  These are familiar points, made by Oakeshott with particular clarity. What he adds to other philosophical discussions of practical reasoning, such as Aristotle’s treatment of techne and phronēsis (Nichomachean Ethics 1142a) or Kant’s remarks on judgment as the middle term between rules and applications (Kant 1793: 8:275), are reflections on how practical, and in particular political, discourse can cause disasters when these points are overlooked. His conclusions rest on a dissection of ideological politics, which, Oakeshott thought, reflects a characteristically modern disposition to substitute rules—which can be moral, historical, scientific, or divine—for judgment in practical reasoning. The rules that are thought to govern practice are not independent of practical activity but abstracted from it. They are “abridgments” of customs, habits, traditions, and skills (RP 121). To borrow language from Michael Walzer, they are interpretations rather than discoveries or inventions (Walzer 1987). And what they interpret are ways of doing things: 