Kirjahaku

This book examines Oakeshott's political philosophy within the context of his more general conception of philosophical understanding. The book stresses the underlying continuity of his major writings on the subject and takes seriously the implications of understanding the world in terms of modality. The book suggests strongly that Oakeshott’s philosophy of political activity cannot be reduced to a branch of conservatism, liberalism, or postmodernism or a theory or set of doctrines which fit neatly into any conventional school, like that of Idealism or Skepticism. Rather, Oakeshott’s philosophy of political activity is a provocation to all of the currently dominant schools of political theory and political practice. It questions their presuppositions and exposes as ambiguous, arbitrary, or confused all of the supposed certainties which they take for granted. It does all this by offering profound insights into the character and limits of both political activity and political theory in the modern world.

This book is a contribution to the ongoing conversation about value pluralism and its relation to political life. Its uniqueness lies in its insistence that the acceptance of value pluralism involves placing certain limitations on what is an acceptable form of government and what functions governments ought to be legitimately performing. In a new approach coined “nomocratic pluralism,” this volume argues that liberty under the rule of law, which is not merely liberty where the law is silent, is a key concept of liberty and cannot be subsumed by the other primary implications of the acceptance of value pluralism: that political communities must reject positive liberty as a political value, and place a high, but not absolute, priority on negative liberty as a political value. The concept of liberty under the rule of law is particularly suited to accommodate a great variety of individual and group conceptions of value and the moral good, and thus, along with negative liberty, should be a primary value for those who accept value pluralism.