Michael Oakeshott is perhaps best known for his essay ‘On Being Conservative’, where he describes conservatism as a disposition. Opposed to the conservative, however, seems to be what Oakeshott terms the ‘individual manqué’, aptly described as “the image of a new barbarism.”1 Oakeshott’s characterisation of the manqué is one of the left-behinds, the ‘mass man’ who is anything but the man of the masses, but is a strange character in itself. “He is not necessarily ‘poor’, nor is he envious only of ‘riches’,” Oakeshott notes, adding that “he is not necessarily ‘ignorant’, often he is a member of the so-called intelligentsia; he belongs to a class which corresponds exactly with no other class. He is specified primarily by a moral, not an intellectual, inadequacy.”2 Even though the reader may be casually misled into believing that the mass man is the sort of individual who would be the working poor who may be the leading advocates for socialism and totalitarianism, Oakeshott emphasises that the issue with this manqué is a moral deficiency that no sort of educational attainment may solve: it is, at heart, a moral issue, one that cannot be dealt with immediately or brusquely unless its origins are traced.