Abstract
In political studies it is understood that every social action produces unexpected or unintended effects, either positive or negative. Over time, this understanding has yielded a clear definition of the field of social studies: “They are concerned with man’s actions, and their aim is to explain the unintended or undersigned results of the actions of many men.”1 The assumption has also led to a definition of power aimed at isolating it from other kinds of human action and social control: “Power is the capacity of some persons to produce intended and foreseen effect on others.”2 In this sense, it is the coherence of intentions and results that qualifies a social action as an exercise of power. Already in 1936, an American political scientist reminded us that “in some one of its numerous forms, the problem of the unanticipated consequences of purposive action has been treated by virtually every substantial contributor to the long history of social thought.”3
For it is just as possible for the course of events to move perversely as for the plans of men; and it is for that very reason that we commonly lay upon fortune the blame for whatever turns out contrary to our calculations.
Thucydides 1.140.1
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Notes
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Counter Revolution of Science. Studies on the Abuse of Reason (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 25.
Dennis H. Wrong, Power. Its Forms, Bases, and Uses, 5th printing (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions, 2009), p. 2. Besides the inevitable, collateral, unintended, and/or unforeseen effects, power produces a particular kind of intended and foreseen effect: it modifies others’ behavior obtaining the desired result; cf. Angelo Panebianco, Il Potere, lo Stato, la Libertà (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), p. 39.
Robert K. Merton, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” American Sociological Review 1, no. 6 (1936): 894. In his Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957), p. 68, Merton indicates the study of the unintended consequences of social action as one of the major tasks of the social sciences. Raymond Boudon’s The Unintended Consequences of Social Action (London: Macmillan, 1982) is devoted to this task. On this epistemological connection, see Ray Pawson, “On the Shoulders of Merton: Boudon as the Modern Guardian of Middle-Range Theory,” in Mohamed Cherkaoui and Peter Hamilton, eds., Raymond Boudon: A Life in Sociology, 4 vols. (Oxford, UK: Bardwell, 2009), 4:317–34. Reviewing Boudon’s volume in Social Forces 63, no. 2 (1984): 613, Eric Leifer noted, “This English version of Boudon’s original 1977 book is of uneven quality.” I will use the original one.
Edward H. Carr, What Is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 46.
can produce aggregated outcomes at the macro-level that nobody expects or wishes, or “perverse effects”; cf. Raymond Boudon, Effets Perverse et Ordre Social (Paris: Puf, 1977).
Of course, at a more complex level there are “microfoundations” of politics, which lie behind political decisions; cf. Angelo Panebianco, L’Automa e lo Spirito. Azioni Individuali, Istituzioni, Imprese Collettive (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009).
Martin Wight, “War and International Politics,” The Listener, October 13, 1955, p. 584, transmitted on BBC Third program on October 6, 1955, at 8:45. See The Times, same date, p. 4. Cf. Martin Wight, Power Politics, ed. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978), p. 136.
Cf. Garret Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243.
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society. A Study of Order in World Politics, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 308.
Michael Howard, “Lost Friend,” in Coral Bell and Meredith Thatcher, eds., Remembering Hedley (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008), p. 128.
Hedley Bull, “What Is the Commonwealth?,” World Politics 11, no. 4 (1959): 587.
Ibid., p. 587.
David Collingridge and Colin Reeve, Science Speaks to Power: The Role of Experts in Policy Making (London: Frances Pinter, 1986), p. 32, emphasis added. “Scientism is not scientific method in politics; it is an idealistic attempt to overcome the limitations and uncertainties of politics through an analogy that confuses the genesis, the verification and the application of the theories of the natural sciences”; Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics. Its Origins and Conditions (Berkley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 224.
Obviously, “to see before” means different things for different persons. For someone, it seems to be “the attempt to apply a theory to limn the future” because “prediction is one test of a theory.” For someone else, a good theory of politics “furnishes a model in which future observations and consequences of actions in the outside world can be predicted.” Others think that “theories can also help policy makers anticipate events”; see, respectively, Kenneth Waltz, “International Politics, Viewed from the Ground,” International Security 19, no. 1 (1994): 199; Karl W. Deutsch, “On Political Theory and Political Action,” American Political Science Review 65, no. 1 (1971): 65; and Stephen Walt, “The Relationship between Theory and Policy in International Relations,” Annual Review of Political Science 8 (2005): 31.
For a defense of the scientific study of the future, originally elaborated in 1964, see Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Art of Conjuncture, trans. Nikita Lary (Piscataway: Transaction Publisher, 2012).
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© 2016 Michele Chiaruzzi
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Chiaruzzi, M. (2016). Introduction. In: Martin Wight on Fortune and Irony in Politics. Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-52873-5_1
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