Gene Callahan

Edmond Fawcett is a long-time journalist, chiefly for The Economist, but also for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian. He has purportedly written a history of liberalism. But it is actually more a defense of Fawcett's particular brand of liberalism, employing the past to make his case. Nevertheless, it is a lively and useful introduction to the subject. However, it also has serious flaws. Fawcett tends to fawn over those with whom he agrees (such as John Rawls) and hastily dismiss those with whom he does not. He tries to cover so much in limited space, that even for thinkers he favors, the reader can only be given a brief sketch. As a nonspecialist, Fawcett would have been better off focusing on six or eight major figures that were representative of liberal thought at different times, rather than on the hundreds with which he showers his readers. (The name index itself runs 11 pages.)

Max Weber and Ludwig von Mises were two of the 20th century's foremost theorists of human action. Mises held Weber, his senior by some 17 years, in great esteem and often discussed his theories, even weaving some, such as Weber's model of ideal types, deeply into the fabric of his own social thought. However, at least at first glance, there seems to be a deep rift between the two men's conceptions about the rationality of action. Weber classified “social actions” into several distinct categories, some of which he saw as exhibiting little, if any, rationality. Mises, in contrast, held that all action is rational by conceptual necessity. Various writers have taken their views to be obviously incompatible, among them, Mises himself. This article suggests that the appearance of a conflict is produced by the failure to discern that Weber and Mises were addressing different sorts of questions and constructing frameworks to support different modes of analyzing social phenomena. I contend that, if that divergence of aim is properly understood, then the apparent contradiction will be seen as illusory.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the rationalist tide had reached its high mark in the arts, politics, and work. But the Holocaust, the Gulag, and other failures have dimmed the popularity of rationalism. However, the evidence of those practical failures would not have been as convincing as it was if not for the existence of a theoretical diagnosis of the malady. This book compares and contrasts the ideas of some of the leading twentieth-century critics of rationalism: Hans-Georg Gadamer, F.A. Hayek, Aurel Kolnai, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Oakeshott, Michael Polanyi, Gilbert Ryle, Eric Voegelin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. While each can be seen as a critic of rationalism, were they each attacking the same thing? In what senses did their analyses overlap, and in what senses did they differ? Clarifying these issues, this book will provide important insights into this major intellectual trend of the past century. By including these major thinkers, Tradition v. Rationalism, we see that that these thinkers believed that tradition should still have a place in the world as a repository of wisdom. As our lives becomes increasingly dominated by various forms of rationalisms—whether political, technological, economic, or cultural—we need to ask ourselves whether this is the type of world in which we want to live; and if not, how can we critique and propose an alternative to it? The thinkers in this book provide us a starting point on our journey towards thinking about how we can have a more hopeful, humane, and brighter future.

There were a number of well-known critiques of “rational- ism” penned in the mid-twentieth century by thinkers such as F. A. Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. But they were con- ducted on the level of “high theory,” with little in the way of detailed analysis. This paper aims to bring their analysis down to earth, or, more accurately, down to city pavement, by demonstrating how the work of urbanologist Jane Jacobs illustrates concrete applications of many of their ideas in the context of rationalist urban planning and its failures. She showed that the ideas driving city planning in the first six decades of the twentieth century were largely unmoored, abstract visions of the city, divorced from any detailed un- derstanding of what actually makes cities work, when they do so.

Enlightenment rationalism may be said to have been birthed with the writings of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, and to have come to self-awareness in the works of the French philosophes (e.g., Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, and d'Alembert), and their allies, such as Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Paine. But almost contemporaneously with the birth of this movement, it attracted critics. The aim of this project is to provide an overview of some of the most important of the many critics of "Enlightenment rationalism," a term we use in an historically loose sense, to cover not just leaders of the Enlightenment itself, but also latter figures whose model of what is rational closely resembled that espoused during the Enlightenment. The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commentary on that thinker, but also to place him in the context of this larger stream of anti-rationalist thought. Thus, while this volume is not a history of anti-rationalist thought, it may contain the intimations of such a history. Some may wonder at the mixed bag of thinkers we address: poets, philosophers, economists, political theorists, and urbanists. But there is unity in this diversity. Although these authors worked in a variety of forms, they all sought to demonstrate the narrowness of rationalism's description of the human situation. It is our hope that surveying the variety of perspectives from which rationalism has been attacked will serve to clarify the difficulties the rationalist approach to understanding faces, rather than dispersing our critical attention. In other words, we hope that these divergent streams flow together into a river, rather than meandering out to sea like the channels of a delta.

