Editors David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole have assembled a distinguished collection of contributors to consider the work of Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Hayek, and Michael Oakeshott “with a view to identifying what remains useful in the context of contemporary issues and concerns” (p. 3). On the evidence presented here, there is plenty of reason to remain interested in all three of them. Each thinker is given roughly a third of Law, Liberty and State, beginning with Schmitt, but most of the chapters undertake some kind of comparative examination of their ideas, and some even refer to one another’s arguments, giving the volume a certain unity despite the editors’ modest disclaimer that “no strict editorial grand plan has been imposed” (p. 3).

Nehal Bhuta’s essay on “The Mystery of the State” draws attention to the fact that both Schmitt and Oakeshott insisted that the state, as a historic and symbolic entity, “cannot rest on abstract principles of reasonableness or justice” (p. 28). But as he is aware, they by no means shared a vision of its foundations. As Hans Lindahl points out in his piece on “Law and Concrete Order,” Schmitt was committed to the view that a unified political community was prior to the existence of any legal order, and rejected Hans Kelsen’s legal positivism for just this reason. This was the ground of the famous, or perhaps notorious, distinction that Schmitt drew between friend and enemy as the essence of political life.

Martin Loughlin’s essay on “Nomos” says perhaps the best that can be said for Schmitt’s view, emphasizing the extent to which it was rooted in an awareness of the undeniable fact that the violent appropriation of territory—space—lies at the origin of all modern states, but Lars Vinx mounts an elegant response in which he dismantles “Carl Schmitt’s Defence of Sovereignty.” Vinx’s outstanding contribution argues that Schmitt’s claim “to ground the legitimacy of law in an appeal to popular sovereignty is self-defeating as an account of the legitimacy of law” (p. 114). The preestablished unity of Schmitt’s political community makes the legitimacy question either redundant, because the law can never be anything other than an expression of the identity of the people, or irrelevant, since anyone questioning it cannot by definition be a member of the community in the first place.

David Boucher shows in “Schmitt, Oakeshott and the Hobbesian Legacy” that Oakeshott wanted nothing to do with the “substantive homogeneity” on which Schmitt grounded the state (p. 146). He resolutely championed an individualistic perspective that denied the state had ever rested, or could ever rest, on such a basis. Poole’s piece on “The Mystery of Lawlessness” makes some pertinent criticisms of Oakeshott’s account of the state, arguing that he adopted the somewhat paradoxical position of “extolling local knowledge” while favoring the same generic form of the state as an association in terms of noninstrumental law everywhere (p. 181).

Paul Kelly rightly insists in “Reconfiguring Reason of State” that Oakeshott nevertheless saw something “worth defending” in liberal democracy (p. 213). Erika Kiss, one of Oakeshott’s most original interpreters in recent years, sets out what that something was in her essay on “The Rules of the Game.” In the modern world, liberal democracy was the form of government best able to accommodate Oakeshott’s conception of the rule of law as “vernacular language” (p. 218). Kiss develops the notion of “stochastic rationality” to describe the kind of thinking that Oakeshott regarded as most appropriate to political life in a civil association. The fundamental fact of politics for Oakeshott was uncertainty; any attempts at comprehensive planning or prediction were doomed to failure, and political reasoning needed to take account of this fundamental truth. More than anything else, she argues, Oakeshott believed that we needed protection from those who want to impose on us “the claims of certainties and truths” (p. 233).

Dyzenhaus’s “Dreaming the Rule of Law” extends this theme, concentrating in the main on Oakeshott’s essay on “The Rule of Law,” which he regards as possibly “the most important contribution on its topic since … the Second World War” (p. 236). Oakeshott offers an account of law as an inherently limited relationship in terms of rules. He shares with Kelsen the belief that sovereignty is not necessary in order to give legitimacy to a system of self-authenticating rules, but avoids the problem that plagued Kelsen of reducing legitimacy to a procedural or formal question by insisting that law must also not be an egregious violation of the morals of those to whom it is supposed to apply. Yet those values are not presented as divine or natural in origin. As Dyzenhaus elegantly puts it, the “myth of the state” (to use Ernst Cassirer’s phrase) that Oakeshott offers “subverts all other myths since it eschews all reference to providence or to the fabric of the universe and requires a justification to mere mortals” (p. 259).

Jan-Werner Müller’s consideration of the question of “What, If Anything, Is Wrong with Hayek’s Model Constitution” tackles the constitutional blueprint set out in Law, Legislation and Liberty. To a greater extent than either Schmitt or Oakeshott, Hayek was a serious constitutional draftsman. Schmitt’s main constitutional prescriptions seem to have been comprised of rejecting parliamentary democracy and endorsing the Führerprinzip (even if Hitler turned out to be a disappointment in this respect), and Oakeshott explicitly denied that his “civil association” was supposed to be a blueprint of any kind.

Hayek, on the other hand, set out a “model constitution” that provided for a “Legislative Assembly … charged with working out just rules of conduct” and a “Governmental Assembly” designed “actually to govern … formulate and pursue policies” (p. 267). But Hayek’s failure to explain how it might be possible to challenge the decisions of his Legislative Assembly and his lack of provision for the means of detecting fundamental disagreements that might strain the social fabric leave Müller skeptical about his proposals.

Chandran Kukathas’s essay on “Hayek and the State” does something to restore sympathy for Hayek’s project by pointing out that the problem that Law, Legislation and Liberty addressed was the fundamental one “of how to contain power” (p. 293). He also makes the argument that Hayek’s real importance lay in his recognition of a problem that he did not solve but which remains vital today. Namely, what defines a liberal social order is a common attachment to liberal ideas that is at variance with the demand for unity implicit in Rawlsian calls for social justice, and which by definition cannot be merely the creation of state power.

The final essay, Adrian Vermeule’s “Global Knowledge in the Administrative State,” is rather different from the others, because it is really a contribution to the literature on American public administration. Although it does a good job of making the case that “Hayekian arguments … overlook the ability of non-market institutions to aggregate local and tacit knowledge” (p. 298), it is concerned with this problem solely in the context of optimal institutional design, and largely ignores the ethical and political questions that have occupied the rest of the contributors. But perhaps the editors wanted to underline that Hayek was prepared to grapple with more concrete problems of institutional design than either Schmitt or Oakeshott.

Overall, this is an excellent volume that deserves close attention from all those interested in contemporary legal and political philosophy.