Why Ed Miliband Gets Everything Wrong | Michael Oakeshott

[00:00:00]Hello everyone. Today we're going to be talking about Michael Oakeshott, quite an influential conservative thinker who attempted to defend tradition, inherited wisdom, and he was an opponent of rationalism.

[00:00:17]I've already mentioned him a couple of times when I talked about Maurice Cowling a couple of weeks back. I think he hovers in the background of Peter Hitchens' basic world view. And he gives a very different defense of tradition from some of the other thinkers that we've considered like Julius Evola for example whose version of capital T tradition is somewhat different from what Oakeshott has in mind.

[00:00:45]So, without wasting any further time, let's get on to it. I will mention right here at the top that my summer sale is ongoing up until the end of July.

[00:00:58]Promo code scored to get you 25% off all courses. Buy it now.

[00:01:04]But with all of that said, let's make a start.

[00:01:08]So, modern politics according to Oakeshott is dominated by rationalism. That is the conviction that political problems yield to abstract principles, technical rules, and ideological blueprints.

[00:01:26]Oakeshott regarded this as the characteristic era of the modern age.

[00:01:33]It was shared across the political spectrum in his view by liberals of every kind from John Stuart Mill on, by socialists of every kind from Karl Marx on or even from Jean-Jacques Rousseau on.

[00:01:47]And many who called themselves conservatives, no doubt Oakeshott had in mind certain libertarians who like to proceed from axiomatic first principles, the Ludwig von Mises' of this world. Uh and Oakeshott uh really had it in for all of these various different kinds of rationalism uh because in his view they can't fully grasp a certain type of knowledge that uh is really under appreciated by intellectuals uh in society.

[00:02:27]So, these two kinds of knowledge for Oakeshott uh uh it's the difference between technical knowledge that can be learned in a manual, right? That can be transmitted through text and written down, okay? And and kind of learned almost like doing an exam that you would do at university or at school.

[00:02:50]And practical knowledge that develops through habit, through tradition, and through lived experience.

[00:02:58]Now, in this country, in Britain, uh this is the difference between the university wit, the university educated intellectual, okay? In the science laboratory there, uh you know, whatever institution, and the archetypical man in the shed tinkering about.

[00:03:19]The man in the shed.

[00:03:22]And Oakeshott is the big defender of the man in the shed tinkering about developing a kind of feel, a kind of experience of the field because in ways that he can't even write down and describe, he has kind of worked out through his lived experience what works.

[00:03:54]All right? What works can't always be written down in a textbook.

[00:04:01]If you don't believe this, just go to any work. Just think of any line of work that you've been in and think about the difference between theory and practice.

[00:04:11]Book smarts and actual experience.

[00:04:15]And you know, when the proverbial uh you know what hits the fan, you can bet your bottom dollar that most people will look for those men and women of experience who've been there and done it, who know what to do >> [snorts] >> uh before they look to those people who have the book smarts.

[00:04:38]Rationalism makes the fateful error of privileging the explicit and the teachable while dismissing as mere prejudice the wisdom that can only be lived.

[00:04:52]>> [snorts] >> For Oakeshott, practice precedes theory.

[00:04:58]The real skill in any human activity, whether it be cooking or statecraft or craftsmanship, flows from tradition and from cultivated habit and only then, after that, from abstract theory.

[00:05:15]Okay? This is I mean, cooking is a pretty good example. I've talked before in this channel about Marco Pierre White.

[00:05:22]Now, Marco Pierre White had literally tens of thousands of hours operating as a top chef, working in a real kitchen, developing his craft over many, many years.

[00:05:35]Now, he can write down a recipe and I can copy the recipe and I can watch his video and I can copy exactly what he does, but you understand the difference between Marco Pierre White and me trying to like trying to copy his recipe.

[00:05:52]Okay?

[00:05:54]Rationalists mistakenly believe that a sufficiently rigorous blueprint can replace or fully direct practice.

[00:06:06]For and speaking of Marco Pierre White, if you watch any of his Maestro videos here on YouTube, he talks about the sorts of things that you won't really see written down in the recipe or you can't really kind of write it down as a test. He talks about, you know, the feel for the pan, where you position it, you know, how you I mean there are there are things that you can only pick up if you've been there and done it.

[00:06:35]And this is an intangible thing.

[00:06:38]You know, recently the World Cup has been on here and they talk about the importance of experience, of having players who have been there and done it and know how to deal with the presh with the pressure.

[00:06:52]As against, [clears throat] you know, the person who has the right technical stats. Okay? They have the right maybe they maybe on paper this is a very good team or this is on paper this is a very good player.

