THE PROBLEM OF FINITUDE

Oakeshott's abiding concern was the fact of human finitude and how humans value their action given temporal limits. In his first book, Experience and Its Mode, Oakeshott (1985) describes practical or ends-oriented experience as an “abstraction” of the totality of experience. In this early stage of his thought, Oakeshott was deeply influenced by the idealist tradition of Hegel and F. H. Bradley in which experience can be understood as a whole or absolute through philosophy. Other ways of experiencing the world (modes of experience), practice, science, history, are completely legitimate in their own domains, but are “abstractions” of the totality. They are “incomplete” and deficient in comparison to what is “total and whole.” Practical experience is incomplete because of the permanent gulf between “what is” and “what ought to be.” The practical actor hopes to transform what is into what ought to be, but this hope is futile since success is always followed by failure. The successful transformation of what is into what ought to be is followed by the creation of the next idea of what ought to be.

It follows for Oakeshott that the characteristic theme of practice is “change” and “mortality.” He writes: “Mortality, I take it, is the central fact of practical experience; death is the central fact of life … I mean … the devastating mortality of every element of practical existence, the mortality of pleasures and pains, desires, achievements, emotions and affections” (Oakeshott 1985, 273). The distinctive characteristic of practice is “permanent dissatisfaction” (304). For Oakeshott, resentment is always a possible reaction to practical experience. He notes that “some” view this “universal mortality … as a poison polluting life and making it insufferable.” Practical experience is a “fog” in which what is given by one hand is taken away by another. He notes that the “apprehension of the futility of living … carries with it melancholy and may lead to suicide” (355). Oakeshott's idea of the ever-changing quality of practice illuminates his historicism. He argues that “there is no value, no judgment of value, nor anything valuable which, taken by itself and on its own account, may properly be spoken of as absolute” (278).

In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott (1975) analyzes action in terms of its radical incompleteness. Every practical action begins in a concrete situation that is “diagnosed” and found wanting. The actor seeks to redeem the deficiency by a future-orientated action. Any achieved situation will immediately be found deficient and liable to a new diagnosis. Human action is interminable and ceaseless. Every situation is lacking or deficient and calls for a remedial action. Action is a “transaction” with the future, a gamble whose payoff only calls for a new gamble. No permanent resolution is possible for the predicament of action. In On Human Conduct resentment is a possibility when humans reflect on what Oakeshott calls the “nothingness” that is attached to all action. The “rot of time” undermines all possible human accomplishment (85).

For Oakeshott, humans are historical identities: “We are what we become in conduct.” Human identity is what it is and there is no atemporal standard by which to judge it. He writes, “There is no ultimate or perfect man hidden in the womb of time or prefigured in the characters who now walk the earth” (Oakeshott 1975, 41). The historicity of identity is another possible source of resentment, particularly for those who wish for a more stable foundation for the self: “Human beings are apt to be disconcerted unless they feel themselves to be upheld by something more substantial than the emanations of their own contingent imaginations” (80).

William Connolly's work provides a more explicit and thorough analysis of the problem of finitude that is an implicit part of Oakeshott's central problematic. For Connolly, finitude is both constitutive of individuality and a possible source of resentment. A human life is defined by its temporal limits. The self is constituted by choices and activities. Every action defines the self and “forecloses” other options. Choosing breeds resentment since the self yearns for the “road not taken.” Given unlimited time, each actor could undertake all jobs and activities and never resent temporally defined identity. But such an unlimited existence contradicts the value of freedom. Connolly (1991, 17–18) writes, “Freedom involves choice in a setting where it is impossible to pursue every valued option concurrently or serially; it presupposes a contrast with unfreedom that could not be maintained in a world without the constraints of time.”

Connolly, like Oakeshott, argues that while desire is always unfulfilled, individuality depends on this lack of fulfillment. Desire defines the uniqueness of the self and for desire to remain desire it must remain incomplete. Connolly agrees with René Girard's claim that resentment at the unfufillment of desire derives from the fact that the self seeks “being” or complete fulfillment that it can never achieve. A “model” is complete and so ends the unhappiness of incompleteness. For Connolly (1995, 52–53) and Girard, models are perfectionistic (How else are they models?) and are antagonistic to other models.

INSTRUMENTALITY AND NORMALIZATION

Oakeshott identifies two types of conformist pressures that result from how the self reacts to finitude: a bourgeois ethic defined as the pursuit of individual external satisfaction and the need for community. In an early essay Oakeshott discusses the first tendency in the development of a “worldly” self. This self finds worth primarily in “work” and the “results” of getting “things done.” The worldly self wants to make a contribution to the “stability of the present order.” This contribution requires a concern for the future, an orientation to what is achieved. “This belief implies what may be described as an external standard of value … what is prized is success, meaning the achievement of some external result” (Oakeshott 1993, 31). Oakeshott employs what would come to be a famous existential description of existence. He writes that worldliness promises an “illusive immortality” that makes “humanity a Sisyphus and its life the pointless trundling of a useless stone. For, as like as not, if we set value upon external achievement alone, death or disease will rob us of our harvest, and we shall have lived in vain” (32).