The British idealist philosopher Bernard Bosanquet’s book The Philosophical Theory of the State was first published in 1899, and by 1923, four editions had been printed. In it, Bosanquet attempts to view the State from the perspective of experience as a whole and determine its place within that whole. And that is why, despite Bosanquet’s defining the State in what may seem to many to be an idiosyncratic fashion, it is worth engaging with his thought. This essay will use Bosanquet’s analysis to reflect upon two prominent forms of “anarchism”: anarcho-syndicalism (whose best-known current advocate is the linguist Noam Chomsky) and anarcho-capitalism (developed by Murray Rothbard ). Seen in this light, neither anarcho-syndicalism’s nor anarcho-capitalism’s ideal societies actually appear to be stateless: instead, both are proposals for novel forms of the State.

Political obligation remains one of the most discussed, and contested, topics in political philosophy. Whether there is a peremptory or prima facie duty to obey the state has been the subject of rigorous philosophical debate, with philosophers offering various theories both in support of and against political obligation. Many theorists argue that if individuals are obligated to obey the state, then the state must possess legitimate authority. Defending such authority requires that the state itself be justified. Thus, a foundational question in the debate on political obligation is whether the state can, in fact, be justified. Philosophical anarchists challenge this premise, arguing that the state cannot be justified, and therefore cannot claim a moral right to demand obedience. What grounds, if any, can be offered for the authority of the state, and citizens' duty to obey its laws? We will explore various recent attempts to justify state authority, as well as some efforts to claim that there is no justification. This edited volume includes contributions from researchers engaging with contemporary discussions on this question, focusing on developments from the 20th century to the present. The scope of the book is limited to the Western philosophical tradition.

C.S. Lewis was a major public intellectual in Britain, beginning from the late 1930s and continuing to his death in 1963. In both his non-fiction, especially The Abolition of Man, and his fiction, most importantly in That Hideous Strength, he offers a critique of rationalism and scientism that is often strikingly similar to those that Michael Oakeshott penned in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This essay examines the question to what extent this similarity is merely superficial, and to what extent the two writers shared a similar basis for their views. Furthermore, it examines whether there is an actual thread of influence: had Oakeshott been reading Lewis before writing his critique of rationalism, and if so, to what extent did Lewis’s work inform Oakeshott’s?

This book provides an overview of some of the most important critics of “Enlightenment rationalism.” The subjects of the volume—including, among others, Burke, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, C.S. Lewis, Gabriel Marcel, Russell Kirk, and Jane Jacobs—do not share a philosophical tradition as much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among modern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonableness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the presuppositions, methods, and logic of the natural sciences. The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commentary on that thinker, but also to place that thinker in the context of this larger stream of anti-rationalist thought. Thus, while this volume is not a history of anti-rationalist thought, it may contain the intimations of such a history.

The political systems of the Roman Republic were based almost entirely on tradition, “the way of the ancestors”, rather than on a written constitution. While the founders of the American Republic looked to ancient Rome as a primary model for their enterprise, nevertheless, in line with the rationalist spirit of their age, the American founders attempted to create a rational set of rules that would guide the conduct of American politics, namely, the US Constitution.These two examples offer a striking case of the ideal types, famously delineated by Michael Oakeshott in “Rationalism in Politics” and elsewhere, between politics as a practice grounded in tradition and politics as a system based on principles flowing from abstract reasoning.This book explores how the histories of the two republics can help us to understand Oakeshott’s claims about rational versus traditional politics. Through examining such issues we may come to understand better not only Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism, but also modern constitutional theory, issues in the design of the European Union, and aspects of the revival of republicanism.

