On History and Other Essays Book

By insiders the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) is placed at the same height as Wittgenstein and Heidegger, as brilliant and genially as they were, but equally hermetic and elusive. In recent years his thinking has been extensively recuperated by neoconservative thinkers, because he was very active in the field of political theory. In all his work a fierce critique on rationalism and modernism stands out, but I hesitate to just call him a conservative or reactionary thinker. My impression is that he just wanted to be thorough and get to the bottom of things, dismissing wrong concepts, views and theories.

That is also what he does in this book. Oakeshott devotes a great deal of time to making precise, meticulous distinctions between terms and concepts (historical past, practical past, encapsulated past, historical inquiry, occurrence, event, change, identity, continuity, etc.) and does this in a very abstract way, that requires a lot of effort from the reader (and I have to admit that some passages were almost impossible for me to follow).

In these essays on history, Oakeshott primordially asks himself what history or the past really is. He makes a radical distinction between the practical and the historical past. The historical past (with some good will you can hear an echo of Ranke's "wie es eigentlich gewesen (ist)") is definitely gone, no longer exists and is strictly speaking (contrary to what Ranke thought) no longer graspable. What remains are relicts ('survivals'), but for Oakeshott they don't belong to the past, but to the present. Moreover, we usually deal with those relicts very practically, with a usefulness that is only relevant for the present and the future. In fact, a historical approach can only say something meaningful about the past if it completely distances itself from that (practical) relevance for present and future, and that is an extremely difficult task.

Oakeshott barely discusses the way in which such an enquiry is possible. He rather devotes his energy to refuting methods that he believes are radically wrong: for example approaching the past from a contemporary question, or from a theory or model, or - even worse - from a teleological perspective (in which what precedes is derived from the result). The use of causality, comparisons, correlations and analogies is also defined by him as deficient (sometimes in very blunt terms). Oakeshott is very strict about this and shows in detail the pitfalls of these approaches, and above all that they have nothing to do with the past, but everything with the present and the future.

When reading these essays, the question arises of course whether Oakeshott considers real historical research possible at all. He certainly answers this question positively, but he gives so many restrictions that hardly anything remains for those who practice history research in reality. So, should we just push him aside and declare what he says irrelevant? I do not think so. Because what he writes actually makes sense. While reading these essays, for example, I noticed that his elaboration on the distinction between practical and historical past comes very close to the temporality theories that were developed much later by Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog. And his accent on the constructivist character of historical approaches almost directly leads to the postmodernism of, among others, Frank Ankersmit. In that sense, Oakeshott may be comparable to a fierce weedkiller, whose work benefits others to harvest. His essays are certainly worth the effort, but definitely also tough reading.