A conservatism of the left: G.A. Cohen and Michael Oakeshott on markets and instrumentality

Philosophically, conservatism can be said to refer to a disposition or an attitude towards the given. Whether this kind of philosophical conservatism supports or relates to political conservatism, however, is another matter. This article considers two thinkers who share a remarkably similar account of philosophical conservatism, but reach radically different conclusions about its compatibility with political conservatism: Michael Oakeshott and G.A. Cohen. Both Oakeshott and Cohen develop what I call a relational conservatism, that is, a conservatism that defends the given by transposing the non-instrumental logic of personal relations to things, institutions, or activities. But they radically disagree about its political implications. This article focuses on their core disagreement: the relationship between relational conservatism and markets. I show that this disagreement does not primarily come from diverging accounts of the market, but from opposing views on the scope of non-instrumental valuation. Oakeshott claims that there are activities that it is “proper” to approach or value non-instrumentally and other activities for which such a mode of valuation is “improper,” chief among them market activities. Cohen, meanwhile, does not place any limit on his relational conservatism, from which he derives a critique of markets as forces of instrumentalization. I argue that Cohen adopts a more critical view of markets because he is more radically committed to relational conservatism than Oakeshott.