A Guide to the Classics: or How to Pick the Derby Winner

A Guide to the Classics

or

How to Pick the Derby Winner

by Guy Griffith and Michael Oakeshott

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Foreword by Peter Oborne

[1]

A Guide to the Classics, written over eighty years ago by two young Cambridge fellows, is a strange place to look for an answer to the question ‘What is Conservatism’ - and to address related issues: Is there a special Conservative[2] body of ideas? A Conservative way of thinking? Who are the great Conservative political philosophers?

This little book provides an unlikely pointer because, paradoxically, it is not about politics at all (and not about Latin and Greek either!). It is mainly about picking the winner of the Derby, the greatest horse race in the world, which is staged annually at Epsom Downs in early June.

Conservatism is harder to define than any other political doctrine - indeed some argue that there is no such thing - while Conservative philosophers are thin on the ground.

Over the last two hundred years some Conservative governments have been pro-European, others isolationist; some have supported free trade, others protectionism; the party often advocates lower taxation but it was a Tory prime minister, Pitt the Younger, who invented income tax. Some past Conservative governments would today be regarded as liberal, others as authoritarian.

A Guide to the Classics is an appropriate place to start because Conservatives don’t think that politics is that important. They know that other things - running a business, bringing up a family, cultivating friendship, going to church, doing the cooking, following a football club, going to a race meeting - matter very much more. In the old days parliament used to close on Derby Day. In the words of the authors:

A surprising number of people choose their newspapers to suit their politics, although hardly anybody in England is really interested in politics, except politicians. But the man who is interested in the Derby will choose his paper according to his opinion of the various racing correspondents, and may very well use the leading articles for lining drawers or other household purposes. We, personally, do not care twopence what The Times thinks about Geneva or Jerusalem; it is The Times’ Racing Correspondent who makes The Times worth twopence to us.

Conservatives have a doctrine of non-interference in ordinary life. They do not think that politicians should tell people what they should think, how to run a business, spend their time or bring up their children.

This is the fundamental difference between Conservatives and their progressive opponents, and no Conservative writers ever set out this distinction more beautifully than Guy Griffith and Michael Oakeshott. Both of the authors were fellows of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, and Oakeshott was hailed in his Telegraph obituary as ‘the greatest political philosopher in the Anglo-Saxon tradition since Mill - or even Burke’.

Their little book had all the Conservative qualities. It took the abstraction out of the Derby. It exploded the systems which had been developed by generations of form experts. It exposed theoretical solutions as fraudulent. It turned its back on the flowery, abstract language used by the racing intelligentsia.

Instead it applied intelligence and hard-headed empirical analysis. It was intelligent, but not intellectual. It relied on facts. It used the past as a guide to the future. It was the result of close historical study. It was beautifully written. It was unapologetically on the side of the working man having his annual wager on the great race. It used character and common sense as its basic tools of analysis:

Common sense provides us with two general principles upon which to make our selection for the race. First we must fix our minds (a) on the character of the race, and (b) the character of the horses engaged, and allow nothing else whatever to distract our attention.

Empiricism, love of the concrete, common sense, character: these are all qualities that lie at the heart of the Conservative disposition. This book, however, could only have been co-written by Michael Oakeshott because it illustrates the idea that was central to his contribution to political philosophy.

This was the difference between what he called the civil and enterprise modes of association. Civil association is a mode of association whose only purpose is to lay down conditions so that men and women can freely pursue whatever ends and purposes they choose.

An enterprise association, by contrast, is a body of men and women brought together to pursue some over-riding goal, which takes precedence over the individual. This is appropriate, when, as in a commercial enterprise, or a charity, the association is genuinely voluntary. But the idea is perverted when the state, a compulsory association, is conceived as an enterprise.

The extreme example was the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state in which the individual was submerged. In an enterprise association it is the job of government to make us work collectively towards an objective or ideology - socialism, racial purity or even the American dream. This means that the state is therefore entitled to intrude into almost every part of human existence. In the civil mode of association the state is more limited as a vehicle to allow people to pursue their own ends. Oakeshott argued in his 1956 essay ‘On Being Conservative’ that it is not inconsistent at all to be conservative in respect of government and radical in respect of every other activity.

