Michael Oakeshott’s “Political Education”

前幾年在網上偶然下載了一位網友摘錄的Michael Oakeshott’s “Political Education”。今天拿出來讀了一下，轉幾條——



Freedom, like a recipe for game pie, is not a bright idea; it is not a ‘human right’ to be deduced from some speculative concept of human nature. The freedom which we enjoy is nothing more than arrangements,procedures of a certain kind: the freedom of an Englishman is not something exemplified in the procedure of habeas corpus, it is, at that point, the availability of that procedure. And the freedom which we wish toenjoy is not an ‘ideal’ which we premeditate independently of our political experience, it is what is alreadyintimated in that experience. (p. 54)

An ideology is an abbreviation of some manner of concrete activity. (p. 54)

On ideological politics: The complexities of the tradition which have been squeezed out in the process of abridgment are taken to be unimportant: the ‘rights of man’ are understood to exist insulated from amanner of attending to arrangements. And because, in practice, the abridgment is never by itself as ufficient guide, we are encouraged to fill it out, not with our suspect political experience, but with experience drawn from other (often irrelevant) concretely understood activities, such as war, the conduct of industry, or Trade Union negotiation. (p. 56)

Political philosophy cannot be expected to increase our ability to be successful in political activity. It will not help us to distinguish between good and bad political projects; it has no power to guide or to direct us inthe enterprise of pursuing the intimations of our tradition… we may hope only to be less often cheated by ambiguous statement and irrelevant argument…. The more thoroughly we understand our own politicaltradition, the more readily its whole resources are available to us, the less likely we shall be to embrace theillusions which wait for the ignorant and the unwary: the illusion that in politics we can get on without atradition of behaviour, the illusion that the abridgment of a tradition is itself a sufficient guide, and the illusion that in politics there is anywhere a safe harbour, a destination to be reached or even a detectable strand of progress. (p. 65-66)