... with some family resemblance to the fondness for and fealty to tradition, custom and, in common law, rather strict stare decisis (precedent) among conservatives of yesteryear.
I suspect the following methodological principles are not sufficiently understood in social science and history literature, but even if I’m mistaken, I am far more confident that public policy makers, politicians and administrators are peculiarly prone to violating these methodological principles when assessing constitutions, institutions, and revolutions; I think these principles are also applicable to not only social democratic and welfare state institutions, but to the various species of welfare state: liberal, corporatist, and social democratic, for example (but also what we might call ‘authoritarian’ welfare and ‘benevolent authoritarian’ welfare regimes).
“Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, was concerned to evaluate the social consequences of American institutions. The following methodological principles can be extracted from his work: (i) One must look at the consequences that emerge when the institution in question is widely used rather than marginal. [….] (ii) Any given institution will have many consequences, some of them opposed in their tendency. It is imperative, therefore, to look at their net effect. [….] (iii) One should not evaluate a given institution or constitution according to its efficiency at each moment of time, but rather look at the long-term consequences. [….] (iv) One should not confuse the transitional effect of introducing an institution with the steady-state effect of having it. The initial effect of a revolution may be loose morals, yet the steady-state effect may be to impose stricter morals. (v) The four principles just indicated can only be applied after the fact, to trace the consequences of a system that has been in operation for some time. Our knowledge about social causality is too slight to permit confident predictions about the effects of an as yet untried system. (vi) After the fact we can often perceive that the main advantage of the constitution is found in effects other than those which are its official purpose and in terms of which it makes sense to the participants.” — Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
As Elster says in a footnote with regard to (v), “it will not do to argue with Edmund Burke or [Karl] Popper that trial-and-error can be a substitute for well-founded predictions, since these methods fail to respect principles (i) to (iv). By requiring initial and local viability of institutional reform, the incremental method neglects the fact that institutions which are viable in the large and in the long term may not be so in the small and short term. This is, in fact, the main objection that Tocqueville makes to Burke’s evaluation of the French Revolution.”
Cf. too Robert E. Goodin’s Political Theory and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1982), published a year before Elster’s Sour Grapes, in which he attributes the “lack of a proper theoretical base for policy studies” to the “perverse and pervasive doctrine of incrementalism.” Goodin’s critique is a bit more detailed and well-rounded than Elster’s, but in all fairness, Elster was focusing on methodological principles for evaluative purposes, not the doctrine of incrementalism as such (or policy studies in particular). See Goodin’s chapter 2, “Anticipating Outcomes: Overcoming the Errors of Incrementalism,” which remains an indispensable yet seldom cited critique of a policy doctrine that still, it appears, rules the minds of far too many people— be they theoretically or politically or administratively—involved in such matters.
An incisive critique of Popper’s model of “piecemeal social engineering” from a Marxist vantage point is found in Maurice Cornforth’s The Open Philosophy and the Open Society (Lawrence & Wishart, 1968): 215-231. Incidentally, Cornforth appears neglected (or forgotten) not only (and perhaps not surprisingly) by philosophers but those on the Left as well.
Finally, to place the above within the proverbial big picture, I suggest browsing through the bibliographies for (i) Marxism, (ii) Philosophy, Psychology, and Methodology for the Social Sciences (available on my Academia page), as well as reading (iii) John Friedman’s Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action (Princeton University Press, 1987). Should (i) and (ii) prove intimidating or overwhelming, one might instead read carefully Jon Elster’s Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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