In his critique of a future orientation, Oakeshott rejects the central temporal norm of bourgeois society, namely, the indefinite “progress” of society. Progress or the continuous improvement of external circumstances cannot be the source of life since it is a “practise of death,” the death of what is most valuable, “ourselves” in the here and now.

Oakeshott links instrumental thinking and bourgeois, future-oriented virtues. These virtues are normalizing since they require a self-manipulation in order to achieve generalized expectations. Oakeshott (1993, 31) criticizes the middle-class values of career and “reputation” in which the vividness of present experience is subordinated to the future: “[F]or the sake of an hypothetical old man, who may bear his name thirty years hence, the young man hoards his energies and restrains his activities.” A reputation is something recognized as valuable by the community and so activities are restrained in order to create an impression on others. Individuals mold or discipline themselves in order to fit a collective idea of how to live. Oakeshott condemns the virtue of “prudence” because it robs the present of meaning and teaches that we ought to live “ahead of ourselves” (33). The prudential person focuses on future considerations. This person is careful, likely to avoid the eccentric or oddball. Oakeshott warns against averageness when he complains that modern life is “saturated” with “the middle-class passion for safety, regularity, and possession” (33–34). These three notions, so central to bourgeois concerns, all speak to a normalizing force. Safety and regularity are averse to the unusual and the abnormal. Difference must be suppressed as unsafe.

In his essay on Hobbes, Oakeshott is more explicit about the normalizing force of bourgeois society. He argues that Hobbes's political theory embodies two conceptions of the personality, each of which seeks “peace,” but for different reasons. One personality fits a political order for a “tame man” whose primary interest is the avoidance of “shameful death.” From this point of view, Oakeshott argues that Hobbes is correctly understood as a philosopher of “bourgeois society.” This bourgeois society involves a uniform model of how to live. It is “a single approved condition of human circumstances for all conditions of men, and morality as the art in which this condition is achieved and maintained” (Oakeshott 1991, 343).

Oakeshott also identifies a normalizing impulse in the liberal “classical economists.” In classical economics, according to Oakeshott, the person is a purely “private” agent intent on the achievement of “the satisfaction of wants.” Although these agents make “choices for themselves,” the focus on want-satisfaction tends toward a leveling of distinctness. All agents are defined by their common role as “would-be consumers.” In the pursuit of singular end of want-satisfaction, agents become objects of manipulation and calculation to themselves. They seek “the ‘happiness’ of satisfying wants with the least expenditure of energy” (Oakeshott 1975, 294). The intrinsic meaning of action is subordinated to the goal of results. As I show in the next section, Oakeshott believes that in self-sufficient experience the expenditure of energy is a value in itself apart from any outcome including “happiness.”

In the framework of classical economy the state is an “association of the mutual satisfaction of wants” because want-satisfaction requires the response of others on a continuous basis. Rules have the purpose of promoting want-satisfaction. This state is outcome-oriented, even though it is not a social democratic state that distributes benefits or a collectivist entity that organizes the everyday life of its members. This idea of the state comes from the belief of the classical economists that “all or nearly all” individuals have the same wants to be satisfied (Oakeshott 1975, 295). A society oriented toward the externality of want-satisfaction engenders a similarity of lifestyles.

Connolly explains how the conformity that Oakeshott finds in want-satisfaction is part of the problem of identity. Humans achieve an identity only within the social order. But while identity provides meaning, it also involves “cruelty.” This cruelty arises from the insecurity of identity that is supposed to be meaningful because it is stable but is imposed on an unstable array of desires and emotions. Selves try to overcome their insecurity by the assertion that their identity is not simply a contingent and short-lived designation, but the “intrinsic” or timeless way humans “ought” to be. Identity requires the subordination or elimination of aspects of experience that contradict dominant forms of recognition. Desires and thoughts that undermine the certainty of identity are deemed immoral or deviant. The need for an unambiguous identity means that those who stand outside are the “other.” Deviant identities are obliterated through the process of normalization in which they are socialized into the proper norms of the community. This normalization turns against the individual. Desires and thoughts that disrupt stable identity must be disciplined and transformed.

Connolly discusses two contemporary patterns of thought, mastery and attunement, which intensify normalization and discipline. Mastery, which speaks to Oakeshott's “worldly self,” is the desire to have control over circumstances. In mastery, the self treats the world as if it were “plastic” and conducive to human reshaping and use. For Connolly (1991, 28), this mastery can take an individualistic form in which “freedom … involves control over personal destiny” through the subjection of “nature to human purposes,” or a collectivist form in which a group organizes a plan for external realization. Attunement, corresponding to Oakeshott's notion of how the self seeks meaning in the solace of the community, refers to the individual's wish to be “fitted” into a larger pattern of meaning, either in the community or in the natural world. Adherents of mastery and attunement hope to reduce resentment by showing the world to be amenable to human ambitions. Connolly argues that mastery and attunement are “perfectionist” so that “discipline must be applied to the selves called upon to achieve” the ideals (31).

