World Politics at the Edge of History: R.G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott and Another Case for the ‘Classical Approach’ by Alexander Astrov Department of International Relations London School of Economics and Political Science Doctor of Philosophy 2003 UMI Number: U185673 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U185673 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract This thesis outlines an idea of world politics as a distinct activity of thinking and speaking about the overall conditions of world order in terms of their desirability. World order is understood not as an arrangement of entities, be they humans, states or civilizations, but a complex of variously situated activities conducted by individuals as members of diverse associations of their own. This idea is advanced from within one such association, or context, contemporary International Relations, wherein it entails a metatheoretical position, neotraditionalism, as a rectification of the initial, ‘traditionalist’ or ‘classical’, approach after the advance of rationalism and subsequent reflectivist critique. Since loose talk about traditions does not constitute a tradition, neotraditionalism is presented by drawing on the resources of a well-trimmed manner of thinking and speaking about human associations, political philosophy, again, understood not as a body of doctrine but a context-specific human activity which can be experienced only through concrete exhibitions of individual intelligence. Therefore, throughout the thesis, a conversation on the place of politics in human experience is re-enacted. Its major participants are R.G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott. Its major achievement is the conditional unity of understanding and conduct, tradition and individuality, the subject of inquiry and the manner in which it is conducted. As such, this conversation is neither an antiquarian item nor a timeless ideal, but an instance of an association to be desired, and thus an example which, once comprehended, that is, both understood and included into one’s own context, becomes a historically enacted disposition for the activity of politics. 7 (4 £5£ .S b * 81&0 Contents Acknowledgements 4 Notes on usage 5 List of abbreviations 6 1. PROLOGUE 7 2. ANOTHER CASE FOR THE CLASSICAL APPROACH? 19 POLITICS AT THE EDGE OF HISTORY 24 WORLD POLITICS: SCIENCE, PRESCRIPTION OR POETRY? 29 NEOTRADITIONALISM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 35 A PLACE FOR POETRY 41 3. POLITICS 43 CONTEMPLATION 46 Contemplation and its modes 46 The scale of contemplation 49 ACTION 52 Utility, rightness, duty 54 Choices, practices, politics 57 POLITICS AND POETRY 63 4. POETRY 66 THE MILL-RACE 70 Action 71 Contemplation 73 THE DRY WALL 76 Action 77 Contemplation 82 POETRY AND CIVILIZATION 89 5. CIVILIZATION 93 POLICY AND POLITICS 95 The mill-race 96 The dry wall 100 LAWS AND MANNERS 106 The mill-race 106 The dry wall 112 CIVILIZATION AND TRADITION 117 6. TRADITION 120 WORLD ORDER 123 Policy and politics 124 Laws and manners 128 WORLD POLITICS 135 Policy and politics 136 Laws and manners 141 TRADITION AND NEOTRADITIONALISM 148 7. NEOTRADITIONALISM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 151 WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THE RATIONALIST-REFLECTIVIST DEBATE? 157 HOW DID IT END? 166 NEOTRADITIONALISM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 172 A PLACE FOR POLITICS 179 8. EPILOGUE 185 Bibliography 189 3 Acknowledgements In preparing this thesis I have had the support of the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I am especially indebted to Stefano Guzzini, without whom no thesis would have been possible, and to Chris Brown whose advice, criticism and patience made possible this particular one. 4 Notes on usage International Relations is capitalized when referring to the academic field of study. Once in lower case, it refers to the practices of the relations between human associations, not necessarily states. Realism, Rationalism and Idealism are capitalized when referring to the schools of thought in philosophy. When in inverted commas, ‘realism’ and ‘rationalism’ refer to the ‘traditions of thought’ identified by the English school in International Relations. Otherwise, the terms refer to political doctrines and political theories associated with them. Since neither Collingwood nor Oakeshott used the gender-neutral language, I refrain from using it as well. Throughout the text, abbreviated references to Collingwood’s and Oakeshott’s works are given in parentheses, whereas works by other authors are referenced in full in the footnotes. 5 List of abbreviations R. G. Collingwood: SM - Speculum Mentis or the Map o f Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924) EPM - An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933) PA - The Principles o f Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938) A-An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939) EM-An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940) NL - The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942) IN - The Idea o f Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945) IH - The Idea o f History, ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) EPP - Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. David Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) GRU - ‘Goodness, Rightness, Utility’ in The New Leviathan, ed. David Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) Michael Oakeshott: EIM - Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933) R - Rationalism in politics and other essays, ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty, 1991) OHC - On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) VMS - The Vocabulary of Modem European State, Political Studies, 1975, XXIII: 319-41. MHC - On Misunderstanding Human Conduct: A Reply to My Critics. Political Theory, 1976,4: 353-67. HCA - Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis: Liberty, 2000) OH - On History and other essays, ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty, 1999) V - The Voice o f Liberal Learning, ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty, 2001) HL - Morality and Politics in Modern Europe: The Harvard Lectures, ed. Shirley Robin Letwin (London: Yale University Press, 1993) RP - Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, ed. Timothy Fuller (London: Yale University Press, 1993) PF - The politics of faith and the politics o f scepticism, ed. Timothy Fuller (London: Yale University Press, 1996) Prologue Responding to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 in New York, British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, diagnosed the situation: ‘This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re­ order this world around us’.1 Despite all the talk about the ‘new war of the new millennium’, which, at least on the level of technology and military strategy this war soon turned out to be, the metaphor itself was familiar. Almost a century earlier, while preparing for the Peace Conference to be held in Paris so as to seize yet another opportunity provided by yet another disaster, Jan Smuts described the outcome of the Great War in similar terms: ‘The very foundations have been shakened and loosened, and things are again fluid. The tents have been struck, and the great caravan of humanity is once more on the march’.2 There is, however, what seems to be an important difference. By the end of the Paris Conference, Smuts had to admit: ‘I am grieved beyond words that such should be the result of our statesmanship’.3 In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Blair, invoking the ‘power of community’ as a remedy, came close to admitting that re-ordering the world may, on occasion, be beyond the power of the institution of statesmanship as such: 1 Speech by Tony Blair, Labour Party conference, Brighton, 2 October 2001. Accessed at http://politics.guardian.co.Uk/labourconference2001/storv/0.1220.561988.00.html. October 2003. 2 Cited in Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference o f 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2001): 98. 3 Ibid.: 479. Around the edge of the room, strangers making small talk, trying to be normal people in an abnormal situation. And as you crossed the room, you felt the longing and sadness; hands clutching photos of sons and daughters, wives and husbands; imploring you to believe them when they said there was still an outside chance of their loved ones being found alive, when you knew in truth that all hope was gone. And then a middle aged mother looks you in the eyes and tells you her only son has died, and asks you: why? I tell you: you do not feel like the most powerful person in the country at times like that.4 The gap between the ambition (re-ordering the world) and the means for its fulfilment (the state) points beyond isolated rhetorical gestures towards what Hannah Arendt described as ‘one of the outstanding properties of the human condition’ in her discussion of violence, where politics was placed into the context of a story of the transformation of impotence into omnipotence: Death, whether faced in actual dying or in the inner awareness of one’s own mortality, is perhaps the most antipolitical experience there is. It signifies that we shall disappear from the world of appearances and shall leave the company of our fellow men, which are the conditions of all politics. As far as human experience is concerned, death indicates an extreme of loneliness and impotence. But faced collectively and in action, death changes its countenance; now nothing seems more likely to intensify our vitality than its proximity.