The political philosophy unfolded in On Human Conduct certainly lacks nothing for radicalism. The core of Michael Oakeshott’s theorizing is the idea that, as the mandate of the modern state expands, the possibility of living life as the self-sufficient adventure it is meant to be contracts. On Human Conduct is above all a reflection on the nature of the state. It can hardly be an accident that Hobbes and Hegel, two of the figures within the canonical theory tradition who most deeply engaged Oakeshott intellectually, were also utterly preoccupied with the project of theorizing the state. There is no question that Oakeshott wants a severe constraining of the scope of state activity, but this view of the state would not have the philosophical character that it does if it were not tied to views about what it is to live life.

Oakeshott’s guiding conception comes out most clearly when he distinguishes between an association “of pilgrims, travelling to a common destination” and an association “of adventurers,” each wandering in a unique direction (p. 243). As individuals, we have a responsibility to respond reflectively to the worlds in which we find ourselves and to exert practical intelligence in comporting ourselves to those worlds of practical existence. An overactive state, for Oakeshott, is a clear sign that individuals are abdicating that responsibility or seeking ways to lessen the burden of exercising reflective intelligence. (More precisely, the problem is not an overactive state but a state that takes itself to be purposive at all.) When Oakeshott speaks of the “individual manqué” (p. 275), he implies a kind of duty to be the sort of individual who is not an individual manqué, and he urges us to repudiate visions of the state that (he thinks) encourage or facilitate such moral abdication.