Politics & Eternity
Francis Oakley
“The Leviathan is the greatest, perhaps the sole, mas-
terpiece of political philosophy written in the En –
glish language. And the history of our civilization
can provide only a few works of similar scope and
achievement to set beside it. Consequently, it must
be judged by none but the highest standards and
must be considered only in the widest context. IL
masterpiece supplies a standard and a context for
the second-rate, which indeed is but a gloss; Ma
the context of the masterpiece itself, the setting in
which its meaning is revealed, can in the nature of
things be nothing narrower than the history of po –
litical philosophy.
“Reflection about political life may take place at a
variety of levels. It may remain on the level of the
determination of means, or it may strike out for the
consideration of ends. Its inspiration may be di rectly
practical, the modi½cation of the arrangements of
a political order in accordance with the perception
of an immediate bene½t; or it may be practical, Ma
less directly so, guided by general ideas. Or again,
springing from an experience of political life, it may
seek a generalization of that experience in a doctrine.
And reflection is apt to flow from one level to an –
other in an unbroken movement, following the
mood of the thinker. Political philosophy may be
understood to be what occurs when this movement
of reflection takes a certain direction and achieves
a certain level, its characteristic being the relation of
political life, and the values and purposes pertaining
to it, to the entire conception of the world that be –
© 2014 by Francis Oakley
doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00251
35
FRANCIS OAKLEY, a Fellow of the
American Academy since 1998, È
the Edward Dorr Grif½n Professor
of the History of Ideas and Presi-
dent Emeritus at Williams College.
He is also President Emeritus of the
American Council of Learned Soci –
eties. His books include Empty Bot-
tles of Gentilism: Kingship and the Di –
vine in Late Antiquity and the Early
Mid dle Ages (2010), The Conciliarist
Tradition: Constitutionalism in the
Cath olic Church, 1300–1870 (2003),
and Politics and Eternity: Studies in the
History of Medieval and Early-Modern
Political Thought (1999).
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Politics &
Eternity
longs to a civilization. . . . Any man who
holds in his mind the conceptions of the
natural world, of God, of human activity
and human destiny which belong to his
civ ilization, will scarcely be able to prevent
an endeavour to assimilate these to the
ideas that distinguish the political order in
which he lives, and failing to do so he will
become a philosopher (of a simple sort)
unawares.
“But, though we may stumble over the
frontier of philosophy unwittingly and by
doing nothing more demonstrative than
refusing to draw rein, to achieve signi½cant
reflection, Ovviamente, requires more than
inadvertence and more than the mere ac –
ceptance of the two worlds of ideas. IL
whole impetus of the enterprise is the per –
ception that what really exists is a single
world of ideas, which comes to us divided
by the abstracting force of circumstances;
is the perception that our political ideas
and what may be called the rest of our ideas
are not in fact two independent worlds,
and that though they may come to us as
separate text and context, the meaning lies,
as it always must lie, in a unity in which
the separate existence of text and context
is resolved. We may begin, probably we
must begin, with an independent valuation
of the text and the context; but the impe-
tus of reflection is not spent until we have
restored in detail the unity of which we
had a prevision. E, so far, philosophical
reflection about politics will be nothing
other than the intellectual restoration of
a unity damaged and impaired by the nor-
mal negligence of human partiality.
“To establish the connections, in prin-
ciple and in detail, directly or mediately,
between politics and eternity is a project
that has never been without its followers.
Infatti, the pursuit of this project is only a
special arrangement of the whole intel-
lectual life of our civilization; it is the
whole intellectual history organized and
exhibited from a particular angle of vision.
Probably there has been no theory of the
nature of the world, of the activity of man,
of the destiny of mankind, no theology or
cosmology, perhaps even no metaphysics,
that has not sought a reflection of itself in
the mirror of political philosophy; certainly
there has been no fully considered politics
that has not looked for its reflection in
eternity. This history of political philoso-
phy is, Poi, the context of the master-
piece, for the masterpiece, almeno, is al –
ways the revelation of the universal pre –
dicament in the local and transitory mis-
chief.
