This volume identifies the exponents of Enlightenment rationalism largely as the luminaries of the Parisian Enlightenment--Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert--and such fellow travellers as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. The ease with which such names are yoked together with Immanuel Kant leaves the reader feeling that too great a load is bearing the weight of this description. However, habits of thought characteristic of such Enlightenment rationalism are well-known, and the somewhat heterogenous cast have plenty of space to critique from every direction.

The tendency to seek for a single source of authority is the subject of those essays focussing on Isaiah Berlin and Michael Oakeshott. Berlin's repudiation of the triptych of monism is rehearsed: the assumption that for all questions there is a single answer, that there is an identifiable mechanism for discovering this answer, and that all answers are compatible with each other. Berlin found this approach characteristic of the phenomenalism of his contemporaries, the logical positivists, and believed this to be simply another recurrence of rationalist assumption which has repeatedly played itself out through history. His own emphasis on value pluralism, on the incompatibility of unrelated goods, can be seen as a rejection of this rationalist juggernaut.

For Oakeshott, the rationalist errs in assuming that the mind is an abstracted and independent tool, which can be applied at will to whatever material one wishes. Instead, Oakeshott argues, the mind is formed through interaction with the world, and undergoes an apprenticeship to a particular tradition of behavior through this interaction. It is a category mistake to abstract a particular idiom of conduct, such as the scientific method, and assume that same idiom holds equal value as an application to other spheres of life, such as politics or aesthetics. [...]

This collection features a broad range of thinkers, all of whom critique Enlightenment rationalism from difference perspectives. While some essays cluster round particular themes, there is a certain disunity in the presentation. The essay on Hayek stands out however, as a bridge between several of the themes of this book. His own critique of scientism is well-made, with particular reference to the two books he published in middle-life; The Counter-Revolution of Science, and The Sensory Order. Hayek denies the mind the ability to reduce the objects of sensory perception down to the level of purely objective categories, as our typology and means of stratifying experience come from modes of thought and experience which rely on our own socialisation. By extending his appreciation of the social nature of man, Hayek also deals with the dilemma identified in my introduction: if man's unaided reason is not an infallible source of authority, to what sources of authority can one defer instead?

Hayek's social theorising is indebted to the eighteenth-century tradition of the Scottish social theorists, such as David Hume and Adam Smith. For them, society and its practices develop according to a pre-Darwinian social evolution. Whether by superstition or accident, particular institutions or practices become habitual and codified, such as private property or the nuclear family. Societies succeed because these institutions and practices harness healthy and productive activity, and win out over time in consequence of trial and error. Consequently, there is a prescriptive authority in favor of that which exists, and traditions which have been inherited. This provides a guide in determining individual and social behavior. [...]

Edmund Burke is the subject of the first essay in this collection; the subject of one of the latter, Russell Kirk, was himself devoted to Burke's thought. Burke can be seen to almost book-end this collection, as he was both a defender of prescriptive authority and a moral crusader who ran roughshod over tradition-defended immorality. His long campaign to impeach Warren Hastings explicitly rejected the "geographical morality" in which different standards of behavior could be permitted: "The laws of morality are the same everywhere, and there is no action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery and of oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery and of oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the world over."

For Burke, the standard that superintends over prescriptive authority was the moral imperative of Christianity, and this theme is taken up in the essay on T. S. Eliot, in which tradition provides the framework for activity and creativity, but is to be supervised and criticised by "orthodoxy."