Civil Association, Politics, and Authority

Abstract

“It is no exaggeration to call Oakeshott’s ideal of civil association the heavenly city of a skeptic and unbeliever”; or so claimed Sheldon Wolin in a consideration of Oakeshott’s On Human Conduct.¹ Wolin’s ironic title of the heavenly city for the unbeliever characterizes the relationship of Oakeshott as skeptic and his concept of civil association. Civil association is Oakeshott’s attempt to fashion a conception of association through which to understand the modern state, to describe the character of politics that sustain and endanger it, and to accomplish all this from his own position of skepticism.This direction of Oakeshott’s work was first revealed in his reading of Hobbes; he viewed that earlier skeptic as developing an understanding of sovereignty and authority that he came to call civil association. In examining this interpretation of Hobbes, Paul Franco asks of Oakeshott “What does Hobbes’s skeptical doctrine about the nature and role of reason mean for his understanding of politics?”² In the past two chapters I have supplied one answer to this question: the authority of the sovereign is based not on natural law or right, not on a notion of the common good or common will, but rather upon the recognition or acknowledgment of those subject to that authority. Franco, emphasizing the place of the will in Oakeshott’s interpretation, suggests that for Oakeshott “the rejection of the rationalism of the ‘Platonic-Christian’ tradition entails the replacement of reason by will.