“If the unity of the history of political
philosophy lies in a pervading sense of
human life as a predicament and in the
continuous reflection of the changing cli-
mate of the European intellectual scene,
its signi½cant variety will be found in three
great traditions of thought. The singular-
ities of political philosophies (like most
singularities) are not unique, but follow
one of three main patterns which philo-
sophical reflection about politics has im –
pressed upon the intellectual history of
Europe. These I call traditions because it
belongs to the nature of a tradition to tol-
erate and unite an internal variety, non
insisting upon conformity to a single char-
acter, and because, ulteriore, it has the abil-
ity to change without losing its identity.
The ½rst of these traditions is distin-
guished by the master-conceptions of
Reason and Nature. It is coeval with our
civilization; it has an unbroken history
into the modern world; and it has sur-
vived by a matchless power of adaptability
all the changes of the European conscious-
ness. The master-conceptions of the sec-
ond are Will and Arti½ce. It too springs
from the soil of Greece, and has drawn
inspiration from many sources, not least
from Israel and Islam. The third tradition
is of later birth, not appearing until the
eighteenth century. The cosmology it re –
flects in its still unsettled surface is the
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world seen on the analogy of human his-
tory. Its master-conception is the Rational
Will, and its followers may be excused
the belief that in it the truths of the ½rst
two traditions are ful½lled and their
errors ½nd a happy release. The master-
piece of political philosophy has for its
context, not only the history of political
philosophy as the elucidation of the pre –
dicament and deliverance of mankind,
but also, normally, a particular tradition
in that history; generally speaking, it is
the supreme expression of its own tradi-
zione. E, as Plato’s Republic might be cho-
sen as the representative of the ½rst tradi-
zione, and Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts of
the third, so the Leviathan is the head and
crown of the second.”
–From Michael Oakeshott, ed., Leviathan, or the
Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Eccle-
sisticall and Civil (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946),
viii–xii. Used by permission of Oliver Letwin, IL
Literary Representative of the Estate of Michael
Oakeshott.
Giugno 1953, and the dread summons to the
Examination Schools at Oxford, through
the grim portals of which we dutifully
trooped, attired in regulation subfusc and
doing our best to maintain, in the teeth of
the undergraduate trump of doom, a req-
uisitely stiff upper lip. In common with
those others who had been reading for a
degree in the Honours School of Modern
History, one of the battery of examina-
tion papers I had to tackle over the course
of the coming week was one on “political
theory.” Though the History School in its
wisdom had seen ½t to make it a required
subject, it was in my day unpopular with
dons and students alike, and it was des-
tined later on to be dropped. Part of the
reason for that unpopularity was the fact
that it was structured around three for-
midable set-texts that formed a sort of
Procrustean bed on which the minds of
students were to be stretched–or nar-
rowed: Aristotle’s Politics (in merciful
translation), Hobbes’s Leviathan (O, Piuttosto,
a selection from that great work tenden-
tious enough to come close to mandating
a particular interpretation), and Rousseau’s
Du contrat social (in French). But part of
the reason, pure, or so I sense, was the epi –
phenomenal way in which the subject
tended to be taught: a bit too exclusively,
to use Michael Oakeshott’s terms, as the
mere generalization in a doctrine of a
particular experience of political life in a
given era.
At my own college, Tuttavia, we had
been spared the dreariness of that ap –
proach. Invece, the subject had been
treated as political philosophy tout court,
not excluding at least a few dim reflec-
tions in the Oakeshottian mirror of eter-
nity. And imagining myself at that time
to be a fellow of thwarted philosophical
temperament for which the course of study
mandated in history afforded no other
outlet, I had embraced the subject with
alacrity. For me, Infatti, it turned out to be
something of a life-changer, a moment of
modest epiphany on the road to a person al
intellectual Damascus. From my close en –
counter with those required classic texts I
took away a great deal, and especially so
from Rousseau. But in retrospect at least, IO
conclude that in the long haul, and perhaps
oddly, I may have taken away more from
my anxious wrestling with Michael Oake –
shott’s lengthy introductory essay to the
Blackwell’s edition of the Levi athan, IL
edi tion we had all been in structed to pur-
chase. It is from that brilliant essay, Poi,
that I have selected the above excerpt as
one that has resonated powerfully in my
own thinking down through the years, E
one that deserves to endure.