The linkage that Connolly and Oakeshott find between instrumentality and normalization is confirmed in the thought of F. A. Hayek. The Hayekian self is very much a normal self, representative of what Connolly calls a “liberal individualism.” In this individualism, the “conduct and interior” of the individual “are … appraised” against the model of the “normal and rational” (Connolly 1991, 74). While I argue that Hayek's liberal individualism has its source in the importance of instrumental considerations, there are elements in his work that suggest a belief in intrinsic value in the liberal order and perhaps even the sense that liberty has primary value as an end in itself. But in the last analysis, Hayek's interest in noninstrumentality is subordinated to his interest in instrumental considerations, with dire consequences for his theory of liberalism.

Hayek (1960, 29) makes an unambiguous assertion that freedom is a second-order good: “We want [freedom] because we have learned to expect from it the opportunity of realizing many of our aims.” Only an outcome orientation can make sense of freedom. Hayek writes, “Our faith in freedom” depends “on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than the bad” (31). The value of freedom is revealed in the future: “It is not the fruits of past success but the living in and for the future in which human intelligence proves itself” (41).

Whereas Oakeshott questions the implications of progress, Hayek's main defense of the liberal order is that it is a progressive society with continuous material and moral development. The apparent instrumentality of this argument is complicated by his ambiguous conception of progress. For Hayek, progress is not a simple adding-up of accomplishments. Hayek notes that progress means “achieving things we have been striving for,” a process which may make us “sadder men.” The benefit of progress lies in what is learned, not the tentative and questionable “satisfaction” of a new stage of development. Hayek writes, “Progress is movement for movement's sake, for it is in the process of learning, in the effects of having learned something new, that man enjoys the gift of his intelligence” (41).

The ambiguity here is whether learning flows from acting or from the result of successful acts. In the former case, acting as learning might be considered an intrinsic good, a possibility given weight in his use of the word “gift,” the noninstrumental concept par excellence. If, on the other hand, learning is the result of successful action, then Hayek understands progress (and freedom) as instrumental values. This second interpretation is more consistent with the broader scope of Hayek's thought. Freedom leads to progress and progress refers to a standard outside the action itself. Humans must “prove” their intelligence in activity. Learning is a matter of possible success or failure.

The same ambiguity can be seen in Hayek's view of the moral rules that are the requirements of an order of liberty. For Hayek, moral rules are essential for the attainment of ends. He notes that moral rules may appear noninstrumental because the individual rarely understands that following rules increases ends-attainment. Ultimately though, moral rules are “instrumental” in that “they assist mainly in the achievement of other human values” (Hayek 1960, 67).

The costs of Hayek's instrumental valuation of freedom are steep. The resentment and internal discipline that Connolly identifies in liberalism are pervasive in Hayek's political theory. Resentment at freedom is an obvious possibility insofar as we want to be free in order to accomplish ends. Failure at ends-achievement might give rise to resentment at the unfilled promise of freedom. To save autonomy from resentment, Hayek redirects responsibility from freedom to the individual. For Hayek (1960, 71) “liberty and responsibility are inseparable.” Individuals are responsible for their misuse of autonomy. Failure indicates not the limits of freedom, but the failure of each person.

Although he warns that responsibility must be limited to what humans can be reasonably held accountable for, in the hands of Hayek, responsibility becomes rather despotic. Responsibility means not just accountability for particular foreseeable outcomes. The social “position” of the individual is a “result” of what the person does. Hayek admits that innumerable factors enter into the person's status. In each life there is an irreducible element of chance, yet he insists that individuals are responsible for their place in life. Hayek repeats a famous deceit of capitalism: Individuals are taught that they are responsible for their places in society even through individuals are not truly responsible for what happens to them due to accidents and heterogeneous factors. For Hayek, agents need to believe that they are responsible because that belief is a source of motivation for individual success and the maximization of the well-being of society.

A constant “discipline” is the self-imposed burden of an instrumental defense of autonomy. Hayek (1960, 72) argues that there is a growing denial of responsibility, and comments: “It is doubtless because the opportunity to build one's own life also means an unceasing task, a discipline that man must impose upon himself if he is to achieve his aims, that many people are afraid of liberty.” Responsibility is a self-imposed discipline. Freedom and responsibility are “inseparable.” Freedom is tied to discipline as a form of life.

Hayek recognizes that a market system generates both discipline and resentment. A market system demands the discipline wherein the self becomes “useful” to others. “It is of the essence of a free society that a man's value and remuneration depend not on capacity in the abstract but on success in turning it into concrete service” (Hayek 1960, 41). In a market economy many abilities go unrewarded and cannot be developed. Hayek notes that similar abilities will be unequally rewarded. He speaks at length about the “bitterness” and “resentment” that will flourish when talents are wasted, an unavoidable outcome in a market system. The difficulty of finding a position causes a “pressure which is often resented” (82).

For Hayek, the progress that characterizes liberalism leads to conformity. Liberty creates the possibility of progress and in a free society “some manners of living are more successful than others.” Hayek (1960, 85) argues that “much of the case” for freedom “would vanish” if it did not distinguish the successful from the failed. A normalizing imperative flows from this instrumentality, as Hayek argues, “the ends of the successful group will tend to become the ends of all members of the society” (36).

