Merchants of Death.

timism of which Descartes was the exponent, and founder, in the seventeenth century.

The belief in progress, which Oakeshott seems to share with Mill, and with all modern Liberals, is the necessary and sufficient justification for his decrying the utility, or even the relevance, of independently premeditated ends. In this, if I read him rightly, the wheel of his argument comes full circle.