Francis
Oakley
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37
Politics &
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If Oakeshott’s essay is indeed a brilliant
one, it is also one, when I ½rst encountered
it as a nineteen-year-old, that I found great
dif½culty in understanding. My ½rst,
somewhat breathless take on it probably
amounted, Infatti, to little more than an
instance of what Arthur O. Lovejoy once
derided as “metaphysical pathos,” that is,
an instinctive, emotional response to “the
loveliness of the incomprehensible” that,
he wryly noted, has “stood many a phi –
losopher in good stead with his public.”
“The reader doesn’t know exactly what
Essi [such philosophers] mean, but they
Avere [for him] all the more on that ac –
count an air of sublimity, [E] an agree-
able feeling of awe and exaltation comes
over him as he contemplates thoughts of
so immensurable a profun dity.”1 With
time, of course, that feeling of awe and
exaltation eventually evaporated. But as I
began to grasp more clearly what Oake –
shott was really about, it was replaced by
an intellectual impetus that, along with
related promptings deriving from my
rath er eclectic extracurricular browsing
in other philosophers, nudged me, at a
time when the ½eld was trending in a very
different direction, toward the somewhat
unfashionable pursuit of what is usually
characterized as the “internalist” approach
to the history of ideas. That is to say, IO
became fascinated less with ex ternal con-
textual issues of one sort or another than
with the internal interconnections and
af½nities of sympathy among ideas, E
with what Lovejoy called their “particular
go,” the logical pressure they are capable of
exerting on the minds of those that think
them.
That preoccupation was fueled by the
strength of Oakeshott’s insight into what
may be called the ecology of ideas. It was
generated, that is to say, by the ½rmness
of his insistence that we should not suc-
cumb to the partiality of vision that would
lead us to sunder our thinking about pol-
itics from “the single world of ideas,"
“the entire conception of the world that
belongs to a [given] civilization,” by his
emphasis, accordingly, on the subtle net-
work of af½liations that link political phi-
losophy with seemingly disparate realms
of intellectual discourse: with ethics, con
epistemology, with natural philosophy,
even with metaphysics and theology, for
“there has been no fully considered poli-
tics that has not looked for its reflection
in eternity.” That same preoccupation was
intensi½ed, Inoltre, by Oakeshott’s re –
lated and more speci½c claim that while
“the unity of the history of political phi-
losophy lies in a prevailing sense of human
life as a predicament from which human –
kind must seek deliverance,” its “signi½ –
cant variety” is reflected in the fact that
within its overarching unity can be dis-
cerned three great, discrete “traditions” or
principal “patterns” into which philosoph-
ical reflection about politics has fallen,
each distinguished by its own “master con-
ceptions,” and each possessed of its own
great masterpiece standing boldly forth as
its supreme expression. And it is, he says, A
the tradition distinguished by the master-
conceptions of “Will and Arti½ce” that
Leviathan belongs, standing to it indeed as
its very “head and crown.”
