14 - Oakeshott and the Cold War critique of political rationalism

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Viewed from a certain angle, the rise of post-structuralist and post-modernist theorizing in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to signal a return to an intellectually dubious (and politically dangerous) cult of irrationalism. Jürgen Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987) stands as perhaps the most sophisticated defence of ethical-political rationalism in the face of the broad but diffuse ‘rage against reason’ symbolized by post-structuralist thought. Lesser figures such as Richard Wolin and Zeev Sternhell have recently added their voices to warn against the ‘seductions of unreason’ and the renaissance of the ‘anti-Enlightenment tradition’. Habermas worried about the levelling of the genre distinction between philosophy and literature, as well as post-modernism's apparent repudiation of normative foundations. Wolin and Sternhell are cruder but more direct. The critique of Enlightenment rationality, they assert, can lead only to fascism or some form of romantic nationalism. To doubt the rational foundations of ‘the rights of man’ was to join the forces of darkness represented by Gobineau, de Maistre, Schmitt and Heidegger.

The reader of the contemporary ‘reason versus unreason’ literature will be struck by how this literature evades (or suppresses) the powerful critiques of political rationalism that emerged during the 1940s and 1950s in the English-speaking world. These critiques – offered by Michael Oakeshott, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon and Karl Popper – were diverse in approach, form and motivation.