 Lex is what Oakeshott calls an “ideal character”, an abstraction that is not to be confused with the actual law of any existing state. To theorize civil association is not to describe the contingent features of a particular state but to identify the presuppositions of the state as a mode of association. Having identified the modes of civil and enterprise association, Oakeshott is able to distinguish a legal order organized to advance a substantive purpose, one shaped by laws instrumental to that end, from one in which the laws are noninstrumental constraints on the choices of subjects pursuing their own purposes. Once we have grasped the distinction, we can see why he identifies the rule of law with civil association: differentiating the rule of law from other kinds of legal rule is necessary to distinguish between laws premised on the independence of citizens and laws designed to conscript them for purposes not their own and thereby to dominate them. For Oakeshott, the rule of law is a concept, not a description of any existing legal order, much less (as it is for a less philosophical thinker like Friedrich Hayek) a guiding ideal or ideology. In what has been called “the ambiguity thesis” (Friedman 1989), Oakeshott holds that any actual state—any existing legal order—is mixture of noninstrumental rules regulating interactions among citizens and rules instrumental to achieving substantive purposes: an ambiguous combination of civil and enterprise association.