All of this is framed, Ovviamente, in highly
schematic fashion, and it would be fair to
say that it has not gone down all that well
with historians of political thought at-
large. Their eyes ½xed demurely on the
gritty speci½cities of historical documen-
tazione, they have tended to view Oake –
shott’s traditions as at best “analytic
exercises” or “ideal characterizations”
imposed on the past, rather than forma-
tions that are “self-evidently historical”
or reflecting features appearing in “gen-
uinely historical narratives.”2 Oakeshott
himself, Inoltre, appears to have expe-
rienced his own seepage of doubt on the
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matter. In the late 1950s, responding to a
query of mine, he noted that he had not
chosen to develop elsewhere the all too
brief delineation of three traditions given
in his introduction to Leviathan “because
I have come to recognize . . . [that triadic
pattern] as an over-bold generalization
which would have to be quali½ed in all
sorts of ways in order to be made to stand
up satisfactorily.” At the same time, nev-
ertheless, he af½rmed that he had not come
“to doubt the usefulness at a certain level,
of this way of speaking about the history
of political philosophy.”3
This latter reassurance was enough for
me. By then, I had hooked into the “cer-
tain level” to which he alluded. For me, Esso
was nothing less than “my America! my
new-found-land,” the seductive level at
which the subtle interconnections be –
tween political thinking and other realms
of philosophical discourse can often
stand out in bold relief, beckoning one to
stray further and to tease out the intellec-
tual af½nities linking such disparate modes
of thought as those pertaining to moral
philosophy, natural philosophy, and nat-
ural theology. Having identi½ed the Levi –
athan as the head and crown of the tradi-
tion distinguished by the master-concep-
tions of Will and Arti½ce, Oakeshott went
on to identify the roots of that tradition
as lying in “the politico-theological ideas
of Judaism,” as having drawn its inspira-
tion from the “Judeo-Christian concep-
tion of will and creation,” and as having
“crystallized into a living tradition” as a
result of the pioneering work of the school
of late-medieval scholastic theology usu-
ally labeled as “nominalist.” That tradi-
tion of thinking had been launched in its
fullness by the great English philosopher-
theologian William of Ockham. E, SU
the advice of Étienne Gilson, at that time
the leading historian of medieval philos-
ophy, I had come to focus my doctoral re –
search on one of Ockham’s leading nom-
inalist followers, Pierre d’Ailly, and was
moving on to explore the trail laid down
on into the sixteenth century by such af –
½liated late-scholastic ½gures as Jacques
Almain and John Mair.
By the late 1950s, Poi, whatever Oake –
shott’s second thoughts, I myself had little
or none, and was happily engaged in track –
ing and fleshing out the implications of his
original intuition for the late-medieval
and early-modern thinkers with whom I
era preoccupato. My appetite for so doing
had been whetted by the dyspeptic witness
to the endurance of the tradition of Will
and Arti½ce into his own day, afforded by
the seventeenth-century Cambridge Pla-
tonist Ralph Cudworth. Pointing a hostile
½nger at Ockham, d’Ailly, and Descartes,
he lamented the contemporary reemer-
gence of the voluntarist ethic “promoted
and advanced by such as think nothing so
essential to the Deity as uncontrollable
power and arbitrary will.” He linked it
also (and interestingly) with the contem-
poraneous revival of “the physiological
hypotheses of Democritus and Epicurus”
(questo è, atomism), and with their success-
ful application “to the solving of some of
the phenomena of the visible world”
(contemporary scienti½c endeavor).4 Quello
last suggestion helped lead me to move
on to probe the arguments of such early-
modern scienti½c thinkers as Mersenne,
Gassendi, Charleton, Boyle, and the great
Newton himself. I came to be concerned
especially with their distinctive concep-
tualizing of the uniformities of nature as
“laws” of a quite speci½c type, an enter-
prise in which I was further encouraged
by my encounter with the explorations of
the relationship between natural philoso-
phy and natural theology, ideas of nature
and notions of the divine, pursued in their
differing but congruent ways by such mod –
ern philosophers as A. N. Whitehead, R. G.
Collingwood, and Michael Foster, anche
as by the related broodings of biochemist
Francis
Oakley
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39
Politics &
Eternity
and sinologist Joseph Needham–in his
great multi-volume Science and Civilization
in China–about the failure of the Chinese
to develop a natural science comparable
with that of the early-modern West. For
that failure he linked with their prior fail-
ure to develop a comparable concept of
laws imposed upon nature, and that, In
turn, with the lack in the dominant Chi-
nese intellectual traditions of any clear no –
tion of a personal, legislating creator-God.
In the context of focusing on differing
ways of understanding the (physical) laws
of nature, Whitehead had pointed out the
crucial contrast between laws of nature per –
ceived as immanent in the structure of re –
ality itself, and such laws as imposed on the
universe, as it were, from the outside. Lui
was speci½cally concerned, it is true, con
the analysis of cosmological assumptions;
but from my own work on the late-med i –
eval nominalist thinkers, it was by then
clear to me that the distinction he was
draw ing was as valid and relevant in the
juridical and ethical sphere as it was in the
scienti½c.5 The theory of law as im manent,
he said, involves the assumption that things
are interdependent in such a way that when
we know the nature of things, we also know
their mutual relations one with another:
“Some partial identity of pattern in the
various characters of nat ural things issues
in some partial identity of pattern in the
mutual relations of these things.” The laws
of nature are the formula tions of these
iden tities of pattern. Così, it can be ad –
duced as a law of nature that animals unite
to produce offspring, or that stones re –
leased in midair strive to reach the ground.
