9 - Michael Oakeshott’s Republican Theory of the Rule of Law

Summary

In his lectures on the history of political thought given at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Michael Oakeshott, the most important English political philosopher of the twentieth century, emphasized the remarkable accomplishments of the Romans. While they may not have produced philosophers of such distinction as Plato and Aristotle, the Romans had shown “a genuine genius for government and politics.”¹ The fruits of this political genius were evident in the establishment of “a political community, a civitas, a state, out of tribal societies,” in “creating the Roman people, the populus Romanus, out of a miscellany of different peoples,” and in generating the sense of a people united in a distinctive mode of association.