Accueil
"Oakeshott as a young man was a socialist, not from any concern with economic equality, nor even from a sense of ‘justice’ but because it was exciting, like being in love."
"Strauss’ ‘perfectionism’, the view that the job of the political thinker is to identify and then advocate the summum bonum, is not shared by Oakeshott, neither is his pessimism about modern relativism. Their respective readings of Hobbes illustrate this gulf. For Strauss, Hobbes represents the acme of relativism, denying natural law and reducing politics to the decisions of the whim of the sovereign backed up by force, whereas Oakeshott reads Hobbes as establishing the conditions for legitimate authority as opposed to mere power."
"He accepts that there is a conflict between different views, values and desires which cannot either be lexically ordered or rationally adjudicated between. But while there is no single ‘end’, there is a process through which such inevitable conflict can be domesticated, which is a set of non-purposive rules that regulate cives behaviour but do not determine their particular or several ends. Government has to be obeyed, otherwise the strongest, most vicious, or unscrupulous win, but it does so not through imposing a single idea of what is in the interest of all, but through enabling people to subscribe to a set of rules that enable all to meet their varying and conflicting purposes in life. It is in subscription to those rules that legitimacy (authority) resides."
-Allan Pond, "Oakeshott’s World View", 17 août 2017: http://www.quarterly-review.org/oakeshotts-world-view/
"Strauss’ ‘perfectionism’, the view that the job of the political thinker is to identify and then advocate the summum bonum, is not shared by Oakeshott, neither is his pessimism about modern relativism. Their respective readings of Hobbes illustrate this gulf. For Strauss, Hobbes represents the acme of relativism, denying natural law and reducing politics to the decisions of the whim of the sovereign backed up by force, whereas Oakeshott reads Hobbes as establishing the conditions for legitimate authority as opposed to mere power."
"He accepts that there is a conflict between different views, values and desires which cannot either be lexically ordered or rationally adjudicated between. But while there is no single ‘end’, there is a process through which such inevitable conflict can be domesticated, which is a set of non-purposive rules that regulate cives behaviour but do not determine their particular or several ends. Government has to be obeyed, otherwise the strongest, most vicious, or unscrupulous win, but it does so not through imposing a single idea of what is in the interest of all, but through enabling people to subscribe to a set of rules that enable all to meet their varying and conflicting purposes in life. It is in subscription to those rules that legitimacy (authority) resides."
-Allan Pond, "Oakeshott’s World View", 17 août 2017: http://www.quarterly-review.org/oakeshotts-world-view/