[00:07:05]But there are certain intangibles, okay, in something like the world of sport, okay, that give that that provide that little edge or provide that differential, okay, that you that is is difficult to quantify.

[00:07:26]And this is what Oakeshott really was interested in first and foremost.

[00:07:32]For Oakeshott, all of this gets things precisely backwards. That is, if you think you're going to put theory before practice, uh, are putting the cart before the horse.

[00:07:44]Practical knowledge is always richer and always prior to its theoretical foundation.

[00:07:51]This is something that Matt Ridley has talked about in his books, >> [snorts] >> uh, somewhat influenced by Oakshott, where >> [clears throat and snorts] >> a lot of the time the engineers come first. A lot of the time the tinkerers and the people who get there through trial and error get there first and the academics, all they're doing is coming along afterwards and simply observing and writing down, okay, what has already been proven in practice. So, the theory comes second and the the the the practice comes first.

[00:08:29]But, intellectuals everywhere get this the wrong way around. And this is what, uh, Oakshott is talking about.

[00:08:38]>> [snorts] [clears throat] >> So, in the rationalist view, politics is an engineering project. It is a set of problems to be identified and solved by clever institutional design applied with confidence and clarity.

[00:09:00]I'm just going to get myself out of the way a minute.

[00:09:02]This is the blueprint logic.

[00:09:05]They impose an ideal plan upon society from above and they use, uh, intimation to draw out possibilities already present in practice.

[00:09:18]>> [snorts] >> And this is the rationalist view of the world and social planners of every kind have some version of this view.

[00:09:27]Against this, Oakshott posits politics is a kind of conversation, the ongoing pursuit of intimations already latent within an existing tradition, a process of refinement and evolution.

[00:09:44]>> [clears throat] >> For Oakeshott, the real test is reality itself as against the abstract principle. Has it stood the test of time?

[00:09:55]Lots of the time, the blueprint, especially, I mean, I talked in the Peter Hitchens video about liberal reforms to crime, where they put completely untested theories, okay, into policy, which then had disastrous results. Thomas Sowell also talked about this as well.

[00:10:16]Oakeshott is saying, like, look, this is because these things are untested.

[00:10:23]You have replaced something that has grown organically through the trial and error of thousands of thousands of people, millions of people tinkering about, with one abstract plan which one person has come up with that can't possibly stand the test of reality.

[00:10:43]>> [snorts] >> And then, Oakeshott says, you know, yes, there's scope for reform from within, but we must also preserve continuity with the past and not going to change things too quickly. You can tell this is how Oakeshott was a conservative as opposed to radical. He did believe in this kind of gradualist change in that kind of Burkean tradition or the Russell Kirk tradition. Oakeshott was this kind of conservative, where he was always seeking continuities with the past, but he did see, you know, scope for gradual change as long as those changes stand the test of reality.

[00:11:31]You know, do they work? That's the ultimate test. There's an empirical test.

[00:11:36]Uh and if it doesn't work, then you need to go back to the the drawing board. Uh and ideally, the new thing should come should come about as a result of the tinkering, not as a result of somebody trying to impose a plan from above.

[00:11:53]>> [snorts] >> Oakeshott defends tradition.

[00:11:58]He says tradition is blind prejudice.

[00:12:01]That is, you you continue doing practices because they've always been done.

[00:12:06]This, however, is the accumulated tested wisdom of an entire society, providing the very background within which rational criticism can meaningfully occur.

[00:12:20]No tradition can be fully reduced to explicit propositions.

[00:12:27]It carries within it a dense inheritance of practices, assumptions, and adjustments that have survived the test of their use.

[00:12:36]To discard all of this inheritance as arbitrary or or as superstitious impoverishes society.

[00:12:45]And this is something for which the leftist uh typically has no feel for.

[00:12:52]Most leftists just think of the past as being kind of the stuff of nonsense that, you know, the it's just bigoted. It's just kind of these things existed for no reason, or it was merely oppressive.

[00:13:07]Oakeshott Oakeshott says, "No. Many of these things have a reason for being there."

[00:13:14]And uh this is a version of Chesterton's fence, of course, where you know, you come across a fence, you don't know why it's there.

[00:13:23]And the the kind of uh the radical or the reformer or the you know the the rationalist thinks well I can't see a reason for it being there. Let's knock it down.

[00:13:36]>> [snorts] >> Whereas the traditionalist says well probably that has got a good reason for being there.

[00:13:42]We don't know why it's there. Let's just trust the people knew what they were doing at some point.

[00:13:47]So let's not knock it down.

[00:13:49]And Oakshott very much stands on that side of side of the fence.

[00:13:57]>> [clears throat] >> He says that you know familiar familiar familiarity breeds contempt.

