The Tortoise and the Elephant

You couldn’t call it a conspiracy but there is surely a degree of censorship governing discussion of the great English conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott. At issue is what to make of the extraordinary contrast, documented by his biographer Robert Grant, between the public and the private Oakeshott. The one is polished, traditionalist, Olympian and, some say, the greatest English political philosopher since Thomas Hobbes. The other is a Dionysiac “love junky” for whom love was the great “cause” (his word) of his life. As Grant sees it, Oakeshott (who he says “seems seldom to have been sleeping with fewer than three women at once”) used his philosophic work “to deaden his sorrows or drive away his demons”.

Grant himself has had a foot in both camps. In 1990 he wrote Oakeshott, the first book about the traditionalist philosopher. Twenty-two years later he published the explosive essay “The Pursuit of Intimacy, or Rationalism in Love” about Oakeshott the nympholept. The play on words in the title of this essay—Grant calls it a quibble—is an allusion to Oakeshott’s idea of mature politics as the pursuit of intimations as distinct from a Rationalist application of ideology. What is puzzling is the dismissive refusal by most political philosophers even to discuss Grant’s essay. (The full biography remains a work-in-progress, now resumed after delays caused by illness.)

Take for example the most recent essay on Oakeshott’s work—“The Compensations of Michael Oakeshott” by Timothy Fuller, in last November’s New Criterion in New York. Fuller is a leading Oakeshott scholar and editor who has done yeoman’s service in what he ironically calls “the Oakeshott industry”. He is a professor at Colorado College. The principal “compensation” suggested by the title of his New Criterion essay is the hope, or illusion, that poetry may compensate for the loss of religious faith and the failure of technology or politics to provide an alternative faith (the theme, incidentally, of James McAuley’s brilliant 1959 collection The End of Modernity).

But what is striking about Fuller’s exposition is that he makes no reference at all to Grant’s work, although he relies in large part on Oakeshott’s Notebooks, 1922–86 edited by Luke O’Sullivan (Imprint Academic)—the same notebooks on which Grant has drawn. Fuller retrieved most of them from the philosopher’s cottage in Dorset not long after his death in December 1990. (Others came to light later.) They were not published in full until 2014 but most were readily available in the archives of the London School of Economics. (I drew on them for my article in Quadrant in June 2004, “The Sad and Noble Music of Michael Oakeshott”, republished in The Last Intellectuals.) They include Oakeshott’s reflections on life and death and anything else from the ancient philosophers to the modernist poets.

But what stands out, as Grant has emphasised, is that many of them, especially those of the years 1928 to 1934, “are mostly about erotic love, in the classic tradition of Shelley, Hazlitt, Stendhal, Amiel”. Grant goes further and sets out to show how Oakeshott tried to make his personal life conform to his erotic ideals. However much he scorned ideology in politics, his private quest was to live his life so as to conform with his ideology of love, which had supplanted the socialism of his youth. It is baffling that Fuller can discuss Oakeshott’s life and work without even mentioning this theme of the Notebooks or Grant’s research.

Grant is well aware that his approach to Oakeshott will irritate many scholars. Addressing his readers, he writes:

Much that I have said will have shocked you, painfully, if you knew and loved Michael but suspected none of it, or from surprise, if you knew only his work. The tensions, contradictions, bizarreries, and irrationalities of his personal life are scarcely reflected at all in his work’s characteristically polished, Apollonian surface. But his romantic-erotic-libertin-Dionysiac side is now wide open to view, undeniable and disturbing, and a biographer cannot ignore it, especially when Michael himself explicitly stresses its centrality to his life and purposes.

Shocked or not, some scholars were indignant at Grant’s biographical essay. It was published in 2012 in A Companion to Michael Oakeshott, edited by two respected Oakeshottian scholars, Paul Franco and Leslie Marsh. They positioned it as the first and a theme-setting chapter of their Companion. But when John Kekes, a leading American conservative philosopher, reviewed the book in Notre Dame Philosophic Reviews, he concluded: “The editors have made a serious misjudgment in including this essay.” It consists “in peddling often malicious hearsay from largely uncheckable sources”. In his rejoinder published by the Michael Oakeshott Association, Grant said he could find in Kekes’s review “nothing to suggest that he had read my chapter with even minimal attention”. His sources, he insisted, are “documented, archived and referenced”. Other critics, especially conservatives, defensively deplore any references at all to Oakeshott’s love life which diminish him and show, as Franco and Marsh put it, how “selfishly and often destructively” he pursued erotic love.

The most common and telling criticism is the familiar argument that no biography, however perceptive, can be a substitute for philosophic analysis. We do not need to research Bertrand Russell’s love life to assess Principia Mathematica. We may know little about Plato’s private life but we have been debating his philosophic ideas for centuries. Yet we surely cannot deny any organic connection at all between a philosopher’s life and his work, especially when considering his work on morals or politics. One of Oakeshott’s characteristic positions, for example, is to reject the idea that a conservative will or must base himself on ideas of God, natural law, the providential order, family, nation or whatever. On the contrary, he argues, conservatism is a matter of disposition, not doctrine. “What I hope I have made clear,” he wrote in “On Being Conservative”, “is that it is not at all inconsistent to be conservative in respect of government and radical in respect of almost every other activity”—from poetry and religion to morals. In my youth (“those dear vanished days when I was so unhappy”, to quote Oakeshott’s Notebooks) I found this approach liberating. I am less sure now. But is it sensible or productive or even possible to consider Oakeshott’s project of merging conservatism and radicalism without taking into account the eccentric and sometimes radical biographical details uncovered by Grant? Silence, censure or censorship is not enough when examining the achievement of a great thinker.

Perhaps I should end by recalling Oakeshott’s parable of the Elephant and the Tortoise, delivered in his valedictory address at the Garrick Club in London when he retired from the London School of Economics in 1969. Everyone knows, he said, that the world is supported by an elephant and the elephant by a tortoise. The tortoise is a cold-blooded and sphinx-like creature that carries in his heart the icy secrets of the universe. But he remains taciturn. The elephant also knows these secrets but, unlike the tortoise, can sometimes be coaxed into unguarded utterances. With his four feet firmly planted on the tortoise’s back, he cheerfully and patiently and with ironic indifference reveals some of the grandeurs and miseries of the world. We should be grateful to the elephant. We should not seek a final revelation from the tortoise.

PROBABLY the most controversial moment at the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in the splendid Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria was Hal Colebatch’s speech accepting his award in the Australian History category for his book Australia’s Secret War about how some unions sabotaged Australian troops throughout the Second World War. He bases the book on letters, diaries and interviews with eyewitnesses as well as official reports. The tragic hero of the book is the Labor Prime Minister John Curtin, who believed heart and soul in trade unionism but could not control “the quasi-Fifth-Columnists”, the saboteurs of the Left, on the coal-fields and the wharves and in caucus. The strain contributed to his early death, as his successor Ben Chifley said at the time.

A related scandal that Colebatch documents is the extent to which leftist academic historians have ignored this “dark aspect of Australian history”. It is not a matter of a deliberate cover-up but of an attitude of mind. Some of Colebatch’s critics sat grimly silent throughout the applause that greeted his speech. (At least they did not heckle.) Others have promptly challenged his sources. I have no doubt that some eyewitnesses, looking back over several decades, have misremembered some details. It would be amazing if they did not. But Colebatch’s case is overwhelming. It turns out that Colebatch offered his manuscript to publisher after publisher but they all knocked it back—until he tried Quadrant Books. A big tick for Quadrant Books! Need I declare that I was one of the judges on the panel which recommended the award to Colebatch along with Joan Beaumont’s moving Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War?