Quotes: What is History? #9

“But what interests me is the sharp contrast drawn between the practical and the concrete, which are praised, and ‘programmes and ideals’, which are condemned. This exaltation of practical action over idealistic theorising is, of course, the hall-mark of conservatism. In Namier’s thought it represents the voice of the eighteenth century, of England at the accession of George III, protesting against the impending onset of Acton’s revolution and reign of ideas. But the same familiar expression of out-and-out conservatism in the form of out-and-out empiricism is highly popular in our day. It may be found in its most popular form in Professor Trevor-Roper’s remark that, ‘when radicals scream that victory is indubitably theirs, sensible conservatives knock them on the nose’. Professor Oakeshott offers us a more sophisticated version of this fashionable empiricism: in our political concerns, he tells us, we ‘sail a boundless and bottomless sea’, where there is ‘neither starting-point nor appointed destination’, and where or sole aim can be ‘to keep afloat on an even keel’.”

E.H. Carr, What is History? (1962), pg. 150.