Recent scholarship on Foucault's politics suggests that the source of the normalizing tendency of Hayek's liberalism is rooted in the work of the classical liberals (figures Hayek cites as major influences on his work). This line of research also confirms Oakeshott's arguments about the implications of classical economics. Graham Burchell, in an essay on Foucault's politics, argues that for Adam Smith and others the idea of autonomy was subordinated to the development of social wealth. Burchell argues that the idea of “laissez-faire” or the economy as a self-regulating system, originates in the thought of Physiocrats as a restatement of an older conception that the purpose of the state is the maximization of the productivity and material well-being of the population. Laissez-faire is not a doctrine of negative freedom as an end in itself, but of a means by which the state maximizes the wealth of society. Early advocates of laissez-faire define the value of action as what maximizes the statistics of the population by the private pursuit of interests through the “invisible hand.” Like Oakeshott's belief that the classical economists subordinate autonomy to want-satisfaction, this Foucaultian analysis holds that the intrinsic worth of the individual is not central to the liberal order. Liberal freedom becomes a “technical requirement of governing the natural processes of social life and, in particular, those of self-interested exchanges” (Burchell 1991, 139). Liberty is a means leading to growth and so “liberalism requires a proper use of liberty” (139). The free self is the useful self, and the useful self is constructed as the “normal man,” a construction done not so much by the state as by “expertise licensed by the state, but formally independent of it: medicine, psychiatry, psychology, criminology, pedagogy and so on” (142).

In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott warns about the dangers of these sub-political institutions. He arrives at his argument in a discussion about the way in which humans escape the burden of freedom in the substantial good of the community. Oakeshott (1975, 275) examines the history of the modern European state through the evolution of two personalities: One sought the intrinsic worth of freedom and one—an individual-manque—was incapable of the enjoyment of experience for itself and needed the “warmth of the communal relationships.” Paralleling these two personalities are two conceptions of the state, a societas, a union grounded in formal laws that bound people by the manner of acting, and a universitas, bound by instrumental rules that organize individuals according to shared purposes.

These conflicting personalities and concepts of the state emerged in the modern world. In medieval times, there was no recognition of a distinct personality. There was no consciousness of a person who takes individuated action and suffers a personalized fate, only the “anonymity” of kinship relationships (Oakeshott 1975, 365). With the collapse of the closed communities of the middle ages, these relationships dissolved and personal identity replaced the facelessness of the group. For Oakeshott, the discovery of the individual is coincident with the discovery (both “unsought” and “inescapable”) of freedom.

The individual-manque and the state as universitas develop in tandem. Individual-manques fit this idea of the state because they yearn to conform to the norms of the community. This person has the “incapacity to sustain an individual life” and so suffers a “revulsion from distinctness” (Oakeshott 1975, 276). Oakeshott's examples of the individual-manque include the “English Calvinist” in Geneva who felt attunement in the cohesion of a substantive community (275). The individual-manque experiences a sense of shame and “guilt” due to the “inability to hold his own belief and conduct” (277). Guilt gives birth to “a small seed of resentment” (277). Oakeshott claims that unscrupulous “leaders” use this resentment as a political tool to increase their own power. They gain followers by promising an end to guilt and loneliness, a salvation gained through the state as universitas that annihilates all distinctness. The individual-manque becomes an “‘anti-individual,’” a figure that is “intolerant not only of superiority but of difference, disposed to allow in all others only a replica of himself.” The need grows for a state that allows for “no distinction of persons.” Oakeshott calls this state a “therapeutic corporation” (278).

The therapeutic corporation is the state as universitas that “treats” its subjects and “cures” them of their ills. Oakeshott's elaboration of the therapeutic conception is very suggestive of poststructuralist concerns. In one version of the state as a corporation, the members of the community are considered diseased or disordered. Oakeshott argues that contemporary therapeutic workers—“sociologists, social psychologists, psychiatrists, group therapists”—are instruments of the rule of therapy. Citizens become “associates joined in being diseased and recognizing themselves not as cives but as the ‘subjects’ of therapeutae (as well as for the therapists themselves), everything is what it is in terms of curative virtue: work (except, of course, ‘social work’) is occupational ‘therapy’, education is curative, leisure is remedial treatment.” The function of the state is to guarantee a universal “‘sanity’; that is, a uniform so-called normality” (Oakeshott 1975, 310).

The parallel with Foucault's themes is striking. Foucault speaks of the proliferation of “judges” of “the normal and abnormal” who “judge, assess, diagnose.” He writes, “The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based” (Foucault 1979, 304).

