  Although Oakeshott criticized the postwar Labor government’s belief in planning, in his youth he thought of himself as a socialist. But it was a romantic socialism concerned with spiritual transformation, not economic redistribution (L. O’Sullivan 2014). And though he later repudiated Fabianism, Marxism, and other left-wing ideologies, the late Oakeshott still sympathized with the anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, sharing the latter’s vision of a liberal order combining community and equality with individuality and independence. His reputation as a conservative thinker was substantially shaped by his trenchant essays on the limits of reason in political life, collected as Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (first edition 1962, cited hereafter as RP). On the basis of these essays he has been compared to a host of conservative figures from Burke to Wittgenstein. Others argue that he is better characterized as a liberal. As a theorist of the rule of law, he invites comparison with Friedrich Hayek and Carl Schmitt. But efforts to label Oakeshott as either conservative or liberal founder not only on the ambiguities of those terms but on the partisanship they imply: Oakeshott was emphatically not politically engaged. As he provocatively informed those attending the twentieth-anniversary celebration of the National Review in 1975, the Right’s differences with the Left were a petty squabble over how the spoils of the state as a corporate enterprise were to be distributed (RP 459). To grasp the philosophical significance of Oakeshott’s thought one must move beyond the vocabulary of twentieth-century political dispute.