Dizzy is what I am today. Dizzy and a bit stung. What I wrote here yesterday surprised me, to say the least, and when I woke up this morning it burned on my mind. Not only what I wrote, but also what occurred to me consequence, yesterday afternoon and last night. Further inventory, literally.

As if that weren’t enough, the Hirschman books arrived. These are the four titles by Albert O Hirschman that Cass Sunstein named at the start of his review of Jeremy Adelman’s new biography of Hirschman:

Hirschman is principally known for four remarkable books. The most influential, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), explores two ways to respond to unjust, exasperating, or inefficient organizations and relationships. You can leave (“exit”) or you can complain (“voice”). If you are loyal, you will not exit, and you may or may not speak out. The Passions and the Interests (1977) uncovers a long-lost argument for capitalism in general and commercial interactions in particular. The argument is that trade softens social passions and enmities, ensuring that people see one another not as members of competing tribes, but as potential trading partners. Shifting Involvements (1982) investigates the dramatically different attractions of political engagement and private life, and shows how the disappointments of one can lead to heightened interest in the other. For example, the protest movements of the 1960s were inspired, at least in part, by widespread disappointment with the experience of wealth-seeking and consumption, emphasized in the 1950s.

Finally, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) is a study of the reactionary’s tool kit, identifying the standard objections to any and all proposals for reform. The objections are “perversity” (the reform will make the problem even worse), “futility” (the reform will do nothing to solve the problem), and “jeopardy” (the reform will endanger some hard-won social gain). Hirschman shows that these objections are stupefying, mechanical, hyperbolic, and often wrong.

I had a look at Exit, Voice and Loyalty, and found it a bit steep — plentiful references to the assumptions of neoclassical economics. The Rhetoric of Reaction proved to be vastly more congenial. Hirschman identifies three standard arguments, or theses, against progressive policies. The first, “perversity,” argues that the proposed policy will have not just unintended consequences but the very opposite consequences to those intended. The second argument, “futility” adds insult to injury, because according to this line of thinking the unintended consequence will be no consequence. (Hirschman traces “futility” back to Sicilian pessimism.) The third thesis, “jeopardy,” holds that the proposed policy will endanger some hard-won and precious benefit of the status quo. I sped through “perversity” and “futility” in no time, thrilled, really, to have so many thoughts of my own organized by Hirschman’s powerful overview. (Shifting Involvements had the same impact.) “Jeopardy” is somewhat more complicated; Hirschman’s discussion begins with Isaiah Berlin’s famous 1958 bifurcation of liberty (freedom from and freedom to) and the recognition that some conception of liberty will almost always be put at risk by any proposed reform. (Reading about the distaste for government regulation that flourishes in Texas even in the wake of the West Fertilizer disaster, I found distinguishing between the “futility” and “jeopardy” roots of the prejudice a very close call, and decided for “jeopardy” by a hair. Either way, the Times story captured the reasons for my discomfort at sharing a polity with Texans.)

As I’m reading The Rhetoric of Reaction, I’m testing a surmise that I glanced at yesterday, over Hirschman’s shoulder as it were. Perversity, futility, and jeopardy are all standard measures in the historian’s toolkit. Looking back, the historian invariably assesses the success of historical acts in one or more of these three terms. In his classic history of the French Revolution, for example, William Doyle fastens on the secularization of the Church as the Revolution’s singularly perverse policy, because it not only sparked counterrevolution in earnest but strengthened — revived, actually — the Church itself. Such judgments are what distinguish historians from annalists, the people who simply write down what happened without much thought for the consequences. I don’t mean to suggest that historians are reactionaries, but it might be said that reactionaries are fools for trying to be historians in advance.

Oh, and another thing about yesterday. I signed up at Feedly.

Dizzy.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, May 10th, 2013 at 11:28 am.