Abstract
It is not obvious why Oakeshott should be considered as a defender of the natural law tradition in legal and political philosophy. In On Human Conduct (1975),1Hobbes on Civil Association (1975)2 and On History (1983),3 Oakeshott provided a complex theoretical analysis of the modern rule of law, in which he examined the constitutional order of the European state in terms of the principles of political morality central to the Hobbesian tradition of natural right. In doing so, he rejected the governing ethical and metaphysical assumptions of the great natural law tradition of Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. Likewise, in his critique of the mentalities of European rationalism, which culminated in the publication in 1962 of the collection of essays Rationalism in Politics,4 Oakeshott called into question the very possibility of the sort of pursuit of universally valid principles of political morality that had characterized the work of the classical and medieval philosophers of natural law.
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