politics of perfection" and the "politics of uniformity" and contends that Rationalism is indeed the combination of both: "the imposition of a uniform condition of perfection upon human conduct."¹⁷ But Oakeshott is even more explicit about the Pelagianism of modern politics in The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism.

The Politics of Faith

 

In The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism Oakeshott observes that the fundamental characteristic of the politics of faith is a conception of government as being "in the service of the perfection of mankind." To achieve human perfection one need not "depend upon the working of divine providence for . . . salvation." On the contrary, it may be achieved "by human effort, and confidence in the evanescence of imperfection springs here from faith in human power and not from trust in divine providence." The politics of faith is "the politics of immortality, building for eternity."¹⁸ It is the attempt to remedy once and for all the unsatis­factory character of the world and the human condition. It is precisely what the Babelians attempt as they build their tower.

 

This view of perfection is partnered with three other principles, the first two of which are closely related. First, the perfection longed for may be achieved in this world: "man is redeemable in history." This doctrine does not hold that any perfection available to man will occur only through faith, in a world to come. Second, this perfection is mundane and understood "to be a condition of human circumstances." It depends, therefore, upon organizing political affairs so that they encourage human beings in their pursuit of perfection. The third principle follows, then: that government itself must be the chief agent of this improvement. It must organize the resources of mankind into a comprehensive plan pri­oritizing efficiency and singleness of purpose. Government does not merely assist in the project of moving toward perfection; it is the "chief inspirer and sole director of the pursuit."¹⁹ Thus it takes upon itself the duty of directing action from a comprehensive perspective and becomes omnicompetent, radically limiting the spheres in which subjects may ex­press themselves.

 

Such is the politics of faith. Human life is understood to be a condi­tion in which people strive for a mundane perfection not merely indi­vidually, but as a society. In this striving they are oriented and organized by a government that steps in to enforce a plan. Dissent is discouraged, for who could doubt the goodness of transforming the human condition from one of manifest ills to one of perfection? The great virtue of this style of politics — and indeed, its great vice, from Oakeshott's perspective — is that it pursues perfection in one direction. It posits a "single road" and is "content with the certainty that perfection lies wherever it leads." The politics of faith presumes not only that "human power is suf­ficient . . . to procure salvation," but that perfection denotes a "single, comprehensive condition of human circumstances."²⁰ Clearly, this view is diametrically opposed to Oakeshott's view of politics, in which self-determined agents pursue a variety of chosen purposes within the framework of a settled rule of law. If the politics of faith is about the spiritual conquest of the world, the politics of skepticism studiously avoids such grandiose posturing.

 

Oakeshott does not, however, make his argument about the politics of faith solely in abstract, theoretical terms. As I have argued, his objections to certain political tendencies are grounded in his views about the char­acter of human beings, views that are religious and aesthetic. Like all le­gitimate theories of politics or of human conduct, they have concrete manifestations in the world, and as valid theories they depend on a clear ­sighted assessment of human beings. Oakeshott therefore brings his the­ory decisively to bear on the contemporary political arrangements of modern Europe. He analyzes modern forms of government in light of their approximation to the politics of faith, on the one hand, or to the politics of skepticism, on the other.

 

Oakeshott argues in the introduction to The Social and Political Doc­trines of Contemporary Europe (1939) that the differences between various doctrines — Liberalism, Catholicism, Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism — are not so much between those that offer "spiritual" or "ma­terial" ideals, but between those "which hand over to the arbitrary will of a society's self-appointed leaders the planning of its entire life, and those which not only refuse to hand over the destiny of a society to any set of officials but also consider the whole notion of planning the destiny of a society to be both stupid and immoral." Oakeshott observes that on one side there are "the three modern authoritarian doctrines, Commu­nism, Fascism and National Socialism; on the other Catholicism and Liberalism. To the Liberal and the Catholic mind alike the notion that men can authoritatively plan and impose a way of life upon a society ap­pears to be a piece of pretentious ignorance; it can be entertained only by men who have no respect for human beings and are willing to make them the means to the realization of their own ambitions."²¹ Once again, the fundamental difference is between those governments that have "faith" in their ability to direct the activities of human beings and those that are "skeptical" about this endeavor.    

[This is the first of two Parts. Part 2 may be read HERE..]

NOTES

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