Anarchy 85/Meliorism

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“My contention is that one has to weigh the special cir­cum­stan­ces of each case, and cannot safely guide one’s conduct by hard-and-fast rules which know nothing of the cir­cum­stan­ces or charac­ter of the people concerned. Surely the duty of man is not to do what he can’t, but to do the best he can; and I believe that, by adop­ting ab­stract rules never to do this or that, never to use force, or money, or support a Govern­ment, or go to war, and by encum­ber­ing our con­scien­ces with line upon line and precept upon precept, we become less likely to behave reason­ably and rightly than if we atten­ded more to those next steps, the wisdom of which can be tested in daily life …”

—<span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: aylmer maude">aylmer maude, in criticism of Leo Tolstoy.  

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Meliorism

GEORGE MOLNAR

This talk is a plea for a revi­sion of the re­ceived liber­ta­rian atti­tude to melio­rism. By melio­rism I under­stand at­tempts to remedy or reform speci­fic grie­vances or defects in a demo­cra­tic society. Some of what I have to say arose out of re­flec­ting on a book of essays by Paul Goodman However this is not a paper on Goodman. I’ll refer to his views at the outset and also make exem­plary use of his work in some places. But my main interest is in pos­sible liber­ta­rian reac­tions to him, and beyond that, in the stan­dard liber­ta­rian atti­tude to melio­rism.

  Goodman calls himself a “utopian socio­lo­gist”, meaning of course to be iro­ni­cal. He is a self-confessed prag­ma­tist, strongly inter­ested in prac­tical goals and in getting things done. Al­though at heart he is a social critic, his avowed inten­tion is to combine des­truc­tive criti­cism with posi­tive pro­posals whose accep­tance would improve the object of criti­cism or even replace it alto­gether with some­thing better.

  “I seem to be able to write only prac­ti­cally, inven­ting expe­di­ents. … My way of writing a book of social theory has been to invent com­munity plans. My psy­cho­logy is a manual of thera­peu­tic exer­cises. A liter­ary study is a manual of prac­tical criti­cism. A dis­cus­sion of human nature is a program of peda­gogi­cal and poli­tical reforms. This present book is no excep­tion. It is social criti­cism, but almost in­vari­ably (except in moments of indig­na­tion) I find that I know what I don’t like only by con­trast with some con­crete pro­posal that makes more sense.”

Goodman is not in the tradi­tion of 18th and 19th century refor­merso were ob­sessed with the idea of a Grand Plan to cure all ills of mankind at one stroke and forever. His thought is there­fore not to be com­pared to clas­sical anar­chism for he seems inter­ested solely in piece­meal reforms and changes. In modern American society thin­king men are faced with a moral di­lemma:

{{qq|It is only by the usual tech­nolo­gical and orga­nisa­tio­nal proce­dures

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