In response to: Michael Oakeshott on the Rule of Law and the Liberal Order
Professor Fuller has provided a very helpful outline of Oakeshott’s conception of the rule of law. The British philosopher is at some of his most difficult here. But this is not to say that Oakeshott is ever easy. For readers educated in the English-speaking world, Oakeshott is challenging on a number of levels. He forces us to rethink many of our unquestioned fundamental assumptions: our dogmatic empiricism, our foundationalism (especially in epistemology and political philosophy), our belief in the importance of theory to practice, our moral doctrinalism, our acceptance that politics is a matter of Left versus Right, our belief…
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It’s hard to imagine an event that more perfectly illustrates Michael Oakeshott’s notion of telocracy than the Supreme Court decision, in a 5-4 vote, that President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, was constitutional. The reasons for this decision were shocking and unexpected; and the fallout is as yet unknown. But I…