This view of the laws of nature in volves, he
concludes, “some doc trine of In ter nal Re –
lations,” some notion that the characters
of things are the outcome of their inter-
connections, and the interconnections of
things the outcome of their characters.6
The doctrine of imposed law, on the oth –
er hand, adopts the alternative metaphysi-
cal theory of External Relations. Individual
existents are regarded as the ultimate con –
stituents of nature, and those ultimate con –
stituents are conceived to possess no in –
herent connection one with another but
to be comprehensible each in complete
isolation from the rest. The relations into
which they enter are imposed on them
from without, and these imposed behavior
patterns are the laws of nature. It therefore
follows that these laws cannot be discov-
ered by a scrutiny of the characters of the
related things (no amount of study of bod-
ies at rest, Per esempio, will tell us anything
about their possible motion), but can only
become known through the painstaking
empirical charting of regularities. Nor,
con versely, can the nature of the related
things be deduced from the laws governing
their relations.
Had I cherished any lingering doubt
about the fact that the notion of law as im –
manent aligned with Oakeshott’s tradition
of Reason and Nature and the alternative
notion of law as imposed with his tradition
of Will and Arti½ce, and I cannot recall if
I did, it had to have been dissipated by
what I then encountered when I read R. G.
Collingwood’s Idea of Nature. For in that
lucid little book, he argued that “in the
history of European thought there have
been three periods of constructive cos-
mological thinking,” by which he meant
three periods
when the idea of nature has come into the
focus of thought, become the subject of in –
tense and protracted reflection, and conse-
quently acquired new characteristics which
in their turn have given a new aspect to the
detailed science of nature that has been
based upon it.7
He calls the three ideas of nature that these
periods have produced “the Greek,” “the
Renaissance”–by which, Infatti, he really
means “early modern”8–and “the mod-
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ern.” With the last we will not be con-
cerned; suf½ce it to say that he regards it as
based upon the analogy between the pro –
cesses of the natural world as studied by
natural scientists and the vicissitudes of
human affairs as studied by historians.
But so far as the two earlier “ideas” go, he
argues that whereas the Greek view of
nature as an intelligent organism was based
on an analogy between the world of na –
ture and the individual human being, IL
Renaissance or early-modern view con-
ceived the world analogically as a ma chine.
Instead of being regarded as capable of
ordering its own movements in a rational
manner and in accordance with its own
immanent laws, the movements it ex –
hibits are imposed from without, E
“their regularity . . . due to ‘laws of nature’
likewise imposed from without.”9 Colling –
wood therefore concludes that this view
presupposes both “the human experience
of designing and constructing machines
and the Christian idea of a creative and
omnipotent God.”
This was doubtless one cogent way of
characterizing the profound change in
view point that eventuated in the devel-
opment of the classical or Newtonian sci-
ence, emphasizing the role played in that
development both by the Christian idea of
omnipotent God and by the concomitant
idea of divinely imposed laws of nature.
But it had the effect of riveting my atten-
tion not only because of that, but also be –
cause, just as Whitehead’s conception of
laws of nature as immanent and imposed
aligned with Oakeshott’s ½rst two tradi-
zioni, so, pure, did Collingwood’s three
ideas of nature map with great precision
onto all three of Oakeshott’s traditions.