Michael Oakeshott had not developed these concepts when he sat down with Guy Griffith to write his manual on racing form. He would not do so till many years later, in another masterpiece, On Human Conduct, published in 1975. Nevertheless germs of Oakeshott’s later philosophy can be detected in Guide to the Classics.

Horseracing (especially as it existed in Oakeshott’s day) was a good example of the different modes of association. Racing exists only for its own sake, not for some larger purpose. It is self-governing, with complex regulations. These rules, overseen by the Jockey Club, exist to allow horse races and race-meetings to occur in good order, for instance by outlawing race-fixing and corruption.

Horseracing is not a private world. But it centres around only one purpose: racehorses and human enjoyment of their beauty and excitement.

Oakeshott’s theory of civil association helps us understand why there is no such thing as Conservative set texts for government. Disraeli wrote novels, Winston Churchill a book on painting, AJ Balfour books of philosophy, the first of which was tellingly entitled A Defence of Philosophic Doubt.

More recently, John Major wrote a history of cricket. But there are no Conservative manuals on politics, and Oakeshott did not attempt to provide one. This is another thing which distinguishes Conservatives from their progressive opponents. As Oakeshott later put it in a self-referential footnote in his essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’:

Not so very long ago, I suppose, the spectators at horse-races were mostly men and women who knew something at first-hand about horses, and who (in this respect) were genuinely educated people. This has ceased to be so, except perhaps in Ireland. And the ignorant spectator, with no ability, inclination or opportunity to educate himself, and seeking a short-cut out of his predicament, demands a book. (The twentieth century vogue in cookery books derives, no doubt, from a similar situation.) The authors of one such book, A Guide to the Classics, or how to pick the Derby winner, aware of the difference between technical and complete knowledge, were at pains to point out that there was a limit beyond which there were no precise rules for picking the winner, and that some intelligence (not supplied by the rules themselves) was necessary. But some of its greedy, rationalistic readers, on the look-out for an infallible method, which (like Bacon’s) would place their small wits on a level with men of genuine education, thought they had been sold a pup - which only goes to show how much better they would have spent their time if they had read St Augustine or Hegel instead of Descartes: je ne puis pardonner a Descartes.[3]

Noel Annan, a famous historian of ideas, described why Guide to the Classics matters:

The key to Oakeshott is to be found in that little book on the Derby. He rejoiced that life was a gamble. There was no device, ideology, method of reasoning, ruse, by which men could bet on a certainty and forecast how to turn fate to their advantage. He felt a faint contempt for those who want such certainty - even for those who think that by putting their trust in some economic theory they can shorten the odds. Why should they expect a political philosopher to predict which horse will win? All he can do is to warn them not to bet on some horse whose breeding makes it unlikely it will win the race; and if a philosopher sets up as a tipster, you can be sure he is out to grab power. The rule of the course (law) and the institutions (the Jockey Club) are there to check a particular owner, trainer or jockey getting too much into his hands. Men need nerve in the race of politics rather than ideas. Oakeshott was the Pascal of political theory - il faut parier.[4]

When Tony Blair came to power almost twenty years ago he had to hand various guides to governance: Lord Giddens’ Third Way, Peter Mandelson’s The Blair Revolution, Will Hutton’s Stakeholder Society, Ed Balls’ post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory and a great deal besides. From a Conservative point of view this ideological baggage meant that Blair was destined to fail, and fail he duly did. Likewise, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has no shortage of set texts: Marx, Gramsci, Lenin, Chomsky etc.

Only progressives could produce these abstract, long-winded theories of government. To Conservatives, the notion of entering office with some tremendous programme of national change and renewal is absurd.

There is, however, such a thing as a conservative sensibility. Many of the great poets and novelists of the 20th century realised this profoundly conservative vision: Eliot, Larkin, Yeats, Waugh, Joyce, the greatly under-rated Somerset Maugham.

Some of these writers were revolutionary in terms of technique. But their vision was conservative: respect for life as it is