Practical Wisdom
Michael Oakeshott
1901–1990 · United Kingdom
Michael Oakeshott spent most of his career at the London School of Economics, where, perhaps appropriately for a thinker who distrusted comprehensive ambitions, he resisted writing the systematic philosophical work his admirers wanted. His most famous essay, 'Rationalism in Politics' (1947), is a sustained critique of a particular cast of mind he saw as the dominant pathology of modern political life: the conviction that any problem could in principle be solved by the application of a sufficiently general theory, and that the accumulated practical knowledge of people who actually did the work was an obstacle to good policy rather than a resource for it.
Oakeshott distinguished between two kinds of knowledge: 'technical' knowledge (the kind that can be written in a manual) and 'practical' knowledge (the kind that exists only in the doing, transmitted through apprenticeship, observation, and imitation). The rationalist's mistake, he argued, was to assume that only the first kind counted — and therefore to discount the judgment of a teacher, a magistrate, a farmer, or a civic administrator who could not produce a textbook account of why they did what they did.
Oakeshott was a conservative in a specific and limited sense: he believed in caution about overconfident reforms, not in resistance to change as such. His positive vision was of politics as 'the pursuit of intimations' — finding within the existing tradition the resources to address the current problem, rather than discarding the tradition for an imagined optimum.
Why it matters here
Done badly, evidence-based policy can become exactly the technocratic rationalism Oakeshott warned against — a small group convinced their data justifies overriding everyone else. Done well, it is the opposite: a disciplined way for practitioners to test small changes against their own accumulated judgment, in their own settings, and to update both the evidence and the practice in light of what is learned. Oakeshott is the discipline that keeps the evidence honest about its own limits.
Further reading
- Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962, expanded 1991)
- On Human Conduct (1975)
- The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989)