James Alexander

If we define tradition too hastily we leave to one side the question of what the relevance of tradition is for us. Here the concept of tradition is opened up by considering the different views of it taken by Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott and Alasdair MacIntyre. We see that each has put tradition into a fully developed picture of what our predicament is in modernity; and that each has differed in their assessment of what our relation to tradition is or should be. Arendt sees tradition as something which no longer conditions action, Oakeshott sees tradition as something which conditions all action, and MacIntyre sees tradition as something which should condition right action. In each case, the view of tradition is clearly one element in an attempt to see how the most important constituent elements of human existence – variously called the human condition, human conduct, or human virtue – should be understood in a modernity which is ours because it has put the traditional concept of tradition into question

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 1 - 28 We still lack a systematic or complete theory of tradition. By referring to the works of many major figures of the last century – Arendt, Boyer, Eisenstadt, Eliot, Gadamer, Goody, Hobsbawm, Kermode, Leavis, MacIntyre, Oakeshott, Pieper, Pocock, Popper, Prickett, Shils and others – I show that a theory of tradition must include insights taken not only from the study of sociology and anthropology, but also from the study of literature and religion. The proliferation of separate academic subjects does not make it any less necessary for us to attempt to say in general what we are talking about when we talk about tradition. In this article I distinguish three elements which are found in traditions. I call these continuity, canon, and core. The argument is that traditions can be distinguished in terms of whether there is a core in addition to canon and continuity, a canon in addition to continuity, or only mere continuity. Together these form a theory of tradition which enables us to see what is necessary to all traditions and also what it is which distinguishes different types of tradition from each other.

Reaction is a subject usually avoided by political theorists, since it raises awkward historical, philosophical and political questions. Perhaps philosophers of history might make better sense of it. In this article I claim that reaction has to be understood in relation to the concepts of revolution, tradition, progress and conservatism. I argue that the specific meaning of reaction is a response to the specific action that establishes the principle that order should be established only on enlightened principles. The few theorists who have dealt with reaction have disagreed about whether it is the same as conservatism or not. I show that reaction is not an element in what I call a status quo conservatism, though it is an element in any conservatism conceived more broadly. I characterise reaction in full as the attempt to reverse the establishment of the principle that only enlightened principles shall be the basis of political order, the attempt to resist the further establishment of those enlightened principles, and also the attempt to criticise contemporary enlightened politics in terms of the unenlightened standards which existed before the revolution.

We still ask the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Every generation seems to offer new and contradictory answers to the question. In the last thirty or so years, the most interesting characterisations of Enlightenment have been by historians. They have told us that there is one Enlightenment, that there are two Enlightenments, that there are many Enlightenments. This has thrown up a second question, ‘How Many Enlightenments?’ In the spirit of collaboration and criticism, I answer both questions by arguing in this article that there are in fact three Enlightenments: Radical, Sceptical and Liberal. These are abstracted from the rival theories of Enlightenment found in the writings of the historians Jonathan Israel, John Robertson and J.G.A. Pocock. Each form of Enlightenment is political; each involves an attitude to history; each takes a view of religion. They are arranged in a sequence of increasing sensitivity to history, as it is this which makes it possible to relate them to each other and indeed propose a composite definition of Enlightenment. The argument should be of interest to anyone concerned with ‘the Enlightenment’ as a historical phenomenon or with ‘Enlightenment’ as a philosophical abstraction.