Education: Knowledge v. Pet Ideas

London’s arch-Tory Recorder carried the story under a six-column headline:

WILD MEN LOSE CONTROL OF LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS! What the Recorder and other London papers went on to tell their readers: the stormy London School of Economics had just appointed a new man to the chair of political science, last occupied by the late leftist, owlishly intellectual Harold Laski. And by any standard Laski’s successor was no wild man.

He was mild-mannered, string-haired Michael Oakeshott, 48, longtime (1923-49) Cambridge history don, a conservative with a passion for horse races.* To many a Briton, it seemed as if L.S.E. and its 3,600 students might be headed down mid-road at last.

No Light Matter. Rightly or wrongly, for 55 years the London School of Economics has had a reputation for just the opposite—a hotbed of socialism, Tories called it, a breeder of radicals. It began one day in 1894, when Fabian Socialist Sidney Webb received an unexpected legacy of £10,000 from a fellow Fabian who had just blown his brains out. After mulling over the matter with his wife Beatrice, Sidney decided to start a new school where socialist theory would stand on an equal footing with more conventional viewpoints. “Above all,” explained Beatrice Webb to her diary, “we want the ordinary citizens to feel that reforming society is no light matter, and must be undertaken by experts specially trained for the purpose . . .”

Before long, the world began to hear a good deal about L.S.E. Hundreds of students flocked to hear Philosopher Bertrand Russell, or Sidney Webb himself, lecturing on the Fabian way in his high nasal voice. In 1912 a young man named Clement Attlee joined the faculty to teach social science and administration. Former pupils remember him as a quiet, dry, sometimes boring lecturer, devoted to his subject, who inspired classes only by his meticulous sincerity. Later, other young reformers followed: Philip Noel-Baker, now Labor’s Minister of Fuel and Power; onetime Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton; and in 1926, Harold Laski.

“Diabolically Clever.” For 23 years Laski seemed to overshadow everyone else at L.S.E., became in the public mind almost a synonym for the school. “My life,” he once cried, “is my students!” and some of his students never forgot what he said (in the 1945 election, 67 of them were elected Labor M.P.s). A brilliant man who could read 200 pages in an hour (“diabolically clever and omniscient,” said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes), he was also a spectacular lecturer. Sometimes gesturing excitedly and sometimes staring motionless at his palm, he spoke “with a force and conviction,” recalls one student, “that sent us all away determined to reshape the world.”

Did the Oakeshott appointment really mean that L.S.E. had changed overnight? Actually, the appointment was part of a tradition much older than that of Laski. “We are,” wrote Beatrice Webb, “perfectly bona fide in our desire to advance . . . knowledge, caring more for that than for our own pet ideas.” In this desire, the Webbs—and later the self-perpetuating Court of Governors who now make all appointments—hired a good many teachers who had no truck with “Sidneywebbicalism.” L.S.E.’s first director was Oxford Don W. A. S. Hewins, an outspoken Tory. Since then, in the school’s two sprawling buildings on Houghton Street, the school has found space for scholars of widely divergent views, from liberal Lord Beveridge to conservative Arnold Toynbee, from middle-of-the-road Historian Denis Brogan to anti-socialist (The Road to Serfdom) Friedrich August von Hayek (“Poor Fritz, poor Fritz,” Laski used to say, “he is a 1906 liberal, a Walter Lippmann Good Society man”).

Last week, as Michael Oakeshott took over Laski’s old chair, he did not seem out of place to those who knew L.S.E. well. “I am not a politician,” says he. “I was brought up an historian.” In the older tradition of caring more for knowledge than pet ideas, Michael Oakeshott felt he was right at home.

*Among Oakeshott’s publications is a treatise entitled A Guide to the Classics. It is not a manual of what good books to read, but a discussion of ways to pick a winner in Britain’s classic Derby, St. Leger, etc. Author Oakeshott himself still has to work for a living.