Introduction : situating oakeshott -- Language, practice, and individual agency -- Individuality between tradition and contingency -- Imagining the modern state -- Towards a conversational democratic ethos -- Conclusion : hearing voices.

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 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)

Michael Oakeshott’s account of political economy is claimed to have found its ‘apotheosis under Thatcherism’. Against critics who align him with a preference for small government, this article points to Oakeshott’s stress on the indispensability of an infrastructure of government-provided public goods, in which individual agency and associative freedom can flourish. I argue that Oakeshott’s account of political economy invites a contestatory politics over three types of public goods, which epitomize the unresolvable tension he diagnosed between nomocratic and teleocratic conceptions (...) of the modern state. These three types are the system of civil law, the by-products of the operation of civil law and public goods which result from policies. The article concludes that Oakeshott offers an important corrective to political theories which favour either market mediation or radical democratic governance of the commons as self-sustaining modes of providing and enjoying goods. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the political–theoretical triangle between liberalism, communitarianism and conservatism. It shows how these three positions are related to each other and to what extent they are actually incompatible. The substantive outcome is the following thesis: the conservative position poses a challenge to liberalism that communitarianism is unable to offer and that liberalism cannot incorporate as it could with communitarianism. This challenge lies in the conservative’s ideal of a traditionally evolved, purposeless form of civil association, and its associated view (...) on the justification of authority within such forms of association. This ideal cannot be incorporated into liberalism’s overall concern with individual autonomy, in contrast to the communitarian’s ideal of community. This will be shown through an investigation of two key elements of the conservative ideal of civil association: its ‘purposelessness’ and its justification of authority. (shrink)