One reason why the renunciation of the idea of law has seemed plausible and gained increasing acceptance is the failure of Hobbes's successors to complete his account of law as a purely human artifact. They explored new aspects of the traditional idea by questioning and explicating much that had never before been noticed. But they failed to provide a way of understanding the relation of the rule of law to the civilization that it had shaped. The many refinements on the idea of law offered no adequate anchor for law in a world where human intelligence lacks the power to discover rational certainties such as Plato and Aristotle had relied on. The task of discovering a new kind of anchor for a system of legal rules was completed by Michael Oakeshott in what may be best described as a skeptical jurisprudence.

The originality and significance of Oakeshott's jurisprudence is, however, difficult to grasp. For it rests on the paradoxical character of Oakeshott's skepticism. The pattern for that character was established by David Hume. What makes both Hume and Oakeshott paradoxical is that, although they are skeptics in the sense that they recognize no rational source of indisputable truth, they could hardly be more antagonistic to nihilism. They both insist, without qualification, that men can know truth from falsehood and right from wrong.