  A universitas, in contrast, is a corporate undertaking (such as a partnership or school) established to advance a particular end. Societas is not identical with civil association, however; it stands for a larger class of relationships based on the noninstrumental considerations that define them. The civil condition emerges only when these considerations harden into rules (“laws”) and are supplemented with other rules for recognizing, altering, and enforcing them. Oakeshott examines reflections on the modern state, so conceived, found in Machiavelli, Madison, Constant, and Montesquieu, among others, and more philosophically (that is, in terms of its presuppositions rather than incidental features) in Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. He also examines the ideas of thinkers who saw the state as a purposive enterprise. These include Francis Bacon, for whom the state was a productive estate, Joseph de Maistre, who saw it as “a religious corporation in the Catholic idiom” (OHC 281), and various theorists of enlightened despotism, socialism, national self-determination, and economic development. But Oakeshott’s discussion of these thinkers and their arguments is only loosely historical, inviting the charge that he is using them for his own purposes and in a way that does not meet his own standard of genuine historical inquiry.