SELF-SUFFICIENCY

The idea of self-sufficiency originates in “Religion and the World,” where Oakeshott (1993) describes a “religious self” that enjoys experience for itself without regard to what is achieved. The religious person does not escape from life through the “hope” of a better life and overcomes concern for a future self and calculations about external achievement. The religious life is informed by a noninstrumental attitude toward things and individuals. “Life to … [the religious person] is not a game of skill, people and events are not counters valued for something to be gained, or achieved, beyond them” (Oakeshott 1993, 37). Oakeshott argues that experience gains meaning when the central value is “present insight” (33). In present insight, experience is valued for what is nearest, namely, “ourselves.” The religious self achieves “‘freedom from all embarrassment alike of regret for the past and calculation on the future’” (37). For this reason, the religious person “lacks nothing” and “‘so far as is possible he lives as an immortal’” (38–37). In Connolly's (1991, 75) terms, this Oakeshottian self reflects a “liberal individuality” that encourages “a range of conduct that is distinctive, stretches the boundaries of identity.” Oakeshottian selves honor their own uniqueness and the “distinctness” of others because they do not subordinate experience to generalized norms of behavior. Their life is their own “telos” not a means to other forms of life.

Connolly argues that this individuality might be encouraged in a Foucaultian ethic that is tied to a “non-thesistic reverence for experience” (1991, 81). Such a reverence can lessen modern resentment. Reverence lies in a notion of “fullness,” that is, the acceptance of experience for what it is. The dilemma for Connolly is that fullness suggests the teleocratic or end-governed model of acting and teleocracy engenders normalization. Teleocracy demands that human acting and the meaning of experience be defined by a governing “end” to which the self is made subject. Connolly (1995, 209) has to find a “protean fullness enabled by the absence of any fundamental purpose or principle in being.” He refers to Nietzsche's belief that the “abyss” and “abundance” are the same. The absence of meaning does not lead to the despair of nihilism but the joy of an overflowing of experience. Connolly (1995, 39) notes that the Chinese proverb “‘holding onto emptiness is like grasping fullness’” relates to the poststructuralist account that “difference” is “that which exceeds determinate being without being determinate itself.” The absence of fixed meaning must be satisfying in itself. A sense of fulfillment might allow the self to move “beyond the lack-fulfillment experience of desire toward an experience that affirms an abundance of ‘life’ or ‘difference’ flowing through and over identity, an abundance that enables the very movement of desire.” For Connolly, such a mode of experience, an “art of the self,” might “draw ressentiment from desire” (55).

Oakeshott believes that self-sufficiency is one way to decrease the frustrations of the “limit-fulfillment” structure of desire. His most comprehensive discussion of the idea is his essay on aesthetics in Rationalism in Politics. Oakeshott (1991, 510) argues that, in contrast to the incompleteness of practical action, aesthetic experience involves the “contemplation” of “images” that are “permanent and unique.” The permanence of the images of contemplation lies in their intrinsic value. The images have worth not as means to an end, but things valued for themselves. Images in aesthetic contemplation are entirely liberated from the constraints of “pragmatic requirement.” Aesthetic experience is characterized by “self-sufficiency enjoyed by each engagement in the activity and by the absence of any premeditated end” (514).

Oakeshott's language suggests the superiority of self-sufficient experience in a number of ways. In practical experience, activity has no value in itself; the achievement of the end is everything. The energy exerted in the act is wasted if followed by failure and so in practice we always find a “need to be satisfied, a thirst to be quenched, and satiety is always followed by want; there may be weariness, but there is no rest” (Oakeshott 1991, 513). Aesthetic contemplation stands in sharp contrast to the “restlessness” of practice. “At whatever point contemplation is broken off it is never incomplete. Consequently, the ‘delight’ which I have coupled with contemplation is not to be thought of as a reward which follows up the activity, as wages follow work, as knowledge follows upon scientific research, as release follows death” (514). Aesthetic experience is a value for itself: “images in contemplation are merely present” (510). Aesthetic activity cannot repair the broken fabric of practical life. It is a “momentary release, a brief enchantment” (540–41).

Oakeshott links aesthetic experience and ethical life when he asks how the transition is made from aesthetics to practical experience. He argues that there are certain practical activities that suffer less from the defects of ends-orientation. Friendship and love, for example, do not involve the pursuit of external change. He writes, “The relationship of friends is dramatic, not utilitarian…. Loving is not ‘doing good’; it is not a duty; it is emancipated from having to approve or to disapprove” (Oakeshott 1991, 537). Similarly, Oakeshott writes that moral considerations are a moment of practice where there is “a release from the deadliness of doing and a possibility of perfection…. For here is a private and self-sufficient activity … independent of what went before and of what may come after.” In the moral life “success” is not tied to “usefulness.” It is a category of experience egalitarian in spirit since it is open to anyone without regard to the ability to calculate “consequences … (as Kant says) by reason of some special disfavor of destiny or by the niggardly endowment of a step-motherly Nature” (538).

There is a subtle shift in Oakeshott's understanding of ethical life. While in the above passage the ethical is “private” and independent of “place or condition,” in On Human Conduct he argues that morality is the public moment of action. This is an important change, for it indicates how for Oakeshott self-sufficient experience is connected to a public world.

