Michael Oakeshott, Conservative Governance, and the Limitless: Finding a Home Amidst the Endless Journey of Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes Michael Oakeshott's conception of conservative governance in the modern world.I begin by reviewing his philosophical understanding of practical activity before analyzing the role of conservative conduct within the world of practice.Through understanding Oakeshott's view, the pervasiveness of the conservative disposition in much of human activity is revealed and defended as a legitimate aspect of how people come to find their place in the world through habit and familiarity.Finally, Oakeshott's notion of the conservative disposition is considered in light of the activity of governing, elucidating why a form of conservative government-at least as Oakeshott conceptualizes it-is well suited to govern the pluralistic and dynamic cultures prevalent in the Western world today.Through Oakeshott, the conservative disposition is revealed to be a love of the present and careful management of its complexity, rather than a nostalgia for a time past as we often mistakenly believe.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".