Criticism and Tradition in Popper, Oakeshott and Hayek

ABSTRACT Popper's attitude to traditions is fundamentally rationalistic. He analyses traditions, along with other institutions and practices, in terms of their efficiency in promoting goals which can be specified independently of the traditions themselves. Hayek, by contrast, looks at traditions in terms of their contributions to the survival of the culture in which they are embedded, something whose evaluation may be opaque even to people within the culture. Both these approaches are flawed compared to Oakeshott's insistence that traditions are not goal-oriented, and that goals cannot be specified independently of agents'forms of life. Oakeshott's views constitute a via media between Popperian rationalism and Hayekian anti-rationalism.