Society as a Civil Association or an Enterprise Association
What, then, does Oakshott have to say about the character of moral and political life in the modern world? Oakshott's third major statement, his book On Human Conduct, seeks to delineate positively the forms of moral and political practice that distinguish the modern European state. Oakeshott begins by characterizing morality - at least in the terms in which we know it--as a noninstrumental practice. This is to say that moral life has no end, goal or telos outside itself, and it does not stand in need of any external justification. Further, Oakeshott avers, there is not a single or ideal form of ethical life of which the variety of forms of life of which the variety of forms of life that we find among us are approximations. Rather, moralities are akin to vernacular languages, in that it is the nature of them to be several and divers. If moral life is in this way non instrumental, and so in one sense purposeless, so also are law and the form of civil association that is created by the union of law with morality independent of any specific purpose.
We come here to one of the key concepts in Oakeshott's later work - the conception, which he finds prefigured in the thought of Hobbes and Hegel, of society as a civil association - an association of persons who having no ends or purposes held necessarily in common, nevertheless coexist in peace under the rule of law. On this account, the office of law is not typically to impose any particular duty or goal on men, but instead it seeks simply to facilitate their dealings with one another. Oakeshott goes so far as to claim that law does not restrict freedom at all, since it merely stipulates conditions and actions but does not enjoin or prohibit them. We need not endorse this perhaps exaggerated claim to find an important insight in Oakeshott's argument that the rule of law in a civil society is not that of promoting general welfare or any other similar abstraction, but rather of securing the conditions in which persons may contract mutually chosen activities. Thus, law seeks not to impose on society any preferred pattern of ends, but simply to facilitate individuals in their pursuit of their own ends. Law itself has, for this reason, no purpose.
In modern societies, a powerful rival has emerged to this conception of civil associations as association under independent general rules--the conception of society as an enterprise association. In this latter conception, which is perhaps coeval with that of civil association, the state is understood as an organization for the attainment of a definite end, or hierarchy of ends. It is so understood by Bacon (who saw the end of government in the exploitation of the earth's resources), by the mercantilists (who affirmed it to be the increase of national wealth), and by sundry positivists and their disciples such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb. This collectivist conception of society and government, while it has never completely extirpated the inheritance of civil association, has been dominant in our times - most clearly and widely in Soviet communism and National Socialism, but also in the New Deal, the mixed or managed economy, corporatism, and "welfare capitalism." The idea of the state as an enterprise association, whether it be the idea of the Fabians or of Mussolini, of Bacon or of Auguste Comte, is an idea inimical to any notion of a civil association among persons linked only by their common subscription to a noninstrumental rule of law. The idea of the state as an enterprise association is therefore inimical to the European achievement of individuality, whose political embodiment is in civil association.
The idea of enterprise association has been given practical reinforcement, according to Oakeshott, by a widespread revulsion from the ordeal of individuality that has accompanied civil association almost form its inception. This revulsion is expressed in the character Oakeshott calls the anti individual or individual manqué, who (unwilling or unable to shoulder the burden of freedom, still less to celebrate it) aims to create a compulsory community of others like himself in which the voice of individuality has been silenced. As Oakeshott has said, " The circumstances of early modern Europe bred, not a single character, but tow obliquely opposed characters, that of the individual and that of the individual manqué: and in one idiom or other they have been with us ever since those times." For Oakshott, the individual manqué of early modern Europe was the prelude to the modern anti-individual.