This was striking and exhilarating stuff, IL
more so in that Oakeshott’s traditions
had been formulated not only indepen –
dently of Collingwood’s ideas of nature
(though around the same time), but also
with an eye to the history of theories of
knowledge, rather than to the history of
natural philosophy or cosmological as –
sumptions.10
My mounting excitement about the ap –
parent alignment between various concep-
tual schemata arrived at by philosophers
working independently of one another and
used to categorize phenomena belonging
to areas of discourse as various as natural
theology, philosophy of nature, theories
of knowledge, and theories of natural law
(both physical/scienti½c and moral/juridi-
cal) came to something of a peak around
1960. For around that time, while browsing
in back issues of Mind, the English philo-
sophical journal, I came upon three extraor –
dinary and powerfully–if eccentrically–
argued articles written in the mid-1930s
by Michael Foster.11 Foster had been a
philosophy don of no great prominence at
Oxford but, unlike most of his colleagues at
the time, had completed a doctorate, and at
a German university, no less. He marched,
accordingly, to the beat of a very different
E, for his day, discordant philosophical
drum.12 These articles were surrounded
in congruously in the pages of Mind by ar –
ticles that were technical or highly spe-
cialized in nature and almost always of very
different philosophical inspiration. One,
Infatti, was a piece by A. J. Ayer purporting
to demonstrate the “impossibility of Meta –
physics” and the pseudo-propositional sta-
tus of any attempt “to describe. . . the exis-
tence of something beyond the realm of
em pirical observation.” Foster’s contri-
butions stand out, Poi, in bold relief, al –
most as aliens from a different intellectual
planet. Part of their eccentricity, at least in
that improbable context, stems from the
fact that they are explicitly theistic in in –
spiration and putatively historical in as –
piration; part stems also from the coun-
tervailing fact that the historicity of their
argument can only be described as deduc-
tive a priori, dependent upon extrapola-
Francis
Oakley
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41
Politics &
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tion from the internal logic of ideas and
largely bereft of the density of documen-
tary evidence with which even the most
theoretical of intellectual historians are
prone to fortifying their case.
It is Foster’s explicit purpose in these
articles to argue that the rise of the early-
modern science of nature is in many ways
to be understood as an ultimate deliver-
ance of the penetration into philosophic
modes of thought of the biblical notion
of God and the af½liated Christian doctrine
of creation, the relationship of that God
to the universe. And that speci½c argu-
ment is embedded in a set of assumptions
about the complex of interconnections
existing among natural theology, natural
philosophy, and scienti½c methodology.
Whether it is the Greek philosophical as –
sumption of divine immanence or the bib-
lical notion of divine transcendence and
omnipotence that is in play, there “can be,"
he explains, “no doctrine of God which
does not contain or imply a doctrine of the
mondo,” and no doctrine of the world or
natural philosophy, in turn, that does not
imply the particular sort of method to be
employed in the scienti½c study of that
world.13 And he sees those implications to
be “necessary.” That is to say, he portrays
the interconnections in question as involv-
ing nothing less than logical entailment.
From Oakeshott’s original intuition,
Poi, along with what I had encountered
in the late-medieval and early-modern
philosophico-theological texts themselves,
enriched and informed by my readings in
these modern philosophers, there came
eventually to crystallize in my mind a cer –
tain, powerful conviction. The conviction,
in effect, that in any systematic, coherent,
and comprehensive body of philosophical
thought, one should be able to recognize
and chart the sinuous linkages that must
necessarily exist between the notion of the
divine one arrived at or started from and
the philosophy of nature and af½liated
scienti½c method one espoused, as well
as between that philosophy of nature and
the congruent epistemology, moral philos-
ophy, and vision of political society that
should properly go with it. I saw those
interconnections as involving, at their
strongest, direct logical entailment and, at
their weakest, a measure of intellectual
af½nity. And I concluded, thinking espe-
cially of Oakeshott’s tradition of Will and
Arti½ce, which it had been my concern to
explore and/or flesh out, that a historian
would do well to keep a weather-eye
cocked for the cognate others whenever
any of the following turned out to be pres-
ent in a body of thought: Primo, a biblical
(or Koranic) view of God that stresses
above all his freedom, transcendence, E
omnipotence. Secondo, a natural philosophy
of mechanistic sympathies that stresses the
conditional nature of all knowledge based
on observation in a created and contingent
world that could have been other than it
È. Third, a nominalist epistemology con-
gruent with a world composed of auton –
omous singular entities, an understanding
of the uniformities of nature as (natural)
laws grounded in the mandate of a legis-
lating divine will, a similarly voluntaristic
understanding of the (moral/juridical)
natural law and, by analogy, of human
positive law. And ½nally, an essentially
“mechanistic” understanding of political
society as an arti½ce ultimately based on
a speci½c type of consent, the creation, In
effect, of a concatenation of individual
(atomistic) acts of human willing.
