Oakeshott believed that civil association has been increasingly displaced by enterprise, under pressure from political elites, managers, parties and ideologues. It is not only socialists with their goals of equality and social justice who have contributed to this displacement. The liberal attempt to adopt the contours of an abstract and universal idea of justice and human rights; the supposedly conservative pursuit of economic growth as the root of social order and the goal of government - these too have a tendency to displace civil association with a new kind of political practice, in which the institutions of society are bent towards a goal that may be incompatible with their inner dynamic. The distinction between civil and enterprise association is not hard and fast: many of our social spheres partake of both arrangements. Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that enterprise tends in a different direction from ordinary forms of community. In enterprise there are instructions coming down from above; there are rivalries and rebellions; there is ruinous failure as well as temporary success. The whole depends on a forward-going energy that must be constantly maintained if things are not to fragment and fall apart. Hence the invocations of 'progress', of 'growth', of constant 'advance' towards the goal which, however, must remain always somewhere in the future, lest the dedication of the citizens cease to be renewed by it.