Our societies are characterized by advanced cognitive division of labor. Let’s take this as a foundational stipulation for the present digression. In a famous (1947) essay, “Rationalism in Politics,” Michael Oakeshott amplifies and revisits a problem famously associated with Schumpeter: that one drawback of the practice of democratic elections is that we have a tendency to elevate people into power who, while they may excel at persuasion and party-management, have no clue how to run things once they have achieved power.
I liked the essay, but the part about aristocracies, or, more broadly, management by family tradition, strikes me as something that could only be written in England, and not much later than 1950. Experience with political dynasties in Australia has not been encouraging, and the same goes in spades for the US.
I read “Rationalism in Politics” today, having recently finished teaching a Politics, Philosophy and Economics course framed around the idea of “wicked problems”. This idea first emerged in urban planning in the late 1960s, to describe problems that weren’t amenable to the rational-technical solutions Oakeshott had criticised about 15 years earlier.
In an important sense, all political problems are (at least nowadays) wicked problems. If all that was required was lots of technical expertise (as with landing humans on the moon), the problems would already have been solved, or reduced to bureaucratic routine.
Yes, I think versions of the distinction wicked/political are re-discovered in political thought regularly and discovered in slightly different governance contexts all the time. The interesting weirdness is that it somehow also remains not quite obvious and regularly needs saying. I would love to see your syllabus!
It was focused on climate change, which has been promoted to "super-wicked". I'm working on turning my slides into a book, so I'll send you a copy when/if it's done
I liked the essay, but the part about aristocracies, or, more broadly, management by family tradition, strikes me as something that could only be written in England, and not much later than 1950. Experience with political dynasties in Australia has not been encouraging, and the same goes in spades for the US.
I read “Rationalism in Politics” today, having recently finished teaching a Politics, Philosophy and Economics course framed around the idea of “wicked problems”. This idea first emerged in urban planning in the late 1960s, to describe problems that weren’t amenable to the rational-technical solutions Oakeshott had criticised about 15 years earlier.
In an important sense, all political problems are (at least nowadays) wicked problems. If all that was required was lots of technical expertise (as with landing humans on the moon), the problems would already have been solved, or reduced to bureaucratic routine.
Yes, I think versions of the distinction wicked/political are re-discovered in political thought regularly and discovered in slightly different governance contexts all the time. The interesting weirdness is that it somehow also remains not quite obvious and regularly needs saying. I would love to see your syllabus!
It was focused on climate change, which has been promoted to "super-wicked". I'm working on turning my slides into a book, so I'll send you a copy when/if it's done