CATEGORY: PHILOSOPHY (14 min)

No rationalism, no problem

One of the most enduring debates in political thought over the past century has focused on the nature of conservatism. What is it, and how should a country and its citizens put it into practice?

In Chronicles, Daniel McCarthy, ISI’s Vice President for the Collegiate Network and editor of Modern Age, details the life and beliefs of Michael Oakeshott, a man who was no stranger to the battle over conservatism.

Oakeshott, a 20th century British thinker, famously warned conservatives not only against the threat of Marxism but against the threat of rationalism. This, McCarthy recalls, set Oakeshott at odds with Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke who believed held tightly to the supremacy of human reason and thought.

“The morality of the Rationalist is the morality of the self-made man and of the self-made society: it is what other peoples have recognized as ‘idolatry,’” Oakeshott once wrote.

McCarthy then impacts Oakeshott’s urgings to our current world, arguing the United States and many other countries are falling prey to the excesses of modern rationalism. He says this “secular salvation” will end up destroying the tradition that ought to define our unique nation.

Read McCarthy’s full article, and much more of Oakeshott’s advice, here.

CATEGORY: EDUCATION (5 min)

Bias breeds bias

Many conservative efforts in recent years have attempted to reclaim our universities from an increasingly progressive and agenda-driven academic class. But how did that class become so entrenched?

Mark Bauerlein, writing in First Things, recounts his own experience at graduate school to highlight some of the enduring problems in our educational institutions.

Bauerlein, who attended UCLA to earn a doctorate in English, writes that professors constantly urged him and other students to critique and tear down nearly all respected thinkers. The only exception, of course, were those philosophers who also helped to destroy their own foundations.

The effect of this phenomenon, Bauerlein says, was to create a new generation of academics who believed that all they needed to know was what they had been taught. They didn’t know anything besides the progressive thinkers they had read. And now, they teach their students in the same way.

Discover more of Bauerlein’s experience right here.

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CATEGORY: PHILOSOPHY (22 min)

Moving past the Mill

The works of Michael Oakeshott have continued to receive high-level academic analysis for decades. Many of these thinkers have delved into a comparison and contrast between Oakeshott and other famous philosophers who preceded him.

In a comprehensive essay for Modern Age in our Intercollegiate Review archive, Timothy Fuller continues this strong intellectual tradition by examining Oakeshott’s relationship with the scholarship of John Stuart Mill. Mill, a 19th century fellow Englishman best known for his theory of utilitarianism, focused his thought on maximizing the greatest good in every sphere of life.

Fuller argues that Oakeshott took some of Mill’s works and pushed them farther along on an “intellectual pilgrimage” that led him to more developed and complex theories. Fuller also discusses Oakeshott’s natural skepticism for change of any kind and his argument that education should focus on the past for its own sake, not for political effect.

Dive into Fuller’s well-written and in-depth essay, which reveals deep truths about our human condition, right here.  

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