Oakeshott's Concept of Civil Association: Notes for a Critical Analysis

Abstract

The concept ‘Civil Association’ in Oakeshott contains two discrepant elements, namely the quality of civility and the institution of the state. This conflation is the result of Oakeshott's idealist mode of reasoning which consists in the method of one-sided abstraction. Civil association, in its abstract presentation, appears as a purely moral association, sharply distinguished from the pursuit of substantive aims in enterprise associations. Analysis of its postulates, however, reveals civil association as being insubstantial and only a particular expression of a given world of enterprise associations. Without substantive inequality and conflict civil association could not be made intelligible, and it is these features only which, although not ostensibly present in Oakeshott's abstract concept, endow it with its distinctive character: morality by itself is not a sufficient explanation. Idealist abstraction is, on a certain level, common to opposed ideological trends; the content of Oakeshott's concept does not meaningfully distinguish it from the ideal vision of utopian thought.