This article examines a tension within liberal theory by comparing the ideas of liberal virtue in the political theories of Michael Oakeshott and William Galston. On the one hand, liberal society is pluralistic, that is, individuals are free to pursue a variety of ends and purposes. Liberals also argue that liberalism requires a bond of shared characteristics to sustain social unity. Working through the conceptual paradigm of poststructuralism, I argue that Galston fails to resolve this problem as he constructs a (...) liberal individuality that is ‘normalized’ or defined by conformist standards. Oakeshott, conversely, describes a non-normalizing liberalism in which individuals are linked by a common bond of virtue. I argue that these different outcomes spring from the fact that Galston justifies liberal freedom on the basis of ‘instrumentality’ or outcome-orientated considerations, whereas Oakeshott links liberalism with the value of non-instrumentality, or the intrinsic value of acting. (shrink)

This article examines Michael Oakeshott's peculiar understanding of religion and its connection to politics and public affairs in democratic societies. It considers Oakeshott's views on both the prominence of religion as an expression of practical life, and the conciliatory role of the religious imagination in human existence. Upon inspection, Oakeshott's notion of a reconciled form of religiosity appears to be devised to speak to problems of religious enthusiasm in liberal democracies. Oakeshott's response to challenges of religious enthusiasm is insufficient and (...) problematic, however, as is the conservative disposition he advocates for individual persons in democratic polities. (shrink)

This paper considers a distinction between two types of politics developed by Michael Oakeshott in his book The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism and argues that the theoretical framework proposed supplies an illuminating and productive perspective for examining the notion of political extremism. These positions are linked to two other important aspects of his work, namely his account of 'enterprise' and 'civil' association and his differentiation between abstract philosophical entities and concrete political situations. There is also a (...) discussion of the idea of 'perfectionism' which is central to the politics offaith. The paper concludes with a consideration of some of the implications for political education arising from this analysis. (shrink)