Michael Oakeshott’s Critique of Technocracy: Politics and Poetics under Technoscience

Although Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) wrote on diverse philosophical topics, from the 1930s onwards, “technocracy” became a recurrent theme in his works, the full scope of which we attempt to reconstruct in this article. Following the intimations of several commentators, we identify the genesis of Oakeshott’s critique of technocracy in his early work, Experience and Its Modes (1933), in which he proposed a pluralist model of social communication wherein science is but one of many “modes” of experience institutionalized by society. We then examine Oakeshott’s more widely known essays from the 1940s, including the first “Tower of Babel” essay (1948), “Rationalism in Politics” (1947), and The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (written in the 1940s but published posthumously in 1996). It was more than two decades after first exposing the disastrous effects and long-term implications of the rule of technocray for Western culture, that in “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (1959) Oakeshott proposed the aesthetic experience of contemplation as the much-needed corrective and antidote to the excessive modern faith in politics, science, and technology.