163 At irst sight, it seems like there could be no more contrasting intellectual stances than those of Michael Oakeshott and Ernesto Laclau. While Oake- shott is hailed as a “brilliant disciple of Burke,” 1 a “right-wing guru” who articulated best “the real philosophical foundations of Mrs. Thatcher’s policies,” 2 and is despised by leftist intellectuals as a “crypto-fascist” 3 for evincing “consistent hostility to most of the central features of modern social democratic politics,” 4 Laclau is counted among the few contempo- rary intellectual pioneers of the post-Marxist tradition, offering a renewed ontology for the emancipatory projects of the left after the end of Cold * Research work for this article was supported by the Kone Foundation. 1. Russell Kirk, Conservative Mind (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), p. 416. 2. Patrick Riley, “Michael Oakeshott, Philosopher of Individuality,” Review of Poli- tics 54 (1992): 649–64. 3. Perry Anderson, “The Intransigent Right at the End of the Century,” London Review of Books, September 24, 1992, pp. 7–11. 4. John Horton, “A Qualiied Defence of Oakeshott’s Politics of Scepticism,” Euro- pean Journal of Political Theory 4 (2005): 23–36. For other, more scholarly critics of his “conservatism,” see Anthony Farr, Sartre’s Radicalism and Oakeshott’s Conservatism: The Duplicity of Freedom (London: Macmillan Press, 1998); Robert Devigne, Recasting Con- servatism: Oakeshott, Strauss, and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994); Corey Abel, ed., The Meanings of Michael Oakeshott’s Conservatism (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010). This view, however, has long been called into question by many commentators, so much so that he has been considered even as a “theorist of contingency and pluralism.” See Steven A. Gerencser, The Skeptic’s Oakeshott (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship and Democracy (London: Verso, 1992). This alternative view of Oakeshott is touched upon in more detail below. Halil Gürhanlı Playing the System: Laclau, Oakeshott, and Skeptical Populism * Telos 173 (Winter 2015): 163–79 doi:10.3817/1215173163 www.telospress.com