 In his essays on Rationalism, Oakeshott discusses many examples of ideological politics. He dissects the rhetorical strategies of Locke, Bentham, and Marx and takes contemporaries to task for thinking that political conclusions can be extracted from religious or scientific principles or from what are believed to be the lessons of history. Marxism, for example, claims that laws of historical change can be discerned scientifically and practical guidance derived from them. But the claim should be understood as a rhetorical one that can persuade only those who already believe it (Oakeshott 2008: 168–177). In his Lectures in the History of Political Thought (Oakeshott 2006: 469–482) and On Human Conduct (OHC 263–316), he discusses the arguments of Francis Bacon, the German Cameralists, and others who impute some collective purpose to the state as an enterprise for promoting some particular substantive goal. This goal might be religious, economic, imperial, or therapeutic. Bacon, for example, argues that the purpose of government is to exploit nature, which implies mobilizing labor for the sake of collective welfare—an implication explored and developed by later thinkers, often but not only those identified as socialist. The “collective” and “welfare” elements of this understanding of the modern state, like the more general theme of exploiting nature for human ends, have become ubiquitous. Oakeshott examines seventeenth-century Puritanism, eighteenth-century enlightened despotism, and twentieth-century fascism and communism, all of which see the state as a corporate enterprise of some kind, as instances of what he calls “telocracy” (or “teleocracy”). In each case, the collective goal is tied to an ideology that professes to offer guidance for how to achieve the goal. 