ABSTRACT
The weight of Oakeshott's case rests on our necessary inability to escape from our own experience. We cannot ever learn from others without assimilating their experience to our own. Thus he argues that though we may study other people's ideals, we cannot act on them, because their ideals are simply abstracts of the sort of arrangements they in fact have, and in the context of our tradition they would mean something else. Again, this is a necessary truth. For to understand another person's experience means, among other things, seeing it in relation to our own. And, of course, just because we look at other people's ideals and institutions from the outside, we are the more Hable to misunderstand them. But this does not necessarily invalidate a rationalist approach to politics, or appeals to principles and wider experience, as Oakeshott seems to imply. When Montesquieu looked at the British constitution, and particularly at its separation of powers, he only partly understood what he saw. But he was very well aware that foreign institutions could not be imported. He believed, however, that one could draw useful analogies, or discover principles of government, from the study of foreign institutions, and that the British analogy could help Frenchmen to recast their own, to secure an analogous liberty. When the Revolutionaries came to apply the principle of the separation of powers, they carefully reversed the British practice by insulating the executive from judicial review. Their reasons were implicit in French and not in English experience. But they were trying to guarantee individual rights against arbitrary executive power under rules of law, to abolish lettres de cachet, and to limit executive power by a representative legislature. And these lessons they learnt from England and America.
