An Association for Amiable Adventurers: On Oakeshott’s Peculiar Constitutionalism

Michael Oakeshott was hardly a typical Cold War liberal.1 Unlike Raymond Aron, for instance, he did not pen polemics against intellectuals who had fallen for the illusions of communism; unlike Isaiah Berlin or Karl Popper, he did not trace the pathologies of Communist political beliefs back to “precursors” in the history of ideas; and, unlike almost everyone else plausibly described as a Cold War liberal, he offered no sketch, let alone a comprehensive theory, of totalitarianism. He gave a talk on Radio Free Europe once and said everything a Cold War liberal would have said about the fallacies of believing in “historical laws”; he also insisted in an unpublished piece on the topic of conversation that he would never want to be a communist.2 But that was it, on the face of it. No grand intellectual-cum-moral battles against “fellow travelers”; no participation in ventures like the Congress for Cultural Freedom; and certainly no attempt to play counselor to any Cold War foreign policy establishment.