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Oakeshott on Civil Association

In “Oakeshott on Civil Association,” Noël O’Sullivan offers a magisterial account of Oakeshott’s ideal of civil association, showing that it is addressed above all to the moral problem of reconciling authority with freedom in the highly pluralistic circumstances of modern Europe. Hobbes made significant progress in this normative endeavor to find a shared sense of…

Oakeshott as Conservative

The topic of Oakeshott’s conservatism is a contentious one, as Robert Devigne shows in his essay “Oakeshott as Conservative.” Using Burke as a touchstone, Devigne demonstrates that Oakeshott’s conservatism is complex and shifts over time. In his essays from the late 1940s and early 1950s, Oakeshott displays a Burkean antipathy toward rationalism and appreciation for…

Lessons from Burke on the origins of our present discontent

The very excellent “philosopher king” Jesse Norman on Britain’s current malaise. Burke understood how language could be debased through the rhetoric of abstract nouns such as “liberty” or “equality”, which move people without enlightening them. ConservatismEdmund BurkeJesse NormanLiberalismMichael Oakeshottregressive left

CFP: Cosmos + Taxis

The interdisciplinary journal Cosmos + Taxis is issuing a call for papers for its second conference on spontaneous orders, to be held at the Rochester Institute of Technology from May 8 to May 9, 2015. Both days will feature morning and afternoon sessions and informal lunches and dinners. The theme of the conference is “Spontaneous…