In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott argues that self-sufficiency was central to the European individuality he prizes. This individuality is characterized by a specific response to the predicament of freedom. It has a

The language of “deliberating, wanting, choosing, and acting” clearly flows from the analysis of self-sufficiency in “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (see Coats 2000 for more on this point). In this disposition, selves find their meaning in the experience of the activities and subordinate the result of acting to the doing of acting. They are “perfected” and “lack nothing” to the greatest degree possible. The impulse to reshape and manipulate the self loses force. Oakeshott (1975, 241) argues that Pico della Mirandola described this personality in the image of “not Adam, not Prometheus, but Proteus—a character distinguished on account of limitless powers of self-transformation without self-destruction.” Proteus is a central image of the human being for poststructuralists like Connolly. This self constantly changes without either foundation or a future idea of perfection. For Oakeshott, Proteus fits the idea of the human being that is not Adam, an original sinless creature, perhaps recoverable through revolution or salvation; or Prometheus, rebel against God and seeker of power, but a creature with the “power” to exist despite an unending contingency.

In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott connects self-sufficiency with the moral moment of action. Oakeshott's discussion of morality is linked to his broader analysis of practical or ends-oriented activity. He argues that action has four elements or postulates: an action in relation to an end, a practice, “self-disclosure,” and “self-enactment.” A human action aims at the realization of an external end and is governed by a practice that regulates the manner in which that end is pursued. These practices are adverbial, generalized conditions of action. One type of practice is “instrumental,” that is, oriented to the pursuit of an end. The rules of firefighters are purposeful, aimed at putting out fires. More important to Oakeshott are “moral practices,” modes of relationships that have nothing to do with ends. He writes, “A morality is the ars artium of conduct; the practice of all practices; the practice of agency without further specifications” (Oakeshott 1975, 60). A moral practice is like a language that supplies the grammar and vocabulary of speaking, but does not demand particular speech-acts. A moral practice has no “extrinsic purpose” (62).

In addition to a moral practice and a substantive end, an actor engages in an act in relation to “self-disclosure” and “self-enactment.” The former is action among others, the act in the external world; the latter is the self-understanding of the actor.

Every human practical action can be placed in a matrix that relates to these four elements. A self discloses itself in relation to a substantive end and subscription to a practice. A self also enacts itself in relation to an end and a practice. For example, when selling a car, the seller is disclosed in the attempt to make the best deal. The seller is also disclosed through subscription to the practices of selling honestly, although such considerations do not help conclude a successful deal. Further, the seller is enacted in pursuit of this end, in this case, the goal of getting a profit. Finally, the seller is enacted through the reason for subscription to the practice of selling honestly, the fear, for instance, of punishment, or the desire for an inner sense of being honest.

Oakeshott analyzes each of these elements in temporal terms. Self-disclosure in terms of external achievement is the least significant aspect of human action. Oakeshott (1975, 73) writes that it is “immersed in contingency, it is interminable, and it is liable to frustration, disappointment and defeat…. And even if what survives bears some relation to the meaning of the act, it may disappoint and it will certainly reveal itself as but another situation to be diagnosed and responded to. Here even the excellences of things are their undoing.” While self-disclosure in pursuit of an end is “immersed in contingency,” this transience is mitigated through moral practices. The moral life provides “some slight relief” from contingency since it provides “general conditions for choosing less incidental than the choices themselves.” The rules of morality are “indifferent” to outcome and provide a “formality” through which “contingency is somewhat abated” (74).

The transitoriness of action is also diminished in self-enactment, that is, in the agent's intention and motive. Intention is oriented to the substantive end outcome of the act, while the motive of the action is the reason for subscription to moral laws. In both cases, the actor is “emancipated from liability to the frustration of adverse circumstances.” Oakeshott (1975, 74) writes that in the interior experience of self-enactment, “doing is delivered, at least in part, from the deadliness of doing, a deliverance gracefully enjoyed in the quiet of a religious faith.”

The highest, most durable moment of action is the “motive” for the act or the category of virtue, that is, self-enactment in relation to moral practices. When speaking the language of virtue, the self is “as unconcerned as may be with the brittle pursuit and enjoyment of satisfactions and therefore as indifferent as may be to its frustration.” This noninstrumentality constitutes how virtue is not “altruistic” but is self-affirming in that it allows for a “release from the bondage of contingent circumstances” (Oakeshott 1975, 75–76).

Oakeshott argues that the advantage of virtuous behavior lies in its “indifference” to consequences. Integrity is present-oriented. Oakeshott takes pains to note that virtue is not self-denial but the affirmation of personal character without regard to what happens in the world. Virtue may “improve” the world, but the inner value of virtuous conduct does not depend on any such improvement. Oakeshott makes clear that the content of a moral practice, such as honor, is not strictly private (as was suggested in Rationalism in Politics) but is constituted by the “genuine compunctions” of a moral practice. In other words, virtue is publicly defined through moral practices. Of course, the enactment of moral rules takes place in contingent circumstances at the occasion of purposeful action. What counts as integrity in the moment is at the disposal of the agent, but the agent reflects on this problem based on generally shared considerations.

