Shoring Up Foundations 151per se, has no substantive purpose. It is not reliant upon will, affection, or a common
good. It is rather a system of rules, implying a rule of law. As he states, in his last work,
the rule of law (lex), ‘stands for a mode of moral association exclusively in terms of
the recognition of the authority of known, non-instrumental rules (that is, laws),
which impose obligations to subscribe to adverbial conditions in which the perform-
ance of self-chosen actions of all who fall within their jurisdiction’ (Oakeshott 1983:
136). The rule of law is again understood as a vernacular language through which
citizens understand themselves and their mutual relations. The rule of law forms the
basis of what Oakeshott calls arespublica. This does not embody any purpose or any
will of the ruler, the authority ofrespublicais the authority of the postulates of civil
association itself. It has no moral purpose. Political engagement is a concern with
the conditions that bothrespublicaand civil association prescribe. Thus, in sum, the
‘civil condition is an ideal character glimpsed here or there in the features of human
goings-on, intimated in some choices and dispositions to choose...but it nowhere
constitutes a premeditated design for human conduct’. For Oakeshott, it can in fact
be glimpsed in the writings of Cicero, Hobbes, Hegel, and Montesquieu (Oakeshott
1975: 180–1).
In the final part ofOn Human ConductOakeshott focuses on the idea of the
modern European state. In characterizing forms of state, he utilizes Roman law terms
to indicate again two forms of state which parallel—to some degree—the earlier
‘civil’ and ‘enterprise’ associations. The terms he uses are ‘societas’ and ‘universitas’.
Both terms (like civil and enterprise association) are, once again, ‘ideal characters’,
which can, in fact, be found together as ‘sweet enemies’ within most actual developed
states (Oakeshott 1975: 326).^8 Both, however, should only be understood as ‘aids
to reflection’ in thinking about the European state; they arenotindicating actual or
empirical states.
Thesocietasstate (nomocracy) is essentially a legal state where citizens are linked
by non-instrumental rules. This is intimated in the writings of Bodin, Hobbes, Kant,
Fichte, Hegel, Hume, J. S. Mill, and Locke (Oakeshott 1975: 252).^9 Asocietasis
conventionally a pact or agreement to acknowledge certain conditions of acting (as
in civil association). Theuniversitasstate is a partnership or relationship or persons
‘who recognize themselves to be engaged upon the joint enterprise of seeking the
satisfaction of some common substantive want; a many become one on account of
their common engagement’. It is thus a teleocratic association involving the ‘man-
agement of a purposive concern’ (Oakeshott 1975: 205–6). Oakeshott’s discussion
of theuniversitas(enterprise-based) form of state becomes much fiercer and more
intemperate in the closing stages ofOn Human Conduct. For example, he describes
theuniversitasstate, at a later point, as a ‘corrupted discourse’, which has comprom-
ised civil law and undermined civil discourse (Oakeshott 1975: 312). This kind of
judgement is reminiscent of his earlier critical discussion of rationalism (Oakeshott
1962 and 1991). Theuniversitasmentality—paralleling the enterprise association—
is a managerial, bureaucratized, corporate state vision, which Oakeshott associates
not only with Enlightenment thinking, Cameralism and Baconian utopian ideas, but
later sees as caricatured in both early twentieth century British Fabianism, and in the