Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy
Albert O. Hirschman
p 1
[In a famous lecture in 1949, the English sociologist T.H.] Marshall had distinguished between the civil, political, and social dimensions of citizenship and then had proceeded to explain, very much in the spirit of the Whig interpretation of history, how the more enlightened human societies had successfully tackled one of these dimensions after the other.
p 32
[...] one of the early general attacks on social welfare policy in this country had the intriguing title "Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems." [...] At the outset the readers are told that they have a very poor chance of understanding how society works, since we are dealing with "complex and highly interacting systems," with social arrangements that "belong to the class called multi-loop nonlinear feedback systems" and similar arcane "system dynamics" that "the human mind is not adapted to interpreting." [...]
Stripped from its hi-tech language, the article simply reflects the widespread disappointment that followed upon Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
p 35-36
One of the great insights of the science of society—found already in Vico and Mandeville and elaborated magisterially during the Scottish Enlightenment—is the observation that, because of imperfect foresight, human actions are apt to have unintended consequences of considerable scope.
p 36-37
The concept of unintended consequences originally introduced uncertainty and open-endedness into social thought, but in an escape from their new freedom the purveyors of the perverse effect retreat to viewing the social universe as once again wholly predictable.
p 37
In contrast to Hobbes, the Age of Enlightenment had an elevated idea of man's ability to change and improve society; moreover, it saw nothing but superstition in ancient myths and stories of divine intervention. So if the idea of hubris being followed by nemesis was to survive, it needed to be secularized and rationalized.
p 82
[...] Cornford distinguished between two main "Political Arguments": the Principle of the Wedge and the Principle of the Dangerous Precedent. Here are his whimsical definitions:
The Principle of the Wedge is that you should not act justly for fear of raising expectations that you may act still more justly in the future—expectations which you are afraid you will not have the courage to satisfy... The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that that you should not now do an admittedly right action for fear you should not have the courage to do right in some future case [...]
p 100
As an opponent of the Bill put it:
[...] the poorer men are, the more easily they are influenced by the rich...
p 103
[...] the jeopardy thesis in France tended to take a quite radical shape: it turned into the assertion that democracy and "liberty" are outright incompatible. One origin of this doctrine is probably Benjamin Constant's famous distinction [...] between the Liberty of the Ancients—the liberty (and obligation) to participate in public affairs—and the Liberty of the Moderns—the right to a broad sphere where one's private life and affairs can be carried out without interference or meddling on the part of the state.
p 105
Fustel's overt argument was, in short, that the famed democracy of Antiquity entailed a total absence of liberty, in the modern understanding of this term.
p 112
The basic structure of [Hayek's] argument [in The Road to Serfdom] was remarkably simple: any trend toward expansion of the scope of government is bound to threaten liberty. This assertion was based on the following reasoning: (1) people can usually agree on no more than very few common tasks; (2) to be democratic, government must be consensual; (3) democratic government is therefore possible only when the state confines its activities to the few on which people can agree; (4) hence, when the state aspires to undertake important additional functions, it will find that it can do so only by coercion, and both liberty and democracy will be destroyed.