Why Michael Oakeshott believed rationalism is a dangerous way to run a society

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Michael Oakeshott, a singular conservative thinker, argued that modern rationalism reduces human life to a series of abstract problems to be solved. By ignoring the deep, practical knowledge embedded in tradition, he warned that we risk imposing rigid, immoral plans on society that fail to respect human experience.

Born in 1901, Michael Oakeshott was a British philosopher whose work in objective idealism challenged the materialist and rationalist trends of the 20th century. He argued that human experience is not a collection of raw sensations, but is instead mediated by established practices like politics, science, and history. In his 1933 work, Experience and Its Modes, he categorized these as distinct ways of understanding reality, rejecting the idea that any single rational model could encompass the complexity of human conduct.

Oakeshott is perhaps best known for his critique of rationalism, most famously articulated in his 1962 essay, Rationalism in Politics. He contended that rationalists mistakenly believe institutions can be designed from scratch using abstract principles, disregarding the culture and tradition that actually sustain them. For Oakeshott, this approach is fundamentally flawed because it discards the 'practical knowledge' that cannot be captured in formal theory. He famously argued that the attempt to impose a universal plan of life on a society is both stupid and immoral.

His intellectual legacy extends to his reinterpretation of Thomas Hobbes. In his 1946 introduction to Leviathan, Oakeshott challenged the prevailing view of Hobbes as a positivist or a mere apologist for absolutism, reclaiming him instead as a moral philosopher. Later, in his 1975 masterpiece, On Human Conduct, Oakeshott explored the nature of the modern European state and civil association. Despite his academic career at Cambridge and the London School of Economics, Oakeshott remained a singular figure, even declining a Companion of Honour proposed by Margaret Thatcher, preferring to focus on his philosophical inquiries until his death in 1990.

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