Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Dan Klein asked me, in reference to this post , whether, for Oakeshott, "dropping anchor" was merely an interruption of the real quest, that of being "perpetually en voyage." As I began to compose my response to Dan, I realized it might be of general interest... well, of general interest to the sort of nerds who hang around here, anyway! So here goes: What Oakeshott is trying to get at in the passage I quoted is not so much that either dropping anchor or sailing on is the "real deal," but that there is a tension between that we should never completely dismiss from out awareness. Let us use an example from Klein's book itself to make this clearer. George Stigler is Klein's chief exemplar of "narrow neoclassicism." Stigler had at hand at a certain "equipment of theoretic hooks and nets," such as optimization within a given means-end framework, perfect knowledge of search costs, knowledge as information, and so on, and began u...