It's not easy to pick sides in a dispute between Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks (perhaps the right analogy is to a Liverpool fan needing a preference in a Man Utd v Chelsea match). The context is Sullivan's review of the reviews of his book, not least the extended review by Brooks in the New York Times yesterday. Brooks recounts the extent to which Sullivan draws his worldview from Michael Oakeshott (which hasn't stopped him straying from the path before), which causes Brooks to note:
Politics is not an effort to find solutions and realize ideals, in [an Oakeshottian] view. It is merely an effort to find practical ways to preserve one's balance in a complicated world. An Oakeshottian conservative will reject great crusades. He will not try to impose morality or base policy decisions on so-called eternal truths. Of course neither would this kind of conservative write the Declaration of Independence.
Faced with the claim that he's pushing a conservative philosophy that misses something essential about America, Sullivan falls back on the Burkean view that the American revolution was actually conservative in nature, but then tries to retake his original ground and claim that, therefore, Oakeshott would have been fine with it too --
The entire mechanism of American government was designed to ensure that as little as possible is ever done by government, that doubt is welded into the core system, that certainty is always checked by other powers, and that the great Certainty of Divine Truth is always, always, always kept at bay. That's one reason Oakeshott loved America - and why increasing numbers of American thinkers are coming to admire his thought, especially in these absolutist, fundamentalist times.
There's just one problem. You wouldn't guess it from Sullivan going back to Burke to find out what Oakeshott would have thought of the Declaration of Independence, because the man directly addressed the question himself, in Rationalism in Politics (1947) --
The early history of the United States of America is an instructive chapter in the history of the politics of Rationalism. .... the independence of the society concerned begins with an admitted illegality, a specific and express rejection of a tradition. which consequently can be defended only by an appeal to something which is itself thought not to depend upon tradition ... The Declaration of Independence is a characteristic product of the saeculum rationalisticum [the age of rationalism]. It represents the politics of the felt need interpreted with the aid of an ideology. And it is not surprising that it should have become one of the sacred documents of the politics of Rationalism, and, together with the similar documents of the French Revolution, the inspiration and pattern of many later adventures in the rationalist reconstruction of society.
Remember that rationalist is always a pejorative for Oakeshott. Tossed by the wayside, inter alia, is any distinction between the French and American revolutions that Sullivan would seek to make. Brooks 1, Sullivan 0.
UPDATE: In a later post, Sullivan hints at, while not explicity acknowledging, the degree to which his support for the Iraq war would never have passed an Oakeshott test --
But looking back, I think I didn't fully realize the radical utopianism of some of the people I was backing.
One final note: John Podhoretz manages a funny comment on Sullivan's response to Brooks --
Andrew Sullivan's response to David Brooks's review of his book has now surpassed Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in length.
Politics is not an effort to find solutions and realize ideals, in [an Oakeshottian] view. It is merely an effort to find practical ways to preserve one's balance in a complicated world. An Oakeshottian conservative will reject great crusades. He will not try to impose morality or base policy decisions on so-called eternal truths. Of course neither would this kind of conservative write the Declaration of Independence.
Faced with the claim that he's pushing a conservative philosophy that misses something essential about America, Sullivan falls back on the Burkean view that the American revolution was actually conservative in nature, but then tries to retake his original ground and claim that, therefore, Oakeshott would have been fine with it too --
The entire mechanism of American government was designed to ensure that as little as possible is ever done by government, that doubt is welded into the core system, that certainty is always checked by other powers, and that the great Certainty of Divine Truth is always, always, always kept at bay. That's one reason Oakeshott loved America - and why increasing numbers of American thinkers are coming to admire his thought, especially in these absolutist, fundamentalist times.
There's just one problem. You wouldn't guess it from Sullivan going back to Burke to find out what Oakeshott would have thought of the Declaration of Independence, because the man directly addressed the question himself, in Rationalism in Politics (1947) --
The early history of the United States of America is an instructive chapter in the history of the politics of Rationalism. .... the independence of the society concerned begins with an admitted illegality, a specific and express rejection of a tradition. which consequently can be defended only by an appeal to something which is itself thought not to depend upon tradition ... The Declaration of Independence is a characteristic product of the saeculum rationalisticum [the age of rationalism]. It represents the politics of the felt need interpreted with the aid of an ideology. And it is not surprising that it should have become one of the sacred documents of the politics of Rationalism, and, together with the similar documents of the French Revolution, the inspiration and pattern of many later adventures in the rationalist reconstruction of society.
Remember that rationalist is always a pejorative for Oakeshott. Tossed by the wayside, inter alia, is any distinction between the French and American revolutions that Sullivan would seek to make. Brooks 1, Sullivan 0.
UPDATE: In a later post, Sullivan hints at, while not explicity acknowledging, the degree to which his support for the Iraq war would never have passed an Oakeshott test --
But looking back, I think I didn't fully realize the radical utopianism of some of the people I was backing.
One final note: John Podhoretz manages a funny comment on Sullivan's response to Brooks --
Andrew Sullivan's response to David Brooks's review of his book has now surpassed Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in length.