Abstract

The question which this book addresses is "What shall governments do?" Oakeshott's aim is to understand the practices of and thoughts about government that have dominated the modern European world. Put more precisely, his question is: "What is the character of modern politics that makes its practice run to ambivalence and its vocabulary run to equivocation?" The most fundamental distinction that can help us to sort through this ambivalence and equivocation is that between "the politics of faith" and "the politics of scepticism," two opposed styles of politics whose interaction is the concordia discors of the past five centuries of European politics.