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)

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 poin...

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)