  These explorations of ideological politics took Oakeshott in two directions. One, discussed in Section 4 below, was to distinguish alternative understandings of the modern European state, each of which could appear as either an analytical concept or an ideology. The other was to affirm the independence of explanatory theorizing from practical engagement by questioning the commonly affirmed “unity of theory and practice”—an argument, discernible in Heidegger and Gadamer, American pragmatism, and Frankfurt School critical theory, for the practical character of all knowledge (Neill 2013). Heidegger treats practical experience not as one mode of understanding among others but as the primordial experience from which nothing human can free itself. For pragmatists from Peirce to Rorty, ideas arise from our relationship to nature, which is how it affects us and our projects. For critical theorists, all theorizing is determined by the practical concerns that motivate it and is therefore implicitly if not explicitly prescriptive. Even philosophy is practical, at least when it deals with ethics and politics, for those who offer practical guidance under the labels of normative or applied ethics. Moral philosophy, they argue, aims primarily to judge and guide conduct and only secondarily and instrumentally to understand it. A similar point is made about political philosophy.