Tim Fuller, one of our Companion’s eminent contributors, here with an article on the Liberty Fund website.
A defining theme of Michael Oakeshott’s thought is that, through the past five centuries, European civilization can count among its greatest achievements the invention of “civil association” and the clarification of the “rule of law.” These are arrangements in which individuals, who think of themselves as individuals, associate with each other, not in terms of a teleological purpose or in pursuit of a uniform goal or end for humanity, but in terms of agreed-upon procedures and expectations to secure opportunities for such self-regulating individuals to pursue their wished-for satisfactions in voluntary associations supported by appropriate rules. Civil association is not a theory of the “state,” but is our picture of what we can expect in our interactions with each other. The modern state, in its variously constituted forms, is designed to support civil association.
manwithoutqualities 