THE STATE AND SELF-SUFFICIENCY

The idea of self-sufficiency is central to Oakeshott's idea of noninstrumental law or “lex.” For Oakeshott, only this proper law protects the integrity of the individual's choice. The self who appreciates self-sufficiency is likely to gravitate to this idea of the state and flourish in it. This is not to say that the purpose of the state is to create a type of personality or “combat” resentment. The whole meaning of Oakeshott's reconstruction of the liberal state is that it is purposeless. The personality Oakeshott prizes is likely to emerge in this conception of the liberal state, in the same way that “peace” (and perhaps peacefulness) is a by-product of the liberal state but not a “purpose.”

In the third essay in On Human Conduct, Oakeshott describes the “civil condition,” a political association constituted by noninstrumental moral practices. This conception of the state is an example of the general distinction between two different types of associations constituted by either instrumental or moral practices. An association bound by instrumental practices is an “enterprise association,” the rules of which are oriented to the achievement of ends, as the rules of a firehouse are oriented to the efficient putting out of fires. A civil association, on the other hand, is constituted by moral practices and has no end whatsoever. Oakeshott calls a state understood as a civil association the “civil condition.” The civil condition is constituted by formal laws. These laws create the set conditions for acting without directing specific individuals to particular goals.

On one level, the formality of the laws of the civil condition protects diversity in the pursuit of ends, a central feature of liberalism. On a deeper level, the formality of the law reflects Oakeshott's vision of the human good or well-being that comes from having a noninstrumental view of experience. To be sure, Oakeshott does not disparage the value of enterprise associations. The world needs firehouses. He does places a superior value on noninstrumental experience.

For Oakeshott, the civil condition is the only understanding of the state that protects “agency.” Oakeshott argues that a postulate of agency is the ability to choose ends. The choice of an end is the “outcome of an intelligent engagement.” Agency remains free when there is no break in the link between an act and intelligence. An enterprise association is organized according to instrumental practices that tell the members what to do and it exists in order to achieve a goal. Enterprise associations are perfectly compatible with agency when entry into them is freely accepted. An enterprise association may direct individuals toward an end that they agree to pursue, as when a business corporation directs its members to gain a profit. Oakeshott argues that if the state becomes an enterprise association, it must limit agency because the modern state is “comprehensive.” By comprehensive Oakeshott means that a person does not choose to enter a state and can only leave by entering another. The modern state contradicts the free entry and departure that constitutes the agent's “freedom” in enterprise associations.

In subscribing to lex, on the other hand, citizens do not assent to a substantive goal. The members of a civil association understand that moral rules are the condition of agency whether they approve of any particular rule or not. Since noninstrumental law has no goal, it is authoritative without the need to gain the “approval” of citizens. Law understood as codified moral practice means that human agency is rule governed but not controlled. Oakeshott argues that in the civil condition the capacity to choose ends is in no way limited. Even criminal law does not impede the choice of ends; because such law is adverbial it articulates how an action is undertaken, not what is chosen. “A criminal law, which may be thought to come nearest to forbidding actions, does not forbid killing or lighting a fire, it forbids killing “murderously” or lighting a fire “arsonically” (Oakeshott 1975, 58fn).

Oakeshott argues that moral practice and the law as codified morality embody the public consciousness of generalized conditions of right action. Insofar as action is constrained by considerations of the moral life, the actor is concerned with others. Insofar as action aims at an end, the actor's consciousness is private. Oakeshott rejects the typical liberal division of public and private into two spheres, domains of interaction between which the actor moves to and fro. Public and private are aspects of all practical action. “‘Private’ and ‘public’ refer to relationships, not to persons, to performances, or to places. And they meet in every substantive engagement: the private ‘interest’ in its success and the public concern that it shall not be pursued without taking into considerations (specified in lex) which are indifferent to success or failure” (Oakeshott 1975, 146).

This reformulation of the traditional distinction between public and private is central to critics who praise the originality of Oakeshott's liberalism as well as critics who reject the entire framework. The former group argues that Oakeshott's liberalism is an improvement on the “atomistic” conception of the self in social contract and deontological liberalism in which the community is a mere means to the realization of the human good chosen by each individual. Some critical readers of Oakeshott doubt that he can sustain the difference between the adverbial and the substantial. These writers argue that, for example, to forbid a murderous killing is to criminalize a substantial act, not to regulate the manner of an action.⁶

In his insistence on the noninstrumentality of the law, Oakeshott goes so far as to reject the category of state “policy,” and even of an “executive” branch, except in emergencies such as war. A state has no interest in any end and no need for an executive branch to direct a policy. Oakeshott (1975, 153) brushes aside the idea of distributive justice: “And there is, of course, no place in civil association for so-called ‘distributive’ justice; that is, the distribution of desirable substantive goods. Such a ‘distribution’ of substantive benefits or advantages requires a rule of distribution and a distributor in possession of what is to be distributed; but a lex cannot be a rule of distribution of this sort, and civil rulers have nothing to distribute.”

At the end of On Human Conduct, Oakeshott summarizes his argument about the two dispositions, a consistent theme in his work beginning with “Religion and the World.” He notes that these dispositions are “powerful and contrary” and that neither one is “strong enough to defeat or put to flight the other.” One disposition prefers being “self-employed.” This self emphasizes “self-determination” understood as the enjoyment “of wants rather than slippery satisfactions and of adventures rather than uncertain outcomes.” Traveling is preferred to the destination and “ambulatory conversation” is preferred to “deliberation about means for achieving ends” (Oakeshott, 1975, 324).