[00:14:05]And the rationalist has a disdain for that which is habitual.

[00:14:10]And the inherited you know anything that's passed down anything that he can't see the reason for the rationalist because he doesn't understand it himself has a problem with.

[00:14:22]Uh forgive my cough by the way it's I thought it'd gone but it's somehow come back over the course of this lecture.

[00:14:28]>> [snorts] >> Um so yes this directly leads to destructive political project because the rationalist is you know continually doing away with things that he doesn't understand and causing a lot more damage in the process.

[00:14:46]Rejecting tradition as irrational the rationalist attempts to remake society according to abstract principles often with results that are rigidly dogmatic socially disruptive and ultimately catastrophic.

[00:15:03]Ideology without the inherited wisdom that he's talking about of accumulated knowledge is destructive. It demolishes. You don't actually know what you're playing with.

[00:15:16]And you end up doing more harm than good. This is the ultimate message of Oakshott.

[00:15:21]>> [snorts] >> He contrasts the civil association with the enterprise association.

[00:15:29]In the civil association, the government is a custodian of general non-purposeful rules. Individuals pursue their own ends, and they respect and the government respects their freedom.

[00:15:46]And it respects the fact that all of the you know, thousands and millions of people tinkering about in their sheds and would doing whatever else uh maybe developing uh practices on their own cuz they know what they're doing.

[00:16:01]Right? The the local fisherman understand the waters in which he's fishing.

[00:16:08]The administrator who's coming from Whitehall doesn't understand any of those things. This also gets us back to F. A. Hayek's knowledge problem that I discussed in the Thomas Sowell uh video a few weeks back, the local knowledge of that fisherman or of the the guy who runs the harbor or of the lighthouse keeper, for example.

[00:16:37]It's so presumptive of the outsider from the capital city with his rationalist assumptions to assume that he knows better.

[00:16:48]And this is seen in every organization where the managers who get their university degrees and their fancy MBAs and so on come in and they've got their ideas about how everything's supposed to work because they've read it in this book and they've read it in that book and their managerial guides tell them this and that. And then they rub up against the local workforce who actually understand how the factory works or how the organization works, or how the how this industry actually functions.

[00:17:25]And they may have very good reasons for that.

[00:17:27]Uh this and there's always that tension between those two forms of knowledge, Oakshott very much uh in the in the latter camp.

[00:17:37]The enterprise association is very much the managerial one, where the government is the manager of a collective project with a shared substantive goal.

[00:17:47]Uh this, according to Oakshott, tends towards totalitarianism.

[00:17:51]The distinction here among >> [clears throat] >> is is among Oakshott's most enduring contribution.

[00:18:02]Civil association leaves room for a plurality of purposes.

[00:18:07]The state sets the rules while leaving individuals free to choose their own destinations.

[00:18:14]Enterprise associations subordinate individuals to a common goal, and in so doing uh tend inevitably towards coercion.

[00:18:26]And [snorts] many people in Britain will have in mind things like common purpose and various other Fabian and clandestine Blairite plans to direct society ever more ever more centrally, or uh various [snorts] directives that come down from government, or head office, or you know, we're doing uh this sort of drive, or that sort of drive.

[00:18:52]Uh I I I and so often those things end up doing more harm than good. Uh one of the things I I I I can think of is uh you know, quote-unquote sustainability.

[00:19:04]Okay, sustainability.

[00:19:06]Uh the idea that uh the central manager that Ed Miliband, for example, would have a better idea of {quote} {unquote} sustainability than fishermen and farmers and people who've, you know, been working the land for generations.

[00:19:25]You know, should should at the very least make you a little bit skeptical. How how could anybody have the faith that Ed Miliband, who doesn't know his ass from his elbow, right? Let you know, can't even eat a bacon sandwich, let alone till a field, could actually be in a position to tell that farmer who's been on that land for 200 years, 300 years, 500 years, you know, try to teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, you hear that phrase? Well, I mean, but this is what the Ed Milibands of this world do again and again and again.

[00:20:04]And when people push back on them and say, "Actually, Ed, you don't have any clue what you're doing."

[00:20:09]His tendency is to double down and become ever more vigilant, ever more dictatorial, ever more tyrannical, and you know, be like, "Right, if well, if you if you're not going to take that, I'm going to make you. I'm going to force you to do it using the arm of the law, using the government, using various, you know, instruments of coercion.

[00:20:31]And this is how British government has gone certainly since Oakshott's time. He saw it coming in his own lifetime, and it's only exacerbated and got worse. Same is true pretty much of every Western nation.

