Notes From the Field - Tradition

Abstract

At Cambridge University in the 1960s, my fellow students and I were implacably hostile to "tradition." We reveled in Quentin Skinner's denunciations from the podium of the British conservative philosopher and doyen of the National Review, Michael Oakeshott, whose critique of rationality and plaudits for change tempered by practice and tradition struck us as at once hopelessly limited and, in an easily heard echo of Edmund Burke, deeply opposed to any sort of rationally justified radical innovation. Oakeshott and Burke were deemed to offer a descriptive and prescriptive account of change as a process of reverential accretion that we wanted (in somewhat contradictory fashion) both to deny and ignore. It is obvious, then, that we saw "tradition" as an unwelcome constraint, mortmain, the suffocating dead hand of our ancestors. This was pretty blind, as well as a sign of the times, because it threatened to inhibit us from addressing properly questions about the processes of artistic, political, and social change. Our case against the invocation of tradition-that it served as a means of avoiding those very same questions-still appears to me a telling one, though our own position, in retrospect, looks little better.

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