The contrary disposition prefers ends-achievement. Oakeshott emphasize the collective bent of this disposition, namely, those disposed in this manner see themselves in league “with others in a common enterprise and as a sharer in a common stock of resources and a common stock of talent with which to exploit it.” This language leads some to focus on Oakeshott purely as a critic of economic planning and socialism. They neglect the fact that Oakeshott wants to deemphasize the pursuit of outcome in general. In this disposition “outcomes” are more important than “wants” or “satisfactions.” The orientation to outcome as a collective matter, as we have seen, also involves the bourgeois state's concern with maximum satisfaction with the least effort.

OAKESHOTT AS EGALITARIAN AND ARISTOCRAT

Oakeshott's discussion of self-sufficiency contains an unresolved tension. On the one hand, the experience of self-sufficiency engenders an egalitarian and nonmanipulative sensibility that might reduce resentment. On the other hand, there is an aristocratic tendency that might give rise to resentment. At least one commentator notes that while Oakeshott believed that “egalitarian politics” were “fallacious,” he “was a spiritual democrat: he did not think anyone could gain exemption from the limits of mortal human existence; he was Augustinian, not Pelagian” (Fuller 1993, 72). What is the content of this spiritual democracy? Oakeshott believes that the self-sufficiency of morality is available to all, independent of “ignorance or inexpertness” in practical action. While the world of desire is an “unavoidable bellum omnium contra omnes” in which one self is a thing for the pleasure of another, in the moral moment of activity humans are “equal members of a community” (Oakeshott 1991, 500). This mutuality is grounded in the ethos that “other selves are acknowledged to be ends and not merely means to our own ends” (502).

An aspect of Oakeshott's spiritual democracy is wariness about market activities despite his support for markets over government, and in clear contradiction to Hayek's unqualified support of the market. Oakeshott contrasts the mutuality and presentness of certain nonmarket activities with instrumentality and the future orientation of market life. The former are “activities where what is sought is present enjoyment and not a profit.” The experience of profit-oriented roles, such as “buyer and seller, principal and agent,” contradict the noninstrumentality of the present. He writes that economic relationships of “supply and demand … allow no room for the intrusion of the loyalties and attachments which spring from familiarity” (Oakeshott 1991, 416). Oakeshott criticizes the purely instrumental logic of market relations not on the grounds of selfishness but because market life intensifies transience, is future-oriented and calculating.

Despite these egalitarian elements, there remains a strong aristocratic tendency in Oakeshott's work. In the essay on Hobbes mentioned above, Oakeshott (1991, 344) argues that Hobbes is better understood as a theorist of the “morality of individuality” that he terms “‘aristocratic.’” Hobbes was primarily concerned with the “‘rarely found’” few motivated by “pride” more than “fear.” For this Hobbesian personality, pride “appears as self-knowledge and self-respect, the delusion of power over others is replaced by the reality of self-control, and the glory of the invulnerability from which courage generates magnanimity and magnanimity, peace” (341). Peace, the end of the Hobbesian polity, becomes an end-in-itself, not the means to self-preservation. The aristocratic figure is a “creature more properly concerned with honour than with survival and prosperity” (344). This suggests that for Oakeshott the liberal order is valuable primarily because it allows the rare individual to appreciate the value of self-sufficiency.

This aristocratic tendency informs Oakeshott's critique of the poor and of distributive justice. He believes that the redistribution of resources is beyond the scope of the state: “Rulers have nothing to distribute.” Material deprivation only slightly limits the possibility of enjoying action for its own sake. His main concern with the poor is that they threaten the liberal order. Oakeshott (1975, 304f) writes, “The poor were recognized to be a threat to civil association because their erroneous belief that they had nothing to lose but their poverty made them the willing instruments of an ambitious man bent upon subversion.” A redistribution of wealth might have a negative effect on the individual insofar as a person's “capacity for agency” may be “emasculated by eleemosynary benefits” (304fn).

There is a note of ambiguity on this point. After condemning the wholesale transformation of the state into an enterprise association to appease the grievances of the poor, he does appear to allow for the validity of Hegel's argument that “great disparities of wealth were an ‘impediment’ (though not a bar) to the enjoyment of civil association, and this hindrance could and should be reduced by imposing civil conditions upon industrial enterprise … and where necessary the exercise of a judicious ‘lordship’ for the relief of the destitute” (Oakeshott 1975, 305fn). Clearly though, Oakeshott's poor are treated as inferiors by the elite capable of making a life for themselves.

In summary, Oakeshott encourages a nonmanipulative ethic. This ethic takes concrete form in his Kantian interpretation of morality, which is the self-sufficient moment of practical activity. This mutuality reduces resentment at finitude because it reduces calculation. Oakeshott, however, is unconcerned with the resentment found in a social order of unequal resources and where only a few can achieve the preferred form of life. Oakeshott's theory provides few resources for the development of the personality he prizes.