The paper aims to explore what it means for something to be a social cycle, for a theory to be a social cycle theory, and to offer a suggestion for a simple, yet, we believe, fundamentally grounded schema for categorizing them. We show that a broad range of cycle theories can be described within the concept of disruption and adjustments. Further, many important cycle theories are true endogenous social cycle theories in which the theory provides a reason why the cycle should recur. We find that many social cycle theories fit with a two-population disruption and adjustment model similar to the well-known predator-prey model. This implies that a general modeling framework could be established for creating agent-based models of many social cycle theories.

A number of social theorists have contended that the essence of historical analysis is the employment of ideal types to comprehend past goings-on. But, while acknowledging that the study of history through ideal types can yield genuine insight, we may still ask if it represents the full emancipation of historical understanding from other modes of conceiving the past. This paper follows Michael Oakeshott's work on the philosophy of history in arguing that explaining the historical past by means of ideal types, even though offering a coherent and fruitful enterprise, nevertheless falls short of fully embodying the characteristics that differentiate historical understanding. This dispute involves fundamental issues regarding the nature of the social sciences. Furthermore, I suggest that it is of more than purely theoretical interest, in that social theorists who have accepted the Weberian view of historical inquiry will tend to be unaware of the defects inherent in all attempts to capture the nature of past events in a net of generalizations, and thus may be lead to ignore the inherent partiality of the understanding of historical happenings provided by ideal typification.

ONE OF THE MOST prominent theorists of anarcho-capitalism is Hans- Hermann Hoppe. In what is perhaps his most famous result, the argumentation ethic for libertarianism, he purports to establish an a priori defense of the justice of a social order based exclusively on pri- vate property. Hoppe claims that all participants in a debate must presuppose the libertarian principle that every person owns himself, since the principle underlies the very concept of argumentation. Some libertarians (e.g., Rothbard 1988) have celebrated Hoppe’s argument as the final nail in the coffin for collectivism of any type; following Hoppe, they believe that to deny the libertarian ethic is not only wrong, but also internally contradictory. On the other hand, a number of other prominent libertarians characterized Hoppe’s initial statement of his case as “one muddle after another” (Steele 1988, p. 47) or “a tissue of bald assertions” (Yeager 1988, p. 45).

This paper aims to persuade its reader that libertarianism, at least in several of its varieties, is a species of the genus Michael Oakeshott referred to as ‘rationalism in politics’. I hope to demonstrate, employing the work of Oakeshott, as well as Aristotle and Onora O’Neill, how many libertarian theorists, who generally have a sincere and admirable commitment to personal liberty, have been led astray by the rationalist promise that we might be able to approach deductive certainty concerning the 'correctness' of some political programme. Of course libertarians, in common with the adherents of almost any other political ‘stance’, are not a monolithic body, but exhibit a variety of more or less rationalist arguments for their views. For example, a thinker like Hayek, who is often placed in the libertarian camp, came to adopt much of Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism in his later work. And, of course, Oakeshott himself expressed an affinity for libertarian ideas in his essay, ‘The Political Economy of Freedom’ (1991 [1962]). But a general predilection to enhance individual freedom as far as is deemed practicable is quite a different matter from taking a stance in which liberty, and liberty conceived in a rather narrow fashion, is the only value deemed admissible into ‘reasonable’ political discourse. (We will see in a subsequent section that Oakeshott recognized this urge to sanctify one value above all others as a logical requirement of striving for deductive political truths.) I believe that a critique of such libertarian rationalism is particularly relevant given the present situation in the United States vis-à-vis civil rights and the ongoing ‘war on terror’, in that many non- libertarian supporters of peace and strong civil rights find themselves allied with libertarians on these issues—if libertarians have gotten these issues ‘correct’, then how might they have gone wrong elsewhere? Furthermore, the critique may aid libertarians themselves, because, if the title of this paper is accurate, such a single-minded exaltation of one value above all others is an enemy of true liberty, so that libertarians might want to rethink adopting such a position. As Philip Pettit demonstrates (1997), freedom as non-domination is more robust and inclusive of all that we value about freedom than is the libertarian concept of freedom as non-interference; by allowing, say, immense economic power to be concentrated in a single corporation, as intervention to break the company up would violate the principle of non-interference, libertarian ideas may greatly diminish the liberty of the people subject to that corporate power.