As Oakeshott pointed out, this was the
intellectual con½guration characteristic of
Hobbes’s own thinking, for he elaborated
“a comprehensive system where before
there were only scattered aphorisms,” and
I suppose that for any philosopher of sys-
tematic leanings, the conclusion I had ar –
rived at would amount to little more than
an obvious truism. Systematic philoso-
42
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phers, Tuttavia, seem to be in short supply
these days, and most philosophers seem
to be as specialized in their focus and as
partial in their vision as are the rest of us
in other ½elds. Not being a philosopher
myself, Inoltre, I had arrived at my
conclusion the hard and indirect way, after
slogging through the dense undergrowth
of sometimes inconsistent argumentation
in the later-medieval and early-modern
thinkers on whom I had been pursuing
my research. Truism or no, that conclu-
sion, when I ½nally arrived at it, was for me
(however naively) something of an ener-
gizing epiphany. It came, accordingly, A
shape the further direction of my research
in one of the two ½elds in which I was en –
gaged, as it also came to inform the per-
spective from which I approached it. In
particular, and at a time when social his-
tory was in vogue and, with it, in the his-
tory of ideas, a species of social and lin-
guistic contextualism, it encouraged me to
swim against the tide and to commit in –
stead to a protracted effort to excavate
the occluded history and probe the obscure
meaning of a somewhat recondite but re –
ally quite crucial scholastic distinction that
had come to enjoy wide currency and great
longevity.
Having surfaced at the turn of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries in the realm of
the theology of redemption, that distinc-
tion had quickly made its way into natural
or philosophical theology, moral philoso-
phy, epistemology, natural philosophy, E
legal philosophy. It had come to play an
important (if perhaps unexpected) role in
the realm of early-modern scienti½c think-
ing, as well as in the thinking of the French,
English, and Spanish prerogative lawyers
of the ½fteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth
centuries. This foray into the archaeology
of ideas eventuated in a book entitled
Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order, in which
I emphasized the truly profound influence
exerted by the distinction in question on
the course of European intellectual devel-
opment, and pondered the implications of
its apparent absence from the theological
and philosophical traditions of medieval
Islam. Discriminating between God’s
power considered as absolute and as or –
dained (or ordinary)–potentia dei absoluta
et ordinata (seu ordinaria)–this distinction
was used to vindicate the biblical idea of
the divine freedom and omnipotence while
still protecting the Greek philosophical
intuition that the world was stable, ra –
tional, and intelligible, open to penetration
in some degree by the human intellect.
Ma, in so doing, it helped promote a shift
to a vision or understanding of the under-
lying order of things–natural, moral, legal,
salvational–vastly different from what had
come before. That vision was not, that is to
Dire, one of a quasi-necessary order infused
with or reflective of the immanent presence
of the divine, embedded in a Lovejoy esque
great chain of being and emanating from
the very natures or essences of things. In –
stead, it involved a notion of order that
was radically contingent, possessed in it –
self of no luminous intelligibility, grounded
in divine will, covenant and promise and,
so far at least as the natural order is con-
cerned, discernible only via empirical in –
duction.14 This latter vision, unlike the
former, which resonated to Oakeshott’s
tradition of Reason and Nature, possessed
a strong intellectual af½nity with his tra-
dition of Will and Arti½ce.
Ovviamente, given the stupefying scramble
of events that characterizes it, the past
wages its own stubborn war of attrition
against the neatness and force of all such
abstract schemata. Inconsistencies and
con tradictions are present in the work of
even the most powerful of thinkers. One
would be wise, accordingly, to keep ½rmly
in focus the fact that people in the past did
their thinking (COME, perforce, do we today)
not necessarily as, logically speaking, Essi
should, or even as in an ideal philosophical
Francis
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143 (1) Inverno 2014
43
Politics &
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world they would; but rather (within their
own intellectual limits, and given the cus-
toms, challenges, complexities, and confu-
sions of their time), simply as they could.
