ABSTRACT
Always subtle in its substance and often oblique and almost hermetic in its expression, the thought of Michael Oakeshott constitutes one of the most profound and radical passages in the history of recent reflection on the character of law, liberty and government. Oakeshott has himself been careful to disavow anything akin to a settled doctrine, but he does not deny that his writings disclose ‘a consistent style or disposition of thought' 1 about the relations of law with liberty and their bearings on the engagements of government. If there is not a doctrine on these matters to be found in his writings, there is nevertheless a definite conception, maintained and developed throughout his works, of the form of political order that best protects both law and liberty, a conception whose separate elements are unified in Oakeshott's conception of civil association. This is a notion elaborated upon in Oakeshott's later writings, intimated perhaps in his earliest publications, which finds different idioms of expression as different styles of theorizing are absorbed (sometimes without leaving a trace) into the body of his thought. One of my aims in this exploration of Oakeshott's thought is to elucidate this conception of civil association, to link it up with the rest of Oakeshott's thought, and to see what might be said in criticism of it. My chief purpose, however, is to argue that in his conception of civil association Oakeshott has isolated and identified the very kernel of ‘liberalism', which is a mode of associations constituted by adherence to rules that are as non-instrumental — that is to say, as little substantive and as much procedural — as is attainable. It is this conception, in which the historic inheritance of civil society is illuminated by being theorized and given a partial relief from contingency, that captures what is most instructive (and most valuable) in ‘liberalism’. Oakeshott's account is mediated through the reflections of the greatest earlier theorists of civil society — Hobbes and Hegel — but it sketches the lineaments of its subject with the least distortion from the metaphysical context in which earlier accounts were framed. Further, it separates the most essential elements of the idea of civil association from irrelevant accretions which have become attached to it — such as doctrines of human rights, the minimum State, laissez-faire, social contract, or whatever. But my exploration of Oakeshott's thoughts has a larger purpose as well. For, in theorizing civil association without the doctrinal excess and universalizing illusion which pervades ‘liberalism', Oakeshott at once shows us why that doctrine belongs to the past, and why doctrines of any sort are an inadvertence in political theorizing. It is in this last respect that his account of civil association (despite its own occasional inadvertences) has inestimable value.
