![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() But sincerity is no substitute for wise judgment when it comes to either moral or analytical issues, and, again and again, Lindblom’s judgment proves the very reverse of wise. Their effectiveness comes partly from his long record of academic and intellectual accomplishments, and in even greater part from his obvious sincerity. Lindblom’s rhetorical skills are not at all contrived. There is the announced anticipation of being misunderstood: he says he is constrained to “put the point in its most cautious and acceptable form” that “the positive Communist claim to a humanitarian concern for freedom” may in some sense be meaningful and legitimate. “great wealth still leaves a segment of the population in a demoralizing welfare system.” There is a reminder of his own fallibility: “I am not pretending impartiality” on the relative flaws in the U.S. In the USSR there are fraudulent trials on false charges, censorship, thought control, and constant intimidation, whereas in the U.S. For instance, there is an elaborate and studied even-handedness: “In unobscured view, no society looks defensible,” he writes. And in fact Lindblom’s persuasive technique is varied and skillful. This tradition makes use not only of formal analytical and critical methods, like the explication of meanings and the ordering of social data, but also of the indirect methods of rhetoric and persuasion. The book aspires to a place in the tradition of political philosophy that begins with Plato and Aristotle and, for Lindblom, culminates in Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Politics and Markets is evidently designed as a work of counter-propaganda, attempting to undo the effects of alleged corporate and class indoctrinaton by making markets and “polyarchy” (Lindblom’s word for our form of government) look less benign while making bureaucratic central planning and authoritarian government look less terrible. Lindblom’s conclusion: a “restructuring” is needed that “goes to fundamentals of the politico-economic order.” unmatched by any leadership group other than government officials themselves.” By the end of the book, even these traditional “privileges” are called into question by emerging “collective purposes” like the search for peace, energy conservation, environmental protection, and economic stability. Businessmen, and the rest of us as well, may think that such decisions follow property rights, but Lindblom admonishes us that they are artifacts of businessmen’s “privileged role in government. Lindblom’s fundamental moral premise seems to be that in the realm of economics there are no “rights,” only “privileges.” Early in the book he muses on the possible validity of Proudhon’s aphorism that “property is theft.” By the middle of the book we are told that decisions concerning plant location and “the quality of goods and services” are really “public-policy decisions” that happen to have been “delegated” to businessmen rather than to government officials. ![]()
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