[00:20:49]>> [clears throat] >> Genuine political understanding, according to Oakshott, cannot be acquired by mastering an ideological doctrine or reading a technical manual.

[00:21:00]It comes from immersion in the practices, history, and institutions of a society.

[00:21:07]Politics is an art learned through participation and inherited through the culture.

[00:21:13]It is also a science derived from first principles.

[00:21:18]So, >> [snorts] >> Oakeshott, uh you know, again, if you go back to the lecture on Cowling, where Cowling talked about the historian almost as a detective, almost as somebody who needs to immerse himself in the materials of his subject to get a feel for it.

[00:21:41]Uh the Oakeshott is all about these things that are hard to put into words.

[00:21:48]Things that uh you know, you can intuit your way through.

[00:21:53]Uh that you can you know, again, it's it's hard to you get a feel for it, okay? It cannot just be learned through book smarts.

[00:22:02]Uh that is something uh that the Oakeshott said.

[00:22:07]You know, that so many of the intellectual types, the managerial types, struggle with because they're of a rationalist mindset.

[00:22:15]But and just because they can't understand it and just because it can't be written down in a test, right? Just because you can't get a degree from it, uh doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

[00:22:26]But the rationalist doesn't understand that and so he seeks to discard it wherever he finds it.

[00:22:33]>> [clears throat] >> The rationalist has a certain illusion of certainty of which Oakeshott was a sharp critic.

[00:22:43]Political life, according to Oakeshott, is contingent.

[00:22:46]It is inherently uncertain, shaped by history and circumstance, with no final solutions available.

[00:22:53]You know, a little bit like the soul saying of no solutions, only trade-offs.

[00:23:00]Comprehensive planning fails.

[00:23:03]You know, no plan survives contact with reality.

[00:23:10]First contact with reality.

[00:23:12]Attempts to eliminate uncertainty produce rigidity, unintended consequences, and institutional destruction.

[00:23:24]Ideological purity is a corrupting force. The quest for the perfect and for perfect consistency in politics is a symptom of the rationalist disease.

[00:23:35]What Oakeshott is saying is that so many things are situational.

[00:23:39]You have to be able to react in real time.

[00:23:42]Uh, in a way, this is what Carl Schmitt was saying about decisionism, about power always in some sense being decisionist. You can't actually have a law for every for every eventuality.

[00:23:55]Sometimes you got to think on your feet.

[00:23:57]Sometimes experience and intuition are much more valuable than what it says in the manual.

[00:24:06]And this is I guess the difference between real wisdom, accumulated experience and wisdom, and the book smarts that Oakeshott has such contempt for.

[00:24:21]Oakeshott wanted a politics of skepticism and restraint.

[00:24:25]His final counsel is a conservatism of temper rather than doctrine, focused on keeping the ship of state afloat, and preserving a course towards continuity.

[00:24:37]Continuity, moderation, and careful preservation of the complex inheritance that we all owe to our forefathers and our ancestors.

[00:24:51]These are much wiser guides than the grand schemes of improvement.

[00:24:58]Politics of skepticism asks how we sustain what is worth keeping.

[00:25:04]Now, there are some criticisms I think to make of Oakeshott, which is that uh there is much wisdom and truth in a lot of the things that Oakeshott had to say, okay? And he's been influential for a reason.

[00:25:19]However, this kind of quiet conservatism, which is today alive and well in people like uh Danny Kruger from Reform UK, it's kind of genteel British, you know, it's a little bit of the Roger Scruton tea with the vicar conservatism, okay?

[00:25:41]Is that >> [clears throat] >> in its counseling of restraint and moderation, and in in its general acceptance of kind of gradual change, many now argue in 2026 that people like Oakeshott didn't go far enough in resisting. I mean, this was in some way Cowling's big issue, uh you know, with conservatism in general, that they didn't take the fight to the liberals and the socialists hard enough.

[00:26:17]That they, you know, because they because their opponents were ideological and rigid, and because this kind of feel your way through, respect the traditions type of conservatism, it's it's kind of soft in a way that they ended up not actually defending the things that Oakeshott said, uh you know, were sacred or important to a society, so therefore they ended up giving away that society to the radicals.

[00:26:56]Uh this is a I guess one of the uh the big critiques of conservatism per se that many younger men on the right today have a problem with because they look back at Oakeshott and at Edmund Burke and at Roger Scruton and they say, "Well, what did you end up What did you end up actually preserving?

[00:27:17]You gave away the house, Oakeshott. You didn't Your ideas didn't go far enough. You didn't fight hard enough.

[00:27:27]This was too genteel."

[00:27:29]Now, I [clears throat] don't know whether that is fair.

