Resumen En el pensamiento contemporáneo, el relato de Babel ha suscitado alegatos teológicos contra los proyectos titánicos del racionalismo moderno y exégesis poéticas en defensa de la diseminación idiomática. Los dos ensayos de Michael Oakeshott titulados “La Torre de Babel” permiten reconocer las principales inquietudes intelectuales del autor y los diferentes dilemas teóricos en la comprensión del Estado europeo moderno. No solo escenifican el aspecto ruinoso del racionalismo moral y el utopismo político, sino también los riesgos de la política de (...) la fe, del colectivismo, y de la reducción de las asociaciones humanas a transacciones instrumentales o corporaciones empresariales. En la exégesis de Oakeshott, Babel se perfila como un mito político moderno, que exhibe una marcada ambivalencia mediante la convergencia de motivos éticos, religiosos, políticos e, incluso, poéticos.In contemporary thought, the story of Babel has raised theological arguments against the titanic projects of modern rationalism and poetic exegesis in defense of idiomatic dissemination. The two essays by Michael Oakeshott entitled "The Tower of Babel" allow to recognize the main intellectual concerns of the author and the different theoretical dilemmas in the understanding of the modern European State. They not only illustrate the ruinous aspect of moral rationalism and political utopianism, but also the risks of the politics of faith, of collectivism, and of the reduction of human associations to instrumental transactions or enterprise corporations. In the exegesis of Oakeshott, Babel emerges as a modern political myth, showing a marked ambivalence through the convergence of ethical, religious, political, and even poetic motives. (shrink)

This paper aims to persuade its reader that libertarianism, at least in several of its varieties, is a species of the genus Michael Oakeshott referred to as ‘rationalism in politics’. I hope to demonstrate, employing the work of Oakeshott, as well as Aristotle and Onora O’Neill, how many libertarian theorists, who generally have a sincere and admirable commitment to personal liberty, have been led astray by the rationalist promise that we might be able to approach deductive certainty concerning the 'correctness' (...) of some political programme. Of course libertarians, in common with the adherents of almost any other political ‘stance’, are not a monolithic body, but exhibit a variety of more or less rationalist arguments for their views. For example, a thinker like Hayek, who is often placed in the libertarian camp, came to adopt much of Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism in his later work. And, of course, Oakeshott himself expressed an affinity for libertarian ideas in his essay, ‘The Political Economy of Freedom’ (1991 [1962]). But a general predilection to enhance individual freedom as far as is deemed practicable is quite a different matter from taking a stance in which liberty, and liberty conceived in a rather narrow fashion, is the only value deemed admissible into ‘reasonable’ political discourse. (We will see in a subsequent section that Oakeshott recognized this urge to sanctify one value above all others as a logical requirement of striving for deductive political truths.) I believe that a critique of such libertarian rationalism is particularly relevant given the present situation in the United States vis-à-vis civil rights and the ongoing ‘war on terror’, in that many non- libertarian supporters of peace and strong civil rights find themselves allied with libertarians on these issues—if libertarians have gotten these issues ‘correct’, then how might they have gone wrong elsewhere? Furthermore, the critique may aid libertarians themselves, because, if the title of this paper is accurate, such a single-minded exaltation of one value above all others is an enemy of true liberty, so that libertarians might want to rethink adopting such a position. As Philip Pettit demonstrates (1997), freedom as non-domination is more robust and inclusive of all that we value about freedom than is the libertarian concept of freedom as non-interference; by allowing, say, immense economic power to be concentrated in a single corporation, as intervention to break the company up would violate the principle of non-interference, libertarian ideas may greatly diminish the liberty of the people subject to that corporate power. (shrink)