The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Eric Foner, Radical Individualism In America: Revolution to Civil War
• I: Methodology
• Scientific Paradigms and History
• Kuhn's Paradigm
• Paradigm Choice, Art, and Reason
• Do Concepts Mold Percepts?
• Paradigms Vs. Research Programmes
• Kuhn and Historical Truth
• Paradigms and Determinism
• A Historian Between Paradigms
• Survival of the Fittest Paradigms?
• Fumbling Toward Truth
• Necessary Truths and Reality
• Economic Laws
• “pure” Vs. “grubby” Knowledge
• Paradigms and Social Change
• II: Consensus, Obedience, and Dissent
• State and Society
• Consensus and Authority
• Civil Disobedience
• Dissent and Virtue
• Underdevelopment Vs. Consensus
• Democracy Vs. Elitism
• Majority Tyranny
• Majority Frustration
• Consensus Vs. Politics
• Consensus and Rights
• Consensus Vs. Majority Rule
• III: Consent and Coercion
• The Right Against Coercion
• Private Property and Coercion
• Consent, Coercion, and Property
• Threats Vs. Offers
• A Clockwork Orange, Freedom, and Coercion
• Weak Will Vs. Compulsion
• Freedom and Using Others
• Equality and Social Coercion
• Human Action Vs. Behavior
• IV: Regulation
• The Regulating Class
• Regulation and Revolution
• Land Expropriation
• State Planning
• Hoover As Regulator
• State Science Research
• The Costs of Research
• Anti-trust
• Sec Regulation
• Sunset Laws
• V: Social Control
• Power and Servility
• State Vs. Education
• Public Vs. Private Education
• Public Schools Vs. Privacy
• Truant Officers As Scapegoats
• Were Professionals Technocrats?
• The Courts and Social Control
• The Army and Social Control
• Land Use and Control
• VI: The Liberal Tradition
• The History of Liberalism
• Freedom and Progress
• Reason and Progress
• Individualism, Property, and Revolt
• Liberal Class Analysis
• Nature and Liberty
• Free Trade and Development
• Liberalism In Transition
• “positive” Liberalism
• Utilitarian Illiberalism
• Spencer and Laissez-faire
• Mill: Liberal Or Socialist?
• Research Fields
• Economics
• Education
• History
• Law
• Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Political Philosophy
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation (act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code)

Paradigms and Social Change

Brian Fay

• Wesleyan University

“How People Change Themselves: The Relationship between Critical Theory and its Audience.” Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives. Edited by Terence Hall. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1977, pp. 200–231.

Can theoretical thinking about man and society guide social action without theorists manipulating persons? Yes, if we reject instrumentalism.

The instrumentalist paradigm assimilates the natural sciences with the social sciences. Social events are thus assumed to be part of a determined lawful process. To achieve social change, external events must be altered. This theory implies that only coercive, manipulative means can create a free society. Endorsers of instrumentalism include Skinner, Keynes, Robert Owen, and August Comte.

An alternative paradigm to the instrumentalist threat of “behavior modification” and social engineering is the educative model, which centers around changing people's self-conceptions. People intensify their social oppression because they perceive themselves and their roles in society in ways that perpetuate the oppressive system. To avoid exchanging one form of oppression for another, the educative paradigm encourages people to voluntarily change their self-conception through a method of rational persuasion and discourse.

People should not be coerced into freedom. But equally fallacious is the idealist view that social structures change simply by a shift of ideas. Structural impediments must be overcome as well as intellectual ones. A middle way would steer between mass coercion and intellectualism. The en masse approach is deficient from the viewpoint of the educative paradigm, which is rooted in a critical theory demanding more than a shift in external conditions. The educative paradigm requires the removal of personal misconceptions. The woman's movement exemplifies how a change in self-conception can generate a massive social change towards freedom.

II

Consensus, Obedience, and Dissent

As a manifesto of political dissent, the Declaration of Independence voices the “self-evident” truth that government derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed.” Arguing from this consensual basis of political obligation, the Declaration draws the radical conclusion that citizens possess the right of rebellion to throw off political obedience. If government loses popular consent: “it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” This revolutionary document weaves together the themes of social consensus, voluntary obedience, and dissent—the unifying conceptual threads that run through the following summaries.

The opening and closing summaries of this section distinguish between the voluntary, consensual, harmonious nature of society and the coercive, dissenting, conflictprone nature of the state as an enforced association. This classic antinomy between the voluntary and coercive principles of human interaction—implicit in the Declaration and expressed in Thomas Paine's opposition of “society” and “government” in Common Sense (1776)—appears in many of these summaries.

What constitutes legitimate political authority, on the one hand, and virtuous civil disobedience on the other? Should a valid consensus be determined by majoritarian decisions or should it require universal, unanimous, individual assent? How do we morally deal with dissent in democracy? Can consensus be achieved only by voluntary “society” rather than by “government?” The following summaries offer dissenting perspectives on all these questions.