[00:27:33]Okay? People can let me know in the comments. If you're a big Oakeshott defender, maybe you can outline the ways in which this type of conservatism actually did put up the fight.

[00:27:44]Um but this is the great danger, of course, uh that if this kind of conservatism uh is found ultimately to, you know, be a weak opposition or to give way to genuinely radical forces on the left, then it kind of provokes an equal and opposite reaction on the other side and therefore you end up with two rather rigid ideological forces going at it, um you know, working from the very sorts of rationalisms that Oakeshott um that Oakeshott opposed in in his lifetime.

[00:28:26]I [snorts] don't actually know what the answer to all of that is.

[00:28:31]Oakeshott has the, you know, [snorts and clears throat] like so many conservatives in history, I'm reminded of the title of uh Samuel T. Francis's book, Beautiful Losers. Maybe Francis is somebody I'll, you know, do a video on down the line, but >> [clears throat] >> Oakshott, like Peter Hitchens, uh and and so many of the these other like Thomas Sowell in many ways is a beautiful loser.

[00:28:59]He was correct. He had the habit of being right in all the things that he said.

[00:29:05]Um but he came out on the losing side.

[00:29:09]So, the question then is by his own empirical test, right? He said, "The test is of reality."

[00:29:19]Right? You test it by experience all the time.

[00:29:23]Well, we've had quite a lot of experience of Oakshottian conservatism at this point.

[00:29:31]And the experience is is that it gets steamrolled by the radical left.

[00:29:37]It gets steamrolled by the fact that by the forces of counterculture.

[00:29:41]Uh arguably, you could argue in America and increasingly in this country as well, uh is not only soft to its left, but it's soft to its right as well.

[00:29:53]That it kind of it's doesn't resist the doesn't resist the margins as well uh as it as it used to.

[00:30:02]And therefore, experience is finding it wanting.

[00:30:06]So, the great challenge for conservatives now, right? The great challenge for Danny Kruger, the and Scrutonian conservatives and Burkean conservatives and Oakshottians in the current moment in 2026, if you're watching this and you're one of those conservatives, as thousands of you will be, your great challenge is how do you answer that charge that your very approach has been found wanting?

[00:30:34]That you have just been nothing but a straight loser for 100-plus years at this point. Nothing but a straight line of L's for your brand of conservatism against these more radical forces. It's not enough to be right.

[00:30:53]You have to be able to take the fight to them.

[00:30:57]Do you struggle to take the fight to them because your set of ideas as articulated by Oakshott here >> [sighs] >> ultimately struggles to be nailed down.

[00:31:11]Right? It's It's like pinning down It's because he's talking about things that cannot be written down in a textbook, are not, you know, they are in some ways intangible.

[00:31:22]Okay, it means they're vulnerable. And what what the challenge for those conservatives is how can you protect those things that you think are so sacred, that you think are so important?

[00:31:34]Okay, without then yourself succumbing to the very traps that Oakshott is talking about.

[00:31:41]Another question to ask is, are human beings cut out for that? Maybe there's a rationalist drive. I mean Alfredo Pareto said human beings are non-rational, but they have a tendency, a bias towards thinking they are rational.

[00:31:55]And maybe human beings need to believe that they're being rational, in which case that means writing down, you know, some of those principles.

[00:32:05]However, when conservatives have tried to write down those principles, it ends up being awful.

[00:32:10]Uh I remember Jordan Peterson's conservative manifesto that I reviewed on this channel line by line, one of the worst written documents I have ever ever reviewed, I've ever read, right? And I'm not having a I'm not trying to have a go at Jordan Peterson, but it was really bad.

[00:32:29]You know, maybe it can't be written down. Maybe that's Maybe that's part of the whole problem.

[00:32:34]Uh the The is as the years go on, okay, and more and more of these traditions and more and more of the old way of life is eroded and taken over and smashed by the forces of radicalism, how much longer can the Oakshotts of this world occupy the space that says, "This is the This is the opponent. This is the relic. This is the remnant. This is the vanguard of the society against these forces?"

[00:33:05]It's failing to do that, I would say, has led to the rise of populism. It has led to the rise of the radical right. It has led to the rise of, you know, so-called uh you know, radicalized young men and whatever else uh scare stories you read in the press.

[00:33:24]Uh a lot of the responsibility lies with the inheritors of of Oakshott and maybe even with Oakshott himself. Maybe there's something not quite right in the conservative philosophy.

[00:33:36]I don't know the answers to all of that.

[00:33:38]I'm being a little bit more critical in this lecture than I have been in some of the others because it's very prescient tonight.

[00:33:46]Anyway, that's Michael Oakshott in a nutshell.

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