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The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Albert O. Hirschman
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Extract

In a recent issue of this journal, Oran Young argued forcefully against the ‘collection of empirical materials as an end in itself and without sufficient theoretical analysis to determine appropriate criteria of selection.” The present paper issues a complementary critique of the opposite failing. Its target is the tendency toward compulsive and mindless theorizing—a disease at least as prevalent and debilitating, so it seems to me, as the one described by Oran Young.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , April 1970 , pp. 329 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1970

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References

1 Young, Oran R., “Professor Russett: Industrious Tailor to a Naked Emperor,” World Politics, xxi (April 1969), 489–90Google Scholar.

2 New York.

3 New Haven and London.

4 Nora Beloff and Michael Davie, “Getting to Know Mr. Nixon,” The Observer, February 23, 1969.

5 March 13, 1969.

6 I have long looked for a good translation of this key concept into English. It now strikes me that an apt, if free, rendering of Flaubert's meaning would be “the compulsion to theorize”—which is the subject and might have been the title of the present paper.

7 Aronson, Elliott, “Dissonance Theory: Progress and Problems,” in Abelson, R. P. and others, eds., Theories of Cognitive Consistency: A Source Book (Chicago 1968), 24Google Scholar.

8 See my article, “The Political Economy of Import-Substituting Industrialization in Latin America,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXXXII (February 1968), 1–32Google Scholar. The Spanish terms desarrollo hacia afuera and desarrollo hacia adentro are convenient shorthand expressions for growth through the expansion of exports and of the domestic market, respectively.

9 It is only fair to note that, in his more recent work on achievement motivation, David McClelland has changed his earlier views on these matters. Thus he writes (after having given cogent reasons for doing so): “To us it is no longer a self-evident truth that it is easier to produce long-range personality transformations in young children than it is in adults.” McClelland, David C. and Winter, David G., Motivating Economic Achievement (New York 1969), 356Google Scholar.

10 “Obstacles to Development: A Classification and a Quasi-Vanishing Act,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, xiii (July 1965), 385–93Google Scholar.

11 Wilson, James Q., “Innovation in Organization: Notes Toward a Theory,” in Thompson, James D., ed., Approaches to Organizational Design (Pittsburgh 1966), 193–218Google Scholar.

12 Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (Oxford 1965), 286Google Scholar.

13 As quoted in Aldiusser, Pour Marx (Paris 1967), 98Google Scholar.