Abstract:

Michael Oakeshott, one of the most influential theoreticians of the twentieth century, has been brought to the forefront surprisingly by a strand in democratic theory that advocates the radicalization of democracy. What is interesting is that Chantal Mouffe, the leading theoretician of the project of radical democracy argues that Oakeshott, who is known as one of the symbolic names of the conservative thought, could make an important contribution to their project. In doing that Mouffe is aware of the incongruence between their approaches but nevertheless she insists that Oakeshott’s conceptual and theoretical framework can be incorporated into radical democracy. As this article shows, the most important parallelism between the two approaches is their concern with individual and his/her life choices and with the danger and/or impossibility of politics of uniformity as well as their focus on the general rules that are supposed to regulate the intersection between the public and private. But they seriously diverge in their approach to the processes through which these rules emerge, in short, to the concept of politics: while Oakeshott has a consensus-oriented conception of politics which has no particular reference to the conflicts, antagonisms, unequal power relations or hegemony Mouffe’s conceptualization of politics is built completely on these phenomena. This in turn leads us to argue that these two approaches are indeed too different to be brought together or that the effort to bridge them is far from being persuading, since this pair seems artificial.

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