  Oakeshott considers the implications of a “civil” understanding of the modern state in many writings, but most systematically in his essays “On the Civil Condition” (OHC Part II) and “The Rule of Law” (OH 119–164). Underlying the theory of civil association that he develops in these works is a distinction between two modes of human relationship, one moral and the other prudential. Laws in the mode of civil association, which is an idea abstracted from what might be going on in an actual state, are noninstrumental rules enabling the coexistence of independent wills, not instruments to advance a collective purpose. Such laws are “moral”, in the sense that they prescribe authoritative constraints on how individuals may go about satisfying their wants, not prudential devices for achieving substantive satisfactions. In contrast to persons transacting or cooperating to satisfy wants, those who are related morally (in this sense of the term) are related on the basis of rules as rules: noninstrumental standards of conduct whose authority is distinguished from their utility. One might question Oakeshott’s use of the word “moral” without disputing his suggestion that there is a distinction between the propriety of an act as judged by its relationship to a rule and its consequential desirability. A moral rule binds people regardless of their purposes; it binds enemies as well as friends. As a moral relationship, then, civil association unites people not as subjects compelled to pursue a collective goal but as individuals pursuing goals of their own, subject to the constraints of laws that are not the instruments of some larger purpose.