  For the study of politics to be genuinely philosophical, Oakeshott thought, it must exchange the vocabulary of political activity for one that explains politics in other terms—different terms from those to be explained. But this can lead to misunderstanding because the vocabularies are not interchangeable. The need to escape the shackles of an inherited political vocabulary explains why, in On Human Conduct especially, Oakeshott modifies that vocabulary to distinguish the kind of association he calls “civil” from association to promote a substantive purpose, “enterprise” association. If we apply the idea of enterprise association to the state, we necessarily generate a conception of it as a corporate undertaking. Civil association, in contrast, implies a state whose laws leave citizens free to pursue their own self-chosen purposes: a state premised on the independence of those associated and therefore committed to resisting the domination that occurs in private life when some impose their preferences on others and in public affairs when the state itself is organized to impose a collective purpose on everyone. For this to work there must be limits to the pursuit of individual purposes, and in civil association these are understood as limits that enjoin respect for the freedom of all. Oakeshott’s Latinate terminology—civitas for state, cives for citizens, lex for law, jus for the rightness of law, and respublica for the common good—springs from his wish to direct the reader away from the conventional connotations of the English words by using words less closely identified with the concerns of enterprise association that pervade modern politics and therefore modern political discourse. Civitas is a mode of association in which cives are related to one another as fellow subjects of common laws and in which the laws based are noninstrumental.