Those of us in the business of teaching and researching education think – and talk – a lot about ‘experience’. For example, capturing the ‘lived experiences’ of participants is a key aim of interpretivist forms of research. But what do we mean by ‘experience’? It depends on who you ask. There are in fact key differences between left and right on this issue, and also within political standpoints. This brings me to a book I am currently working on about how the concept of experience has been treated by four writers: two on the political left (E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams), and two on the political right (F.A. Hayek and Michael Oakeshott). Interestingly, while their political orientation differs, what all four writers have in common is an assertion of the productive role of experience in social practice.
Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) is the conservative philosopher that more thoughtful Conservative MPs have habitually referred to if they wish to claim a philosophical foundation for party policies or values. His views may be best summarised in his own words, “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” It will be my argument that Oakeshott’s emphasis upon incrementalism and his aversion to ‘utopian’ futures derived directly from his idealist ontology. Philosophically, idealism offers the argument that something mental (the mind, spirit or will) is the ultimate foundation of all reality, and everything ‘real’ is taken to be a manifestation of something mental. The consequence, for Oakeshott, was that everything was experience and, given that is all we have, we can only learn from it in a gradualist way that pays heed to the wisdom we inherit from past generations.
Oakeshott exemplified a form of sceptical conservatism that has been largely, although not completely, pushed aside by the market fundamentalism of Hayek (1899-1992) and his intellectual successors. The starting point for Hayek’s treatment of experience is his notion of ‘constructivist rationalism’ or what I term ‘tacit knowledge’. In writing of English Common Law, Hayek notes approvingly that its basis in precedence is a product of how learning evolved ‘naturally’ within our earliest communities, “…as man (sic), living in such groups governed by a multiplicity of rules, gradually develops reason and language and uses them to teach and enforce the rules. At this stage it is sufficient to see that rules did exist, served a function essential to the preservation of the group, and were effectively transmitted and enforced, although they had never been ‘invented’, expressed in words, or possessed a ‘purpose’ known to anyone.” Epistemology then lends credence to politics: if we can only learn in an organic, trial-by-error, experiential way, it follows that we must eschew rationalistic planning and set the ‘spontaneous orders’ of market forces free.
In a book, I hope to show that I am deeply sceptical of the scepticisms of Oakeshott and Hayek. Both represent a functionalist stance that overlooks power relations. Whose traditions do we learn from? Whose tacit knowledge becomes eventually codified into rules and institutions? Although they did not engage directly with Oakeshott and Hayek (to the best of my knowledge), these are questions which E.P. Thompson (1924-1993) and Raymond Williams (1921-1988) would certainly have raised. Both these writers were central figures of British Marxism from the 1950s onwards. Their key contribution was to insist upon the importance of experience as a key driver in social formations. If this seems a commonplace starting point to sociologists today, it was more contentious then, at least in academic Marxist circles, when experience was dismissed as epistemologically unreliable—something always tainted by dominant ideologies. In contrast, when Thompson writes that he wishes to rescue the 18th-century working poor from the “enormous condescension of posterity”, he is attempting the recovery of experience. When Williams discusses the “practical consciousness” that forged industrial communities in South Wales in the 19th century he is doing the same.
Experience is a fascinating concept that can be bent into all sorts of different shapes. For Thompson and Williams, experience could function as a site of resistance or, at least, dissonance. For Oakeshott and Hayek, it cemented social norms and order. I hope, in a book or other future publications, to be able to elaborate further on this.
Dr Andrew Morrison is an Associate Head in the Sheffield Institute of Education. He lectures and researches in the field of Sociology of Education.
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