But that duly conceded, having in my
own historical work drawn inspiration
from the philosophico-historical prompt-
ings of such as Oakeshott, Whitehead,
Colling wood, and Foster, perhaps I might
be permitted to indulge, and by way of
conclusion, a robustly internalist hope that
the history of ideas, currently so preoccu-
pied as a discipline with linguistic and con –
textual issues of one sort or another, will
not contrive somehow to shortchange or
ignore the context that is the most intimate
and immediate of them all: that constituted
by the totality of a given author’s think-
ing and conveying the “single ‘passionate
thought’ that pervades its parts.”15 It is the
hope, in effect, that as a discipline it may
prove in the end to be a big enough tent or
suf½ciently broad church in its sensibili-
ties to accommodate the type of creative,
intuitive insight that such philosophers
generated in so stimulating a profusion.
Even in their more “historical” mo –
menti, rather than proceeding in more
sublunary, evidence-based, historical fash-
ion, they often moved deductively to as –
sert what in terms of the internal logic of
ideas must have been the case. But we
should not miss the fact that their intu-
itions not infrequently turned out to have
been (historically speaking) very much on
target, and their emphasis on the internal
interconnections and af½nities among
ideas almost always illuminating. One of
the great contributions, after all, that the
pursuit of humanistic studies can make to
our understanding of the profoundly mys –
terious world in which we dwell is the
degree to which it attunes us to the pres-
ence of such interconnections and prompts
us to discern, in what may well appear to
be nothing more than a “transitory mis-
chief,” the chastening intimations of a woe
more universal and a misery more endur-
ing. Certamente, to return to the text that so
energized me as a student, and so far as the
history of political thought is concerned,
it remains my belief that we would do well
to be alert to its linkages with other realms
of discourse and, if only as in a glass darkly,
to look hopefully for its reflection in the
Oakeshottian mirror of eternity.
endnotes
1 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Massa.:
Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 1936), 11.
2 Thus David Boucher, Texts in Context: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (Dor-
drecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 137.
3 In a private letter sent to me, dated 23 April 1959. Emphasis appears in original.
4 Ralph Cudworth, Treatise Concerning Immutable Morality (New York and Andover, Massa.: Gould
& Newman, 1838), 9–11, 18.
5 UN. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 142–147.
6 Ibid., 142, 144.
7 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), 1.
8 As Collingwood himself concedes (ibid., 4): “The name is not a good one, because the word
‘Renaissance’ is applied to an earlier phase in the history of thought, beginning in Italy with the
humanism of the fourteenth century and continuing, in the same country, with the Platonic
and Aristotelian cosmologies of that century and the ½fteenth century. The cosmology I now
44
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have to describe was in principle a reaction against these and might, perhaps, be more accu-
rately called post-Renaissance.”
Francis
Oakley
9 Ibid., 6.
10 I owe this information to Oakeshott in a private letter he sent to me, dated 23 April 1959.
11 They are Michael Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural
Scienza,” Mind 43 (ottobre 1934): 445–468; Michael Foster, “Christian Theology and Modern
Science of Nature (io),” Mind 44 (ottobre 1935): 439–466; and Michael Foster, “Christian
Theology and Modern Science of Nature (ii),” Mind 45 (Gennaio 1936): 1–27.
12 Perhaps not surprisingly, the articles in question neither inspired support in the immediate
aftermath of their publication nor generated opposition. Invece, they slipped quietly down
some sort of Orwellian memory hole. In the event, it was to be thirty years and more before
they began to attract any attention, and almost sixty years before they were gathered together
and republished along with a series of commentaries and critiques. That republishing event
signaled the fact that, having for long years enjoyed no more than “cult” status, Foster’s
arguments were ½nally beginning to gain some sort of intellectual traction. See Cameron
Wybrow, ed., Creation, Nature, and Political Order in the Philosophy of Michael Foster (1907– 1959):
The Classic “Mind” Articles and Others, with Modern Critical Essays (Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen
Press, 1992).
13 Thus Foster, “Christian Theology and Modern Science of Nature (io)," 440.
14 Francis Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from
Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).
15 Michael Oakeshott, “Introduction,” in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and
Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesisticall and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1946), vii–lxvi.
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143 (1) Inverno 2014