Public goods in Michael Oakeshott’s ‘world of pragmata’
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| Author | Maurits de Jongh |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885119890452 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
Public goods in
Michael Oakeshott’s
‘world of pragmata’
Maurits de Jongh
Utrecht University, The Netherlands; Goethe University
Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Abstract
Michael Oakeshott’s account of political economy is claimed to have found its ‘apothe-
osis under Thatcherism’. Against critics who align him with a preference for small
government, this article points to Oakeshott’s stress on the indispensability of an
infrastructure of government-provided public goods, in which individual agency and
associative freedom can flourish. I argue that Oakeshott’s account of political economy
invites a contestatory politics over three types of public goods, which epitomize the
unresolvable tension he diagnosed between nomocratic and teleocratic conceptions of
the modern state. These three types are the system of civil law, the by-products of the
operation of civil law and public goods which result from policies. The article concludes
that Oakeshott offers an important corrective to political theories which favour either
market mediation or radical democratic governance of the commons as self-sustaining
modes of providing and enjoying goods.
Keywords
Michael Oakeshott, privatization, public goods, the commons, welfare state
Introduction
While Michael Oakeshott’s distinction between civil and enterprise association is
much debated, its implications for political economy remain unclear. These
Corresponding author:
Maurits de Jongh, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13, 3512
BL, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Email: m.j.dejongh@uu.nl
European Journal of Political Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885119890452
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2022, Vol. 21(3) 561–584
implications have either been overlooked or have been interpreted to require
‘small’ government. Instead of focusing on his views on political economy, scholars
clarify Oakeshott’s distinct take on concepts like contingency, free agency and self-
enactment in the baffling essays in On Human Conduct (Oakeshott, 1990 [1975]) and
‘The rule of law’ (Oakeshott, 1991 [1983]) (e.g. Kim, 2016; Podoksik, 2003).
Illuminating discussions on the (in)appropriateness of characterizing his thought
in terms of liberalism, conservatism, republicanism or scepticism are also given pride
of place (Boucher, 2005; Gerencser, 2000; Nardin, 2015). However, when critics do
consider Oakeshott’s account of political economy beyond a short sidestep,
1
they
struggle to avoid the conclusion that Oakeshott adheres, in Dyzenhaus’s (2015: 259)
phrase, to ‘a covert and radical libertarianism that dresses a “Tea Party” agenda in
philosophical garb’. While interpretations which stress Oakeshott’s influence on
neoliberal apologetics are not without a measure of plausibility (e.g. Plant, 2010:
5–6; for pushback, see O’Sullivan, 2014), they are exegetically incomplete and ulti-
mately misleading. Far from having found his ‘apotheosis under Thatcherism’, as
Skinner claims (cited in Koikkalainen & Syj€
am€
aki, 2002: 45), I argue that Oakeshott
attaches crucial importance to an infrastructure of public goods to ensure just and
orderly social life, in which individual agency and associative freedom can flourish.
This article reconstructs Oakeshott’s accommodation of public goods in what
he calls ‘the world of pragmata’ (Oakeshott, 1990 [1975]: 32–33). My reading shows
that public goods are central to his account of political economy, and epitomize his
diagnosis of the tension between nomocratic and teleocratic conceptions of the
state. Government-provided public goods expose this tension to be fundamentally
irreconcilable rather than temporarily unresolved. This irreconcilability opens up
space for a contestatory politics in which the character and scope of public goods
are constantly renegotiated from the opposite perspectives of nomocracy and tele-
ocracy. The implication of this irreconcilability is that public goods are never more
than imperfectly justifiable. Notwithstanding their imperfect justifiability, the
scope of public goods that may be extrapolated from Oakeshott’s account is not
incompatible with, and may even exceed, provision in an extensive welfare state.
Oakeshott’s account of public goods offers a sobering perspective on political
theories which favour either market mediation (e.g. Buchanan, 2000; Hayek, 1998)
or radical democratic governance of the commons (e.g. Dardot and Laval, 2014;
Hardt and Negri, 2009) as self-sustaining modes of providing and enjoying goods.
Against a blind faith in privatization and deregulation, he reminds us that no civil
association is conceivable without both its respublica (or system of civil law) and
a plurality of (im)material res publicae (from schools and bridges to hospitals,
utilities and social security arrangements). Moreover, when the commons are
appreciated for anti-statist as much as anti-market qualities, their advocates
usually target a specific version of the state qua corporate enterprise without
overcoming what Oakeshott (2004: 374) calls ‘the plausible ethics of productivity’.
These protagonists fail to take the nomocratic conception of the state into account
as a well-suited, indeed indispensable, host to the transformative projects of
‘commoning’ (Bollier, 2014) they celebrate. Adopting Oakeshott’s perspective,
562 European Journal of Political Theory 21(3)
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