Suchergebnisse

A central theme within political theory is the rational management of society based on science and technology. This idea involves several problems concerning the philosophy of technology and social engineering. Some of these difficulties, which are discussed in this essay, are (1) the scientific identification of objective needs and what we can do with it with respect to rational choice, (2) expert-management versus user-management in technical matters, (3) the nature of technology and its consequences for planning, and (4) the nature of technology and its consequences for democratic social engineering.

This article takes it for granted that science is intrinsically social and that competition is part and parcel of science. Four kinds of competition are distinguished and related to four kinds of rationalities: technological, normal scientific, political, and philosophical. It is argued that science as a whole is rational when there is interaction between the different (sub-) rationalities. Science needs not only different disciplines, but a methodological division of labor.

It is customarily assumed that welfare-state thinking can only appear as a product of the sharpening conflict between revolutionary socialists and the defenders of the status quo; the case of Tom Paine proves otherwise. Although he defended private enterprise (to the exclusion of large landed property), he developed a forgotten early version of a comprehensive system of public welfare in the second part of his The Rights of Man and in his Agrarian Justice, where he argued that the new revolutionary democratic government based on representation and universal suffrage has the duty and the means not only of relieving poverty but of preventing it by a system of universal allowances for marriage, childbirth, the raising of children, basic education, old age pensions and temporary housing and employment for the unemployed of the metropolis. This, he said, should be financed by a progressive inheritance tax levied especially on landed estates.

Utopian rationalism names the belief that science has made utopia a practical possibility. Its characteristics include determinism, collectivism, distrust of individual initiative and belief in the superiority of collective planning in securing human happiness. The first section traces the utopian and dystopian tradition into modern science fiction. The ideas collected here are systematized in the next section, which on all points dismisses the tenets and claims of utopian rationalism as false, and in a final section, which discusses utopian thinking and its dangers in general. Utopian thinking is traced to three traits of human nature, namely, the quests for happiness, perfection, and submergence.

This essay develops a general account of one type of explanation found in history in particular: that an individual action is conceived as an exemplification of a rather complex schema of practical inference, under the provision that the facts which instantiate the various terms of the schema have an intelligible connection to one another. The essay then raises the question whether historians, anthropologists, and their contemporaneous audience can have an internal understanding of the actions of others, where those others come from radically different cultures or times from the historians or anthropologists. An account is offered that, arguably, can resolve this problem and do justice to both the claim of internal understanding and the presumed cultural differentness between the agents studied and the historians and anthropologists who do the study.