Michael Oakeshott And The Practice Of Civility: A Brief Introduction

In this paper I analyze the distinction between civil association and enterprise association, one of the most important contributions of Michael Oakeshott to political theory. First, I describe those two modalities, as competing ideas in the Modern European State. After, I will examine the argument that the civil association is a utopia because the idea of a non-instrumentality practice is questionable. Finally, I argue that non-instrumentality and instrumentality are categorically distinct, but in practice it can be difficult to distinguish them. On the other side, it does not mean that civil association is not a relevant category: au contraire, this concept must be understood in the context of the whole work of Oakeshott, an original approach to a skeptical conservatism disposition.