W.J. Coats. “ Michael Oakeshott as Liberal Theorist,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 18, no. 4 (1985): 773-787.

Excerpt:

This article cautions against facilely casting Oakeshott’s thought in the mold of either Kantian liberalism for its account of civil association as purely formal association to which rational individuals could consent, or Burkean liberalism for its emphasis on the continuity of general practices and traditions in diurnal politics. Oakeshott’s work is then thematically summarized with an eye to showing its artfulness and originality as a synthesis of modern European individualism, providing a theoretical account of civil association which combines, without logical contradiction, the Aristotelian idea of politics as the activity of attending to the arrangements of the whole, and the liberal (and Christian) idea of the individuality of value, mediated (and made logically possible) by the Roman idea of civil obligation to the form of authority.

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